Mark Bell's Power Project - Exposing Medical Shortcomings: How to Manage Your Health - Brigham Buhler || MBPP Ep. 1071

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

In episode 1071, Brigham Buhler, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how the healthcare system is setup to put profits over progress and keep people sick. 🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab! Follow Brigham on IG: https://www.instagram.com/ferrisbuhler81/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/untapped ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza & Get Podcast Guides, Courses and More ➢ https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

a lot of the clinicians who would immediately prescribe a GLP-1 have never pulled a comprehensive blood panel. You shouldn't write any drug without first understanding the patient, but you can't do that when you only have six minutes and the insurance tells you, we don't give a shit what you want to do. You're not allowed to pull a blood panel. The truth of the matter is it's because insurance companies are controlling all of this. If your primary care attempted to practice the type of medicine that Merrick Health or WasteWell or any of these telemedicine cash pay clinics, they would get threatened by the insurance company for running up the cost of medicine through practicing preventative care. Health insurance, view it like car insurance. It's there when you blow out a knee, but don't expect them to maintain the

vehicle because if you do, they're going to maintain you all the way to chronic disease and huge profits. There's a lot of stuff coming that people are going to be forced to take their own healthcare into their own hands, but nobody's talking about The Rock or Dwayne Johnson. He's doing the same thing Leverking's doing. He's saying he's not on stuff, but I mean, I feel like it's giving some people false hope and then also giving the critics who refuse to put in the work the ability to go, oh, it's because he's just on stuff because you won't acknowledge. I feel like we could destigmatize it if really prominent people who are doing great things like The Rock would talk about it. Yeah, I think maybe that ship has maybe sailed for some celebrities to endorse. And I can't imagine what it would be like to be The Rock.

Can you imagine that? I don't think you can do anything normal. I think it's hard to judge. I think the guy can't do anything. I mean, even if he's shown like, shown in a picture with somebody, that might mean that he endorses that person or endorses the way that they think or their ideology or I don't know. The level of pressure that society puts on those guys

is just totally unfair, man. It's a level. I was watching, what was was it The Last Dance that Michael Jordan I've watched it like a hundred times but that's like when I want to watch something and just kind of passively

I'll just re-watch that over and over again it's incredible but he was the first guy I can ever think of that went under the level of scrutiny that any everyday athlete faces today like college kids man

they're kids, dude. And they're under the, with social media, with everybody from all directions just waiting for somebody to mess up and then wrecking these people. They're just people, man. Just because they're an athlete doesn't mean they're supposed to walk on water.

It's crazy. Yeah, it's brutal. I mean, you know, it's someone like The Rock or some of these celebrities. I'm sure a lot of them would love to like say, oh, yeah, I, you know, ran this for this movie or I do this for to stay in shape, you know, in my later years. But they probably just feel that they can't. Yeah. And then also like it may have been, you know, that years ago, maybe they felt they had to lie about it or couldn't share the truth about it.

And now they're just kind of going or couldn't share the truth about it. And, um, now they're just kind of going to stay there, I guess. Yeah. Well, that's where I have tremendous respect for Rogan, man. Like his, him bringing awareness to this space and helping people understand there is no substitute for hard work. There is no substitute for diet and nutrition and exercise. You're going to have to put in the work. You're going to have to put in the reps. You're going to have to put in the reps. Hormone optimization is not going to lift the weights for you. It's going to give your body the ability to process protein and protein synthesis, optimize muscle health and muscle fiber regeneration, all those things.

But it's still, you got to go put in the work. muscle fiber regeneration, all those things. But it's still, you got to go put in the work. And it's just, it's one of many tools that can help people optimize their health and longevity. And even with some of these people that are on these, these kind of weight loss drugs that you're hearing so much about, Ozampic and these,

you can describe it better than me for sure. But these things that are helping people with their hunger hormones, I think that people just think that's an easy cop-out and that's just a cheap way to go about doing it. But it doesn't work for everybody all the time, right? And you still have to adhere to some of the general rules that anyone has to follow in order to lose weight and be healthy. A hundred percent. I think GLP-1s and Ozempic and all these weight loss drugs, the pendulum swung both directions on them already. And you have one set of people saying,

these things are catastrophic. It's dangerous. It's running up the cost of healthcare. It's not a silver bullet. It's too much liability. We shouldn't be using these compounds as people being lazy, you know, whatever the narrative may be. Then you got on the other side, you know, doctors prescribing it for a girl who's trying to lose five pounds before spring break,

you know, and saying that this is the best compound ever made. The truth is always in the middle. It's risk reward. It's finding where the tool fits in the tool belt, where it's best utilized in a medical practice. And so for us at WasteWell, the GLP-1s have been phenomenal. But before you ever prescribe a GLP-1 for weight loss, you should take the time to understand the patient, to understand the root cause of the obesity, to understand why they're gaining this weight. Do they have any workout regimen? Do they sleep? Do they eat enough protein? Are they living the right life? Now, where my lens is a little different, and I'm not a clinician, I have a team of people way fucking smarter than me that make these clinical decisions, but I view it as it's not our job to dictate to a patient.

It's our job to educate and empower a patient and give them the knowledge and the tools for them to improve their overall health and wellness. And for these obese people, a lot of people want to chalk it up to they're lazy. What I've seen historically is a lot of them are in the pit of despair. I really call it the pit. My family's that way. My dad, he just says, I'm fucking 50. I don't, he used to say, I'm 50. I don't give a shit. I'm never going to get this weight off. I give up. Right. Some of these people need to get wins on the board. What came first, the chicken or the egg? If we can give these people hope and we can, in a safe and compliant way, enable them to start

getting that body fat off. Because if you look at just longevity, like I would say that these peptides are going to be one of the cornerstones for longevity in the future because for obese individuals, right? If you're a fit athletic guy, you don't need to be on a GLP-1. That's not who it's indicated for. But if you're over 20% body fat, 25% body fat on the cusp of diabetes, on the cusp of metabolic disease, number one risk factor for cancer behind smoking cigarettes is obesity. A lot of people don't know that. Number one risk factor for heart attack, stroke, all of those heart-related ailments, obesity. Number one risk factor for metabolic disease, obesity. Diabetes, obesity.

We've, number one reason people have to get total joints, obesity, wear and tear on the joints. And once that joint's toast, it's toast. It's never coming back. So can we help these people get the weight off in a safe way? And I think the answer is yes. A lot of the critiques people say,

and I don't know if you want me to go down the rabbit hole on this one or not, you tell me. Well, I was going to say, you know, people, they don't just take the drug and lose weight. They take the drug and they, over time, their hunger isn't overriding, you know, their body's ability to say like you had enough. Yes.

And in these situations, they still over time have to have the discipline to eat less. Correct. And it takes time. It's a commitment. So I think that a lot of people are like kind of frowning upon this. I think we're in a compromised position in America. And I think that we need to figure out a way out of it. Another interesting thing that happens though is like there's a lot of judgment placed on

somebody just wanting to feel and look better, which is interesting. Cause that's where this whole thing, this whole entire thing, we can circle TRT clinics and people being on the juice and we can circle that whole entire thing. It's been around for a long time and people are like, oh yeah, if I was going to do a movie, I would blast some stuff and be big for a movie. But like, what's wrong with just like, if you just want to blast some stuff because you just want to look good and you just want to, it's not about necessarily looking good to other people. It's about looking and feeling good for yourself. Yeah. I think, and feeling strong for yourself. And that could be whatever degree you want to take it to. So even

somebody who wants to lose some weight for a wedding or something, I don't see any issue with it. I just think that people need to be educated. They need to know the pros. They need to know the cons. Like, what is this going to do? What about like a year from now, you know, if a woman is utilizing this for their wedding, what about getting pregnant, stuff like that? My thing is, stop. Dion Sanders said it. If you look good, you feel good. You feel good, you play good. You play good, they pay good. It is all about building confidence, building momentum, helping put wins on the board. on the board and whether we want to admit it or not, America's obese. You know, most, most of Americans under the age of 30 can't qualify to participate in the armed forces. You know, we're headed towards massive amounts of chronic disease. We're going over the ledge, whether we

want to admit it or not. It's the number, the number one cost to a state budget is healthcare. The number one cost to the federal budget is healthcare. The number one cost to the federal budget is healthcare. The number one reason for bankruptcy in America is healthcare. Look at what happened during COVID. And not to make this all about the system, but even during COVID, the hospitals were surged with individuals, but why? It's because we're chronically ill with metabolic disease and obesity. So to try and say that these GLP-1s are all bad or all good, I'm not here to tell you they're good or bad. I'm here to tell you they're both. They can be good and bad depending on how you use them. A hammer in the wrong hands is a deadly instrument, right? A hammer in the right hands can build beautiful things. And so when

utilized appropriately with diet and nutrition, you know, one of the critiques that people say is it's running up the cost of healthcare. We can get into that, but in reality, through a compounding pharmacy, these products are pennies on the dollar compared to what you're seeing in the insurance-based model. A cash pay model makes these products affordable for the average American. model. A cash pay model makes these products affordable for the average American. So that's a way to get away from that. One of the big risk factors of side effects are because big pharma has created a one size fits all approach like they have with everything. There's not a lot of options out there for dosing. And so the beauty of compounding pharmacies is they can custom compound these molecules to allow patients to titrate up and titrate down,

minimizing side effects, maximizing fat loss. And then the other challenge is it's getting prescribed over telemedicine platforms. It's getting prescribed by every fucking primary care in America right now, but they're not taking the time to talk to the patient. And if you educate the patient on, hey, the fat's going to shed off. The good news is the fat will shed off if you do what I ask you to do. The bad news is we need to closely monitor your lean muscle mass. We need to make sure that you're consuming adequate protein. You're talking about a patient population of obese patients that historically hadn't done any of that shit. They don't know about that. So you've

got it. Yeah. And you have to educate them because otherwise that woman who was living off cookies and ice cream is just going to eat less cookies and ice cream and they will lose body composition, but that's going to include lean muscle mass. But a lot of folks are like, include lean muscle mass. But a lot of folks are like, I think Mark Twain said it, there's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics. We can skin this however you want and make things look how you want. And so people ringing the bell saying this is causing lean muscle mass loss, they're taking subsets of data. They're looking at patient populations that were obese and not consuming adequate protein. Almost all the studies have shown the risk reward on this compound

when dosed appropriately, utilized appropriately, alongside with diet and nutrition and workout to maintain that lean muscle mass. I think the juice is probably worth the squeeze for a lot of obese people, for a lot of, and it gives them hope and the, you know, to steal from the great Ron White. Sometimes you just got to shoot the alligator

that's closest to the fucking boat. You know, like if somebody is headed over the cliff with obesity, chronic disease, and metabolic disease, their risk factor on all the things that kill us as humans is sky high. Let's begin to reduce those risk factors, get the weight off. Then we can begin to talk about more nuances and how to titrate down and do all those things. But of course, diet, nutrition, working out are cornerstone to anything.

Well, how does one go about figuring out how they get their specific dose and all these other things? Because when they go to a doctor and they ask, some people can't get it, or like you said, they're just, everything's just being thrown at them. That's given to everybody else, right? So how does this become an individual process? So one of the challenges, again, not to go too deep down that rabbit hole is with the existing healthcare system and the insurance model. These clinicians are limited to six minutes with a patient. That's not enough time to truly understand that patient, their genetics, their family history. How did they get here? Let's not condemn them. Let's understand them. Because if we understand people, then we can find common

ground and we can help people. And so at Ways to Well, we're a cash pay model and Merrick Health and all these great companies out there, like, I think it's going to change the game. I really do. And it has over the last four to five years, you can throw a rock and hit a cash pay clinic. Now there are viable options in your area. And so our approach is let's, before we decide how to optimize the motor, let's assess the motor, right? What does that mean? Let's look at you holistically. It's beyond looking at bio, like a lot of the clinicians who would immediately prescribe a GLP-1 have never pulled a comprehensive blood panel. Well, why would you write that? You shouldn't write any drug

without first understanding the patient, but you can't do that when you only have six minutes and the insurance tells you, we don't give a shit what you want to do. You're not allowed to pull a blood panel, you know? So at minimum panels, comprehensive and maybe expensive too, right? Correct. Correct. So the blood panel we pull at Ways to Well, um, it's like $500 and that's with 45 minute

consult with a clinician. That's going to deep dive into that. I believe Merrick Health is close to the same. A lot of these companies are doing that now. If you were to go in and try and use your insurance and get a Ways to Well blood panel, it's $2,800 is what they bill your insurance. And that's a whole nother subset of issues

because there's a lot of backdoor arrangements and agreements and people making money all the way through the process on your disease states. What about if somebody wanted to get a GLP-1? What's the difference between paying cash for it and using insurance? So in the insurance model, there's a little-known hidden middleman called a pharmacy benefit manager. I'll try and make it super as simple as possible for a very complex thing. These pharmacy benefit managers control your

insurance, but indirectly it's like Scooby-Doo. You pull back the mask, it's Mr. Rogers. It's like, right? The fucking insurance companies bought all the pharmacy benefit managers. They own them. United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield own the five biggest pharmacy benefit managers in the country. So you have a middleman negotiating a rebate, which in healthcare, they would call it a kickback and you'd go to prison. But when big pharma and big insurance do it, there's such a lobby that nobody says shit.

