Neal Sofian: Using Conversational Content to Build Relationships – Episode 39

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Neal Sofian leads a company that builds conversation bots for the health-care industry. Using algorithms, machine learning, and contextual storytelling, they create complex, customized content on the fly to help people change their health behavior.

Neal and I talked about:

• conversational AI and how conversation bots can create conversations and build relationships
• how technology that permits the creation of unique compelling content helps people change their behavior
• their “Mad Libs” model for creating conversational content on the fly
• the differences between machine learning and AI and how natural language processing relates to these technologies
• how his background in public health leads to a people-first, behavior-first approach to the tech solutions he works on
• how establishing conversational context – with concepts like the “vulnerability index,” like information about relationships, etc. – drives the tone of the content they deliver
• the importance of starting conversations by asking questions
• how his service adds an “engagement layer,” making them the concierge that helps you find the info you need to solve your problem – smoking cessation, for example
• how they protect the privacy of users by giving control of their information to the consumer
• how some medical content has been diluted by focusing on compliance with HIPAA and other standards, which reduces opportunities to create interesting, compelling content
• Jamie, their gender-fluid bot whose personality can be programmed to be like your mom, a drill sergeant, coach, mentor, BFF, and whose vocabulary, patience, and how other voice and style choices can be customized for the context
• how establishing context enables content creators to use vocabulary and deliver content that is appropriate for the exact situation the reader is in
• how writing to one generic reading level is a relic of old mass communication – now we have “segments of one” with the customization that is possible
• how storytelling with a narrative customized to the user’s needs is superior to generic advice like, “You need to exercise. Here’s why.”
• how the conversation itself provides the permission mechanism they need to include third-party information in the profiles from which they derive the context of the conversation
• the ongoing need for good writers to create compelling content for their “Mad Libs”
• how to go from “pushing information to creating a conversation and a relationship”
• “Always start with people.”

Neal’s Bio

Neal Sofian is the CEO of tuzag, Inc., a digital, conversational AI health company that has built an “infinite” tailored-content & engagement platform, using conversational AI to drive exponentially greater consumer behavior change. Previously Neal was the Director of Member Engagement at Premera Blue Cross where he was responsible for development strategies to engage the 2.2 million members of Premera in reaching their optimal health.

Neal is a noted author and speaker and continues to be acknowledged as one of the true innovators in the world of health behavior change., and the role of personalization and social networking. Neal holds a master’s degree in public health from the University of Missouri School of Medicine. He is also a working potter/sculpture and has done stand-up comedy in a vaudeville show.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 39 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Neal Sofian. Neal is the CEO of Tuzag, which is a really interesting company that helps folks do behavior change in the healthcare field. One of the online … I think the website says they do hyper-personalized content and interactive storytelling to promote health. Is that accurate, Neal?

Neal:
Yeah, I think it might grow a little bit. You’d almost say now, it’s conversational AI. I guess I’d boil it down to conversation bots. How can you create infinite variations of content that are contextually relevant to just each person and turn that into a conversation and build a relationship with it?

Larry:
That’s golden in this day and age of, like, everybody wants engagement, and if you create a relationship, you get that. So, tell me a little bit about the technology and how you stitch that together, how you make these relevant? Because this has to be a real conversation or something approximating a real conversation. Tell me a little bit about how you get to that point of being able to do that.

Neal:
Well, I think there’s three parts to it: one is technology, two is behavior change and three is compelling content. You need actually all three. So the first part was … From our perspective, the technology was really just Dave Bulger, who’s the founder of the company, saying, “I wanted to do the other two, and the only way to do that at scale was to create some technology to help me.” So, it wasn’t that he started with technology; he started with a communication problem, and then said, “Can I build technology that will help me solve that problem?” Which is infinite variation that says, “People are unique,” and that the nuance of communication is incredibly important. Knowing that you’re a fisherman and I’m a baseball fan means how you talk to me, in terms of the analogies and the metaphors, might be different. And how do I account for each one of us? Or then the third person’s a potter, and the fourth person’s a dancer, and somebody’s family-oriented. All those things matter, so how do you actually then create variations of content so it will sing for each person?”

