Shaun Newman Podcast - #287 - Mike Kuzmickas

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

He's the CEO of Ichor Blood Services. We dig into his ideas around screening for cancer, being back in Canada & the Alberta government starting to test for antibodies.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast⁠

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make sure you let them know, you heard them on for the podcast. The sip of beer definitely, definitely helped. I'm not going to lie. Now, let's get on that tail of the tape, brought to you by Hancock Petroleum. For the past 80 years, I got Bostrozyk watching me do this. So every time I kick out Hancock, anyways, it doesn't matter.

Long story. For the past 80 years, they've been doing, they've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil field locations. For more information, visit them at Hancockpetroleum.com. He's the CEO of I-Corp blood services. I'm talking about Mike Kuzmiskis. So buckle up. Here we go.

This is Mike Kismiscus, and welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Mike Kuzmiskis. Of course, you've been on here multiple times, Mike. It's good to have you back. And I believe you're on the Canada side. Last time, I'll ask two times, I think we talked to you. You were sitting in Mexico.

Yeah, down to Mexico back, back on the Canadian side of things. I wanted to get back up here and get some of that summer camping and golfing and weather. We've been back about two months. And I think I can count the number of nice weather days on two hands. I think we've had like eight nice weather days between May and June. Came back a little early. I learned that lesson next time. But yeah, happy to be back.

How's the adjustment been? You obviously were down. When did you go to Mexico? When was that? November? October 23rd, because the Trudeau thing was supposed to drop on the 31st, I think. So we flew down on the 23rd of October. Right.

So you were down there for, you know, half a year. What was the adjustment like coming back from Mexico to Canada? harder than we expect it to be totally honest with you. When you go down to Mexico for like two, three weeks at a time and you're, you know, you're at an all-inclusive and you're at a pool and you're drinking, whatever. It's a different. When you're immersed in it, like you physically move there, you live there. It's very different culturally.

The big difference, I think that we had a hard time adjusting to is we left Canada in the middle of COVID sort of isolation. We go down to Mexico, and it's not really a thing where we were. And so you have, you know, people, you're talking to your, the guy you buy your bananas from and everybody's waving to each other on the street and everyone's you know picking your kid up and playing with them and then you come back to this where it's kind of right back into the soup even though it's not quite as as bad as it was when we left that sort of has been ingrained in people a little bit where you're kind of staying in your

staying in your box in suburban suburban area and and you might wave to your neighbor on occasion but you're certainly not really like striking up conversations or doing things so it was a tough one. We definitely felt quite a, quite a bit alienated, isolated, looking forward to, we're going to head back down there. We just booked our tickets actually for October night. So looking to head back down there for another six, six to eight. And it's tough. Yeah, it's tough. But knowing you're, you're going back, are you excited about that? Like, that must give you, I don't know. I don't even know, peace of mind is the right word to use, but I'm going to throw it out there anyways. I'm just very fortunate. We're very fortunate that I have the setup that I have where I have the ability to work

remotely, right? Anybody who has the ability to work remotely, this is, this is all, you know, potential for them. A lot of people don't, obviously. When we went down the first time, it was kind of like you're going down in this emergency state. You don't really just packed up and sold all your shit. You don't really know what's going on. And so you're not down there quite in the mindset that we're going down this time. This time we're going down. We have a little two bedroom place that we own down there. We're going down knowing what we're getting into, knowing what we're stepping into. And it's going to be a very different thing that we're looking forward to. right. We got child care for the kids sorted out.

Icor is doing its thing. So definitely looking forward to getting back. And I think if we can, if I can find a way to make this Icore thing work and we can settle into a six and six or an eight and four type situation for a little while, I think I'll be very happy. Yeah. So coming from the Canada side then or from the side of being down in Mexico and watching Canada, are you still concerned about the direction? I know, I know where I sit. And I certainly know where a lot of Canadians sit. sitting in Mexico watching Canada and now being back, are you like, I don't know, still concerned? Still like, you know what? I just, I don't want to be in this environment. The best way to answer that question is to say that I just booked ourselves some appointments at the embassy,

the Mexican embassy, to get our temporary residencies, which will allow us to stay down there for four years if we need to. The eight and four is the plan. but when I see things like the Arrived can app being solidified forever, essentially, you know, restrictions and things being extended past September 30th. I took public transit yesterday or two days ago for the first time and there's still like mask mandates on the sea trains. Like, you know, COVID, it's kind of back there. Yeah, we still have all this legacy stuff that people said, you know, they would drop.

They haven't dropped. So you see that. You see inflation rates going through the roof. You just know there's going to be foreclosures and businesses. and I don't think it's headed in a very good direction myself. It's going to take something drastic. So we're kind of planning to, we got a place down there.

We've got to get our temp residencies and if we got to wait it out for a few years, we'll kind of spend a lot of time down there. But it's, yeah, not ideal, I would say. Not what I would vote for or champion, certainly, if it was my choice. Yeah. Well, and once again, I think you use the right word. You're fortunate enough to be in a situation where, you know, you can do things like that.

A lot of people are stuck or believe they're stuck, right? Right. If they started looking at options, I mean, don't get me wrong. Change a life. Icor gives you the ability to really do something special, right? Yeah, yeah. Very fortunate. I'm not understanding that by any means.