And so the truth is there's about $400 of profit off every month's worth of GLP-1s for a patient that goes to a pharmacy benefit manager, which is artificially running up the price of your drug by $400 a month. Okay. And then at the end of the year, the challenge is that insurance company, whether Cigna, Aetna, United, they're not really paying for that medicine, right? They're not paying the $1,500 a month that they're telling you, the patient and your boss, your employer that they're paying. But then at

the end of the year, they go back to your employer and they go, well, I waste a well and revive across both companies. I have over 300 employees. They're going to come to me at the end of the year and go, Joe Bob was on GLP-1 for a year. It cost us $25,000, you know, or whatever it's cost us what 15,000, I think is what it add up to. Um, we got to raise your premium by 15,000, I think is what it'd add up to. We got to raise your premium by 15,000 plus a cushion to make sure we protect ourselves. I'm fitting the bill for that. In a cash pay model, you cut all that riffraff out. And that's what Mark Cuban's trying to do. That's what we've been doing for over eight years at Revive Pharmacy, our compounding pharmacy, is how do we find these compounds, identify which compounds are not

covered by insurance, and help bring down the price of these drugs? So you're literally talking under $500 a month for the most expensive compounds that we possibly make. And I don't want to tell you the wrong price on the GLP-1s. I think it's like $300 a month is what most compounding pharmacies are charging for GLP-1s, which is literally, you know, one-fifth of what the insurance model is charging. The insurance model could be as high as $1,500. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy.

That's nuts. So. What are some of the downsides of these GLP-1s? Because we've heard, you know, you talk about some of the good sides, but like what should people be aware of? Yeah. And with any medicine, it's risk reward. You know, even testosterone, I tell people risk reward.

What's your age? What's your demographic? What's your goals? What are you really doing? You know, if you're a 24-year-old kid and you're not a pro athlete, why would you push the envelope? You know, what is the risk versus reward for you? And how do we

make sure that we at least make you educated and knowledgeable from a clinical standpoint on how this is going to impact your longevity, whether positively or adversely. GLP-1s, the biggest challenge I've seen is people not taking the time to understand that patient and deep dive into their diet and their nutrition. Again, like we said, if you don't, you're going to restrict calories. That's what's going to happen because you're going to lose appetite. So the mechanism of action for a GLP-1 is multifaceted. It's pretty interesting. They discovered it because a scientist was monitoring gila monsters in the desert and realized that these lizards didn't

eat for months at a time. And he was curious if they were hungry. Is that, that's because they're like cold blooded or something like that, right? Yeah. They're able to slow their, like, uh, their need for caloric intake through like slowing their heart rate and all of these different variables. But what also that does is the GLP-1 slows gastric emptying. So the food moves slower through the digestive tract, which creates a more full effect. The second mechanism of action that they didn't even realize when they first launched this drug is it impacts dopamine response to a stimulus.

So they're now investigating it for alcohol. It lowers the dopamine response. So you're not getting a, when you eat that sugar cookie, you're not lighting up those dopamine receptors like you used to. And you're also not that hungry. So you go, I'm eating this cookie. You don't really want it. And then after a few weeks, you just stop eating the cookies. The problem with that is that sword cuts both ways because you still got to get the protein in. And again, like we said earlier, if, if this is a difficult patient population,

somebody who's obese and non-traditionally doesn't know how to navigate this, if they stay with that diet of candies and sweets and they don't consume enough protein, even like a fasted intermittent fasting, you will cannibalize muscle. And you should expect to lose 15 to 20% of the weight you lose could potentially be lean muscle mass. But, you know, if under the guidance of a good clinician who actually knows what they're doing, which again, a lot of these companies out there do, especially in the cash pay field, the clinician's going to guide you through that. Make sure that your diet's on point, make sure you're consuming adequate protein, you know, depending on your age and demographic, does it make sense to supplement testosterone to preserve lean muscle mass?

Yes, it does. And it varies, but- I got a laundry list. Yeah, a lot of our guys in their 40s and women in their 40s who were obese and are trying to get that weight off, we take a strategic approach of, we, we give them a free consult with our nutritionist to try and make sure we do everything we can to give them the tools they need to be successful and minimize the side effect and the bullshit. Because if you just write somebody a GLP and send them off into the wild, they're going to come back months later, looking like a deflated balloon. They really are. They're going to cannibalize muscle. There's a risk that they lose bone mineral density,

which is crucial to longevity. So it is not all sunshine and roses. I think it's a phenomenal asset to be utilized when done appropriately. Do you know if there are any other long-term risks? If one, let's say they come back as deflated balloon and they stop taking it, does their dopamine just go back to the like normal? And I know they're going to be skinnier, so maybe their appetite isn't the same, but do, do things

just like go back to the way they were? Is there any long-term aspects of this that people haven't seen just yet? I think there's a lot of long-term data that's still to be determined, which is interesting. One of the things that's scary though, is if you get it wrong and you don't have these conversations we're talking about, you know, if you're over the age of 35, you're never putting bone mineral density back, you know, and a lot of people don't realize this. Diabetes is one of the biggest risk factors to low BMD too. So these again are already chronically ill patients. The good news is obese patients typically have high bone mineral density from carrying that weight around on their

bone structure, their skeletal structure. So if we're horse trading, you know, to optimize again, this isn't the compound for a girl trying to lose five pounds for spring break. I know that's a lot of what's happening here in California, especially in LA. Apparently every actress is on GLP-1s. And it's great for them. It's their choice to make. I just hope that,

and I'm assuming they are in this space with the right amount of money and cash pay that a clinician's guiding them and maintaining protein and all those. But you can always put lean muscle mass back on. You can't put bone muscle mass back on. You can't put bone mineral density back on. Um, a lot of patients too, it's like, can you put the winds on the board and titrate down and get them off this medication? Cause one of the, one of the things that a lot of the clinicians are saying in this country right now is it's like testosterone. Once

you go on, you're on it for life. Um, that that you don't have to physiologically be on it for life. It's that if you don't change the behavior that made you obese in the first place, then when this chemical straitjacket, if you want to call it that, limiter governor is off in three months and it's out of your system, can you control those hunger pains and those dopamine responses and not feel the need to eat that sweet, to eat that cookie, to overeat, to overindulge? And a lot of these people have struggled with that historically. Because it's changing dopamine, does it make you low-fee in some way? Has anybody reported

that to you? Like, I'm just not as excited about much of anything anymore? We haven't seen it in our practice, but again, we start really low dose and try and titrate up, but there are studies and reports and now they're trying to do studies because as many, there's probably a hundred positive articles on all the crazy things they're looking at for these GLP-1s with opioid addiction, alcoholism, even reducing cancer rates using GLP-1s. It has promising data and studies. For as much good as there is, there's a lot of fucking bad out there too. And people saying, I was depressed. I had anxiety. I felt like it took the joy out of life. You know, I didn't enjoy things like I used to. And so, yeah, that for certain

individuals in everything, there's outliers, right? Everything there's an outlier. And that's why any treatment, I don't want people to take lightly, like know your stuff, educate yourself, take some sovereignty and accountability because a lot of these clinicians, unfortunately, are not super educated in this space. And I would absolutely agree with what a lot of people are saying that this is being over-prescribed, it's being over-utilized, and it's being utilized inappropriately. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and let's look at where it adds value. If you're someone that's taking supplements or vitamins or anything to help move the needle in terms of your health, how do you know you really need them? And the reason why I'm asking you, how do you know, is because many people don't know

their levels of their testosterone, their vitamin D, all these other labs, like their thyroid, and they're taking these supplements to help them function at peak performance. But that's why we've partnered with Merrick Health for such a long time now, because you can get yourself different lab panels like the Power Project panel, which is a comprehensive set of labs to help you figure out what your different levels are. And when you do figure out what your levels are, you'll be able to work with a patient care coordinator that will give you suggestions as far as nutrition optimization, supplementation, or if you're someone who's a candidate

and it's necessary, hormonal optimization to help move you in the right direction so you're not playing guesswork with your body. Also, if you've already gotten your lab work done but you just wanna get a checkup, we also have a checkup panel that's made so that you can check up and make sure that everything is moving in the right direction

if you've already gotten comprehensive lab work done. This is something super important that I've done for myself. I've had my mom work with Merrick. We've all worked with Merrick just to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction and we're not playing guesswork with our body. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at merrickhealth.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save 10% off any one of these panels or any lab on the entire website. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. Speaking of babies, what's up with these Ozampic babies? Have you heard about that? No. I guess women that are typically on their,

um, I guess, I guess there's a fertility rate. Yeah. I guess there's a lot of women, maybe they're not even utilizing birth control. I don't know, but like let's just maybe suppose that somebody has been eating unhealthy and had unhealthy practices for a long time. Now they lost 30 pounds. Maybe they are hornier, you know what I mean? And maybe, you know, so yeah, anyway, I saw this on the news the other day, they were talking about these it's not like these are deformed babies because everyone's on Ozant. Yeah, yeah. I originally thought was the case, but now this is just people getting down and popping out more babies. That's interesting.

I know every situation is going to vary. So I know it's hard to say there's a certain age threshold for these types of medications, but I know it's been approved for like as young as like 12 year olds. And again, I don't know what the right answer is, but it seems like 12 is extremely young to be doing something. That sounds crazy to me too. Thank God we're not a pediatric practice, so we don't have to make those decisions. But if I had a kid, I mean, that would be, unless it's dire, dire consequences. Again, I would say the same thing with Adderall and all these, you know, methamphetamines that were pumping into the school systems with kids. Like, there is a risk reward for everything. And only that individual and their parents can decide what that risk reward is.

But I would avoid it. There's no way I would want my kid on a GLP-1. But as an adult who's struggled with obesity for 20 years and is headed towards chronic disease, it's a no-brainer. Like, sometimes you got to shoot the alligator close to the boat. Let's just, let's knock this one out and address the fire right in front of us. I think you said something really important. You said the bone density, like can't be gained back. I mean, maybe it could, like maybe someone could like lift, but lifting and, and, uh, you know, doing so, you know, in your forties or

something is probably going to have the same impact as doing stuff from when you were a kid. So it, that might move the needle a little bit. It might be exercise or could be nutrition. Um, but you lose that bone density and for the most part, you're not going to get it back. You lose that muscle mass, it's going to be an uphill battle to get it back. Especially if you haven't had – if you never really loved fitness, if you never really loved exercise, then it's going to be very difficult for you to, you know, maintain and to get into those things. So, and, and, you know, interestingly enough, though, I think you said about 15% is like, they might lose in muscle mass if they're not paying attention to some of these other variables. But I think if you lose, you know, a significant amount of body weight, you almost always invariably lose a good five, 10%. I realized that 10%, 15% are quite a bit different, but you're going to lose muscle

mass nearly every time you lose weight, unless you do so with like absolute perfect precision. Yeah. A hundred percent. And the biggest thing that I think they're ringing the bell with, with the GLP ones, and it's all fixed through proper titration and conversation is gastric emptying. And they'll say that it can cause gastroparesis. That is such a anomaly. And it's typically, it's not the arrow, it's the archer. You got some dumbass who prescribed a max dose and never had a consult with a patient and they drop ship it to their house. Patient starts injecting. They don't understand the mechanism of action. They're chronically constipated and they just keep injecting every week, seeing the weight shed off, but they're freezing their

stomach. They're freezing their gastrointestinals emptying. And so that is why, again, like any, I would say this with testosterone, like I'm a huge proponent of testosterone, but in the right circumstances, with the right discussions, with the right knowledge base, because a lot of guys think, you know, more is better. I'll just do more. I'll just do more. I'll just take more. Give me more. Why can't I take more? And it's like, well, let's look at bioavailability. Let's look. And you have to methodically educate the patient on, you know, why more may not be better and why we're taking this approach and give them the tools to understand it. Yeah, there's a range of testosterone that you could probably get yourself into where

you're seeing a lot of the benefits without a lot of the negatives. There's still be side effects, but you can get yourself into a range. Like somebody might have, you know, their testosterone might be like 400 or something like that. They go to a clinic like yours and that practitioner might be able to get them up to like 800,000, something like that. That's going to feel way different than that 400 that you were producing for a long time. So it's interesting because, you know, I think years ago when people would just go on like a full cycle, the way that they would like mitigate that was by just taking more and more stuff.

And so they would take more and more, they would take more and more drugs. But if you simply just don't take that much of it, then you don't have to worry about as many of the negative side effects. And for people that are concerned about like fertility and all those things, you guys have strategies for all that stuff too, right? Yeah. If somebody comes in in their 20s or 30s, again, like with everything, first, it's doing the deep dive. It's looking under the hood.

