TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #461: Defecting from Corrupt Healthcare with Andy Schoonover

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Marty sits down with Andy Schoonover to discuss CrowdHealth's new Lightning wallet integration, as well as how CrowdHealth has been doing in the last year. Andy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchoonoverAndy CrowdHealth: https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc 0:00 - Intro 7:23 - It’s been a year 14:22 - Doctors are excited 18:22 - The government owns the system 22:29 - Insurance is impersonal 28:23 - Bitcoin and LN 34:13 - Bitcoin doctors 42:49 - What’s the catch? 48:29 - How many people does it take for change? 51:22 - Relationship with employers 55:28 - Metabolic health and strong communities 1:04:09 - Defectors from the corrupt system 1:08:21 - Spreading knowledge 1:13:01 - CrowdHealth profitability 1:15:50 - CH’s relationship with TFTC 1:20:23 - Press the hard button 1:24:21 - We’re gonna win Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip at tftc i sat down with andy scoonover founder and ceo of crowd health one of our core sponsors here at tftc just get an update what's going on at crowd house how they're implementing the lightning network how the model's working whether or not doctors are getting interested very important stuff opt out i think the the lesson of this episode was what logan what was the lesson opt out no that's what you said to me just now what are we hitting what are we hitting are we hitting did you even listen i i block out every single episode as soon as we're done we're hitting the hard button god damn it he failed what are we hitting

uh the hard button the hard button some inspiration for tftc we're gonna hit the hard button before it hits you i'm kidding it was great catching up with andy opt out of bad money opt out of bad food opt out of bad health care pretty simple i guess you could say opt out i'll give you partial credit for saying opt out logan this room is brought to you by good friends at river river best place to buy bitcoin if you're looking to stack sats go to river.com slash tftc set up an account today you can dca using river if you do dollar cost average you're not gonna pay any fees

i think they just made it so you can uh dca every hour if you want to they just add an android app If you're an Android user, you're looking for the River app. It's available now in the App Store. They released that last week. I forgot to say that during the Mike Benz ad read. Sorry, River. New Android app. You can set limit orders.

If you want to buy at a certain price below or above the current price, you can set those orders to execute a trade at some point in the future. If the price does or does not, it would have to hit it to execute the buy. You can do that. You can set up auto withdrawals via River as well. They back all their reserves one-to-one in multi-sig cold storage. They don't have any third-party dependencies on Fortress Trust or any of those companies out there.

They built everything in-house. Try to stack sats. Go to River. They make it very easy. Go to river.com slash tftc. This trip was also brought to you by a good friend down the hall, Unchained. Unchained is here building the financial platform of the future, which leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties.

They have their Volt product, which is a 2S3 multi-sig wallet. And you can hold two keys in that quorum. Now they're releasing, they have released multi-institution, which allows you to decide you can hold one key in that quorum or no keys as well. It's a beautiful thing. Multi-institution, multi-sig is the standard. Unchained is pushing the standard forward. they were the first to market with their lending product which is a multi-institution multi-sig

product where you put bitcoin up as collateral to get usd liquidity you have one key in that quorum so you have visibility you know that your bitcoin's not being re-hypothecated kingdom trust and unchained hold the other two keys it's a beautiful thing they have an ira product as well they just launched sound advisory which is an ira service they have an inheritance protocol building the future set up a consultation with the team down the hall just to learn about what they're doing how they do it and why they're doing it go to unchained.com slash consultation that's unchained.com slash consultation tell them the tftc sent you say marty from down the hall said i should come talk to you this was also brought to you by our good friends at crowd health

crowd health press the hard button logan jumping in to the ad read i mean i said it during the conversation i'm a crowd health user a crowd health community member i've been doing it for almost two years now me and my family are very happy with it it's a better model it's cheaper for us has been significantly cheaper for us up to this point it's a good join crowdhealth.com slash tftc set up an account crowd health you pay monthly fee if you ever have a health event you go to the doctor you get the bill you bring it back to crowd health they negotiate it lower you pay the first 500 of that bill and then the rest is crowdfunded by the crowd health community which as you'll learn in this episode with andy is growing pretty significantly it's a beautiful

thing to see you can opt out of bad health insurance policies of the health care system more doctors are beginning to opt in to crowd health because they see the value of opting out of hospital systems and health insurance going directly to the end patients it's a beautiful thing go to crowd health join crowdhealth.com slash tftc or use the promo code tftc at checkout and you're going to get $99 a month for your first six months. Or $99 for the first six months of your subscription. It's a beautiful thing.

Join crowdout.com slash TFTC or just use the code TFTC at checkout. Last but not least, this report was brought to you by Bitcoin Talent Co., a recruiting firm built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. If you're a company in the space looking to hire the best talent, go to bitcointalent.co.

Tell them the TFTC sent you and leverage the incredible resources they have. Andy, the co-founder, built the team at Uber, the hiring team at Uber. Took them from 100 to, I believe, over 10,000 employees. He knows what he's doing. He's a Bitcoiner. The rest of the team, Eric, everybody else at Bitcoin Talent Co. is a Bitcoiner. They understand multisig.