But in the same respects, even with that sort of safety net behind, It's a big jump to sell all your shit and move, you know. You're not moving from Alberta, Saskatchewan or something. Like you're literally moving to a different language, different country. It was a big deal. And I think that obstacle is a big mental block for a lot of people. I think a lot of people want to do that. Like the idea of it may be able to.

But it's a big hurdle. So now that we've ripped a bandage at its old hat, you know, we move five times in the six months. We were down there and we're minimalist now and it's not a big deal. but when you got to downsize your house that you've been living in for 20 years and try and fit it all into like a 10 or a 20 foot sea can, it really hits you just how much stuff is solidified in your life that you got to deal with, right? What's one of the things you had to give up that you're like, oh man, I didn't think I'd be giving this up? Um, a lot of, I don't know, like we have two kids, right? We have a two. Well, she's going to be five in a couple days, actually. And then her son turns two in a couple months.

We got a two and a five. And just the sheer amount of toys and kids shit. You know, we had like 13 modes of transportation for our kids at some point between hiking backpacks and bikes and carriers and strollers. And so you start to, you know, as your kids get older,

you can start to wind some of that down. But then you have, you know, that couch that you have in the room that you maybe go sit in once every six months. Like, you know, get rid of that.

You don't need that room. You just start to realize that you can really just live in a much smaller space. Like our two bedroom place down in Mexico that we have is a two bedroom place. We were getting bunks built for the kids. So the kids, be in there. We got our other room. I'm going to set my office up in the living room and kitchen. And ultimately, that's it. Like, even with this house, we're renting now. We don't use,

I'm in the basement right now, but the only time I'm ever down on the basement is to, is to do stuff like this or do work. Like it's, so you just, you just realize you don't really need a lot of stuff. I sold my, my tragger when we, when we went down to Mexico, that one was hard, but I bought another one when we came right back. And this one, I'm just going to put in the sea can when we leave again. I'm not, I'm not selling that again. Um, stuff like that, you know, so nothing, I'm not a, my wife's more nostalgic. I'm not a big hoarder. nostalgia guy. There wasn't there wasn't like a ton of photo albums and photo books and all that kind of stuff to get rid of. We kept some of it. But all in all, it wasn't too bad. It's a hurdle that

our society has to hop around because a lot of stuff, man. Everybody believes you need your own room, your own, your own, your own, your own TV, your own, your own, your own, and you get these monstrosities built. And I'm not against them on, you know, geez, if I could have a giant house, I don't know if I would or not, but maybe I would. But at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's, you put these roadblocks in front of you, especially once you're up there to come back from that must be, you know, once again, you realize pretty quick. And I'm paraphrasing for you, but I mean, we've, we've got kids that share rooms and everything else, right? And you realize that it's not that big a deal. I mean, yeah, there's a couple of roadblood or a couple of hurdles,

sorry, speak, that they got to hop through and a little uncomfortableness, but then you come to enjoy it just as much as what you had before. Yeah. Yeah. They've, They're, man, their best friends, which is a big advantage. I know a lot of siblings fight quite a bit. And they have their scraps, but they're really good friends and they get along. So that's going to be an easy transition. I'd say they're even looking forward to it. And then, like I said, from our perspective, we don't even use 80% of the house anyway.

So. Well, let's, let's hop to here. You got a bunch going on with, I believe, the Alberta government. What's ICOR? What's new in the IICOR world? You know, we had the pop-up clinics go across Alberta, Saskatchewan, maybe other places. I'm not sure, Mike, you can certainly fill us in. But what's new in the I-Corps side of things that people might be wanting to pay attention to? Sure, yeah.

The pop-up clinic thing, we never actually got into Saskatchewan. It's a Saskatchewan government. They came out and they basically kiboshed it and they said, we do not allow antibody testing, period, in the province of Saskatchewan. Really? Yeah. And so they said if that's the main, if that's the main driver of why you're coming, you're just not allowed to do it. And also there was there was an issue around you have to be in Saskatchew and you have to be licensed, which you don't in Alberta. You have to be licensed to do some of the stuff.

So there was some hurdles that we could have jumped through on the regulatory side. But at the end of the day, the main reason we were going out there was for doing some of that antibody and T cell testing. And they just said flat out, we don't do that. We're not allowing that. So we kibosh the Saskatoon one. Isn't that? Whatever. It is what it is, man.

I mean, it's, it's, you know, on that side, it's interesting. You see, you see the Alberta government now with the, the Alberta Tomorrow project, where Hinshaws asked for an antibody study to follow 4,000 people over the course of a year, right, get them tested every three months and see how their antibodies wane. And so it's interesting that now we're, there's value in antibodies. And so we've actually restarted to them. We've said, hey, we've been doing this for two years. We've got 10,000 data points.

We've got, you know, I'm not giving you any of our client or, or patient. data because they came to us and trust, right? But in terms of like anonymized this person from this state of birth had this score here and this score here and like it would help them. If their goals, I truly understand how immunity wanes, we'd be able to help quite a bit. So we've reached out to them. We have a meeting in July on that. But the pop up clinic model was good.