It's understanding what are your genetics? Do you have a methylfolate detox issue? What's your lean muscle mass? What's your visceral fat? What's your body fat? How's your sleep look? And I know these are all things y'all have probably talked about a thousand times.

So I don't want to bore everyone with that. but the building block, are you consuming enough protein? It doesn't matter how much testosterone you take. If you're not consuming enough protein, you're never putting lean muscle mass on. What's the real quick, just rewind methylfolate detox level. What is that? Never heard that. So a percentage of people, and I'm actually one of the gene markers, 40% of Americans, 40% of humans have a methylfolate detox issue. And so anybody who's consuming folates, which is in all of our foods, it's added chemically to our foods. It'll create chronic inflammation. Processed foods will create GI issues. A lot of people think that they have potentially neuropathy or they'll say, I'm in chronic pain,

their joints are inflamed, their bowels are inflamed. They think they have a lot of GI issues, arthritis, all these things. You look them up, you do this test. It's a simple genetic test that we can do through blood or saliva. And within a week, we know, are you one of these 40% of people? The other thing that's crucial with that is it'll impact your ability to absorb B12. So you need methylated B12 if you've got this gene marker. Otherwise, you're just pissing out your B12 vitamins. It's like the motherfucker test. Gary Breckhardt talks about the different types of B vitamins and stuff. You want to try to get methylated B vitamins, but only if you fall in this category. Correct. Correct. And it's not, I like to say that it's not a be all end all. I don't ever like to overhype it, but there is a subset of people that are dealing with chronic

issues that they have no idea is just because they have this gene marker. 40% is a huge number. Yeah. And so if we can help somebody uncover that, you know, that's going to fix a lot of chronic issues. The other thing is like, what is your baseline testosterone level? Where are you at? And testosterone is one hormone and a symphony of hormones. And we've got to balance all these hormones like vitamin D. Everyone's chronically deficient on vitamin D. Most people come in chronically deficient on magnesium, you know, calcium, like just basic supplements and dialing those in for people and making sure that they get enough sunlight and all these things that aren't sexy but are free

make a huge fucking difference. And then it's like as you age and progress, if you're in your 20s or 30s, we will oftentimes use HCG and clomiphene, which stimulate your body's natural testosterone production. Bodybuilders know about it because they use it as a tool when they come off cycle. They'll put that into their system

to stimulate their natural testosterone back up and upregulate. But when utilized as a proactive prevention rather than testosterone, we can boost your body's natural testosterone levels. Any drawbacks to that stuff? The main drawback is by boost, HCG can indirectly raise estrogen levels too. And that's where the clomiphene provides some insulation. It's pretty rare that we'd have to

use another compound like anastrozole, which bodybuilders know of too, because it suppresses the estrogen levels. Yeah. And then once you progress past a certain age group, if you're a male who's already had kids, who doesn't want to have any more kids, and we can't get you there through HCG or clomiphene, then I mean, I'm a huge, huge proponent of testosterone. I think it's, if you look at the risk reward of that compound and what we've learned about it over the last 20 years, I mean, it is pretty much universally agreed upon as one of the gold standards to help with healthspan and longevity.

He shared something private in the gym, but I'll just say it here. He's got a really high sperm count. So, and I proceeded to back up a little bit. Yeah, so for me- But it keeps your testicles full, basically, the HCG. Yeah, and I proceeded to back up a little bit. Yeah. So for me, it keeps your testicles full, basically the HCG. So for me, I'm, I'm, I'm 43. I took a couple. So I was like, yeah, for me, I'm 43 and I haven't had kids. So I, I take HCG and clomiphene alongside a super, super low dose of, of, uh, testosterone, um, to try and keep my levels around 800 to a thousand

is where I feel best. Um, and then we're monitoring all my biomarkers. So like one example I can give you is we have so many athletes come in and that have historically potentially pushed the envelope. And most of our client base is average Joes. It's just somebody trying to improve their health span and their chance at longevity and all of those things. But we do have a lot of athletes too. It's just the nature of the beast. And with those guys, they know this space so well. It's trying to give them new pearls of wisdom and help them take a step back. So you have this one group of individuals, the average Joe, who's terrified of testosterone and has been told all these lies and they're worried it's going to cause prostate

cancer. They're worried it's going to cause heart attack and stroke. Even though when dosed appropriately within physiological normal levels, testosterone insulates and reduces the risk factor of almost every chronic disease. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's a phenomenal, and this is all data research back, and everything I talk about too, I've actually, from the Rogan podcast, it's on Ways to Well's website. So I have white paper study after white paper study,

articles, all of it attached under JRE links on the Ways to Well website that'll back anything that I tell you guys today. Mark and I dove into the whole prostate misnomer earlier, but a lot of fear-mongering occurred that created an improper stigma around the safety around testosterone and scared people out of it. And so there's that subset that I want them to have peace of mind when guided by a clinician who understands hormones and can talk to you in a form that's educated and nuanced about this space, you're in good hands and you're more than likely going to be

in a better situation than you are by not having intervention. Now, the other side of that is you got really high-end athletes and Instagram influencers who may be pushing the envelope. And that's a whole nother talk track when we talk to those guys, because it's, hey, understand there's saturation levels. There's only a certain amount of receptor sites. There's only so much you can get out of this testosterone. The higher you go, you're increasing risk profile now. Now you've gotten away from longevity and we're a longevity practice. Our goal is to help people live to be happy, healthy centenarians.

Like that's the vision of the future. You know, not to get guys jacked and tan. Even though that may be a side effect that is desired, that's not the end game. What are some of the big risks of overdoing it so that like people can understand? Well, it just puts a strain on your body. So you're going to crash your natural testosterone levels.

You've got to maintain your natural gonad function and your testes. You will have testicular shrinkage. All that usually comes back. And that's if you're dosing inappropriately and not utilizing other compounds that are in your tool belt, like HCG and clomiphene that can help you minimize that. So quick question is test, cause like, I've just heard that

testicular shrinkage is just part of that process. So are you saying that guys can be on TRT and their balls don't have to shrink? Yeah. If you're taking HCG and clomiphene, you can minimize that. Okay. Um, and for a lot of guys, there won't be any difference. Um, yeah. And it'll, so HCG is used as a fertility drug to stimulate sperm count. So the negative of HCG is you're going to have some dangerous loads for, if you don't want to have kids. Yeah. Be careful because your fertility rate is going to go through the roof. Okay. The downside to testosterone is just the strain it can put on your body. Like as people, if they're not monitoring their hematocrit, you're going to have, you know, red count skyrocket quick.

Red count is thickening the blood, which is putting more strain on the organs. But again, when properly monitored and within physiological norms, all those things go away. You know, the bacne, the acne, all the things that people talk about, that's from non-physiological norms. You know, that's from extreme dosages. When again, in normal ranges, you can get most of the, almost all of the benefits with minimal side effects with pretty much no side effects when done appropriately.

Uh, there's always outliers, but for the average person, if they can stay in physiological norms and stay on top of it, we can truly optimize their health and longevity. there's always outliers but for the average person if they can stay in physiological norms and stay on top of it we can truly optimize their health and longevity and it's just one tool when we're talking about athletes taking bigger dosage we have to explain like how much can your body use what is your a lot of guys are just looking at their free testosterone they go man my free testosterone is 1500 it's really kind of a bad indicator because free the way, the way my clinicians explain it, uh, Denise is one of our lead clinicians and she's phenomenal. She'll explain it to an athlete. Your free testosterone are the

bullets in the safe, right? Or your total, sorry, your total testosterone are the bullets in the safe. Your free testosterone are the bullets in the gun. The total is pretty much irrelevant only to see the correlation to the free. So some guys will push the envelope and this is where the nuances of this field become important because a low T-center maybe misses the mark on this sometimes. And I'm not here to shit on any, like in particular,

but there's a lot of fly-by-night shops that have popped up and everyone's getting 200 milligrams of test sip. Whoa, whoa, this guy's at 1,500. Oh, awesome. Well, what is his free? If it's less than 10% of that is bioavailable, then now you have, you need to reassess this individual and figure out, because the goal is to improve your free testosterone.

What is available in the body in that moment, on hand, the bullet in the gun. And how do you do that? Well, what you see with a lot of guys is they'll take a massive amount of testosterone and shoot up their sex-binding gobulin hormone. And SPGH is like Pac-Man. It'll eat up testosterone. And so it's killing your free. So some guys just keep taking more thinking that that's going to get them better results,

but there's better strategies. Like at WasteWell, we'll say, let's take less, right? Let's scale you down, titrate you down. And let's explore maybe adding something more nuanced, like an Anovar. You know, Anovar will actually gobble up sex binding goblin hormone, freeing up your free testosterone. And rather than pushing the envelope and taking these levels, we can, in a safe and compliant way, help you get optimized to where you're getting the most efficacious benefit. And everyone asks, what's the right dose? What's this? It's different by every person. We're all different.

And what works for me, like, I don't like being above 800. For me, I get like anxiety. I get restlessness. I don't sleep well, you know, but I have friends that swear they feel great at 1200 and their levels are on all their other biomarkers are phenomenal. And so that's why I think it's crucial not to try and treat to a number. And again, I'm not our clinician. I got people on my team way smarter than me. We've got pharmacists, we've got MDs, we've got nurse practitioners all under one roof, working hand in hand to try and make sure that anything we do is above board and helping patients

achieve their goals in a healthy, safe way and drive healthspan. What you got over there, Andrew? I was very, very curious about the cholesterol markers on TRT. All my markers are really good. My free test is like somewhere between like 250 and 300 and then total is around 1100. Everything is always like really, really good except for my cholesterol. Now I do have a meat-based diet. I eat a shit ton of eggs. But it has concerned me especially because my dad had triple heart bypass surgery due to high cholesterol. At least that's what the doctor said, you know.

And it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that he had one major artery that was like 100% blocked. Like it wasn't even 99%. It was completely blocked. artery that was like 100% blocked. Like it wasn't even 99%. It was completely blocked. But what I am curious is, can TRT affect the cholesterol markers to the point where it seems like, oh, that's a huge red flag when in actuality, I might need to get like a calcium score or something along the lines of like more than just a cholesterol lab? Yeah. And it's interesting that you talked about your dad because that would be immediately one of the things I would say is what's your family history? What's your genetic predisposition to high cholesterol? Because what we've found out now

is diet actually has a very minute amount to do with your cholesterol level. A lot of it comes down to just your genetic predisposition. Testosterone can raise cholesterol levels. You know, obviously meat centric diets can also raise cholesterol levels. Obviously, meat-centric diets can also raise cholesterol levels. One of the other caveats though is the cholesterol levels have been artificially pushed down in traditional medicine. And we talked a little bit earlier about how academia is funded by big pharma. All these cholesterol levels that they're taught in med school were all formed in the 90s. And they were formed once Big Pharma began to sell statins and cholesterol drugs. And so they have sold the public on cholesterol is bad, but cholesterol is crucial to testosterone,

to muscle building, to a lot of good things in the body. And so our clinicians try to take a cognizant approach. Like one of the things we like to do in a dream world is to do a DEXA and a VO2 max before you start therapy. And that DEXA allows us to somewhat assess your cardiovascular conditioning and cardiovascular health. Obviously doing checkups with a cardiologist, if you can afford it, would be recommended for anyone, whether on testosterone or not. But I think the battle you're facing more than anything is your genetics and your epigenetics. And how do you stay within the confines

to keep you safe on those things? Do I think that testosterone's the thing that's going to push you over the ledge? No, especially if all of your other biomarkers are good. And Peter Atiyah talks a lot about, what is it? Lipo, little a, little b. Apo, b. Yeah, apo, is it? Lipo, little a, little b. Apo B.

Yeah, Apo B. Sorry, Apo, little a, little b and like being able to assess, you know, do you have that genetic predisposition? And that would be interesting to see to do a little bit deeper dive and just look at everything holistically as you can to assess what makes the most sense for you.

Peter Atiyah said something really interesting in regards to like Apo B and I guess like some of your lipid profile and stuff. He basically said that he chooses because of his family history. And because I think his ApoB was typically high, he chooses to utilize pharmaceuticals. And what he said about it was, he's like, I just don't think that people are going to eat low enough amounts of fat for long enough to actually have a positive impact on some of these markers. And he was saying like, you might need to be like under like 50 grams of fat. And he's like, and that can cause a whole cascade of other issues that you don't want. So for him,

he's just like, you know, easy call for me, especially because he researched it so much. And he's a doctor and clinician. He's brilliant. Yeah. He knows what he's doing. So he chose to take a drug. And I'll fuck it up. But it was either 80 something percent or 90 percent.

And I heard this on from Peter, but it was 80 or 90 percent of your cholesterol is genetics. It has nothing to do with diet. So, OK, you go on a crash diet and you cut out steak. OK, well, you're going to change it by 10%, maybe 20, if you're lucky. And so I just think with time, I mean, the biggest thing that I think is going to be exciting about the future is how AI and large language models are going to change the game. It is going to change the fucking game, man. I'm telling you, I am telling you, like we're working on launching a large language model that'll work to assess. So the goal is we get a VO2 max, we get a DEXA.