They understand lightning. They understand mining. They're going to know what you need within your company. So go to them. They will find the best talent that may be hiding in other industries. and bring them to you so that we can build the bitcoin standard on top of that they have a flex product where maybe you don't need a full-time employee you don't want to take up all the operational expenses that come with that all the upfront costs that come with that you just need

somebody for a three month or six month sprint to finish a design sprint an engineering sprint a growth marketing sprint whatever it may be hit up their flex product they have a roster of people waiting on the bench to come do contract work for you so go to bitcointalent.co tell them the tftc sent you and enjoy this rip with our good friend, Andy. indices bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be it's always like the good stuff happens before it actually records this i think it's i think it's the only way podcasts work you know it's you have to record the good stuff before you actually hit record there you go just kidding

this is going to be filled with good stuff andy it's been like a year a year thanks for having me on thanks for coming on yeah you're right outside the door here it's not hard to find you to get you on yeah no i i appreciate this is like our our prime time so we think like 60 of our customers are going to come and then the november december and january months this is open enrollment open enrollment season everybody's like what do i do with health care next year it's like doing taxes in april or october or whatever you do them it's like this sucks like i gotta go through healthcare.gov i gotta get my w-2s i gotta turn those in because w you know healthcare.gov wants my w-2s now which is ridiculous this is relatively new uh it was i think since the government started

doing subsidies you actually have to turn in your paychecks so that they can validate your your uh your income your right to get health care your right to get health care so um yeah we're in the middle of it we're in the middle of it and things are going well yeah like we were just discussing the good things before we record i mean there's two things we want to cover predominantly or i want to cover you guys have integrated lightning really pushing forward bitcoin as a medium of exchange to pay for your health care and support uh health care providers on the back end and then number two what i'm really curious maybe where we could start is has the economic situation deteriorated to a point where health care costs are beginning to

enter the economic calculation people are taking into consideration on a month-to-month basis and with that in mind like it seems to me i've experienced this personally with me my family using crowd health for over a year now year and a half um it's much cheaper has been and it's like the economic decision for health care that makes the most sense for us um even though we probably could pay for more expensive health care it's just a better experience and cheaper overall yeah i mean i think it has i my my board member interestingly asked me this is either last board meeting or the one before it's like do you guys do better during the up times or the down times. And for a variety of reasons, the downtimes. I mean, we're getting a ton of people who've been

laid off by all these companies that have a decision to make. They can go on COBRA, which is ridiculously expensive. In essence, what COBRA is, is you take both your responsibility and the employer's responsibility, and you have to pay them both now. So it doubles or maybe triples. You know, you can go uninsured, you can do crowd health, or you can do something else. And so we're getting a lot of people coming off of Cobra. So that's one, you know, it's, it's good for us in that way. And then, you know, two, it's just easier to operate, you know, in terms of hiring people and getting people on board and things like that when, you know, Facebook's not paying a developer 500 grand anymore, you know? So it's, it's easier actually to, to operate within this

environment. And we have a lot more people who are looking for alternatives. I mean, with that said, I mean, one of those interesting things about crowd health is, and I posted this on Twitter the other day, people come because it's low price, but it's actually, I think bigger, like you're now a part of a community on a mission, you know, like we are in the same tribe. I mean, we literally sit next to each other, you know, and, and Parker sits in between us and he's a crowd health member, you know, and Jimmy song was in here yesterday doing some, and he's a crowd health member. And so we're actually like a part of this little community of crowd health members that are helping each other out with healthcare expenses. And that's

step one. Step two is like, can we take now this little group of people, a little group we're at, we'll be at like 6,000 by the end of the month, decent chunk of group, people who can then take Bitcoin and incorporate it into this and now see our, you know, what we all love being used more widely in the economy. I mean, and that's what I'm fired up about. So, I mean, we talked about this last year but i i wanted to start crowd health to first take down health care but i think i said burn down health care atf called me um and then it's like once we get like some critical mass then we can use that group to expand the use of bitcoin you know and i think there's probably one more step into our food system of saying like how do we actually impact you know the crap that we're

putting in our bodies and make some incentives to allow people to to eat better right and those are the three steps that i want to go down we're on step two but we're super excited about it yeah and approaching 6 000 members that's way a way bigger community than this time last year where we first recorded and yeah i can't remember what it was but i think it was maybe a couple thousand yeah i think it might be three or four x where yeah three or four x what we were last year that's about right we're about three x this year versus last and so what have uh some of the growing pains or growing pleasures that you've experienced over the last 12 months? I mean, growing pleasures are way easier, right, to talk about.

It's working. You know, anytime you have a startup, there's a number of things that you're like, this could blow this thing up. You know, and it's like my deal as a CEO is to reduce the risk of any one of those things blowing up. like the big one is are the bills going to actually get paid right like our if I ask Marty to help me with my bill is Marty going to say yes or he's going to say no and it's like 98% of the people say yes like that's worked and that's been for now two years so it works the bills are getting paid then the question is like can we actually get bills for a significantly

lower cost than health insurance plans and the answer to that has been yes so we're at about somewhere between 140 and 150 percent of medicare so whatever medicare pays we pay about 40 percent more health plans pay 250 to 300 percent more so you can do that math or like half of what health plans pay which is significantly which is significant i mean i shared the story again on twitter but my father-in-law had a gallbladder surgery last week or two weeks ago and i forget exactly what the number was but it was like 45 000 for gallbladder surgery and that was in austin and we had a member that got one last week at like five thousand dollars yeah one-eighth the price one-eighth one-ninth or whatever it was and and they were in arkansas so i mean it's one state