Wasn't a big revenue. I think we broke even on most of them. The goal was really just to demonstrate that we have a model that we can, we can basically get to anybody at any corner of the province, essentially, right? We can get these services to anybody and we prove that out. in, you know, five or six locations. So we have that now in our tool bag to go to the government and say, listen, we have, you know, we're a triple threat. We have a lot of stuff going on. Let us, let us help you. So where we've pivoted to now, we've kind of, you know, we're still do COVID

testing, but that's back there. We've got it into preventative health screening now. So this is, this is where I kind of started the company from, was to get into that preventative health care side, alternate access points to the system. You can, you know, there's a six-week wait for lab work right now. so you can come to ICOR and pay a small fee and kind of skip that line, so to speak, and get your lab work done quicker. And we're starting to get some referrals from doctors and things like that for that service, which is great. But the big one to me that I've been just digging into and putting this proposal together

now is early detection of cancer and cardiovascular disease. So what we know, like if I'm sure people are familiar with cancer statistics, but two out of five people in their lifetime in Canada are going to be diagnosed with cancer. So just under 50% at some point. If I look at last year in 2020, the data I have from Alberta, 11 of the top 14 things that really causes of mortality that kill people were related directly to cancer or cardiovascular disease. And so where science has come in the last few years is there's some very good screening testing

now where you can start to pick these things up way earlier than you were able to before. And what it's showing is some of these case studies that, coming out or showing if you're detecting early stage cancer, if you're detecting, you know, flags from a cardiovascular side, the cost of early treatment and getting these people in for early treatment versus catching it in late stage, dramatic difference in your in your cost to the healthcare system, right? So what we're essentially put it together is we found this really great test from a lab in Virginia, rich in Virginia called stage zero life sciences. And they have a test called Aristotle. And so Aristotle, I think it's just them and another company that's in this space called Grail.

It's just the two of them, but essentially it's a multi-panel cancer test that can look for 10 different types of cancer in one blood test. A lot of people are skeptical when they hear this because there's a company, you know, 12 years ago, I think 14 years ago, who claimed they had this, they raised $750 million and ended being this big fraudulent, you know, show. So anytime somebody hears this, they're like, is this another thing. But it is a legit valid test. It's a test they've developed.

And so it tests for breast cancer, ovarian, cervical, endometrial, colorectal, bladder, stomach, liver, and prostate cancer, all with one blood specimen. Very high accuracy. It goes as high as, you know, 100%. I think the, I think colorectal is at 57. So it goes from 57 to 100%. And so, you know, what it shows is as you, if you catch these things early, dramatic humanitarian difference, dramatic healthcare difference. So one of the prime examples, I guess, one of the sort of more prevalent ones would be, would be breast cancer, right?

Everyone's familiar with breast cancer and sort of the effort that goes into combating that. And so if you look at statistics, the five-year, what they used to talk about this stuff is the five-year survival rate. And so if you find breast cancer early and you're able to treat it early, you have a 99% five-year survival rate. If you catch it late, that drops to 28% five-year survival rate, right? You can look at bladder cancer, 96% five-year survival rate versus 6% five-year survival rate, early versus late.

And it goes on and on, all the different cancer types. So in addition to saving lives, improving quality of life, you're also saving money. Where we're going to the government is we say, listen, we know we all understand humanitarian side. we all understand there's lots of things that we could be doing. But if it doesn't necessarily make sense from a financial side, it's probably not going to get in front of the people it needs to get in front of. So the goal here, I think it was in the Crown speech. I think the focus was on building capacity, right?

We came off COVID where it was like there's always a capacity issue. It was the people's job to protect the healthcare system and not the other way around. It should be the health care's job to protect the people. So we came off this capacity thing. And so the theme now that we're hearing from the government is we need to build capacity. we need to go capacity. And so we're taking this to them and saying, listen, we have this very good screening test for cancer.

We're with the testings that we have from Mayo Clinic Laboratories, they have a very, very interesting test called the seramides test, which tests essentially assigns you a likelihood of having an adverse heart event within the next five years. So it's a really good flag wave on the cardiovascular side. So if it's cancer, we have the cardiovascular and hey, while we're in front of people, why don't we run an antibody test and see where our population is sitting right now for protection against COVID or whatever else you feel would be would be relevant. Give me, you know, it's going to come to around $1.9 million for 1,000 people.

I'm like, give me, give me $1.9 million. Let me go screen 1,000 people that are between the ages of 50 and 75. They're asymptomatic. They currently don't think there's anything wrong with them. Let's see how many of those people come back positive for one of these indicators or triggers, early cancer, cardiovascular. And then you can run a business case on it. So if the cost of keeping a someone out of a bypass surgery, heart attack type situation

saves the province $50,000, for example, you can easily just apply $50,000 by the number of people you find. Cancer, we know we spend, you know, $6,000 a month on chemotherapy. We spend $8,000 per acute visit in a hospital, per night in a hospital for acute care. So you can start to build the economics case of like, this is how much it costs us to treat somebody late stage. This is how much it costs you to treat them early stage. this is the cost savings multiplied by the number of people we find.

So I've talked to, I don't know, a dozen MLAs. I've talked to two leadership candidates. Everybody I've talked to says, makes a lot of sense. It's a great idea. I don't see why they wouldn't fund the pilot. They just spent $11 billion on COVID, you know, giving you 1.9 to see if there's anything in this. So I'm hopeful. I think it's, I think it has a lot of promise.