Okay. We combine that with your blood work. We put it into the AI. The AI can then calculate your all cause mortality risk across all of these different variables. And there's a bunch, there's dozens of companies doing this. We're not the only one. And we're just essentially taking all these people's various tools and putting them into one user interface that's seamless. And so the vision is you now have a doctor in your pocket and you can ask that large language model anything. So think about ChatGPT, but it's educated by Huberman, Atiyah, all these thought leaders in your pocket, 24 seven, we've loaded the white papers. We've loaded all of it. Mark gets his blood work back. You want to, Hey man, I noticed my cholesterol

level was X. How does that equal out? Well, now we know your gut health. We know, you know, do you have any sort of genetic predisposition? We know your VO2 max and your DEXA, your lean muscle mass, your visceral fat, the AI can help us guide you to optimal health. And then it can also monitor you 24 seven, monitoring your REM sleep, your deep sleep, your heart rate variability, your recovery rate. How many workouts did you get that week? Give you suggested workouts that might, right, assist you even further. All the way. And then even with DEXA, like once we have a DEXA and you really want to get into weight loss and you really want to be optimal, well, now we know exactly how many grams of protein you need to eat to maintain lean muscle mass. We know exactly how many calories

you need to eat to maintain your physique or at what deficit you need to be. And then instantly the AI algorithm can tell you meal prep solutions and be able to give you recommendations based off you, not a shotgun approach, not, Hey, just do this amount. It's literally based off your unique situation. Do you see this as like at all cutting the cost to the consumer too? Since it's like, if an AI is able to do a lot of this that would mean that there's maybe less people that need you know less well hopefully employees aren't getting fired but at the same time it's like you know more people are going to be able to work with a model that's learned this right so do you see that cutting the cost 100

that's the biggest when we started this thing eight years ago, I said, I want to bring cost-effective care to the masses. I want to bring longevity-based medicine to the masses. I was a drug rep. I was a device rep. I stood in surgeries. I've been in the trenches. I've seen what happens in those practices. And I thought there's gotta be a better way to do this. And the challenge is, you know, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the fucking face. You know, the challenge was I got behind the curtain and I go, shit, I got to pay this clinician. And in my model, a clinician can only see six patients a day. Okay. Well now I'm having to scale nationwide, you know? So for me to break down, to do all these things that I'm preaching, a clinician's got to have the time to do a chart review. They've got to be able to spend a minimal 45 minutes on the phone with you,

deep dive into all the data sets that we've uncovered, analyze those data sets. Okay. Then when they do their follow-up visit with you three months later, they got to go back through your chart, reread everything you discussed, look back through your family history, refresh their memory so they can add value on that one hour consult with you. AI fixes all of it. Like, so a lot of competitors scaled quickly by outsourcing providers. That's what, like after I went on Rogan the first time, people are like, why aren't you nationwide? Why aren't this? We had this huge demand. To me, I'm horse trading at that point. I'm no better than big pharma. If I make this a money grab and all I do is hire a fucking nurse practitioner

that was delivering babies on a Tuesday and all of a sudden she's supposed to be a testosterone expert on a Wednesday, that's not healthcare. I'm right back to sick care. And this stuff is so complicated and so nuanced and so deep and intertwined. It takes us six to eight weeks to train our providers

before we'll allow them to even do a call with you. And so they have to come into the WasteWell ecosystem, get trained up. All that goes away with large language models. All that goes away with AI because the AI won't only be a resource to you. It'll be a resource to a brand new MD who maybe came to work at Wastewell and

needs some training wheels, needs some guidance. Not that they don't know how to practice medicine, but to get nuanced into this longevity-based medicine, that's not in med school. Diet nutrition is not in med school. You know, a lot of this stuff that's, you know, nobody's talking about ice baths three years ago, you know, all these different infrared, all this stuff. And they, and a lot of that, even doctors today think is foo-foo. But when you look at the data and the studies, Huberman broke down in 1903, a guy won a Nobel prize for red light therapy, you know? Yeah. It's been, it's been in the market for a hundred plus years. Uh, and there's a study out of London that showed, uh, red light therapy, five minutes, three days a week, uh, helped regenerate eyesight and degenerative eyesight for people over

the age of 40. And it's because why does your eyesight diminish? Because of ATP. What is ATP is what fuels our cells. What are we doing when we do NAD drips? We're trying to get ATP. What are we doing when we take NMN? We're trying to get ATP. What are we doing when we take NMN? We're trying to stimulate ATP.

You know a really easy way to stimulate ATP? Red light. And now you're refueling your cells. And unfortunately, optics, like your eyes, your optical circuits require a massive amount of ATP to function appropriately. It's a big energy drain for those cells. And you have a limited amount of ATP.

So can we spur that? And that's what red light did, uh, in these studies over in London. How did you, uh, how did you start these? How did you start this clinic along with having, uh, your own compounding pharmacy? You got, uh, Joe Rogan, Segura, you got all these, you know, uh, high level people. Um, you've been on Rogan's show twice. Um, how the hell did you get here? Like what, and what drove you to start the clinic in the first place? Yeah, no, that's a good question. It's been a long, hard road. Um, honestly, I was a surgical rep standing in orthopedic surgeries and watching just opioids get prescribed. Like it was candy to all these athletes coming out of surgery. And I honestly, at the time, I didn't have a dog in the fight. I never really thought about it. Nobody was talking about the opioid. Yeah. You're like, oh, these help with pain. These guys are in

pain. Makes sense. And during that timeframe, I had been approached by one of the big orthopedic surgeons in Houston, Texas. And he said, Hey, would you want to quit being a device rep and come run a pharmacy for me? I've got this idea. We're going to use pain creams instead of opioids. And these creams are non-abusive, non-addictive. And at the time I'm like, huh, dude, I've got a great job. I'm good. In the next year, my brother got addicted to opioids and passed away. And that really changed my lens on a lot of this stuff. And I thought we can build a pharmacy that can provide solutions for patients. And so we built this pharmacy to be able to do the pain creams

and the scar creams and all this stuff that was non-abusive, non-addictive. And after running a retail pharmacy for three years and seeing the corruption and collusion of the industry, like this is no joke, this is no bullshit, hand to God, like it's bad. And the insurance companies are deciding what people get to take, when they get to take it, what dosage they take. They're not clinicians.

Your doctor's hands are tied. So within a year, year and a half, the insurance company said, oh, fuck you. We're not going to reimburse on any of these anymore. We want them on opioids. We're not covering $150 pain cream. They can go back to their $8 opioid prescription, right? And so they cut the bottom out from under it. And I began every month getting a book, like literally a book, like the size of a phone book or a Bible with all the drugs that the insurance companies have reclassified or changed their reimbursements on. And after going through that beat down for like two years,

I just started taking the books on all the shit they were not covering. And I said, we could build a pharmacy and just make all the shit they won't cover. We can make a living just doing that. So I got out of the insurance model and started that. And a big chunk of that was, like I said earlier, testosterone, you know, they want a guy, insurance companies want you to basically come in chronically low. They want you to have a fasted testosterone level

of under 250 twice before they'll cover your prescription. And even then, a lot of times after you're on prescription for four or five months, they go, okay, your problem's fixed. You can come off the med now. It's because they don't understand medicine. It's all about profit margins. So anyways, that led to me starting a cash pay pharmacy where I tried to, I realized I couldn't buy the products as a retail pharmacy at a price point that allowed me to make it affordable for the average person. So the only way to do it was to compound these medications.

And that's what led us into a compounding pharmacy. And then that led into sterile compounding. And then that led into the juggernaut that's revived today, where I think we've treated over 800,000 patients at our pharmacy. We're in 47 states. over 800,000 patients at our pharmacy. We're in 47 states. And the goal is to provide treatments that insurance either refuses to cover or is price gouging individuals on, like GLP-1s would be a great example. Pennies on the dollar at a compounding pharmacy for those products. Testosterone, pain creams, any of the peptides, all of those things. And then getting

into that space led me to meeting with clinicians to educate them on where these tools could be used in their practice. And the history of everything I'd been through, I began to realize really quickly, the average clinician in America is not prepared to have these nuanced conversations and they honestly can't afford to. They have six minutes with you. They get a $40 copay. They don't have time to spend an hour with you explaining why you have metabolic disease and how we can actually fix it. So instead, they're going to write you a diabetes medicine and push you out the door and see you can actually fix it. So instead, they're going to write you a diabetes medicine and push you out the door and see you again in six months. They're oftentimes not

educated in that realm either. You know, a lot of times doctors are, they're good for when you're sick. You know, when you do have an illness, they can be good for that. But they're not going to really be good with preventative care or a real way for you to get out of whatever it is you have, because a lot of times they're just going to probably prescribe you something maybe recommend a surgery and all those things could be beneficial and they could help a ton but their hands are kind of tied because they don't have the education background to be like i need you to lose probably about 80 pounds and we need to sit down we need to talk about this this is you know your life is

being threatened right now your blood pressure is high this. This is, you know, your life is being threatened right now. Your blood pressure is high. Instead, it's like, you know, blood pressure medication. I don't think they're, I don't think they mean any harm. I think it's just the way the whole thing is set up. No, it's hard. Like, we're headed towards a massive scarcity in primary cares in America. Like, we're losing more primary cares every day than are entering the marketplace. And it's because the job's a beat down and it's thankless. And they don't have the freedom or autonomy to make clinical decisions that are best interest of their patient. The days of your doctor coming to your house with a leather bag that knows your kids and your wife, that's over, man. They've got to see 50, 60 people a day and they're just putting out fires. They're not practicing healthcare.

They're practicing sick care by no fault of their own. And the truth of the matter is it's because insurance companies are controlling all of this. So when you asked about how I got into Wastewell, where this is crazy is one of the other things I did, I was, I was kind of a serial entrepreneur. I had a company that was doing an array of tests and I would go to clinicians and I would educate clinicians throughout the state of Texas. Why is it important to pull blood work? If you're going to prescribe an opioid, shouldn't we first do a genetic test to make sure this patient is not going to have an adverse event and not be able to not metabolize this opioid? And are they at a predisposition of addiction?

If you're not willing to do all that, shouldn't we have minimal toxicology tests this person to make sure they're not diverting the medication or abusing the medication, right? These are just nuanced, simple things that we should do. And I would go educate them. And then I'd go build a toxicology lab and then I'd go build pharmacogenetic lab. And then I'd have them send me their stuff. And I would help build that practice out to drive patient outcomes, but build a business at the same time. And same thing happened. Within months, when I rolled out my blood lab, insurance companies began sending letters to doctors.

Hey, Dr. Joe, we noticed you pulled 60 comprehensive blood panels this month. We don't like that. If you continue to pull comprehensive blood panels, we will revoke your contract. That puts that primary care out of practice. So what I'm telling you, this is the truth. If your primary care attempted to practice the type of medicine that Merrick Health or WasteWell or any of these telemedicine cash pay clinics practice, they would get threatened by the insurance company for running up the cost of

medicine through practicing preventative care. So, and then I'll give you one more little pearl of wisdom. You would say, well, wait a second. If somebody's pre-diabetic and they become diabetic, it costs the insurance company eight fucking fold a year in cost to keep that person healthy. Why would they let them progress from pre-diabetes to diabetes? Why wouldn't we take preventative action? And the answer is the entire system, the entire ecosystem

is based on quarterly earnings. That CEO is held accountable for UnitedHealthcare's quarterly earnings and profits to its investors. And they know, statistically, Americans switch jobs every two and a half years. 80% of Americans are insured through their employer. So if I'm a CEO at United and I'm looking at some fat ass with diabetes, I'm going, well, we'll just let him get chronically ill. And by the time it's really catastrophic, they'll be Cigna's problem.

They'll be Blue Cross Shields problem. They won't be my problem. Or they'll be the American government's problem, right? Because most of the cost of healthcare happens after the age of 65. So we're the ones fitting the bill for these insurance companies to provide shitty care and allow people to get sick as hell. And then we get saddled with it when they're in the system in their 60s, or they move to a new company and you're the employer, you're left holding that bag, not the insurance companies.