Neal:
And so he started looking at that problem and said … So, in essence, he had to create a technology that’s more like Mad Libs, but it’s a technology that says, “If I build a profile on you, and then I build a generic form of content based upon that and then essentially it’s full of gaps and holes, and then that way words within sentences, sentences within paragraphs, paragraphs within the whole body of what we send all become on the fly, filled in with that profile appropriate to you.” And then build that on a neural net, such that it now begins to then say, “Let’s look at, did the information I send you resonate?” In a sense because we’re asking you to respond, because it is a conversation, or to do things. And then how you respond, we can then begin to learn and say, “Do we need to get better?” That actually saying things this way is more important than saying them that way. Where this offer resonates with these kind of people who respond in that way.

Larry:
Interesting. We talked before, it sounds like machine learning, what you described.

Neal:
I think it’s called machine learning.

Larry:
Got you.

Neal:
And in fact, I would tell you it’s more machine learning than it is true AI. A lot of people love to use AI, and I have to tell you, I’m a guy out there talking to investors all the time. If you don’t use the two letters AI, then they just yawn. You got to say it. But everybody now says, “What is AI?” And I think some people describe almost anything that has an algorithm, they say it’s AI. I’d like to suggest that most of what we’re doing is really much more focused on machine learning. We’re building algorithms, and then we’re going to learn from them, and then we’re going to use those to get better, but I think that’s much more ML than it is pure AI.

Neal:
Where AI is important for us is that if somebody else is producing AI around predicting who may get sick, who may have an issue, I want to absorb that AI from others so that I can use that to inform the content I should create for you. So I’m perfectly happy to use other people’s AI, and then I’m doing machine learning and I’m also very much involved in natural language processing to be able to convert what we’re doing so that it can actually be … whether it’s chat, whether it’s voice, whatever it be.

Larry:
I want to back up just a little bit and have you talk a little bit about natural language processing.

Neal:
Yes.

Larry:
Because it’s something I think I have my head around, and I guess many of our listeners will, but I’d love you to-

Neal:
It’s like, “How do I turn from language to text and text to language, and how do I make that work well?” Again, I’m not the technology guy. I’m the public health guy who knows what I want it to do. You probably will need to set up a separate podcast where you can talk to Dave and he will go into the … He will get into long conversations with you about how to build this stuff and before you know it, you’ll have a conversation that has somehow involved Dungeons and Dragons.

Larry:
Like all tech conversations.

Neal:
Yes.

Larry:
Ultimately . . .

Neal:
And then you find out, of course, that the public health guys don’t all play Dungeons and Dragons. We play other games.

Larry:
Right. Well, that’s it, yeah. And I forgot to mention that about your background, you’re a master’s of public health and that was sort of the behavior change aspect of this is what drew you into the project and into this whole venture.

Neal:
Yeah, so I’m public health and I’ve always looked at, how do you create? How do you use behavior change and then technology? So the first big thing I was involved in was a thing called Free & Clear, which was a smoking cessation program, which is telephonic. And you go, “Well, that doesn’t sound very exciting.” But in 1986, it was [crosstalk 00:05:47] exciting.

Larry:
Old-school voice tree kind of thing? Or …

Neal:
Well, no. It was live coaching.

Larry:
Oh, live. Actual people.

Neal:
Actually do live coaching on the phone. Instead of having to go to a group, you got to talk to a coach on the phone. Well, everyone goes, “Oh, ho hum.” 1986, that was a radical concept that needed to be proved, and it was a randomized clinical trial with the National Cancer Institute. It was on the basis of that we started doing phone coaching. So that was the new technology of the day. My next conversation was really building social platforms around cancer or arthritis or end of life care. And it was like, how do you start connecting people contextually through other people like themselves using social capital and profiles of saying, “I am a woman. I am 35. I have breast cancer. I’m in recurrence. I’m still thinking of having children. I’d love to connect with other women like me or hear the content that those women created.” And we made it sound like radio shows, radio talk shows.