Anyway. You know, it seems like a really smart idea. And usually in the last two years, smart ideas haven't gone very. far. Thanks to your photo conference. Yeah. Literally, literally we sat. Did we not say, like I feel like I'm on Groundhog Day.

Yeah. We go back to when literally I did the SMP presents off of a conversation me and you had about the whiteboard idea, you know? I'd love for you to be up on a panel at an SMP presents because I love the way your brain thinks, right? I look at what you're doing and I go, you know, for people who don't, uh, haven't listened to the first, um, first time you came on, Mike, like you aren't a healthcare person. You are an engineer who saw a

problem who started to fix said problem. Am I paraphrasing that? That's right, which I think is potentially why this may be working and why people might pay attention because we've had exclusively medical people with medical brains trying to solve medical problems. And so I'm coming at this from an engineering mind, problem solving and project management without medical background, without the bias of medicine saying here's a problem here's my here's what I think we should do about it if it makes sense medically or not then you can get into your technicalities and tell me if it does or not but from a from a project side or a business side it's it's a different outlook so I think people understand that I agree with you 100% we'll see well I don't know well so I just come back to

the whiteboard idea that came out of our first or second conversation you know I can't remember exactly if it's the first or second I feel like the first so when I say it's a great idea I mean like you listen to that and you go like yeah that makes a ton of sense like it just makes a ton of sense and your record your proven track record at this point with iCore is like it's it's it's it's laughable but that means nothing at this point in the stage of the game because i go you know literally we just went through two years where nobody had listened to a thing you said and so i you know i hope we're past that but i don't know if i'm putting my i don't know if i'm putting my i don't know if betting the house on it. Yeah, I think, I think, I think the difference between ICOR from four months

ago to ICOR today is that Icore four months ago was like that, that yappy chihuahua, yapping at the government without like, they're just kind of like, shut up. Like, they're not really listening. They got their, you know, they're going forward with their thing and I got this annoying company. Hey, hey, hey, pay attention. And they're like, ah, it's COVID. I don't want to hear about it, you know. But now you're coming in and you're saying, all right, I'm not, I'm not yapping at you. I have a, I have a solution that's going to save you money. I have a solution that's going to improve health care system, will you listen to me for that? And now it's a different conversation. Now it's like, I'm getting in front of people from Alberta Health, deputy ministers, things like that. We're like,

yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm not the, I've grown, my Yapi Chihuahua's growing. I'm like, I'm like a lab now, like a yellow lap. And I'm kind of in the conversation a little bit. And yeah, I mean, even even some of the solutions, you know, I'm going to talk to him too about if COVID comes back this fall, you know, we had a lot of innovative things that could have made people's lives a lot easier, like the, you know, rapid antigen test. from home that you just do for cheaper than shoppers. You just do it from your house. And we video witness it and give you a certificate or the, you know, the PCR by mail.

Like there's a lot of things that come out of small private enterprise that's innovative that I hope the government starts to, you know, at least listen to, pay attention, involve us in some of these conversations. And for the feedback I'm getting so far as they are. That's the best thing about Western Canada, certainly Alberta, Saskatchewan, probably the other province as well. But, I mean, growing up in both of them. we have really smart people who when they put their mind to a complex problem come out with

great solutions and you've just you've proven it right like I I implore the listener if it's the first time you hearing Mike go back to the other episodes and listen to what we were talking about back then because you were looking at a problem and figuring out how to you know make a solution out of a difficult time and that's the idea that you know I guess you give credit to our first conversation. That's where the SMP presents came from, putting four people up on a stage and throwing a problem at them and seeing what the different disciplines came back with. One I was missing, because you were down to Mexico, was an engineer.

I didn't have an engineer on the stage. Yeah, we think differently. You're all a little bit like that. You're kind of like goalies, you know? Yeah, I can see our pictures. Same kind of deal. Yeah. Yeah.

So we had, I don't know, we had, we had really good conversations last week. The mandate, as they told us, they told us the mandate from, from the minister, the health minister is that Alberta has some of the highest per capita health care costs in the country, but we don't have the health care necessarily the results to show it. And so their mandate is to get, is to open up on ramps and initiatives for exactly what I'm trying to do is to get these ideas in the door and then try and work together to, to drive innovation in the space, try to, you know, decrease costs and things like that. It's funny. I had a meeting with them and I spent about 10 minutes like I just did with you laying out exactly what we want to do.

And then they told me, yeah, there's initiatives starting on July 4th that we're looking for submissions that basically are what you described. So I think from getting a pilot sanctioned perspective, I'm quite confident that we're going to be able to get that done. What's going to be interesting is what comes out of that. So if we do a thousand people, the math I've done based on the prices, we would need about a 5% catch rate or incidence rate for this to make sense. right, where you're saving more money than you're spending. If you are in excess of 5%, you're talking about a real solid case to, if not take that to a larger scale where you're going to do, say, a 10,000 person pilot and prove it again. But at that point, you're talking about, okay, there's 1.1 million people in the province

between the ages of 50 and 75 in that target zone. You're really talking about a long-term contract to get 200,000 people done every year and you're just rolling everybody and making a five-year cancer and cardiovascular. their screen part of their health care checks, right? Which would be tremendous. And on the back end, you're going to save a ton of money because you're going to grab, everybody, you know, early treatment on all. Yeah.