So, I mean, not to be too sinister, but it is a really broken system. And all of that combined is what pushed me to start Ways to Well. I looked at how much optimizing my hormones changed my life. I was at 25% body fat, dad's obese, brother's obese, sister's obese. All of them are diabetic. I was in what I call the pit of despair when I talk about when I was talking to Joe, like everybody's not a gifted athlete. Everybody doesn't have great genetics. Some people think that they're fucked, but they don't realize with a little momentum and a little help,

we can fix this. We can get some wins on the board and we can get you moving the right way and we can get you healthy. And I've been, you know, this was, I was 32 when I was at 25% body fat and now I'm 43 and you know, I can get my body fat as low as 6%, a matter of like months when I just dial in and it's life changing. I never thought that would be possible in my thirties. I just thought I was headed towards obesity. What,

I'm just curious, what would your advice be to whether it's a young person, um, as far as navigating insurance, dealing with insurance, health insurance, et cetera, along with working with a company like Merrick or Ways to Well, how would you navigate that financially? Yeah, that's a good, that's a very good question. So not to be, not to put my salesman hat on too much here, but I try to just be real with people. You have to change your perspective and your mindset and understand that health insurance, view it like car insurance. Car

insurance is there when you wreck the fucking car. Car insurance does not change the oil, does not improve the performance of the motor, does not rotate the tires, does not maintain the vehicle. Health insurance today has been redefined. They don't even call it health insurance. If you actually look at your insurance plan, they now call it managed care. Yeah, it's a managed care plan. And so they're managing your prescription drugs

and managing your chronic disease. If you're okay having chronic disease and being on drugs the rest of your life, then that's the path that that system is built to put you down. And so I tell people, what's the cost of accountability? What's the cost of taking ownership

and sovereignty over your health? This is not life-changing amounts of money. You know, by law, if somebody's on a schedule control like a testosterone, we have to have their blood work. I try to recommend people quarterly, but every budget is different. And so for $500, and I don't know what Merrick's price is, probably exactly the same or close. You get a deep dive and an analysis from an unbiased source that can explain to you the nuances of what's going on. And the more we can do, the better we can get proactive and preventative. So start viewing

your health insurance as the oh shit bag. It's there when you blow out a knee. It's there when you get in a car accident, but don't expect them to maintain the vehicle because if you do, they're going to maintain you all the way to chronic disease and huge profits because they are monetizing all the medicines you're on. The insurance companies through their middlemen are making money off of these prescription drugs. And so insulin, you know, we talked earlier, I don't remember what you said the price was, but it should be like $40 a month. You know, I think the last price-

Like 30, 40 bucks at Walmart. Yeah, yeah, see? And that's- But Walmart has some sort of weird monopoly on it. You can't get it anywhere else. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what that's about. It's interesting.

In the insurance model, the reason it's $290 a vial is because the same thing we just talked about with GLP-1s, the Scooby-Doo middleman is pocketing like a hundred bucks a month. Well, and it keeps people tied to their job. Yeah. Like I know so many people are like, I can't quit my job because I have it for the insurance. And I'm always like, does that guy know that you can just go buy your own insurance?

Yeah. Like you can. Well, and that's where I- Select a different type of job. And then the other thing is like with these AI and large language models, not to get too far ahead, but like there's a lot of stuff coming that people are going to be forced to take their own healthcare into their own hands. There's no shame in wanting to have great sex. And there's no shame for wanting your member to perform the way it should be.

A lot of us sometimes have some issue with blood flow, but that's where joy mode comes in. Let me read you these ingredients because it's not going to be very long. Vitamin C, L-citrulline, arginine nitrate, and panix ginseng. The cool thing about the ingredients in this is that they're all natural and that they're going to help you increase your blood flow, not just everywhere. So you could use this as a pre-workout. You will increase blood flow when it counts to where you need it. So if you know you're going to have a good time a little bit later, 60 minutes beforehand, put some Joy Mode in some water, drink it. And then when it comes time to perform, and you know what I mean by perform,

you're going to be ready because you're going to be flowing. Joy Mode is going to help you do that. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at usejoymode.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save 20% off your entire order. Again, usejoymode.com slash powerproject. Promo code powerproject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. And so all these companies are launching robots, large language models, artificial intelligence that will be able to do jobs. Yeah, really cool stuff.

And these are powered by large language models and artificial intelligence. Robots like you're too fat. Yeah, exactly. It's like, wait, is that all the robot says? But where I'm going with this is between robots and large language models, again, 80% of people, their insurance coverage comes from their employer. It's going to reach a point. And Sam Altman, the CEO of, what is this, the AI company, whatever they are, I'm blanking out on the name. He had an article that he wrote, a blog that's called Moore's Law for Everything. And all he's explaining is, doesn't matter what you think on

it, these robots and this AI and this technology is going to displace jobs. And all he's explaining is, doesn't matter what you think on it, these robots and this AI and this technology is going to displace jobs. And so people are going to have to figure out ways to provide their own health insurance. And this system that's built on profiteering off them is going to make it tough. So I know that's a long answer to your question, but one of the things I talk about is, what did you spend on a car last year? What'd you spend on your house? What'd you spend on your mattress? Okay. Well, you're only in that mattress eight hours a day, right? You're in that house a few hours a day. You're in that car a few hours a day. This is your flesh vessel. You get one of them. This is what's going to get you from point A to point B till the day you leave this earth. And for $500 every six months, you can at least have some insight and

nuances into helping drive your healthspan and longevity. I'm going to make it cheaper. The goal is to make it cheaper. And this technology like AI, large language models, and robotics will allow us to drive down the cost of healthcare. And that's the positive of it. The negative of it is how many jobs get displaced over the next 10 years where people don't have access to health insurance and they're forced to go cash pay. You know, that's. Yeah. You're making me think, you know, I almost wonder like, what do people know about their health? You know, like when you get a client, someone comes to you, probably the most they know is just going to sound like confusion.

They're going to say, oh, you know, my knee kind of hurts. And then I went to the doctor and then they said I need a surgery, but I never had it. And it feels kind of weird. And like you asked about other health, you know, my dad had this happen or whatever. They probably don't really know much about their own health. And it's amazing what you can learn. I'm not saying that blood work is the end-all, be-all, but blood work, something like a VO2 max, I mean, most likely people are probably aware that they haven't exercised in a while.

So they're probably assuming that they're not super robust with a test like a VO2 max. They're probably aware that they're heavier than they want to be. And so they get the DEXA scan and stuff. But how awesome it is, is it to get some of those tests done. So you have something to kind of match it up against at some sort of beginning set point. And you really get to actually learn about not only your health, but what you can do to improve it. And if you think about, we're talking about like, do to improve it. And if you think about, we're talking about like, you know, someone gets their blood work done and their red blood cell counts a little high, their homocysteine's high or something, a couple of things are off, find out they don't methylate B vitamins well, and you just tweak little things. It's not always about testosterone and growth hormone and getting on all kinds of

different stuff to become jacked and tan. You know, it's about, you know, just solidifying your health, but you're really, might be just steering yourself away from some chronic disease. Maybe you're headed towards having high blood pressure. Maybe you're headed towards gaining a significant amount of weight that starts to negatively impact your sleep.

And then a cascade of other negative things can happen. And so with what you're suggesting, what companies like Merrick Health do is they get you going in the other direction. And it might sound pricey, it might sound expensive, but it sounds like it's necessary. I think it's, I think as people get more and more educated, there's been a huge adoption rate post COVID. It's been really fascinating to watch because there's not only more resources and more phenomenal companies out there like us and Merrick and all these companies that the space has grown, the sector's grown, and the awareness of the public has grown because of podcasts and guys

like you and Joe and biohackers and fitness podcasts. And again, whether it's coming from me or anyone, I always say like, do your own research. You know, I hate to say it, but don't trust anyone. Like try your best to research for yourself, to understand the nuances, because there is a lot of fuckery going on out there and a lot of over-promising, under-delivering. You know, I don't ever want to overhype anything we do at Ways to Well. I just try and say, let's block and tackle. Let's put out the fires that are in front of us. To tell you we're going to make you a centenarian is a stretch. To know that we can delay the onset of chronic disease is possible. That's 100% possible. And with the technology we have and

artificial intelligence and large language models and the amount of data sets that it's going to be able to capture. Like think about it, at Ways to Well, I think we're at over 37,000 patients now. You know, I've only been doing this four years. All that data is going to be assessed by large language models. All that, we're going to know what date men started testosterone, what date they started HCG, who's trending where, how they're trending, how's their REM sleep, how's their heart rate variability, how's their they're trending, how's their REM sleep, how's their heart rate variability, how's their DEXA, how's their deep sleep, how many workouts did that guy do a week? If they allow us to tie into their wearables, the more data you give us, the better we can drive your health outcomes. And then imagine you have a question unique to you and you just pop

open the phone and say, Hey, Alan, uh, explain to me why Denise prescribed me, uh, a methylfolate detox test. And then Alan will answer it. And that's there today. This isn't like future sci-fi stuff that's here today. Like all that technology is there. It's just putting it together and launching it to the public, which is what we hope to do this year. Um, We've been working with a startup in Austin that's a large language model where you have your individual chat bot, but it's a character.

And so you have a little alien that pops up on your phone and you can ask it anything. And it's going to know your chart, your medical records. And what's crazy is now these large language models, they call it have eyes.

They can tie into the camera. So you come into the, you come in and it's gonna, at some point, AI is gonna be able to assess your health based off your physical appearance. Where'd you learn that from? I learned it from my alien.

Leave me alone. Yeah. And it's fascinating. This guy can already answer questions better than any fucking clinician I've ever met. It's crazy. You, cause you just clinician I've ever met. It's crazy. Because you just ask it. He looks smart.

It's like chat GPT. You ask it something and you go, hey, man, can you explain that to me in a more chill way, like a bro way? He'll be like, yeah, no problem, bro. Let's talk about your testosterone level. That's amazing. And he'll give you pros and cons, right? And the goal is to have that in your pocket 24-7. you pros and cons, right? And the goal is to have that in your pocket 24 seven. So if you have any questions about your healthcare or your healthcare journey, or what your cholesterol means to you,

it's not a broad generic answer. It's a proprietary unique to you and your medical indications and records and genetics answer. I have a question for you. Are there any, answer i have a question for you are there any do you feel that we may be a little bit too trusting because i okay now get don't get me wrong i think maybe i've watched too much fucking sci-fi shit black mirror black mirror type shit but at the same time like this is amazing and i can see like all of the upside and all the possibility but do you think there's any inkling where there's a level of consciousness that can be gained by this language model or do we have just have control of these language models i'm not gonna lie it scares the shit out i'm just like i told joe this it's again like anything it's a tool and tools can be used for good or bad this shit's man. Like the level of knowledge

that these large language models have and they call it, I can't remember what they call it. I'll butcher it. It's like ghosting or something when they do behaviors that aren't programmed and they're already doing that. We could go down that rabbit hole.

I mean, I've had in-depth talks with people about it. It's like Altman, you know, and I don't know anything insider-wise, but the word on the street in Austin was Altman was ousted because the AI had reached a level that he was required, had a fiduciary duty to the board to report. And that model is AGI, artificial general intelligence. There's an incentive for him not to report that to the board. And that incentive is financial because Elon Musk was a backer. And once it reached AGI level, which is average general intelligence,

which means it's as smart as every human on earth, you needed to report that to the board because now it's getting to dangerous territory. Because the next step is ASI, which is artificial super intelligence, which means it's now smarter than the culmination of humanity and everything we've ever done and that's something that we need to discuss as a society and a culture and make sure but now it's like this genie how do you put it back in the bottle because china russia everyone's in an arms race to launch ai um and so the the word on the street and all,

and I have no inside knowledge. I don't know if it's true, but Joe and I talked about this on the podcast. He had heard the same shit and he knows way more people than I do, was they had ousted him originally because he didn't report that leap to the board. And then, you know, there's a huge insurrection.

Everyone threw a fit and they brought him back. So it is scary. Like, it's scary. I can tell you, I can see immediately how this could really fuck people over in a traditional healthcare model. Now you got Blue Cross Blue Shield. And they say, hey, let's roll out this AI. It's going to monitor you 24-7. It now knows you're headed towards a fucking heart attack in six months.

24-7. It now knows you're headed towards a fucking heart attack in six months. And guess when they're going to cut your contract? Right before the heart attack where they don't have to spend the money. And so when everyone talks about cash pay versus insurance versus that, that's one of the things I say, the importance of this. People, they use the word, the P's. They say it needs to be personalized. It needs to be predictive. And I agree with those things. That's, that's true predictive proactive medicine. But the fourth P that nobody's talking about is it needs to be private. It has to be private. You do not want this shit in the hands of a big insurance company. You don't, you do not want these bastards having this data set. And it, it, that's where this tool can cut both ways like a sword.

It's like- And there's no legality from stopping them from doing something like that also, right? They could. They could try. They could try to say, we're going to roll this out. And it would be a Trojan horse. And that's where I'm like,

begin to partition out your life and say, okay, I can't trust these guys. And I'm not saying it's us. Find somebody you trust, a clinician in your area, cash pay clinician. As AI evolves, it's here whether we want it or not. Even my clinical team's very nervous about AI because they're worried it's going to take their jobs. And I don't think we're there and I don't think we'll be there for another decade, but who knows? I don't know. I mean, but I do think it's going to displace a lot of jobs and it's not the jobs people think. People think, oh, it's going to replace factory workers and it's going to replace accountants, attorneys,

doctors. Like we're outsourcing human intellect and knowledge, right? Why am I going to pay an attorney when I could just load in everything that's going on and that AI is going to guide me through it and write a seamless legal document? That's what's coming. And so what do we do with all these jobs? And I don't know, that's a whole nother talk track, but it is wild. We can't stop or slow down, you know, progress. Like we need progress, so we can't really stop it. Yeah. I was going to ask, like, are you able to keep this AI model unbiased? Because I know when you ask certain models, like certain questions, whether it be political or like draw me somebody, like draw hate or something. And it's like they're wearing a certain political party's, you know, colors or whatever.