Larry:
Interesting.

Neal:
So, that was the new technology. In that way, you tailor people. This is now you tailor information so that it becomes very much more like people.

Larry:
But that context, that still drives the ability to create that content.

Neal:
Correct.

Larry:
And we were talking before … It sounded almost like conventional demographic and psychographic kind of stuff. But you do a lot more. Like, you were just talking about relationships and-

Neal:
Yeah. I want to know things like, for example, there’s a thing called the vulnerability index, which was created by Alexandra Drane and Wendy Lynch. Great research they were doing, and it looks at saying, “What are the underlying behaviors that drive behavior change?” So knowing about your energy, knowing about your sleep, knowing about your relationships. Are you a caregiver? How are your finances? Are you depressed? All those sorts of things are incredibly important in terms of understanding. If I want to, for example, get you to take you to take your medications correctly, believe it or not, all those other things matter.

Neal:
It’s also important to know what your values are. Are you family driven, relationship driven, career driven, spiritually driven? Most people don’t care about their health, to be honest. So why, would we keep telling people the reason they should make health changes is because it’s good for them? It’s much more important if I know that you’re family driven to show you that from a value perspective, making this change somehow will help you meet your values. Then I’d probably want to … by understanding things like your hobbies and some of these other issues, I can then say, “Here’s the language I should use to support that value.” Then I want to then understand these other things like the vulnerability index that say, “What are the enablers or disenablers of your behavior?” So that way, I might be able to offer you up things that might be surprising.

Neal:
So, the solution to getting you to exercise, if I understand that you’re also taking care of a mom and three kids, and you’re financially strapped, probably offering you, telling you you should go do yoga is not the right solution. Helping you solve the problem of how do I manage my mom on limited budget and deal with the stress of that … I might go exercise if you help me with what’s a problem for me. So, I need to both understand what’s going on with you, I need to understand what you value, and I need to understand the context of what’s the way to talk to you about it. Then, based upon that, I can create content and offers that are meaningful to you.

Larry:
Yeah. We’ve talked about how you establish a context, how you gather all of that … Talked about this … I have this picture the super Mad Libs, sort of fill-in-the-blank kind of thing. There’s the content that goes in that fills it. Does it start with a database? Like in machine learning, I know you start with a learning set. Did you start with sort of a base level of if you want to help somebody quit smoking, here’s what you tell them. And then how do you mix that together with the contextual information?

Neal:
I would say that the first thing you do … If you want to have a conversation, the best conversation people start by asking people questions. They don’t start by telling you anything. You know: “Hi, nice to meet you.” We have a cup of coffee. “Tell me about yourself.” I think that’s the place you start, by asking. Let’s get to know you, and then based upon as we get to know you, then I can connect you up to content that’s meaningful to you.

Neal:
I think I’m not trying to be the actual intervention. I’m the engagement layer. So, I’m the concierge. The concierge doesn’t need to be able to tell you everything on how, if you want to go to a Chinese restaurant, they don’t need to know everything that goes on in the Chinese restaurant. They need to understand what you’re looking for, that you’re looking for casual dining, that you’re looking for a place that’s clean, that you’re looking for a place that’s authentic. I mean, take your pick. You want Szechuan, not Mandarin. Then they’re going to say, “Oh, cool.” And they want to walk no more than 10 minutes.

Neal:
Their job is to then say, “How do I solve that problem for you?” And send you to something that’s meaningful to you. In that case, I can do the same thing for smoking. I can then send you to the right service for you. I’m not trying to be all those services. So, I don’t have to create all the content that says, “Here’s how to quit smoking. Here’s how to manage your stress. Here’s how to sleep better.” There’s a hundred thousand apps out there. There’s people who devote their whole lives to each one of these topics, whether it’s diabetes, sleep, stress, asthma, managing, adherence, all those things. So really, what we need to do is how do we connect people to use all those services? And so, my content is really around the conversation, the engagement, and in essence, that word, but it’s the truth, the steerage.