away so there's probably a little bit of a thing but it's not 90 different i mean or whatever 500 different you know in arkansas than it is in austin um but it just proves that like we have been able to really get people to awesome docs at a reasonable price well i consider another question like the awesome docs like obviously users like myself in the community have really seen the value of the crowd health model are you see more doctors become aware of what you guys are doing and not only that but excited about they're more i'm more excited about it than our members are really yeah they're like man please will you send people our way and we don't have any direct relationships with docs because we don't want to make like a network um but we have

docs reaching out on to us on you know twitter and all kinds of places every day being like please will you send people my way so it's been it's been amazing to see that because they want to release themselves from health insurance the same way you and i want to release ourselves from the fiat world right like health insurance is their fiat world yeah right and so they were like please like anything you can do because you know the thing that happens is united healthcare for example is a lot of these guys like 40 50 maybe even 60 of their revenue so if you think of a business that has one customer for 60 of their revenue that's not good they can come in and really jam you that's concentration risk that's concentration risk is what they call it in the mba school

um you know and so united will come in you know and allegedly they've done this and say like you have to take 20 cuts or we're out we won't we won't you won't you can't beat our network i was like what do you do what do you do you know what do you do you have to sell to the hospitals what you have to do and then the hospitals get huge and consolidate and take those rates and they jack them up because now it's a duopoly in austin with st david's in ascension against a basically duopoly you know it's an algopoli but maybe a duopoly oligopoly in the health insurance space so just prices go up like it's just basic economics yeah you know yeah no that's insane but you had those concentrating market forces prices are going up inflation's running rampant

you mentioned mass layoffs across many different sectors and healthcare is something that is one of the most important expenses that people deal with and so having this option and then the crowd health team sort of advocating on behalf of the patient at the end of the day is massive yeah well i mean think about like running a business you have not only concentration risk with a customer but the customer that absolutely hates you right like that sucks yeah can you imagine like that's i mean one of the best things kind of going back to your original question like the the things we've learned is like it's fun like with our customers because our members are like we want to take down this system like help us take down the system it's pretty cool i wanted

to mention it earlier but as you're describing that the parallels to the beef initiative and going out shaking your rancher's hand are impossible to ignore like it's just this grassroots movement through initiatives like the beef initiative and crowd health to go fix the problems that you view as systemically uh serious in your life yeah i mean i think that's that's totally right there's a flywheel effect to that too which is is pretty cool yeah so you know it's this this month will probably be like 50 of our customers come from our existing customers So we do some advertising on podcasts, including yours. Somebody emailed me over the weekend.

Yeah. They're going to move over. Yeah. And so it's, you know, we give our members 250 bucks if you refer somebody or a million sats, which is way more than 250 bucks now. We originally were like, hey, it'll be 250 bucks or a million sats when a million sats was 250 bucks. And now it's way more than 250 bucks.

It's like 350. And now we're like, hey, you know what? Bitcoin went up, but we're still giving you a million sats. Like, that's just how we are. Hell yeah. because we bought the sats way back then so you get the upside congrats you know so if anybody's listening to that and this and is a crowd health member they have a buddy or a friend who's looking for for health care a million sats we'll we'll uh we've got you know lots of sats stacked up ready

to give away hell yeah open enrollment season go tell your friends tell your friends tell your friends and how has the incumbent health insurance industry changed if at all over the last year any big news items or i mean nothing is significant nothing significant i mean the the the thing that's happening right now is you know clearly um the government owns the poor and i use that word owns specifically like on purpose right like they have to go to the government now for pretty much everything includes their including their health insurance you know the government owns the old you know 65 and above and now what they've done is for the healthcare.gov plans they've now taken you know another middle chunk and say we're going to totally subsidize you

but we're going to just fund the private insurance companies to do that so in essence you know they're trying to go from old to young and from poor to rich and they're going to meet somewhere in the middle and ultimately going to you know it's a fight to a single payer i mean this is ultimately, unfortunately, where I think we'll end up in the next decade if we don't do something serious. Because what's happening is what we're seeing is these employers are getting another massive increase this year. And these are big employers like General Electric and, you know, JP Morgan and all these people. Right. And they're going to these to the legislators And they're saying, man, look, we can't compete with China because we have to own the health care costs.

You know, and so it's just impossible to compete. And so government, what you should do is you should take over health care. Right. This is what's happening from these big organizations. You know, and so then the legislators are saying, look, you know, we can't compete. We're losing jobs like they're making to make this narrative around how this is actually good for U.S. business. Are they saying people are going to go work in China because of the health care or? No, we're losing competitiveness with China in terms of our businesses being able to compete with them globally because we're responsible.

Here, they're responsible for the health care costs, whereas in China, the government pays for all the health care costs. So it's the opportunity cost of having to pay for employee health care. Expense structure, in essence, expense structure. Or think about Europe. Europe pays pretty much everywhere in Europe, with some exceptions. the government pays for all of their so if you have a company in the united states where they have the company united states has to pay for the health insurance which for a single person seven

grand a year for a family it's 21 or something like that thousand dollars a year and the company in europe doesn't have to pay for the health care expenses the company in europe has a leg up on the united states company because the cost structure is just significantly different completely different and so that's what they're saying is we can't compete anymore globally because this health care crisis and that's ultimately i think going to lead to the government saying okay we'll take it you know we're doing it because the business has told us to that's ultimately where this is going yeah and the whole it's funny it's striking at branches instead of solving the root of the problems like do these companies not realize what they're saying there's a health care crisis like