Whether we're talking COVID or cancer goes a long way. Yeah. So I think it has tremendous impact potential on, on provincial health care. And so for me, it's just all about getting this pilot submitted and hopefully approved quickly, turned around quickly. And, you know, we'll just, we'll draw from our existence. high core clientele will qualify people and that'd be the quickest way for us to get the thousand done from the Calgary area. And then I've been talking to rural MLAs at a good meeting

with Brooks Medicine had MLA yesterday saying, you know, would there be interest in and coming in and, you know, there just happens to be 3,000 people in that demographic in Brooks. You could come in and hit the entire entire population demographic within a couple days, get in and out. So big potential for it. For sure, we can't take on a million one by ourselves. obviously, but with enough money, we could scale. I mean, scaling is easy when you have money. So we'll have to see. Let's see our goes.

Well, if there's one thing our governments love to do over the last couple of years, money shouldn't be an issue. Spending. What do you think about, what do you, you know, your mind and everything else looking at the different things that have been going on? What do you think of this monkeypox? It's not transmissible enough to be a threat. I don't feel.

There's a lot of the same headlines coming out around it. that you saw with COVID. You know, you've got labs retooling to do PCR testing. You've got warnings coming out saying that the testing capacity in the states does not match the requirements to contain this thing. So you've got a lot of the same headlines coming out. But if you look at the transmissibility, it's a fraction of what Omicron was. So I don't think it's a threat.

I see smallpox is back on the scene. I see polio is back on the scene from Europe. Just so happens all these things are showing up right now. So I don't know if it's going to be the smallpox. I don't know if it's going to be the seventh wave or eighth wave or whatever it is in the fall. Obviously, the government has set the stage for more of it because by extending the requirements to the end of September, you're basically telling everybody there's going to be a fall wave and we're going to make sure that we have everything in place early that we need for it. So I just don't know how you can sustain the spend on these on health care defense in a sense and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and. prop ups and business prop ups and all these things.

Like, and man, Trudeau should cut some more checks to foreign governments to help internationally. Why not? And they keep going on that versus taking care of home. But it's just with the spend here, it almost feels to me like he's intentionally driving this country to a breaking point on that. I just don't understand it at all. So it'll be interesting to see what comes out of the,

uh, the federal leadership race. And obviously we've got our provincial one, right? Um, see who, see who takes the reins and see what combination of provincial and federal kind of, grabs things, but I don't know, man, what are your thoughts? I mean, what do you think is going on here? Do you think monkeypox is going to come shut us all down again? No, I don't think monkey poise. I mean, first off, they're changing the name or they probably already changed the name if you hadn't heard because it's racist, right? Yeah, monkey fox. I mean, anyways, what do I think? I think we'd all be naive to think it's over, right?

We're just going, like the fact they've extended, uh, the ride can to September 30th. Tells you all you need to know. And then, and then stack on that, Mike that they've, they've went away from their, they're trying to change the terminology, terminology from your shots plus booster to are your shots up to date. Right. So like, you can see where this is sliding slowly. So last summer was my last summer. I got to be naive. Last summer I was like, no, I think we're going to get at it. We're going to hit a certain percentage and things are going to going to be fine. Well, we all know how that went. And that was a good cold slap across the face. So where I sit right now is, you know, I love your idea. I love ideas like this. They're sitting everywhere, you know,

and certainly on the podcast and reading different things, you get to hear like really, like this is how the West was built, is off really creative ideas that go on to benefit more than just yourself, right? Like they go on to benefit a ton of people. What I saw. They drive other innovation too. They drag other players into the space, which increases competition and drives innovation. 100%. And that's what you want.

That's how we get better. Yeah. What I worry about is they're setting the stage to what, you know, you go back to the defense. Well, we've just had two years of defense. And I'm sorry, those two years sucked. And I just keep, you know, you got time right now. What are you talking about? I'm like, that makes a lot of sense to me.

I would rather be on this point, attack mode, right? Let's play some offense. Let's realize that the underlying root cause of a lot of hospitalizations is general health. It's people that were unhealthy. So let's not close gyms. Let's give tax credits for people to go to the gym. Let's encourage healthy eating.

Let's let's, you know, let's prepare. Let's do something so that we're actually on the offense. Like you said this time. But I haven't heard anything about any of that. It's just back on, you know, even. in one of my meetings here last week, I talked about, like, why don't we do, if the government actually is interested in antibodies and believes there's value in them, why aren't we doing right now just a very large scale T-cell or antibody program to gauge, like, I think I talked about on their very first chat. like see where we are. What's our baseline for protection?

Are we going to, are we in such a panic that we're, that we're feeling we're going to have to get into this whole mandate of vaccines and vaccination again? Or are we at a high enough percentage that we're close to this herd immunity and maybe it's not a big deal? And I can tell you from, we've done, we launched our T cell test there a few months ago. Because of the price point, not a huge adoption on it, right? It's about 300 bucks. It's hard to justify people paying that.

But the, I think we've had a few hundred of them done. And you're at 93%. So the people that are generally coming to see us for the T cell, they either struck out on the antibody. They didn't have any antibodies because they got like sick early in in 2020 and the antibodies waned. So they come to see us because the T cell test gives you that indication for 10 to 12 years kind of thing. I think they've tracked them up to 12 years. And they're hitting on those. And so 93% on the T cell. So how good is the population right now? Does anybody, does anybody know? No. And the government officials I've talked to about it and

say, well, we're just culturally, we're not ready for that. The world's not ready to adopt, you know, the concept of antibodies and natural immunity. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, like, we just, we just went through this. And you're admitting that you believe in them because you're commissioning a study to look at them. So let's, let's do some testing. Let us help you out. So, yeah, I don't know.