Larry:
Yeah, well, and sending them to the right place. That seems super valuable in this information overloaded world. To be of service in that way is to … And I bet … Well, I want to quickly sidestep into the privacy area on this. I know most of what you do happens in the medical world. So you have HIPAA protecting the whole shooting match and everything like that. But what you’re telling me just seems to have so much broader application in this modern world where everybody wants to engage and send people off, kind of help people make better decisions and find the right content. And you guys have figured out how to do that. I guess … So, a couple of things here. Is that true that HIPAA’s sort of the guiding thing within the healthcare world? But have you looked outside of the healthcare world and figured out ways to …

Neal:
Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, we’re starting … We’re working in healthcare now because actually I don’t know anything about fintech or … I have no competence there. But absolutely, this platform is applicable to any engagement. At that level, it’s technology and behavior is behavior. Even when we’re talking about an employer, I’m just as interested in helping an employer get their employees to sign up for a 401k and get a match, or find out that there’s other educational opportunities for them as an employee. So even within the employer set tied to in a way broad set of what is health and productivity, some of the things I might offer you may have nothing to do … It may be the mint. It might be something like that. But it would work just as well in terms of helping you find a home if you’re in a market where you’re buying and selling real estate. It could work for anything.

Neal:
In healthcare, HIPAA does make a difference. But I think sometimes we’ve spent a lot of time in healthcare thinking that HIPAA is simply a barrier. I would tell you it’s not a huge barrier. It means that, one, you have to give control to the consumer and the consumer gets to decide how much of the data that I might tailor on is available to me. That should be in their call. Do I have access to their medical record? That’s their call. Do they want to answer questions from me? That’s their call. Do they want to let me have their Fitbit data? That’s their call, and they can turn it on and off as they please. That’s the first layer and if you’ve given them that, then everything they are offering is voluntary. That gets you around a lot of the HIPAA issues.

Neal:
The second is you do have to be, if you’re … For example, we’re not just using tailoring in terms of chat, but some of it might through your smart speaker, through an Alexa or Google Home. There’s certain things we will suggest not to do when it’s voice, because other people might hear. So that way we’d say, “Hey, for this, go … We have private polling and private questions. Go into the app and answer them there.” So, you can manage that stuff. I think that too often, we’ve spent our career as being more concerned about HIPAA and that, “Will legal sign off on what content we are creating?” We don’t care whether or not the content we are creating is actually compelling, or interesting, or funny, or amusing, or engaging, or contextually relevant. What we care about is that we have turned legal into our customer. As long as they can say, “Well, it’s HIPAA compliant and yeah, we don’t see anything that’ll get us into trouble.”

Neal:
But then this is the whole point. That’s not engagement. That’s compliance. We’re about engagement. I think that that’s why you can’t allow … HIPAA has to be dealt with. You have to deal with it and you stay on the right side of the law all the time. You have to stay on the right side of legal. At the same time, that’s not an excuse for not creating compelling, interesting content. What’s wrong with assuming that the customer has control of their own data? I think that’s not nearly as hard to do as we think.

Larry:
In that sense it seems like medical communicators like you are ahead of the game, because with the arrival of GDPR and just growing privacy concerns among people. So, you’re balancing this thing that everybody is challenged by right now, this need to be GDPR compliant, but still engage people. You’re starting to crack that.

Neal:
Well, yeah, and I think part of that is by asking. The way you engage people is asking questions … Certainly in healthcare, we haven’t traditionally asked them. For example, not only are we only asking values and metaphors, but let’s say we’re having a conversation. What would you like the person you’re having the conversation to be like? Do you want them to be more like your best friend? Do you want them to be like a drill sergeant? Do you want them to be like your mom?