Or they're all white for some reason. Yeah, right. White people are angry. Yeah, are you able to keep it unbiased to where it's not blatantly obvious? Like, oh, I asked the Ways to Well AI, and guess what? It told me I needed testosterone. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Obviously, we can't.

So the answer is, the reason they call them large language models is they take data, and they assess that data, and the data you load in is the decision that it's going to lead to right so it's just assessing a massive amount of data the the hard part is if you were to make this architecture open and it could go to the internet it's going to pull data that's bullshit too right and so it could skew it the wrong way so what we're doing is i'm trying to build out a medical advisory board of thought leaders like i've talked talked to BioLane as potentially sitting on it. Really, people way smarter than me. Come sit on this board.

Let's peer review white paper studies before we load it in the AI. Let's get a general medical consensus from the best and brightest in their field. And let's put those motherfuckers in your pocket. Not me. I'm just a business guy. Let's take really smart people who are nuanced and experts in this field and have them assess which white paper studies make sense, which data sets make sense.

And we can control the input to the AI, which then allows the AI to make an unbiased decision or you could say biased, but it's based off the data sets that we as a culture, as a organization believe in. I'll get on that board and have everybody slingshotting and venting every single day. It'd be great. I'm in.

Thanks. So going back to like the insurance thing really quick, I always thought it was something I needed, right? Like I wear glasses. So like, oh, I need the vision plan or whatever it is. I paid 20 bucks a month or a paycheck or whatever it was. You know, No questions asked. And then I got my one office visit a year and I got my one prescription glasses a year. And I was curious, my daughter went in for one and I was like, Hey, how much does it cost to just get your prescription essentially? Office visit and whatnot. It was only like 60 bucks.

And I'm like, Holy shit. I've been like paying triple a year for the same thing. And so like that blew my mind. But anyway, is anybody pushing back on whether it be telemedicine, telemedicine with AI? Like my worry about all of this stuff is that you're going to help a lot of people. And then at one point, maybe it all goes away because somebody, some entity is like, no, we're the overlords. We're going to shut everyone down. Now everybody that's currently on a protocol,

you have to go through us and now it's like the prices are like 10X and that sort of thing. 100%. I'm going to steal another quote from Deion Sanders again. He said, if the enemy's not coming at you, you're walking with them. So take a look around. And the truth of the matter is this sector in this space is under attack. It's absolutely under attack. It grew, it boomed. It's become this huge thing post-COVID. Compounding pharmacies are under attack. Telemedicine's under attack. telemedicine's under attack and all of that is being driven and powered by big pharma and big insurance

and they have huge lobbies and they're an 800 pound gorilla and they're moving shit behind the scenes to orchestrate and suppress these things from evolving into the marketplace because it hurts their pocketbooks so whether you're talking telemedicine

the DEA was considering implementing the Ryan hate act, which is basically an act that restricts the ability to prescribe testosterone or any controlled over the phone, which, you know, is idiotic because all those diagnosis are going to be based off blood work. And now you're restricting people's accessibility to be able to get to those. And you're increasing the cost of a cash pay model, which makes it not sustainable, right? So do I think they could put it out of business or do I think they're gonna say,

you're not allowed to do this anymore? I don't, but what they're doing is making it so hard and so painful and so financially restrictive that it's hard to eke by with a profit. Like with compounding pharmacies, like we discussed earlier, the FDA wants us to make all this stuff for crash carts. And, you know, most of what is used in a hospital in an emergency event is made by compounding pharmacies.

But then in the next breath, their buddies at big pharma want to lean on them to hammer compounding pharmacies for peptides and reclassify peptides with no merit, no clinical backing, no clinical knowledge or expertise, just a blanket statement out of left field. And when you peel back the layers to onion on that, why? You know, Merck is looking at over 200 peptides for patent. The GLP-1s that we've been discussing,

those aren't banned. Why? They're peptides. They should be banned too, like all these other peptides if you're going to blanket ban peptides. Oh, wait, they're patented by Eli Lilly and all these companies that are making billions of dollars off of them.

And so that's the real reason. Hundreds of billions of dollars. Yeah, a lot. It's like $700 billion. Yeah, it's insane. Those GLP-1s will be the biggest drug in the history of the world. They're the biggest compound in the history of the world. They're the biggest compound in the history of the world. Bigger than antidepressants, bigger than opioids, bigger than all of it.

This is the new blockbuster drug for these companies. And so there is a level of savagery and corruption that goes into that. Like an example, Eli Lilly sued me. You know, they sued my pharmacy for compounding it, even though GLP-1s are on an FDA backorder list. So the FDA says, if these products are on the list, that means that the public can't get them. We are asking you compounding pharmacies to please make this so it's affordable and approachable and available for the average American. Then you make it at the request of the FDA. And these motherfuckers sue you

and try to tie you up in litigation, run up your cost of running a compounding pharmacy. And I'm fortunate enough that we've been in the space long enough and have a big enough presence that I can fight that fight. But if you're a small little shop, you're done. You can't fight that fight. And so there's, yes, it is under attack and it's scary. And I have concerns in that even with large language models and AI, you know, that's going to have to go through an FDA regulatory process. Like my vision

right now is everything's given a disclaimer. This is not medical advice. This is just, you know, if you want medical advice, you can hop on the phone with a clinician. This is just some general guidance, right? We have to give disclaimers and caveats because that will end up eventually having to be an indicated tool with FDA approval. But the FDA still hadn't figured out biologics, and we've been doing biologics for 30 years. You know, they still don't have their heads wrapped around stem cells or any of these cellular treatment options. They started as the food and drug administration. Now they're having to deal with biologics, technology, AI, robots, like they're not equipped for this. I want to ask you, how sick are people?

You know, you go to a gathering, you go to a family function, uncle so-and-so and your aunt and this person, that person, people on the street seeing you, maybe from Rogan. Like, how sick are people? Like, how compromised are people out there? It's pretty bad. I mean, it's pretty bad. Uh, I mean, it's pretty bad. I think it's, uh, over the age of 45, uh, average Americans on four or more prescription drugs. Um, as a society, we're obese as a society, we're headed towards metabolic disease as society, our cancer rates have gone up and climbed. I mean, all of the chronic diseases that are killing man, aren't being diminished. They're going up. And when you, uh, start to make people aware of some of the stuff that you do, or they heard you on, you know, a couple podcasts or whatever, they must kind of

be in shock, right? They must be like, like when you start to tell them stuff, oh, that's actually really simple. We can help you solve that. Here's what you do. And you're going to, you know, get on the phone and you're going to talk to somebody who might have to prescribe a couple things and should be able to really help you with that pretty quickly. And they're going to be like, they're probably, they're probably in total shock. I'm assuming. Oh, a hundred. I, we had a, I was telling your team earlier, this is a true story. Like maybe a month ago, we had a special forces guy that was referred to me from the staccato pistol company. Um, cause we work with a lot of those guys over there and they're in Austin and man, this guy called me after being

on treatment for four weeks and said, brother, you told me that your goal is to help people. You didn't help my life. You saved my fucking life. He's like, I wasn't suicidal, but I was homicidal. And his tongue in cheek, somewhat joking, but he's like, I laid in bed with my gut on fire every night. I didn't sleep more than two hours. You know, our sex life was struggling at home. My wife was frustrated, all these things. And again, people don't understand the cascade, man. If you don't feel good, if you can't recover, if you can't sleep, it takes its toll.

And so, so many people, he had thought it was hopeless. Like I keep using the words pit of despair, but it's not just obese people. It's somebody dealing with a chronic injury or chronic pain. And they think there's no way out and that they can't fix this shit. And they've seen five doctors. That's one of the challenges again, with, I hate to keep shitting on the existing system, but I got to call a spade a spade. It is so siloed that nobody's, everyone's a niche specialist. So even for me, my personal experience, I was training CrossFit.

I was a device rep leaving my house at 4 a.m. to go train CrossFit five days a week. Then I stood in surgeries till 9 p.m. at night, went home, crashed, right? I was 25% body fat, even though I was training, go to a primary care, took me three months to get in, sat in that motherfucker's clinic for three hours, waiting for him to see me. I see him for six minutes. He pushes me out the door, tells me I need to lose weight,

gives me no real solutions and I'm off. And then I do that two or three times. I'm begging him to send me to a specialist. Jump forward, it's two years later. I'm finally getting in with a urologist who's hopefully gonna give me some answers. I get my blood work done. I get a bill in the mail for like a thousand bucks. My insurance denied it all because I wasn't a certain

age demographic where they felt like I needed that blood work yet. And it turned out my testosterone was 110, 110. So of course I'm going to have all these issues. Now I was talking to Joe about this on the podcast too. He asked what caused that? And I'm like, well now hindsight, like getting up at 4am, not getting a lot of sleep, not being in the sun, being not supplementing vitamin D. There were a lot of things we probably could have done, but whether we did or didn't is irrelevant at this point because we treated me with HCG and clomiphene and that's all we did. That's all this urologist did. And within eight months, I shit you not. I went, all I did was add that. Didn't change my lifestyle. Didn't change my diet. I went from 25 to 6% with like a six pack, just optimizing my heart. And I felt like a new human.

And it was so life-changing, so life-changing for me. And that is what I see with so many clients is whether they're obese or they're lean and they just can't put on muscle or they're chronically injured or hurting. The system is just not built to help these people. It's built to push medicines for chronic disease. I'm curious about this because I haven't heard anything about it in a while. But I remember a few months back, whether it was last year, there was something going on with testosterone. And it was something, I don't know what was going on,

whether there was some legality stuff. I think that's what he was referencing maybe, yeah. Oh, people worried that they couldn't get their testosterone? Oh, I didn't know that. I think you were maybe mentioning- Oh, you're talking about the Ryan Haidt Act. Is that- Yeah, so that was the fear.

The Ryan Haidt Act is this old law that's been on the books since like the 70s. And essentially the DEA was worried that testosterone's being over-prescribed. Yeah. Okay, and then here's how I would answer that to the DEA if they're out there listening is, we don't regulate women's hormones.

We don't tell. There is no difference fundamentally. It is just as crucial for a male to have an optimal hormone level of testosterone as it is for a woman to maintain her estrogen levels. When a woman reaches a certain age, her OB gen almost always recommends now that they go on estrogen treatment therapy to make sure that they maintain bone mineral density, skin elasticity, all these benefits that estrogen, heart health, organ health, tissue protection. It's the same for men. And so the terrifying thing is somehow testosterone, because of the dogma from 1930, has ended up in this weird space

where the government kind of views it as something more than it is. I don't know if they thought we're going to have super soldiers and everyone's going to become Captain America. In Bigger, Stronger, Faster, my brother said that some of the research he did, he came across, they thought they would have super criminals. Yeah. I wouldn't say, yeah. Did Hillary Clinton say that one?

When people ask, when I got asked about that, the Ryan hate act and the law, thank God though, I saw you posted about it. Joe reposted your post. Momentum was gained. The DEA was willing to hear the voice of reason. They said, we're going to put this on ice for two more years as we sort through it. But there is a chance that they come in and potentially over-regulate telemedicine

and make it really hard for men to get access to these treatment modalities. But that's the problem with the system. Texas still has a law, literally a state law. It's illegal to lasso a fish. That's a a state law. It's illegal to lasso a fish. That's a, that's a law in Texas. It's illegal to lasso a fish. Why?

Who's lassoing fish? Like, do we need a law for that? Like there's certain things where it's like, this is ridiculous. Like just cause somebody made this rule up in the seventies doesn't mean we should start implementing it. Yeah.

Like it's. Yeah. And, and, and hire an entire task force to police people lassoing things. And then the biggest thing is I understand how they came to that consensus in the 70s because they're looking at it going, oh my God, this is going to cause cancer. We're going to have superhumans. We're going to have guys roid raging. They didn't understand the physiology and the

biomechanism action of these compounds and how, when utilized appropriately, they're improving healthspan, improving longevity, reducing the risk of chronic disease. It got mislabeled. And that dogma has followed that compound since the dawn of time, since the thirties. I think you mentioned, you know, how sick, you know sick many people are, people come into you with these various issues. I'm imagining that by lowering some of their markers of inflammation and assisting with some of the blood work and seeing that they're starting to trend in a direction that you guys want. I'm imagining, as you mentioned with that soldier, everything's probably improving. Probably their sleep. as you mentioned with that soldier,

like everything's probably improving, probably their sleep. I think we don't really realize or understand like how pulled down we are by, or it's weighted down by so many of these things, things like BPC and some of these other interventions that you might be able to utilize. I mean, if you could just get somebody to have a little less pain every day,

that might be the kicker that gets them on their bike that day. That might be the kicker that gets them to go out on their walk and to be more productive in their day. What are some things that you've seen in particular with something like stem cells? Because you were telling me a little bit about it. And I think maybe from years ago, people are like, ah, it's like 50-50, but maybe people were getting it done in a particular way that wasn't the most efficient and effective. So I actually missed this earlier when you were asking about governmental regulatory bodies. Stem cells are one of those.