It's frustrating. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say no to the testing revenue that we're probably going to get back in the fall. I mean, we could certainly use the boost in revenue to help drive some of these other initiatives. That's the only silver lining to all of this for me, honestly, is the, is the revenue we're pulling in from some of some of some. of this testing is paying for us to drive some of these other things that can actually make a

difference, right? Then that's, that's really nice. But I just wish we would do something to be ready rather than just wait for it to come again and then go through the same cycle. Well, and be ready with something that that can provide, you know, so much of what goes on in, you know, like, I think we both can agree. In the fall, we're going to have the flu season. It's going to come back, right? Like, I mean, that's as old as time. Yeah. The thing that would be nice is if they prepared for it with things that weren't defense mechanisms, give people the confidence to know that they're okay around people and everything else, right? Tons of people that are coming to eye court or you got that confidence. It's the it's the general public.

Yeah. To know like, listen, you're okay. You got this. Let's move on with life. But that's, I don't know, that's a tough conversation, Mike. Like there's a lot there. Certainly seeing some of the moves that the government has pulled over the last little bit. I mean, you can tell where their mindset is.

Now, that's federal versus provincial. Provincially, you're going to get, you know, in the next, you know, by October, you're going to have somebody new in there. And we'll see what they do. I'm hopeful. Obviously, I think I don't want to be pessimistic about it. I'm extremely hopeful that whoever steps into that place. that place is going to have the best for Albertans is going to carry a lot of the momentum

of why Jason Kenny got hosted in the first place. I listen to your, I haven't had a chance to talk to you. I've talked to three leadership candidates so far. I've had a chance to talk to them. And Danielle, obviously I was on her pod a while ago and I listened to you and her chat there last week.

And in terms of what you just said, her approach is stiff arm, right? It's just thrilled out to stiff arm being like, no, we're not doing this. We'll do other things. We'll do some more testing.

We'll do preventative. measures. She's she's talking about a, you know, a health spending account allowance for Albertans to do private testing to do some preventative testing like we're talking about things like that. So she's got the offensive mindset. It's like, no, no, no, we're, we're good. Like you don't need to. Well, the one thing, the one thing about Danielle is she hasn't been in politics for the last, what is it, like six years. Apologies to the listener somewhere in that range. So she's been on the other side, this side of the mic, talking to, and she's, I give her a ton of credit for this. She talks to more Mike Kuzmiskis than I do. Right. So like what I mean by that is she's

talking to people in business and innovation all over the map, not just COVID, but energy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So when you listen to her talk, like that's all that is. When you start talking to people like yourself, you're like, why aren't we starting to push this? If we start pushing these things, we're going to start winning in different ways and it's only going to benefit the population instead of just sitting there acting like we got the victim mentality of like we can't do anything and just lock ourselves in and just wait for it all to pass and it'll all go away eventually. Yeah, which which you see a lot of it. I mean, it breaks my heart when you still see these like high school kids walking around

by themselves wearing masks and we've conditioned this behavior, right? This has nothing to do with that kid's not protecting himself from anything wearing a mask by himself walking down the street. It's just been he's been so conditioned to be wearing a mask in class all day, every day. that it becomes part of his face or her face and they just don't take it off. And now you're wondering like, what other health issues are we now creating

in the next generation that they didn't really understand or have a choice in? What are we driving now? So I think there's, first of all, there needs to be a very concerted effort from both government and media

to be very selective about messaging that we put out. My best parallel, I would say that I just sort of thought of is construction, right? When you actually have a construction project going on, and you're, you're actually concerned about making sure that people are being safe in construction zones and

following speed limits. You're very selective about signage you put up, where you put it up, and it's targeted. It's targeted warnings. It's targeted, this and that. What you see in a lot of places is you'll have two and a half kilometers of highway that's closed for a single lane with signs saying construction construction and nothing fucking happening. Nothing happening. So as a driver, I'm sitting there going fresh. Like, why am I driving 50 kilometers an hour? Why am I listening to this? There's no one here or it's it's Sunday. There's no one on site. So, but, but, by just taking this catch all like everything's closed, you lose the respect for when you're actually in a zone

and you want to be conscious and making sure that you're not, you're very cautious, you're watching crossings, you're making sure you're not speeding to make sure that everyone in that zone is safe. And I feel like what they've done is just like, everyone wear a mask, everyone do this, everyone do this.

And so there's no, if you actually need to dive in and take a focused effort on some sort of precaution, I think they've lost people's hearing and respect on that. I think they've just lost it. So I think we really need to, from the top down, and be like, listen, those of you wearing masks by yourself, take that shit off.

You're doing yourself a disservice. You're not helping anyone. You're not helping yourself. If you're in your car by yourself, take your mask off. You're hurting yourself. If you're walking down the street by yourself, take your mask off. If you're exercising, if you're going for a run and you're jogging, take your mask off, right? I haven't heard any of that.