Neal:
So what we’ve created is a bot we call JAMIE. JAMIE is intentionally gender-fluid. JAMIE can be male, can be female, can be neither. Then, not only can you set JAMIE’s personality into either mom, coach, mentor, drill sergeant, BFF, but then you can actually then up the scale of their vocabulary and their sense of charm and humor and their patience. How straightforward do you want them to be with you? How funny do you want them to be with you? If you create mom, and then you up the humor and you lower the patience and you up the vocabulary, she stays on this side of blue, but she gets interesting with some of the things she says. So we can even tailor around personality type, because the nature of conversation is like, some people you like to talk to, some people you don’t.

Larry:
You’re getting at some one of the reasons I wanted to … Just as a quick background, Neal, we’re in a place Cambia Grove right now. It’s a healthcare innovation center in Seattle. It was a little bit of a stretch asking you on, but I’m totally not regretting my decision to have you. This is all great stuff. But it was that sort of … I inferred from our conversation that things like this might come up. For example, what you just talked about raised issues of both voice and tone, what we’d call in the content strategy profession. A lot of places like Mailchimp being the classic example of you know when you’re reading Mailchimp copy and interacting with Mailchimp. There’s that voice and tone issue, but there’s also grammatical style and readability of content. There’s sort of a growing consensus among content strategists and content designers that you want to be around the seventh grade level or something like that. But there are probably contexts where it makes sense to have a different voice and tone as you have with the different personas that you’re serving up the content with. What about that level issue? Are some of these people more erudite? Where do you-

Neal:
Yes, there are differences. I do think that there is a … And I don’t have any evidence. This is now just me believing. This notion that we must always look for this lowest level of vocabulary and content, I think is actually a little bit of a red herring. The story was once told to me that I loved was, “Have you ever looked at … If you like to play the ponies, if you’re a horse racer, go look at a tote sheet. It’s incredibly complicated. You know what? The people who play the ponies tend to be more historically blue collar, lower educated people, but they are extraordinarily interested and engaged in the ponies. Therefore, they read very complicated things.”

Neal:
So, it’s not just an issue of vocabulary, this notion that we have to either dumb down or dumb up. It’s a matter of engage people, and they will go deeper. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to … You need to use highfalutin words so to speak, or low highfalutin words. I think it’s a matter about the notion that of level I think that’s a misnomer in terms of thinking about what makes sense.

Larry:
Well, and I wonder if it’s like a relic of mass communication?

Neal:
Yes.

Larry:
You know, that you have to play with that least common or middle denominator?

Neal:
I think that’s exactly right. If you work on the assumption that we can only write one thing, so we have to write it for everyone, hence mass marketing is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s a 20th century phenomenon, because if you really go back to early forms of marketing and communication, it was the snake oil guy who was standing on a wagon looking at each person in the eye, selling literally snake oil in a bottle. It’s only when you get to the world of the Mad Men in the 1930s onward that you go into a mass communication strategy.

Neal:
Technology now lets you get back to essentially segments of one, and that means I can build stuff that’s of interest and level and style for each individual person, and that’s where we really need to go to. But don’t just assume that just because I know you’re educational level, that speaks to the level of what the language should or shouldn’t be. I think that’s a real simplistic misnomer.

Larry:
This circles right back to the context thing.

Neal:
Yes.

Larry:
You know that from all your context setting stuff.

Neal:
Right.

Larry:
I want to make sure we get to storytelling, because you talk about that in your … It’s an important component of your engagement. Tell me how storytelling fits in with your engagement model.

Neal:
Okay, so let me give you an example. I can give you generic message that says, “You need to exercise. Exercise is good for everyone. Exercising for three days a week for a minimum of 30 minutes is great for your health.” That’s a piece of information. What if all of the sudden I start knowing the weather? Let’s say I know that you prefer a certain type of exercise. Let’s say I know some psycho-demographic data on you. Let’s say that I know that you’re family oriented versus relationship oriented. Let’s say I know you have a medical condition or not.