what is driving that health care crisis at the end of the day why are your health expenses being driven through the roof and making it so that you're less competitive with the global marketplace yeah well then they're not even looking at it i mean they're i mean they're looking at it just in terms of the line item being really really big but most of these companies look if you're in you know a software business a sas business that has nothing to do with healthcare and you see this line item of healthcare you're kind of like i don't know what to do with this right like i'm good at sas i'm i'm built i'm good at you know writing code like healthcare is not in my wheelhouse so i'm gonna let somebody else do it and then they don't even look at it

until they end up you know just basically fueling this crazy insurance driven healthcare system where you know as we've talked on their last one the last couple of times i've been on here is it just it fuels price increases because all that's all the incentives it's just it's going to increase prices yeah not only increase prices but due to the pricing power that these insurance companies have in these hospital systems have we've talked about this too like the incentives of actually providing good care are significantly diminished and that's one of the favorite aspects of crowd health in my mind um supplementing crowd or crowd health with uh direct personal care yep tpc yeah um is that i do think this is going to be a trend i've just

seen in my own life is like we were interacting for pediatricians with that duopoly you you mentioned here in austin and i believe we used arc it was just a terrible experience and very impersonal um no room for negotiation like trying to see our perspective and we went once we're like we're never going again we found veronica uh oh yeah great and uh she's great she's awesome but it's funny my wife has said it multiple times like uh using ultra personal health care going to veronica is probably her favorite aspect of moving to austin that's awesome it's health care like she's never experienced in her whole life yeah so what others out there understand what we're talking about is in essence what's happened is is a lot of these doctors have said

i'm getting out of out of this system i'm not doing it anymore so i'm going to have a direct relationship with my my patients and so the patients pay veronica in this case with ultra personal health care um directly on a month-to-month basis and what is it like 100 bucks a month per person or something like that or adults i think it's 150 adults 50 for children yeah so you have a direct relationship with the doctor you're paying the doctor i've said this multiple times but it's like you work for whoever pays you right and right now in our system the doc works for the insurance companies that they don't work for you. Right. And in your situation, you're paying Veronica directly and all crowd health situation work, you know, crowd health members are paying

their doctor directly. The doctor gets to be worked for you again. And they, once you tell them that there's a, a massive change in the way that they act, they're like, okay, great. This is between me and you. Yeah. It's a conversation. It's a conversation. I want to hear your dudes understand your personal healthcare journey. Cause it's different for everybody. It's not just some form fit solution that the health insurance company or the hospital system gives you it's actually like a conversation and an ongoing one which is great yeah the doctors don't have to ask the insurance company's permission anymore for what they can or cannot do because it's back between the patient and the doctor which is the way it should be and it's affordable yes yeah i

mean you add dpc plus crowd health which is an awesome combination is still way less expensive than your typical health insurance plan and you're getting way better service from my perspective i mean you got veronica you can call her any time of day day or night if you have an issue we've texted her at 1 a.m before on a weekend she answered yeah or somebody within her network answered almost immediately and then for the big stuff you can lean on a crowd health what you had something with your it's just phi so i don't mean to talk about your your your kids you know My son got a rock in his ear. He had a rock in his ear.

He got a rock in his ear. He had to get it removed. And that was, what, $1,500 or something like that? And so it wasn't huge, but it was bigger. And then you paid for the first $500, and I remember crowdfunding it. And we asked, I don't know what it was, 10 people or something like that for $100.

And you got it paid for within not too long of a period of time. So DPC, direct primary care, for the little stuff. CrowdHealth for the big stuff. And you're still paying less than you would, you know, a Cigna plan. Annually. Annually. Yeah.

And even if it was parity, it's less. But even if it was parity, I'd pay for it because the experience is much better. And the experience is way better. Yeah. It's literally, you don't, the impersonality of health insurance and the massive corporate healthcare system is so impersonal that i would pay more for the experience i have with crowd health plus dpc it just pans out that i'm paying less which is even better we had um somebody on on instagram today tell us about her surgery and it was like i've been in crowd health for two two

years i went into surgery and uh crowd health called the surgeon the day of to make sure everything was good ready to go call the front desk wanted to make sure when i showed up everything was taken care of and the front desk ladies were like what is this company because it's usually the insurance company being like no we're not doing this we're not you know like it's like an enemy of the patient whereas we're making sure everything's good like making sure you're taken care of like those types of things it's just a totally different experience yeah yeah So you get the health care advocate walking through the process, what you need to do, getting the bills, submitting them, getting them paid on the back end. And we're going to we're going to a big thing for 24 is we're going to make that a little bit more frictionless, which will be which will be cool.

You know, in essence, what we're doing is, you know, the way I tell my my wife, this is clearly different than your audience. But my wife is not a Bitcoiner. She's like, you know, she wants to make sure that when she pays for something, it can get paid for. that's about it right um but the way i explained it to her is like hey you have a venmo account she gets venmo right and what if everybody had venmo accounts you know and and i we as the schoonover family needed help then we'd have a bunch of people sending us money and then we could pay for that help right out of our venmo account or we could you know off ramp it to our bank of america or pnc or whatever bank account and we could pay for it that way but in essence you have your little health care wallet right and that's what we're doing you have your little health care

wallet you can fill it up if you want to you can take it down if you want to but you got a little healthcare wallet there that you know you can pay at the point of care in lightning you can do that with veronica because she now accepts bitcoin um which that's ultimately what we want to do like everybody should have their a wallet and pay directly with lightning and if you can't pay with lightning then you know pay with fiat and on the back end we'll we'll kind of reimburse you with you know bitcoin and so then you can keep that bitcoin in that wallet and just hold it or you can pull it down and off ramp it or send it to you know uh your unchained account or whatever um you know that that just seems like a way better way of doing this um and so let's

