Morad Fareed Podcast Transcript
Morad Fareed joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Morad Fareed. Morad Fareed is the founder and CEO of FC Mother and the Mass Standard, co-founder of the Well Building Standard, and a former professional soccer player. FC Mother is establishing the category of fandom health, social longevity, powered by the loyalty, rituals, and community of fans.
Mass, released this October, is the first standard for mobilizing fan teams for health, starting with new mothers. It follows the model of Well, which has grown to nearly six point five billion square feet across a hundred and thirty-eight countries. An Edison Award winner for science, Morad founded a Harvard research lab on motherhood in twenty eighteen and launched FC Mother in twenty twenty-three, which pilots in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, including a FIFA World Cup twenty twenty-six health legacy partnership.
Well, good afternoon, Murad. Welcome to the show.
Morad Fareed: Good afternoon. Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. Hailing out of New York City. I’m in Kansas City, so we’re just traversing one hour today. I appreciate that. And Morad, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump right into your first question here.
You started at Goldman Sachs at nineteen. You cap– really captained the New York University soccer team and played for Palestine’s first national team. So how did that path lead you to inventing new health categories?
Morad Fareed: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a, kind of an unusual route. But to me all of these are tools and experiences from being a lifelong athlete and learning a lot of discipline and rigor to pursuing a career on Wall Street, being a macro analyst, which is really about reading trends diving into research, which is a good thing for a scientist to enjoy doing, which is one of my passions.
So a lot of it is about skills, cultivation, and development over the years that have enabled me to kinda connect some dots. When I got to a place where I looked at some of the data, some of the studies in health, there was one pie chart that I saw twenty-something years ago that’s still, like to me, the most important pie chart in all of health, which is this eighty-twenty pie chart of what drives our health and wellbeing.
And eighty percent of that is actually social, environmental. It’s not clinical, it’s not genetic, and it’s not behavioral. That’s only twenty percent or more or less. And so looking at this thing and, and this pie chart was like, “Wait, we’re doing health wrong. It’s actually upside down,” got me really interested in inventing, pioneering, researching that eighty percent, and that’s what’s fueled me for the last two decades of work
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And of course, you’ve had some a lot of great experience, working on Wall Street. You’ve got a hard, great work ethic, obviously being in, a, a professional athlete. But that’s, that’s just amazing and th- that 80% statistic is interesting as well. And people don’t realize that there’s a lot of factors that influence our life in a positive or negative, and, and healthcare is obviously a, a big part of that.
So thank you. And Morad, in co-creating the WELL Building Standard and founding the WELL Living Lab at Mayo Clinic, what did you learn about turning environmental science into a standard the world would actually use?
Morad Fareed: Yeah, I mean, the, the thing about what we did with WELL and looking at this 80% of indoor spaces and how they impact our health was the science was already there.
There were decades of research on things like air quality, water quality, lighting, and other indoor things that experts around the world already had consensus on. What was missing was somebody to pull it all together in one unified tool and translate it into a solution that the world could use, right?
So the hard part is translating academic research and science into solutions and platforms, and that’s kind of the magic to me. That’s what I love doing. I love looking at this 80%, I love talking to brilliant people who’ve spent their careers, like, understanding a piece of it. And in our case with WELL, we had to unify 13 domains of what goes into a building with dozens of domains of health.
So that included three hundred and twenty experts working over a seven-year period, technical experts across health, medicine, building design, architecture, you name it. And what’s so interesting about it is when you get this interdisciplinary approach, you have something really powerful. So our aim was to first create a standard, kind of saying, “Hey, we’ve talked to everybody in the world.
This is what the sum total of expertise believes would be the solution from a science and research point of view.” And then taking that into a business and a product that the world could engage with, solution, was kind of the step after that, and there’s many steps along the way. But what you realize when you’re building something like that that’s so foundational is you’re building a company, you’re building a public health platform, but you’re also building an industry And when we started well wellness real estate as a category did not exist.
That will surpass one trillion in value next year. So it is the fastest-growing segment of longevity, is wellness real estate. And so at the beginning, there was no public awareness, there was no consciousness in, in mainstream or culture. But over the last two decades in watching it grow, we did a lot of the foundational education for the market.
We unified globally so many of the, like, foundational pieces. And what I learned was a playbook, and a playbook that could be repeated, which is what we’re doing now
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome, and we’ll talk a little bit about that playbook here in a second. But I appreciate that. There is a lot of data, research science that goes into this stuff, but you talked about how you can apply that to a problem or in the real world, and you’ve done so much around the healthcare space, and I appreciate you highlighting the the well real estate piece of it as well.
I think that’s important ’cause that’s again, that’s part of the whole everything that surrounds us as far as health, and that includes living as well. So thank you. Morad, your new Mass Standard follows the Well Playbook for fan teams. So how do you measure whether fandom truly improves health outcomes and longevity?