And so it is the same way you're trying to give advice on the positive side. You need to help people understand why that they're doing what they're doing. If you're in a crowded place and we believe masking is effective, Yes, drive people and drive behavior. You'd be like, oh, I'm in a crowded place. My mask would do something I put it on, whether you believe that or not. But we have to stop this. We have to stop conditioning people to be scared and living in fear 24-7.

Because when it actually matters, no one's going to care. If smallpox was actually like coming back in big force right now after two years of this and you would tell me. Nobody give a shit. No one would give a shit. No one would give. I'd be like, yeah, whatever. Probably same as the other one, right? You've lost people.

So they need to get back to focus messaging. and targeting what are you actually trying to get through to people, right? Well, what you're talking about is. Sorry, a little rant there. No, but it's fired up. But what you're talking about is a loss of trust, right? You've lost. Right.

You've lost like, take a look at the corporate media. They've just lost. I don't know if I can ever turn it back on where I'm trying to get information on what's actually happening. I don't know if I'll ever go back. I just, I just don't know if I'll ever. go back. I don't know how you get me back. Because right now I don't, I've seen too much.

And it's just like, I don't trust this. And politicians, it's why, you know, it's part of the reason why Jason Kenney is out. He just lost a lot of public trust where he wasn't doing what we wanted, wasn't doing what he said he was going to do, et cetera, et cetera. I, uh, I think, I think it extends a lot further than COVID on that. I mean, certainly it does. You talk about, you talk about mainstream media and and you know messaging i mean you can look at a few things that have happened um the the big one that that kind of got me was i used to be on it's funny two years ago i was actually a i was a i would probably would have voted liberal i was a i was more left and and believed in certain things and one of those things was like you know the donald trump situation right

mainstream media is like steel dossier he's compromised there's there's there's peepey tapes from russian hookers and he's he's in putin's pocket and they drove that drove that drove that drove that that. And then quietly you find out that was completely in total bullshit that was completely made up. And they're like, oh, Washington Post was like, oh, yeah, it wasn't real. It was made up. And then you get into some of these other, you know, like there's this, you know, the CBC ripped on the trucker convoy about being funded by terrorism and it's a front for money laundering, right? And then they quietly issue this. It wasn't a retraction, but they quietly issued this correction. It's like actually, you know, that wasn't exactly what was going on. So how do you trust? Like you said, how do you trust any

headline that comes out of these media groups now because they've repeatedly lied over and over and over again and then quietly silently, silently walked them back rather than making a big like, we were very wrong and we apologize. It's just a quiet retraction in the background because it doesn't get headlines. So I agree with you. The trust, the trust is gone. Media needs to, I think you're going to start to see a major shift away from mainstream to some of the alternative media. And as long as they're responsible in doing their job, you might start to get a little bit of that trust back. But certainly like me personally, as a former lefter, CBC kind of guy, I'll never trust CBC again.

I honestly won't. It's been burned too many times with no apologies or no admission of fault, which I can't stand. If you screw up and you put your hand up and say, that's my bad. That's my bad. I'm like, okay. But we don't see that. And we don't see that at media or politicians. We're politicians.

And again, one of the elected officials I met was last week is she said that's an underrated skill that not a lot of politicians have that people want to see. They want to see humility. They want They don't mind you making mistakes. Everyone's human.

Everyone makes mistakes. But own it, right? Own it. Put your hand up. That was me. That's my bad. We're going to do something different or better next time. You don't see it.

Well, what do you want out of a leader? Do you want somebody who points the finger or always takes the blank? You want the guy or a woman for that matter, you know, certainly we got some qualified women who are running for Alberta right now. You want the one that'll say, you know what? It's my bad. That was on my watch. This is what we got wrong.

and carry on because that's going to endear you more to a population than anything. It will, but the problem is if you're always the person saying, does me, that's my bad, does me taking it, although the population may for a time appreciate that authenticity, it goes up to a losing record. The media is going to start hammering you about all this person does is lose. They're always wrong. They always make wrong decisions.

And so there needs to be a little bit of a balance between owning certain things. I'll give you that. I'm not saying they're going to own every wrong. but hell when was it I can't think of the last time a politician owned one wrong and certainly right now there is a lot now I'm not trying to get you in hot water because I mean you're trying to work with the government you're trying to do really smart things you've been trying to do really smart things since I first talked to you till now and that's what I hope I push for is like let's do some smart things yeah like this this is a smart thing if you could you know like one of the things if I go

back to December 2020. That is a long time ago. We did the live stream and a lady came on talking about how they'd stop doing pre-screening for breast cancer. She says, like, people aren't talking about this. Now, that became an outrage last summer or maybe last fall, but that was like almost a full year before. And I was like, oh, wow, yeah, you're right. Because everybody knows if you don't find it, it's going to get to where it's a dire situation. I mean, they talk. about it with prostate cancer all the time, right? If you catch prostate cancer early on, it's one of the easy, one of the most treatable cancers out there. But if you miss it or don't get it diagnosed, I mean, it can kill you. Right. Goes from 99% five year survival to 30.