dive into it like how have you guys approached implementing bitcoin yeah relating network you know we've been trying to do something with bitcoin for a long time and we you know with typical startup fashion have tried and some of it has gone well and some of it has not gone well You know, hopefully our members, I think they do. They're like, they see the heart behind this is like, man, we really want to incorporate Bitcoin into what we do. You know, I sat with Jimmy, Jimmy Song down at the Capitol Grill a couple few years ago. And he's like, man, you know, these health insurance companies are holding this big bucket of fiat and it's declining, you know, minute by minute. You know, what if you held that bucket in in Bitcoin? And that's got me thinking like, man, we should just let our members hold kind of any excess funds in Bitcoin and they can do with whatever they want with it. Right. So for an individual, you know, it's one hundred twenty five bucks a month that we ask for people. We're only spending somewhere between seventy five and a hundred.

So what if that other twenty five or that fifty you could let people, you know, just stick into Bitcoin and they can save it and they can do it, do with it whatever they want. but it was custodian and we know all the stuff that's going on right now with custodians a bit of a mess yeah the custodian we used we just you know our two of our big estates disappeared like it was just a mess and we're like all right why don't we just let people hold their own money like so you know if it's 125 bucks we need 75 for marty's you know rocking your ear and you know The remaining 50, you keep it and then you can put it wherever you want. You buy Bitcoin, you can put it in custody, non-custodial, whatever, wherever you want to put it. Like that's our second step.

And people are like, why can't I save in Bitcoin? And I'm like, oh, no, we're letting you keep your money so you can invest in Bitcoin. But it wasn't as easy. Like, all right, let's try again. You know, ultimately where we've landed is saying if we can put a Bitcoin wallet, a Lightning wallet in the CrowdHealth app. and then let people fund each other's healthcare expenses through the Lightning Wallet, which is way better than the fiat rails for so many reasons.

One, now your transaction fees go to basically zero. I mean, it's not zero, but it's pretty darn close. It's instantaneous, which people don't understand that the fiat rails, like we don't see this on the customer side, but like you got to let this stuff settle before you can actually move it. you know and so sometimes it's three days sometimes it's six days with ach sometimes it's 12 days

depending upon the banks and so the back end of that is just like craziness it's a mess whereas a lightning like i can get money to you you know i can do it right now and you get it instantaneously right and so that's the beauty of using the lightning wallet so in essence this is the way it would work right um you have your 15 rock in your ear um or let's say it's 2000 and 1500 you paid the first 500 bucks of it the 1500 we would go to all the bitcoiners and we say hey 15 of you send marty a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin via lightning i would send you an invoice you'd accept it you would have money in your lightning wallet because you've already pre-stocked it and it's going to go directly to marty's wallet and marty within minutes now is going to have the 15 he

needs to pay for your son's rock in his ear. Now, if that doctor accepts lightning, you can pay in lightning directly from that wallet. And if the doctor doesn't accept lightning, then you have choice. I can pay in fiat $1,500 and hold that $1,500 in Bitcoin, which you're just transferring fiat assets to Bitcoin assets is what's happening there. Or you can off ramp it and you can use that money then to pay your your doctor right and i ultimately we think the circularity will be you know one or two percent in year one like you know lightning to lightning to lightning to veronica who's except lightning and she holds it in lightning but it's like can we start at one or two percent and get to three or four percent and get to ten percent and 15 like that's where we

want to see gradual increases so you know online you know the twitter sphere people are like oh there's just nobody to accept it and like yeah we gotta have people willing to pay it before people are going to accept it right so let's start at one or two percent and then move our way up and i think if we can just take a small chunk of the health care space 4.3 trillion dollars like just a small tiny chunk 10 bips 10 bips right you could say hey bitcoin does have actual use as a medium of exchange. And we're doing it in healthcare. Like this is the biggest industry on the planet. You know, that's my vision, you know, and so maybe I'm, I'm too optimistic, or I'm idealistic. But I was like, man, I think somebody's got to go out there and say, we've got

to at least start this. And then we're gonna have somebody full time on crowd health who are going to all these doctors and trying to orange pill them to say, hey, you can accept Bitcoin, it's really easy. And what is the benefit of that? One is I hope we can convince you that fiat sucks. Right. But two is you're going to Veronica, I'm assuming partly because, you know, she's a Bitcoin minded, you know, person, a sovereignty focused person. And we can get people to you, doctor, if you will accept Bitcoin. Yeah. If we had a Bitcoin doctor in Austin, which veronica is one like i guarantee you we can get more people there like because i want to go to a bitcoin doctor because they're they're not fiat right they're not like pharma first take a med

be done right they're actually like thoughtful and seek truth as opposed to just doing whatever the medical industrial complex wants to use so that's the big vision i mean that's we'll see if it works at startup stuff right but um that's the big vision for what we want to do here no i think it's totally achievable i mean and going back to veronica like i was my wife uh interacts with the ultra personal health care acts app so when she sent me the uh she sent me the message where they're like we're accepting bitcoin yeah and they were like using zap right i was like oh my god this is incredible and then you read the blog post that she put out which um was like hey not only do we believe in your sovereignty when it comes to health care we believe in your sovereignty when