Morad Fareed: Yeah. So if you think about it, go back to this eighty percent it’s the people and the places that surround us is that eighty percent. I spent a lot of time in the places with Well, and what we’re living through right now is a social disconnection, loneliness, lack of social support epidemic that is global, that is faster than I think we realize, scaling across all life stages which is really we’ve deconstructed the community.
And our mission really with Mass and this new standard was to resurrect the village around an individual. And we believe that a team of human beings is really the kind of the missing gap that we all need for health goals. And, when you look at all the science, we’re not meant to do health alone, but the system treats us all purely as individuals.
Every single health tool, health plan, health benefit is an individual plan. Every single longevity tool is for an individual, and we’re saying, “Guys, that’s actually not what the science tells us. You’re not meant to do it all alone.” We’re social, tribal creatures, so we’re wired, hardwired to be communal and codependent, and so we’re kind of pointing it in, in this opposite direction.
The challenge with that though is our system’s not built for that. So how do you take a social platform to an individual system? It doesn’t work. So we needed to think very creatively about what is the largest social vehicle that already exists in the world? What is the infrastructure and language that people already know, that people already have belonging and affinity for and loyalty to?
And that’s what fandom is all about. So the idea is work with fandom communities, fandom partners, fandom networks to mobilize teams and a team philosophy for health. And it is actually really, when you think about what fandom means today for humans for our species really around the world, whether it’s sports, whether it’s gaming, whether it’s music, whether it’s comedy, whatever you’re a fan of, these are communities, and they’re coherent communities.
They have a shared identity, and they have a shared mission of supporting one another. So community health is a thing, but community health has no scale. Community health has no system, and it’s lacking that catalysm that, that fandom brings. So we work with fandom i- in mass to basically say, “This fan community exists- If somebody in this fan community needs an assist or an act of health support, we’re gonna mobilize the community to help do that.
We’re gonna ask people what they need to learn from a data-driven point of view. So take new mothers, take a mother who just had a baby and is in postpartum. We’re gonna ask mom who she wants playing on her team. We’re gonna ask mom what she needs on a week-to-week basis that would help make her feel more supported.
So that’s things like well visits. It’s things like s- childcare support. It’s things around the house. It’s simple things. And then we’re gonna measure how that impacted or improved mom’s quality of life, and we’re gonna reward it and score it like we would any other part of the team. So think of it from a point of view of we’re measuring how people show up for one another.
We’re doing that by asking people, so surveys, measurements, some gold standards there in public health. But fundamentally, it’s a new foundation for a whole new category, how to do, whether it’s pregnancy health or, or health in general
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Thank you. Appreciate that. You talked about resurrecting that village around that individual, right?
We all need help. We’re humans. We need to have that human connection at various levels for everybody else. But I really appreciate you talking about the community and how, how that support system is so important. And again, you talked about this fandom, and we’ll jump into that here in a second. So Morad, last question of the day, if you could briefly share, as we look ahead, how do you see fandom health data and digital platforms changing the global longevity economy over the next decade?
And what role do you hope FCMother plays?
Morad Fareed: I think it’s the missing piece because the longevity economy, it’ll be eight trillion to ten trillion dollars. Nobody has the sa– everybody has the same gaps. So we’re all, all building for the individual. Nobody has this supply of social. No– which means distribution, so nobody has scale.
How are you gonna reach a billion people? Like, start there. How are you gonna reach a billion people? Chronic disease right now is about eighty percent of the United States, so you can’t create a longevity solution, to me, that is only for the one percent, that is only gonna reach, let’s say, a million people, and you build a twenty-billion-dollar business.
That’s cool, but that’s not a solution. That’s a nice widget, but I’m interested in changing how people live at scale, which is why we f- we called it mass. It’s about mass mobilizing people and democratizing this whole longevity economy so that it can reach anybody. And so I think it’ll be the missing layer of distribution for the whole economy.
Over the last twenty years, through our work at Well and our work at FCMother, I’ve probably met, talked, partnered with a thousand technologies, digital health platforms, companies who have amazing innovations. They’ve either come through our lab or just, as, as allies in the industry, and I’ve observed the patterns that are gaps, and these are the gaps.
So it’s not about the underlying health intervention. There’s great health interventions that exist, but they cannot scale So we fill that gap of scale of standards and measurement and, and trust. And I think it’s gonna play a foundational role in this n- in this new kind of normal where we’re able to really resurrect the village and measure that as a health intervention and mobilize people.
So I think we’ll partner with hundreds of companies who have really important health innovations and really play that, play that role of filling in the gap.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Obviously your experience is very it’s varied and, and it’s really cool that you’ve diversified in so many areas here in the healthcare space.
But you talked about your framework really and your process that fills that gap. You talked about that and, and working with some great innovative health companies, leveraging that amazing technology again, to accelerate and build a long-term community that’s healthy. And, and, and again, not just about the profit or not just about building a company, but really bringing people along for that healthy journey.
So I appreciate that. And Morad, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Morad Fareed: Thank you so much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.”
Morad Fareed Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