During the Bush administration, George W. Bush was worried that they were going to be aborting babies and turning them into stem cells in a blender, which is just a total misnomer and misrepresentation. Babies are loud. They can be annoying. Yeah, it's like, so in the U.S., people think that stem cells are illegal. Stem cells aren't illegal. It's illegal to use fetal cells, meaning to take cells from a fetus or to abort a fetus

and clone those cells. Can't do that. It's illegal to clone human cells in the U.S. So you cannot manipulate or alter the cells. What you can do in the U.S. is take birth-derived tissues, healthy birth, healthy mother, pre-planned C-section. You take that after-birth discarded tissues, the placenta, the umbilical cord, and in those are the juices of life

or all the essential building blocks and elements that help. Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just the juices of life. It really is. It's like what kept that baby alive all the way through that process.

And they are squeezing all the juice. Well, you've heard of like people drinking like the blood of younger kids or whatever, right? Like crazy shit like that. Well, that one dude, I don't know if you've had him on. Yeah, what the fuck? He's doing some strange shit.

Yeah. Good for him. Yeah, I mean, it's weird, but yeah. So a lot of people misunderstood what it is, how it works, where it comes from, right?

Healthy birth, healthy mother, pre-planned C-section. One out of 10 umbilical cords makes it through the stringent process, right? Then it's processed in an ISO certified lab by PhDs. They isolate out these tissues and put them in usable formats. That's all it is in the US. What does that mean compared to what they're doing in Panama, Panama? They're doing the exact same thing. The only difference is they curate the cells in a Petri dish and expand them or cultivate them, which in the U S would be close to cloning. And you're now manipulating human cells. And the FDA says, uh, we're not allowed to do that. And that's illegal here. Um, but you can take those healthy derived birth tissues and utilize those cells. The most common thing they're doing is orthopedic practices because it's the only FDA indicated solution is they're pulling from bone marrow. And, you know, there's

varying opinions on it. And I have not seen tremendous results with bone marrow. And it makes total sense because there's a precipitous drop-off on all these goodies that actually help heal you. And that drop-off starts the day you're born. And if you're pulling bone marrow from the hip of a 50-year-old woman, she doesn't have the viable cells that a brand new baby has in an umbilical cord, you know? You need to go after these babies. I knew it. And then it's like, what are they? And so I'll, I'll try and make this quick. People are like, what, what is it? What am I getting with these tissues? You're getting cytokines, exosomes, scaffolding,

uh, extracellular vesicles. Just think of them as building blocks. Like the simple way I try and explain it to people is you've got a construction site. You need all the materials to build a building. You don't only need the materials, you need the blueprint and you need the plan. Well, when we put these cells in a shoulder or a knee, we're giving your body millions and millions of messenger cells and all these building blocks. And they're screaming at that joint saying, hey, come over here. There's an injury. Come look. And then your cells show up and all those cellular goodies are transferred from those young baby cells into your cells. And within 48 hours, those cells that we put in your body are gone.

And it's your body that does all the healing. It's refueling all the goodies that your cells are deficient in as we age. And so we've seen phenomenal results. It's so weird. It like makes so much sense that you take something from something that's really youthful. Yeah. Right. And that's, you know, perfectly designed to handle this world for many, many years and implement it back into someone who's older.

And the way there's a fancy term that the PhDs use, the scientists use, heterochronic parabiosis. So Harvard took two mice, cut them open, intertwined their organs, kind of like this Brian Johnson shit you're talking about. Yeah, and what they found is the old mouse got younger and the young mouse got older because they're interchanging all of these biomarkers, right?

Which is what Brian Johnson's attempting to do through this blood transfusion stuff that he's doing. And I mean, I'm not, it'll be interesting to see what the data shows, but it honestly, there is potential with that stuff, but that is not something we do or in at all. But it is interesting, like the beauty of the cellular treatments from Healthy Birth,

Healthy Mother is everyone benefits and there's not really a downside. And in this model, they only pre-screen. And if it's not a Healthy Birth and Healthy Mother, we don't use that tissue. You need to be breathing through your nose at night for better sleep quality because your nose humidifies the air you breathe. It filters the air you breathe. And when you're breathing through your nose, it allows you to be more parasympathetic, which allows you to be calmer. But a lot of us, and myself in the past included, breathe through our mouth when we sleep. And when you're breathing through your mouth, you have a higher heart rate, you wake up with a dry mouth. It actually makes your dental issues worse and your sleep quality becomes much worse too. That's why we use and we've partnered with

Hostess Shape for such a long time. Because no matter if you're using a CPAP, if you have a beard and your sleep quality becomes much worse too. That's why we use and we've partnered with Hostage Tape for such a long time, because no matter if you're using a CPAP, if you have a beard or whatever you're dealing with, if you're able to breathe through your nose when you sleep, your sleep quality will be better and everything else in life will get easier. Your fitness habits, your nutrition, et cetera,

because your sleep is quality because you're breathing through your nose. So get Hostage Tape on your mouth and Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at hostage tape.com slash power project, where you can receive five packs of hostage tape for the price of three. That's almost half of a year for the price of three. That's again at hostage tape.com slash power project links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. You've had to help a lot of people though, their stem cells, right? like uh aaron rogers

with his achilles injury uh he's such a good guy man he's he's the man like he didn't he didn't tell me he was gonna do it he didn't he went on rogan and told the world about it uh he's just a stand-up guy and we worked with a bunch of nfl athletes that we've worked with a lot of people that have wanted to keep it under wraps but we've also worked thankfully with a lot of people that have wanted to keep it under wraps. But we've also worked thankfully with a lot of people that are very vocal about it. A lot of the UFC fighters we've been able to treat, Rogan. Sometimes people are maybe expecting it

to do like everything. And it's like if, I'm sure it depends. Like there's probably been people that you guys have treated that didn't notice much from it. Am I correct in saying that? Correct. There's always outliers. And I tell people it's medicine, it's not magic. The problem that

the FDA rightfully has with this space is you got people telling elderly people, this is going to cure your Parkinson's. That's a stretch. If we're looking at muscular skeletal issues, and I'm not saying it's not, there's the potential for that utilization in the future as we know this space more and can do more. But right now we're pretty restricted in the United States with what we can do with these cellular and acellular. There's both. Like amnion has amazing benefits and there's no cellular genetic messaging in that. But with muscle skeletal issues like joints, knees, joints, knees, shoulders, elbows, ankles, backs, Achilles, like Aaron Rogers was Achilles, Zach Bitter, you know, he was told he

wouldn't be able to run that marathon. We treated him and he ran an ultra marathon and like did it, was willing to do a testimonial for us and thank God. He runs like under seven minutes or something like that. When he does his hundred mile run, whatever, six 30 or something time. Um, wacky George St. Pierre was told he needed shoulder surgery. He said, I'm going to go visit Rogan's guy.

His doctor said his bullshit. There's no such thing as stem cells in the United States. Yeah. George was a skeptic. George didn't have shoulder surgery. And George announced two weeks ago that because of ways to, well, he's going to be able to grapple and compete again,

uh, at a high level without ever having surgery. So does like, do the stem cells fully heal? Like if it's a ligament tendon stuff, does it fully heal those areas or does it just minimize pain? It depends on the person obviously, but what have you seen it like heal as far as? Partial tears. If you have a full tear or structural integrity issue, you got to have the surgery. But I tell people after the surgery, you should heavily consider using this as an adjunct because again, we're just going to put a massive amount of building blocks right there, right where the injury happened. It's going to bring down inflammation. It's going to help your body heal itself. And so that's all it is. It's a nudge in the right direction,

but it's not a miracle. And that's, what's tough is there's a lot of people out there promising miracles. And I always, I always try and tell people, we have no idea if this is going to work for you, even though we've had phenomenal results. I never want to overhype anything. We have had a lot of great success stories and we have had some people who haven't had it. I've had the privilege and opportunity to work with some big name WWE wrestlers and retired wrestlers from that space. And that's a tough one, man, because what I've seen with these cells is it's only as good as the vessel we put them in.

So if you've got a banged up, chronically inflamed body and you're drinking and drugging and partying, this is not a miracle, man. Yeah. Like you gotta have the system primed and all we're really doing in reality is giving your body all the tools and elements it needs to optimize its chance of healing.

But if you're dumping a gallon of vodka in your body a day, I mean, good luck. Like, I just don't think there's just, it's just unrealistic. And that's, those are the people that we've struggled with the most are the more like banged up, older power lifter, bodybuilder dudes,

like, you know, athletes that are on the back end of their career, but are trying to figure out their space, like in life, you know, there's that transition period where a lot of guys are looking for that dopamine response and they're doing a lot of things outside of, you know, extracurriculars that could be hindering their healing. Just goes to show, I mean, still the habits and the lifestyle, no matter what you do, still going to hold you accountable. Yeah. You know, how about, uh, like cognitively though, like can stem cells do anything for the mind? Like whether it be like maybe coming

off of addictions or like depression or even, yeah, just like slowing down cognitive decline. Um, there are clinics out there. I don't, I don't, there's no studies that I'm aware of that have looked at what we can do in the U.S. to do that. But one thing that's interesting is some cognitive decline can occur because of inflammation in the brain. And so like head traumas and injuries. And so at our clinic, one of the things we do is a baseline EEG to assess your brain health. And again, we use AI to assess where do you fall? So your brain moves at one speed at the back, a different speed in the middle and a different speed at the front. Think of it like a freeway. How fast can we get from

the back of your brain to the front of your brain where you make decisions and cognitive reasoning skills? Um, people who have had concussions or head traumas, that's diminished. Yeah. So everyone's diminished. Like even me trying to optimize and biohack and do all this stuff. I'm at 12.5 at the back. I'm down at 9.5 at the front. You lose. Measure and test all that, huh? Yeah. We can use an EEG and then plug it into the AI and it'll tell us how you're performing

at each level of the brain based off your brain waves and where neurons are misfiring. And then one of the things we want to do at WasteWell when we open the new facility, we're going to do some psychedelic research with Dell Medical to explore psilocybin and some of those things from a different lens, not for anxiety and depression, but for neuropathic optimization. Yeah, how the hell to open up your brain and mind, you know, and all those different things. So this is the brain scan. It's wave neuroscience. This is a technology that I licensed from a company here out of california super cool stuff what have been things that you've seen uh have a drastic impact on some on uh the speed of the brain have you like uh alcohol yeah okay yeah

alcohol is a big one man people have no idea how to drink more alcohol alcoholism is a big one concussions head trauma uh a lot of the guys who like people have anxiety they don't sleep um so again as we methodically walk through what they're not doing in traditional medicine is like if you come in and say i have anxiety i don't sleep i'm agitated i'm restless and you're in a primary care practice. Okay. Here's an antidepressant. Here's an Ambien. All right, get the fuck out of here. You know, at ours, it's like, okay, let's look at your hormones. Let's see if there's anything going on there. No. Okay. Everything looks pretty normal. We should do an EEG and assess your brain health because if your neurons are misfiring because you are a special operator and you jumped out of helicopters and you got 30

concussions fighting for your country, there's a high likelihood that you're losing neuropathway decline from the rear of your brain to the prefrontal cortex. And all of those neurons, they're going somewhere. So they're firing in other areas of your brain, lighting up areas of your brain, causing anxiety, causing restlessness, slowing down your ability to have cognitive reasoning skills. A lot of the behaviors are because of that. And so for people who have really fast brains at the back, who maybe are slow brained at the front, there is a direct correlation to substance abuse because you're trying to figure out how to slow, whether you realize it or not,

you're attempting to slow the neuron pathway because you're overloading your brain. The front of your brain can't process the data fast enough because the back is just dumping data so fast. And if that disproportionate amount gets to be too much, like a 40 or 50% decline, which is what happens with people in car accidents or major concussions, that leads to like behavioral changes, substance abuse, addiction. Yeah. Pain as well. Yeah. Which is interesting. What are things that can get the brain going the other direction, going faster?

So the traditional way is MERT, which is a magnetic electric resonance therapy. And so it's a magnet in front of your brain that helps pull that neuron the right pathway. And the AI, once it assesses your brain can pull it that way. Um, we use an AI guided MERT at our practice. Um, if you're in an insurance model, unfortunately they don't do the AI guided MERT, which kind of sucks because for me, I have the capacity to move at 12.5 at the posterior. I want my brain to be as fast and efficient as possible, right? That's going to improve my recall, my ability to fire, my ability to react to situations.

Think if you're a pro athlete. Think if you're a quarterback. You got to be able to assess a situation and make a decision in a split second. You don't want to slow the brain. So if you don't do the AI guide and use traditional MERT, it's all set to 9.5. So if you're somebody who has a really fast brain, which a lot of pro athletes do and a lot of special ops guys do, that's how they ended up in those fields. They actually are really good under pressure. And they're good under pressure because they have the ability to process data sets quickly and make decisions with confidence. It would slow your brain.