it comes to money too and that's why we're going to accept bitcoin if you want to pay us in that and that's what we paid two months of invoice i think she launched like two months ago so we paid two invoices over zap right and it's just like yeah it's awesome and as a bitcoiner like if i didn't want to reach into my stack i can easily buy and send or use something like strike to just pull from my u.s dollar bank account and send bitcoin uh directly to her address whether silver lightning or on chain and i think that's what it's going to take is just one man at a time a woman at a time in the case of veronica stepping up and saying i'll accept it and then i'm more than happy to pay her prefer to pay her in bitcoin right because i know she's really helping my

family and if she wants to accept bitcoin and enable that like more than happy to pay in bitcoin i think it's important like i'm not asking you to pull from your stack like i'm asking you to say hey one line item my budget was being paid in fiat i'm now going to convert that to being paid in bitcoin and if you know more people do that we i think we can get to a critical mass of most doctors most hospitals you know being willing to accept bitcoin i mean i think that's been an incredible step for bitcoin nobody can say out there none of the pundits can say if we were able to do that oh you can't use bitcoin anywhere like it's you know that's that's that's just be it will be bs if we can actually accomplish that yeah and you

see i know uh last week there was a dentist in denver yeah yeah he's using zap right now to accept bitcoin so it's definitely happening there are those doctors out there i know them obviously veronica is one of them but there's many others that i've talked to that are bitcoiners that's actually i mean it makes sense doctors are very smart people uh you think they'd come to understand bitcoin the thing that was so interesting in that i don't know if you really looked at that tweet that doctor did that tweet and i think he had like at the time he did the tweet like 120 followers or something like that that tweet i think got like 150 000 people to see it like you're now accepting bitcoin you got 150 000 people now see that this dentist in denver is accepting bitcoin i guarantee

it it would be an awesome case study to go back to him and say did you get any bitcoiners like i bet you like he's gonna his business is gonna go really really well because he accepts bitcoin like and that's the only way i think we have to do this like i i think going to doctors and be like you should accept bitcoin just because it's a cool thing to do i don't know like i don't i don't think that works i think we have to go to them and say if you accept bitcoin they will come yes you know and so it's like if we get bitcoiners to say i'm gonna go to bitcoin doctors if there is one then man again you you you create demand for a good and that's beautiful capitalism like you demand for a good you want to go to that doctor or that dentist or whoever

that's how i think we win agreed and i know myself i'm an archetype of many other bitcoiners out there like i want to go support doctors that accept yeah and likely if they're in bitcoin necessarily it was probably philosophically aligned with the problems that uh enter one's life when they deal with centralized institutions obviously health care is majorly centralized if they're accepting bitcoin they probably understand the importance of decentralization and when it comes to health care and like we said the two episodes we recorded maybe three even like uh last year the year before like it's got to be grassroots it's going to be one has to be time like you got to go support the people like and like like you said like bitcoiners

want this to happen and obviously hodling is a used case um but i do agree except pre-recording like we need to break out of that and i think spend and replace or simply use something like strike to convert what was already a monthly line item they were paying in fiat anyway convert it to bitcoin totally just grow and empower the people that are that are treating you yeah well and i think you know dentists are one doctors are another like one of the problems with our system is we are incentivized to maximize revenue regardless of how it impacts the patient right dentist for some reason when we started talking about dentists it came to my mind like the last time i was a dentist you know at the end they're like trying to upsell you on everything

like do you want fluoride and do you want and it looks like your teeth are a little out of line you want a five thousand dollar invisalign you know like i maybe i'm naive but i just don't think bitcoin doctors will do that like i just don't think they're gonna like fiat you to death like maybe again maybe i'm naive and maybe i've the doctors i've met thus far who are beat or fiat are bitcoin doctors like they're like no i want to provide you a service it's it's it's value for value like i want to provide you a service that creates value i want you to pay me and i don't need to make all my money on all the up charges because i'm providing you a great service and you're providing me money you know in the form of of bitcoin to to provide me with a living that i

need to to you know there's that relationship there without an insurance company in the middle yeah you know so you don't need to upcharge you all these 22 different things that you don't really need you know um so i think i just think you get better it is it's a lower price it's better care and like you know that that to me is is a winner i can't stress enough that it is better care which is again the most refreshing thing like i never thought that finding a good doctor would be the highlight of our move to texas yeah for my wife that's awesome it's uh it's really it helped her like under like changed her perspective on health care more generally like understanding that this dpc model exists in the first place she's like why have we been

doing this our whole lives it's uh and so then on the doctor's side like so are all the bitcoin doctors coming to you yeah yeah and we're building a database so we're building this you know nationwide database of docs who said they will they either do or will accept bitcoin so the fun thing is we had a lot of doctors say look if you can send me patients i'll do i will accept bitcoin and it's like you know doctor btc or something is their you know screen name so i know it's not like just because it's like no like i will accept bitcoin if if you send doctors or if you send send patients my way so i think you're going to see bitcoin doctors who want to accept bitcoin which i think is awesome but i think you know if we're if we're trying to uh you know be missionaries

here in some way like what if doctors who weren't bitcoin doctors are orange pilled because they see the demand driver of bitcoin they're introduced to bitcoin they understand the fundamentals of bitcoin and how it's so much better than fiat like i think this is a way to to orange pill the health care space too um so there's so many just kind of good components of this that it just it it feels right it's fun to be able to to kind of be the first to to you know on the back end help people pay in in bitcoin so it's fun it's been a bit of fun journey are there any bit have there been any skeptical doctors like what is this this cloud health number one what is bitcoin number two that have been like oh yeah yeah i mean i think that the big challenge with this