Neal:
If I know all of those things, all of the sudden it goes, “Hey, it’s 41 and raining. It’s a great day to exercise inside. But you can tough it out.” What we just did was we just pulled an API because we know the weather. But we also know that the person is in Miami. So, 41 and rainy means they think they’re going to freeze to death. And so, their message becomes … So now you’re telling a little story. It’s … (singing). But then you say the exact same thing, “It’s 41 and rainy,” and all of the sudden, we’re talking to the next guy. We say, “Hey, it’s 41 and rainy. It’s a great day to go outside. Put your shorts on and let’s go play with other people.” Well, he’s in Duluth, Minnesota. So, now we’re telling the beginning of a story.

Neal:
Then we say, because why? What does she want to do? She wants to play golf. Okay. He wants to go hunting. Then it’s not exercise; it’s hunting and golf. She wants to do it with her friends. She wants to take some strokes off her score. He wants to go slay the beast. She wants to do it with her friends, and he wants to do it with his family. She wants to get some walking because we know that’s her preferred exercise. So it’s, “How do we get her going with that first?” And we say for him, “Let’s get to the gym and do some lifting to get you ready.” Then we also say, “Oh, by the way, he has metabolic syndrome,” and so we want to say, “But before you take off for the woods with your kids, why don’t you check in with your doctor?”

Neal:
Those became two stories. Just little micro stories, but they’re two … They went from a message about exercise to a story about me and what I like to do what with my friends or family and what I need to do before I do it. Then based on that, you not only have that little story, but then you pop up and she gets an ad for a discount on a golf tee and a discount at Walmart for walking shoes. He gets a discount at Cabela’s, and a connection to an agency, a thing called in this case Vim, which helps connect you to a doctor to make sure you have a doctor who can help deal with your metabolic syndrome. So, it becomes a story with a payoff.

Neal:
Well, if you can do that by the millions … And you can, because essentially all those little things are just plugging in holes to that generic piece of content. So what you’re creating is tiny little stories. And sometimes, stories are very simple, but what they aren’t is really about medical information. They’re about a story. So maybe there’s a narrative to it. There’s a kind of, “It’s about me.” There’s some sort of initial issue and there’s a resolution. That’s old-fashioned storytelling.

Larry:
But also, it’s every communicator’s dream to be able to speak directly to their audience and know their exact concerns.

Neal:
Correct. Yeah, and some of that is using … And in our case, what we’re doing is a mixture of thinking that through, what is the story we want to tell? Then it’s, what kind of third-party data can we get as well as first-party data? I can ask you … If you’re family oriented, I can actually buy a psychographic profile on you. That’s third-party data. I can go to weather.com to get the weather and know where you’re located. I can get your medical information through a third party. All of which, if you give me permission. And the more you give me, the more detailed the story can become.

Larry:
Yeah. I want to go quickly to that because I’m also I’m thinking about … You know Tim Berners-Lee current project? He calls it Solid. It’s this notion of … I don’t know. I haven’t gone to school on it entirely, but it’s basically … It sounds like it would be a great foundation for what you’re doing, this idea of your personal social profile and information, and your sort of permission giving to let people have that.

Neal:
Correct.

Larry:
How are you doing that? Until that exists. How do you do that now? How do you get that consented permission to …

Neal:
You literally ask them.

Larry:
It’s part of the conversation?

Neal:
It’s part of the conversation.

Larry:
Got it, okay. Yeah.

Neal:
And you can say, “Here’s a page where you can decide what you want turned on or off.” You basically let them know. In many cases, it’s starting with an employer saying … is giving us an eligibility file saying, “Our employees are going to participate,” for example, “in a health assessment, health risk appraisal assessment.” So, they’re essentially giving us and then we’re going to reach out to them. They’re going to then choose to sign up, but it’s only eligible for these employees. Let’s say you’re at Acme Plumbing. And then they sign up, and then we start that process. Then we say, “Is it okay for us to get this information?” In fact, some employers will insist on that sort of thing, that they will not share data from the insurance files without the individual’s permission, and that’s okay.