So by using the technology from wave neuroscience, we set the speed based off your brain. Does that make sense? And so- Is this like a treatment? Like you just like sit there and put something on your head? It's literally a little helmet, like what he pulled up and you just put that on.

And, you know, if you do the in-clinic treatment, and they're all over California, that's where these guys started out of. So I don't know if they have one here in Sacramento, um, but this isn't something unique to us. This is, um, there's probably a few hundred clinics. I know, I think the, uh, the chargers, the Rangers, a couple of different teams are using these guys. Um, and then a bunch of special forces guys are using these guys. Super interesting.

Have you, uh, so you notice like, obviously alcohol slows down brain function, but have you noticed anything else, any other substances, like things like weed, marijuana, what correlations have you found with other substances? Yeah. Marijuana, weed, all of it will, anything that's a depressant will slow that brain function. And a lot of people who abuse substances are doing it because they feel overwhelmed and have anxiety or they just can't slow their brain down. And so indirectly, whether they realize or not, they're abusing that substance to slow the neuropathway speed so they can think somewhat or not think even like be a little calmer, not care, not be so wound up.

And over time, like, do you know if, for example, I know a lot of people chronically use marijuana. A lot of people have alcohol addiction, but we know that these things happen when it's used, but do they have effects outside of like when the individual isn't using? Do you know any of that? Yeah, these, you know, what's funny is

the neuroscientist who reviews these and they went through, they've mapped out thousands of brains and they've done all these studies. They have a typical brain type that they can tell you've been utilizing substances or drugs. And so there's like certain, and I'll butcher it. I don't want to mess it up and get it wrong, but there's different wavelengths in the brain. So there's the beta wave and the alpha wave. but there's different wavelengths in the brain. So there's the beta wave and the alpha wave.

And I don't remember which ones, the alpha wave is what you want optimized. And if you think of it like, again, a freeway, if your beta wave's out of control, then it's burning bandwidth. Like think of your phone having five apps open. If you close all the apps and just use the app you need to use, you're gonna save the battery,

you're gonna save the bandwidth, and you're going to maximize that app's speed. It's the same with the brain. And so individuals who are abusing substances indirectly are suppressing, I believe, their alpha and maybe inadvertently providing more bandwidth to the beta. But I may be butchering that. I'm obviously not a neuroscientist, but these guys from Wave Neuro have all sorts of crazy studies and data and a plethora of information. It's pretty cool. What are some other treatments to kind of help with cognition? I think that my personal knowledge, which is not vast in this area, but I have heard people utilizing testosterone for patients

that have had like a lot of concussions. I don't know exactly how that mitigates that or how that helps, but what are some, maybe some other things that can help kind of help people with not allowing their, you know, function to decline over the years? You know, what's fascinating is again, the, the, these, uh, wave neuroscience guys have a bunch of different studies that they've actually done. They worked with some low T centers throughout California where they just came in and assess brain health before and after hormone optimization. Uh, I don't know if it's on their website, but it's fascinating stuff

because what they saw is once the hormones were optimized, the neuropathic health improved in most of those patients, which is pretty interesting. The other big ones that I, you know, we don't really prescribe anything for the brain health other than. There are some peptides and stuff like that a little bit, right? Yeah, yeah. There's some peptides out there for brain health. This is, yeah. It's just from a news article from Wave Neuro.

There's a ton. Like one of the things we talked about in the future of stem cells is, okay, when somebody gets a concussion, that's an instant inflammation in the brain. The brain's trying to protect itself, so it inflames. What brings down inflammation rapidly is amniotic fluid and stem cells.

And so if we could administer an intranasal delivery system, you could instantly reduce inflammation in a fighter who got rocked or somebody who got in a car accident and received a concussion because those amnion can pierce the blood-brain barrier and bring down brain inflammation. And so Dr. Ian White, who's the PhD, who's taught me everything I know about stem cells, he graduated from the Ansari Stem Cell Institute. He was a professor at Cornell University. He's like one of the godfathers of stem cells. And he thinks there's tremendous potential in using these treatments to treat guys right after a concussion and preserve brain health. Can we treat immediately

and have this like in a pack, you know, so if somebody gets hit, they just spray it in their nose and at least at minimal minimize the damage to the brain because of the inflammation. But he's, these guys are way smarter than me. I'm just a monkey trying to explain what the organ grinder told me. So. Anything for sleep, any sort of peptides that you've seen be effective for sleep? This MERT is crazy for sleep because if you have that active brain that can't wind down and you've got all these neurons misfiring, that's one of the biggest indications for MERT therapy.

Even the traditional, the non-AI guided. If you have insomnia or sleep issues, one of the top recommendations they'll do oftentimes if if sleep aids aren't working is to have you do MERT and assess your brain health with an EEG and see if they can't use magnet therapy you have any idea if we get similar stuff from like the earth that you get from the MERT oh the magnetic like from walking grounded and yeah the sun and stuff like that I don't I don. That's an interesting question, though. Yeah, because supposedly I think some of our wavelength of our brain is the same frequency as the earth. It's like weird shit like that.

Yeah, that would— I mean, I even know Huberman talks about grounding every morning, walking barefoot. I know a lot of people believe in those things and have had good results. I'm trying to think of anything else. From a sleep perspective, any peptides or- Oh, for the sleep. You know, I mean, everyone's chronically deficient in magnesium. We've had so many people that it's like,

they just are so low on magnesium. If we just fix that, all of a sudden they start sleeping. You know, and hormone, optimizing your hormones, that helps reduce anxiety, stress, all the cortisol levels. So many Americans are just chronically stressed with sky-high cortisol levels and agitation and all these things. Well, of course you're not going to sleep. One of the big ones is how much sunlight you get before 9 a.m. That's one that's directly correlated. Sleep's not a drug. It's not a treatment. But if you can get sun on the eyes and the face before 9 a.m.,

I think it's 30 minutes. It improves your circadian rhythm, which helps upregulate the proper level of melatonin the right time of day and all these different variables that are pretty interesting. What about sleep apnea? Have you seen anything like you guys must treat, you know, people with all kinds of different conditions other than like just a mask? Have you seen anything be helpful for that? We don't, we actually don't do a lot with that, but I was interested because there's, I mean, I know there's the sleep apnea test that people are doing. We haven't implemented them into our practice yet because we were trying to figure out, it was just so expensive. It's like, how do we make this?

It's another $500 test is what it would end up. Like an at-home sleep study or something like that? And then we would get all the data back and be able to help. But that's one of those that insurance still covers, thankfully, for a lot of people. And so we haven't messed with it because it's a tough sell to say, hey, spend $500 when you can get it for free, you know? And so we, we, we push people to get it tested through insurance. And then from there, let's assess what's going on. I know you mentioned, uh, I don't know if it's that these companies or telehealth companies don't do pediatric care.

Is that a thing? Or like if, you know, parents want to get blood work for their kids, et cetera, is there anything for that? Or is it just, you gotta be 18 plus? You know, I don to get blood work for their kids, et cetera. Is there anything for that? Or is it just, you gotta be 18 plus? You know, I don't know of a, I don't know if there is a pediatric wellness clinic. I've never been asked that question. I know for us licensing wise and regulatory wise, we haven't treated pediatrics because none of our clinicians are trained in pediatrics and hormones. And, um, But it is interesting because as things evolve, almost all these thought leaders now that are going on these podcasts

and that are experts in this field, when they say, when should I start blood work? Their answer is as soon as you can. Like you should be monitoring this stuff in your 20s because we can't improve what we don't measure. And that's what I tell people with DEXA and VO2 max. Like if we had a DEXA, a VO2 max in your blood work, starting in your twenties, and we had AI monitoring you all through your twenties, imagine how much data we'd capture by your thirties. And now we know your

family history and we know on average how much bone mineral density you've either gained or lost every month or year. And can we maintain lean muscle mass? Can we maintain bone mineral density you've either gained or lost every month or year. And can we maintain lean muscle mass? Can we maintain bone mineral density? You know, it's crazy to me that in healthcare, we just wait for people to get sick and then give them a drug. That's insane because almost everything now with the technology we have is preventable. All these chronic diseases that are killing us are preventable. And Peter Atiyah talks about this. One of the leading indicators of whether you'll make it to being a centenarian or not is the onset of chronic disease. And most centenarians, the onset of chronic disease for them as an individual is about a decade later than the sample size of the United States. So if you want to improve your shot

at living a long, healthy life, then step one would be to prevent chronic disease and to improve health span. And how do we improve health span? Well, if we have all the measuring tools to begin to do that and get proactive, like in a business, I tell people, I don't just show up and go, what are we doing today? Right, we have a game plan. We say, what is our quarterly goal? What are we trying to achieve? What is our mission statement?

And then how do we measure that mission statement and course correct if we're headed the wrong direction? We should be doing that in healthcare. We should know, hey, your bone mineral density was perfect. Let's maintain that. Let's continue weight training, continue lifting heavy things. Your subcutaneous fat was good, but your visceral fat was a little high. It's putting you at risk.

And that combined with your VO2 max, X, Y, and Z, if you're trying to make it to centenarian, you're not headed there. Your statistical chance is diminishing. And give people wins early. And that's why I think if we can gamify it and allow the AI to make it a scoring system where you could share with your friends, kind of like what whoops doing and a lot of these different companies, but in a more robust level, um, people could then make it fun where they're like, man, I improved my all cause mortality risk. I'm now down to a 400%

reduction and dying of a heart attack, you know, whatever it is like we can quantify these things and help people guide them. It doesn't mean that you're, you're out of the woods. It just means statistically your chance of that being what takes you out is drastically diminished. Wasn't your bone density like nine or something? Yeah, it's like 7.2. It was like off the charts over there. That's wild. I had the opportunity to talk with RFK when I was at Gold's Gym, just talk to him real briefly. I know that he's somebody that you know as well. And I was talking to him about the pharmaceutical advertisements and stuff like that. And he was

like, you know what, they just need to, they just need to ban it. They need to kind of being an entrepreneur yourself and being somebody that, you know, is, you know, working on making your own business flourish. Like, what are some of your thoughts on that? I mean, I don't think it's good. You know, one of the things I've said, what's harder for me than the fact that they do advertise is the fact that they suppress our ability to advertise. There's a number one funder of ads for the news networks is pharmaceutical companies. They literally control entire market sectors. And that makes it tough for innovation to come into the marketplace. I talked about this. Can you run a TV commercial?

I cannot. I can't SEO optimize. I can't Google search engine optimize. Peptides, any of these cellular treatment options, stent cells, testosterone, any of that for longevity is considered off-label. And so anything off-label, not FDA indicated or approved, you're not allowed to advertise or make claims. And so it puts you at a disadvantage when half the narrative gets pushed and the other half doesn't. And it's funny that you brought up RFK because on his podcast, he and I talked about, he said in one of his speeches, he brought up Eisenhower's speech. And Eisenhower's speech that everyone throws out all the time about the military industrial complex.

And if we begin to make it about wars, it's gonna become about wars and profiteering. There's a second half to that speech where Eisenhower says his second biggest fear is the scientific industrial complex. And if we get rid of the garage tinkerers, the innovators, the thought leaders, and we transfer the power and the ability to innovate and create to just big industry, then what we're going to find is siloed, isolated, and monopolized science. And I would argue that we're there.

Like we were talking about who, how do you become academia? How do you get, you know, how are you, how does your college become recognized? Oh, they did a bunch of studies. Well, who funded the studies? It's all funded by big pharma. So when the studies are funded by big pharma,

when every data set is funded by big pharma, when the media is funded by big pharma, when every data set is funded by big pharma, when the media is funded by big pharma, what you begin to see is things like what happened with COVID, where it can be irrational and the level of agenda that's being pushed is not in the best interest of the American people. That to me is more frustrating than the fact they can advertise. It's the fact they can move fucking worlds. They can control entire sectors and patient knowledge

and accessibility to data and information. They can lean on their buddies at the FDA to obstruct up and coming treatment modalities that could disrupt marketplaces or hurt their profitability. And there is, whether we want it to be or not now, unfortunately, an incentive for the FDA to be partnered with big pharma because 80% of their funding comes from big pharma. It's not, people think it's a government entity and it is, but it's, it's not funded by the people.

It's funded by private industry for the most part. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you where they can find out more about your stuff? WaysToWell.com is our website. And then we do share a lot on Instagram, a lot of testimonials. We're going to try and add more educational content with some of these brilliant minds that we've been talking about. Hopefully we'll get those guys in the boat, helping us educate the masses on options and treatments and what the research is showing.

But yeah, waystowell.com and then the website's Waystowell. And then our pharmacies revive. A lot of the clinicians, even Merrick Health uses us for a lot of their various treatments. So we work with tons of the telemedicine companies throughout the country. And there's tons of options out there. It's not all about us. Just find a clinician you trust,

build that relationship. And I would beg your listeners to try and find a cash pay clinic and see the difference for themselves because there's a lot of great providers out there. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.

Bye.