right is like crowd health is so different than health insurance already and people are kind of like what what huh um and then i'm like oh yeah we're doing bitcoin too and they're like okay hold on a second you know our brains can only process so much and just as a defense mechanism anything we can't easily understand we just say this is dumb right and so you see a lot of people doing that and so we've had to be very careful of not trying to double pill people at the same time it's like no we want to get you on crowd health first so you understand it and then let's see if i can transition you to the bitcoin crowd so we actually had to you know bifurcate our twitter handle one is like crowd health btc which is going to be all of our bitcoin stuff and one's just

generally crowd health because i'm trying to not double whammy people yeah you know into this you know our number one kind of barrier to growing is is people thinking that this is such a crazy model right but that's the number one concern for most totally disruptive you know categories and so i just don't want to double yeah people don't believe me when i explain crowd health yeah what's the catch this is a scam it's a it's a what's the catch andy the catch is we're getting 50% better rates than health plans. I mean, that's crazy for, for bills greater than a thousand dollars. And so all the big bills, we're getting incredible rates for our members. And so even if we're just like 50% better, that's, that's it right there. And then we have a self-selected

group of people like me and you who are, you know, in our thirties and our forties, we're healthy. We take care of ourselves. What we put in our body is really important to us. We work out, um you know we take care and love our families well like those people just have lower medical costs right and so it's a self-selected group of people to come together to do that so and that's a multiple multiplicative effect right on on costs so that's that's the reason it's very easy math actually yeah no it's funny though when you mention like people you don't want to double whammy people like even like explaining the model to the doctors when we go to the doctors and like oh what's your health insurance like i don't have health insurance you do like direct pay

this crowdfunding model. They're like, what? They start whispering because direct pay is usually looked down upon. One time they asked my wife, what's the income of your household? And she responded, they're like, oh,

why are you doing direct pay? Why don't you have health insurance? It's funny. Everybody would have been psyop to think that health insurance is the only way. It's hilarious. at the front desk when you say direct pay like they start whispering and like what they quietly ask for your debit card and like how you're gonna pay um it's it's strange and we hope to i mean i

have a t-shirt right now that says you know just like uninsured across the front you know it's like i want to own it like it's it's it's the same thing as saying like fiat like you know i'm i'm out of fiat or bitcoin like you know i'm saying like we are out of that insurance you know racket and we are into something which is much more delightful well that's funny because it is i mean obviously we've talked about this over the last year plus but like it is such a racket it is funny that people look at you while they're involved in the rack and they're like oh what are you doing you're crazy yeah it's it's the same look though that we get as bitcoiners yeah for people who understand bitcoin oh one of you bitcoin people you must be strange right which

is kind of like oh wait you don't have insurance that's that's strange but it's just you you're psyoped by the powers that be to think that there this is the only way and we know as bitcoiners like this is not the only way there's a way better way you know and so i think so that's why bitcoiners right now you know half of our members or something like that are bitcoiners like are so like interested in this because they're like oh yeah i know i know i kind of like looked i like being looked upon as being a little bit different i liked opting out i like opting out yeah exactly it's uh opt out of the rackets in every aspect of your life whether it's money health care food you can opt out you just gotta go shake your doctor's hand shake your rancher's hand shake

your doctor's hand there it is bitcoin um i would say though that we've gotten lots of feedback where doctors have treated them differently i don't know if i said this one with you before but um i had a cardiologist who i had to go get scans um for from my heart and everything's great um but he's like hey you know typically i would ask you to come back into the office so that we could go over these scans but since you don't have insurance and your direct pay can i just call you i'm like hell yeah you can call me like and he called me he's like everything looks great and i'm like wait a second you would have charged me 200 to come into your office for me to set for you to say everything looks great right like people are being i don't know like potentially like an

hour plus of commute it's in it's the worst thing ever sitting in a waiting room at a doctor's office yeah no way in hell i want to do that just call me yeah call me yeah and the only reason he said is because he knew i didn't have health insurance would he and he'd be able to charge yeah he'd be able to charge for that that follow-up he doesn't have to charge for the phone no he's just like i'm just gonna call you we're gonna be done with it i'm like great more of this would be awesome yeah what do you think the critical tipping point is to shake people out of the PSYOP of health insurance. You know, unfortunately, I don't know if there's,

are you taking a societal tipping point or an individual tipping point? Because I think for an individual, a couple of things that we're seeing is happening. One is the insurance plans continue to treat their people like crap and people finally get to place where like, I'm not taking this crap anymore.

Like I hate my insurance company being my enemy. it just doesn't make any sense. Second is the prices are going up significantly. And so at some point it makes so much like pain, you know, it's like the Stockholm syndrome. Like, I don't understand why people continue to go through this pain and like, oh, my insurance companies, you know, helps me out. Like this is, this is crazy. I think eventually it's so much pain that they have to, you know, rattle their cages. And then I think societally, I mean, I think we need to get to 30 to 50,000 people. I don't think it's big.

I mean, 30 to 50,000 people in a country of 350 million is not a lot, but I think, I think we need 30 to 50,000. I think there's a, an effect here where people start talking about it. And it was like, this is like legitimate,

you know, like a legitimate alternative, at least in the minds of like that early majority, like you've got to cross the chasm to that early majority. Let's do it. This open enrollment season freaks. I mean, we'd be great.