I had the numbers that's up on my screen. So, you know, there you go. One second, this turns found out. Yeah. And that's the, that's the other thing. I think that's important about this pilot and what we're talking about is you're coming off two years of people not, essentially not seeing their doctor, not getting lab work, not getting diagnosed. So you've seen a drop actually in cancer, not rates, in cancer findings. But that's purely because diagnosis has dropped off. So I'm fully expecting as we start to ramp back up and maybe what we find, you're going to find this huge pop in people that have been stressed,

eating unhealthfully, not exercising for two years, not getting to the doctor, not getting screened or tested, all of a sudden they get back in the system. I think you're going to have an influx of problems that you need to address. Yeah, hopefully, well, I don't know. I think it'd just be better to know, right? It's so everything, until we start doing testing, looking at it specifically and finding out exactly what problems we've created or what problems are sitting there, you just don't know. So it's all like speculative, right? We can sit here and talk about it.

I think, you know, once again, I'll say this for the 10th time is like what you're trying to do is I've really commend it because I look at it and I go. it's being on the offense. It's trying to create solutions for problems that we can all foresee coming down the pipe. And if you do well at it, it could actually save the taxpayer, the government money, which can only benefit all, right? Whether you're talking the humanity of it or the pocketbook or both, you go, it just seems like a smart option. And if it works, then it can not only benefit Alberta, but it can benefit like wider. breadth of the human population because if it works, who else isn't going to or who else would be silly enough not to adopt it and start straining for things.

That's the thing. And I don't know, because some of this technology is so new, I don't know if this type of approach is really being done anywhere else. I'm sure there's some research studies and things, but from a, from a perspective of a customer facing I Corps health type environment or type company who's who's dealing with customers and selling private tests and doing these things. and just taking an asymptomatic snapshot of where the population is with some of these. I don't think that's being done.

And so depending on how this pilot goes, if it comes out with a very high rate of incidents, yeah, that's going to absolutely drive other provinces and other people to say, oh, my gosh, we should probably take a snapshot of our place as well. I just hope that people understand, to me, I'm 37, even though I'm not in this 50 to 75 range, and I'm not going to be one of these people who's necessarily getting these tests. and out people, it's free testing, you know, that I'm not getting these tests. I'm still of the understanding and the impression that it's still going to save the system a lot of money and save, potentially improve healthcare down the road so that

when I get into that 50 to 75 range, things are a lot better for me. Listen, at 37 who's healthy, I've been paying taxes and paying into this system my entire, you know, since I was my working life. And I don't think I've really rarely draw out of it, so to speak, right? I paid for all my own surgeries out of province. I don't have a family doctor. I've been to maybe the Schumer a few times for some stupid ding-ups that I got stitched up or something like that. But in terms of actually making a real draw on the system, that's just not something I've done.

It's most people my age haven't done. But we still understand that you can make improvements to the system such that when you get into that where you're going to need it, it's better. That's what it's about is making it better so when you get there. Yeah. So we all inherently benefit in the future from an idea like this. Yeah. So I'll keep you both. keep you posted as soon as I think they said they were going to take it in and, you know,

next week or so and then maybe have a decision turned around by, by September, hopefully sooner. But it's such a small dollar value in the grand scheme that I'm hoping we can just maybe try and push that through real quick and just get some, at least get that initial snapshot done and say, hey, what potential incidents rate are we looking at? Is this worth really going out hard or if not? We'll see. In the meantime, I'm still going to keep down indoors and trying to meet with leadership candidates.

you know, elected officials and just make, my goal is to make everybody talk about a different way to do health care. If everyone's passing the same message and they're focused on the same things, I don't care who necessarily from a business side, who gets in the office. I think we can all agree that if the NDP get elected, I may as well just shut my doors the next day being just against the idea of private health care. They might take the idea and have the H.S. do it for three times the price and 10 times slow. But if it's, if the government stays the same, whoever's leading that ship, if everyone's speaking the same, if everyone's speaking the same, same language and they're focused on the same goals of improving health care and driving innovation and decreasing costs. That's it for me. That's my goal is to get that in front of everybody. So certainly if you're, you know, your listeners are listening to this, you know,

write or or call your elected members and, you know, say, yeah, you're interested in this. You'd like to learn more. Can I court come and potentially do some work in the community, do something like that to help try to drive that message that this is of interest. You are standing behind this and you want to see this push through. That would, that would, that would have. help quite a bit. Cool. Well, before I let you go, then, let's do the last segment brought to you by Crude Master Transport. I showed it to Heath and Tracy McDonald. They've been supporters of the podcast for a very long time. He said, if you're going to stand behind a cause that you think is right, then stand behind it, absolutely. What's one thing an engineer stands behind in this world?

That's one thing an engineer stands behind in this world. What can I stand behind? I can stand behind being true to yourself. Always be true to yourself. So we have a poster in our daughter's bathroom. It's a little picture. It's a little dragon talking to a little panda. And the little dragon says, you know, something like, what if I meet people who don't like me or the things I do?

And the panda says, you must walk your own path. Better to lose them than lose yourself. and that stuck with us immensely. And it's been no more relevant than recently. So be true to yourself and maintain that integrity and make sure you can always look yourself in the mirror. That's my advice. Well, I appreciate you coming on, Mike,

giving me some of your time and everything else. Hopefully at some point here we'll actually get to bump into one another. Come to town, man. I'll get you some testing. We'll go do some golfing. we'll get to the I-Corps experience and get here before I go back down south though because no guarantees I'll come back. Sounds good, Mike.

Appreciate it. Thanks, Sean.