Neal:
It’s just the more you give me, the more I can do. It doesn’t mean I can’t … I think with just the information I ask you, I can do a lot. So, even if you give me no access to third-party data at all, I can do a lot. Most people will answer most questions. They don’t tend to tell you how much they earn. They don’t necessarily want to give you their exact address or a phone number, and I don’t blame them for that. But you can ask all kinds of questions, and you can actually make inferences. It’s like asking people, “If you could only be hot or you could only be cold, which would you prefer?” Okay. We actually do ask that question. Different types of people tend to answer those questions differently. So you can then make some guesses, hence now the machine learning kicks in as you start having lots of people. Did cold people respond and did they have different pattern than hot people? Those are the … You know. And we’re just at the beginning.

Larry:
And you have nice tidy permission and privacy protection in place-

Neal:
Correct.

Larry:
… for all this stuff you got. That’s great.

Neal:
Yeah, and we’re just at the beginning. I think we’re doing way cool stuff, and we are … The one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind. In healthcare, we’re pretty damn blind in terms of communicating with consumers. So, I don’t want to present … I think some people think that we now have a system that creates all the content. Well, you still need really good writers to then say, “Based upon all this contextual stuff, how am I going to create those Mad Libs that will be compelling?” It’s not like we’re data in Star Trek where data just creates the content. You still need that, and preferably you structure that content where you have a deep understanding of whether it’s the health belief model or stages of readiness, trans-theoretical model, or some mixture of that. I need to understand those things so that as I structure that conversation, that story, that it’s built around efficacy and it’s built around readiness. It’s built around initial staging of meaning for you. Then I have to create cool content.

Neal:
So, it still takes all three: technology, content writers and behavior change to make it all sing. And so, we’re still at the very beginning of this process, but I think it is a fundamental paradigm shift from instead of saying, “I’m pushing information,” to, “I’m creating a conversation and a relationship, and that over time, I will get to know you such that what you need today is not what you need tomorrow. You may not be ready to exercise now, but six months from now you might be.” Your life circumstances have changed, and maybe that’s the important part. It’s about people’s lives. It’s not about health. It’s about people. We’re starting with people, their life circumstances, their life interests, their life. Then our job is to contextualize health within the context of their life.

Larry:
And that history becomes part of the story even though it’s going forward.

Neal:
Correct. Correct.

Larry:
Yeah. Boy, I could talk to you all day, Neal, but I like to keep the episode near a half hour, and I’m fine going a little bit over with this. But I want to give you an opportunity … I always do this toward the end of the episode. Anything last? Anything that we haven’t talked about or I haven’t brought up that you would like to share with my listeners?

Neal:
Two things. One, and I think I just said it in a way, always start with people. People are not diseases. People are not risks. They are not claims. They are people. It’s so critical to start there as opposed to saying, “Here’s somebody who is a diabetic. We need to do something to them.” As opposed to, “Here’s a person that’s a very rich and interesting human. One of the things about them is they have diabetes, but there’s a bunch of other things about them, too.” And then if you understand that and you start from that perspective, how you create content and services is very, very different.

Neal:
So, I’d say that. And so, you can do that both in terms of products we’re creating, kind of like that health assessment. But you can also put this inside of any intervention you’re already doing. There’s nothing that prevents you from saying … Let’s say I am a diabetes education program or I am a sleep program or I am a … All this kind of stuff can be embedded inside what you’re already doing. You know? So, it’s not like you’re either in this business or out. This is an engagement capability that should be embedded into what we do. It should be a different way of thinking about the nature of how we relate to our customers and consumers.

Larry:
Well, thanks so much, Neal. This has been great.

Neal:
My pleasure. It’s fun.

Larry:
Yeah.