I mean, 50 might be a lot. We'd be operationally strapped. But I mean, I think we'll probably get 6,000 by the end of the month. We'll probably be at 10 or something like that. I'm hoping somewhere around 10 by the beginning of next year, first quarter of next year. So that's a good start, right? I mean, I asked somebody, I think it was Eric, Eric Podwoski. Do you know him? Yeah, good dude. yeah um asked him like how many bitcoiners out there are there that actually are so down the rabbit hole that are willing to like buy stuff with bitcoin right like where are the metrics on that i don't know you know i know el salvador lots but here in the united states

like how many of their of us are there that would actually like go and do it because it's not pressing the easy button i think there's more than any information will disclose publicly just because of the tax situation of spending bitcoin i do think a lot of people spend bitcoin they just don't want to admit it because yeah that's her yeah that's why you look you look at strike i mean how many accounts to strike have or i don't know what are the what are the other kind of like widely used you know bitcoin platforms and what kind of membership do they have and that you could probably start figuring out like what is the the current bitcoin market and then the next question is like how do you double triple quadruple that right as we go into a bull market i think

that helps for sure yeah that's the other thing too thinking about like getting more people on to the crowd health model and thinking about how they interact with traditional health care and health insurance it's usually their employer that's providing them the options that they're opting into so how how much progress have you guys made of getting crowd health as an option for employers oh for for employers oh man talk about regulatory madness really yeah anytime we have we can't have a direct relationship with the employer okay because then you're under what's called erisa rules i don't even know what erisa stands for but it's a huge bureaucracy within the Department of Labor that is, you know, will hammer you if you touch anything close to ERISA rules.

There's another. Yeah, I mean, in the Biden administration has put, you know, serious million dollar, you know, plus fines for anybody who is not totally complying. We're not an ERISA. We're not an insurance company, so we can't be in ERISA. However, we have been able to go to employers and say listen instead of paying for your members insurance why don't you just give them cash to go and get their own their own health care it's like school choice but for health yeah health insurance exactly exactly and and for a decent chunk of bitcoin companies um we've gone to them and they've they've been like okay well yeah we'll do that um you know especially i think now as we're going to be able to actually offer a lightning offering where it's like truly you

are transacting in bitcoin i think next year will even be better for us because we were one step away from bitcoin before saving in bitcoin and things but it's now it's like no no you're actually transacting your health care expenses in bitcoin in lightning right and so um i think we're gonna have a much better success you know next year so if you're running a small bitcoin company and trying to figure out what to do with excuse me your members health care please call us we'd love to work with you and as an employer like if i were to be an employee i would see this as an added benefit yeah because i don't want to deal i remember sitting in like boardrooms at this time of the year when i was working at like larger companies and you'd sit down you'd waste like

half a day on going over like the health care options that you could opt into and i never came out of those boardroom meetings with clarity like you're still like what the hell is this which one do i pick what i mean you have to have a crystal ball to figure out like which one is going to be economically better for you yeah whereas for us it's like look you know your ear or a rockineer 500 bucks you know er visit 500 bucks like it's just anything that is big it's like you pay the first 500 bucks and we'll submit the rest of the community it's super easy yeah what's the average deductible for a plan these days oh man well in healthcare.gov for a family of four it was my only options were like between twelve and sixteen thousand dollars that's insane so that's

what you pay before first anybody comes in and covers any extra i think it was i don't quote me on this but i think it was 19 or 20 or something like that max out of pocket so typically the way it works is like you have this deductible which is you not only pay premiums every month so for my family it was fourteen hundred dollars a month you know so that's what sixteen thousand dollars something like that um in premiums and then it was another fourteen thousand dollars for uh my deductible so that's thirty thousand dollars before the insurance plan pays a dollar and then everything above that i paid twenty percent of up to me paying a total out of pocket for that deductible twenty thousand dollars right i mean it's like mind-boggling like anybody would even

consider it it's not really covering i mean anchoring to my family's health expenses like we come nowhere near that no in a year and so even if we had the health insurance that we're paying for like it's not going to help one dollar to our health uh health care cost over the last year and this is where i think that like somewhere close nutrition wellness exercise things like that has got to be taken, has to be accounted for when somebody goes and gets their health care dollars because somebody, you know, sitting on the couch, eating chocolate, fudge, whatever, right,

has got to be treated differently than somebody who's working out, you know, four or five times a week. Like, it's just, it can't continue to be where people who are working out and taking care of themselves and figuring out what's going on with their body and, like, truly treating their body as temples, right, can't continue to pay for people who aren't.

You know, like, 77% or something like that of Americans are overweight. That's insane. It's like 37% are obese. I mean, it's insanity. And that's where I think that the food component, which I kind of talked about as my three pillars of things I'd like to challenge, is next. So there's got to be something there, you know.

So we're working through that. what do you what do you think we need to attack on the food side most importantly well i mean i think it's most importantly is i mean an education and understanding of how what goes into your body and how it impacts like um your your body makeup right i mean at a very fundamental level but i what i'd like to do is i'd like to take some labs and some metrics around that right so like let's get everybody a set of labs and some key metrics that they understand so that everybody understands what their metabolic where their metabolic health is right so there's five components of it what what are your metabolic health components and then how does food and food impacts all of them

right how can we change what we eat to to impact these five metabolic you know components and um and and then you know basically you know bonus you based on being able to get them down like you pay less based upon you being able to to get into these five metabolic you know thresholds green zones green zones yeah because in essence what i want is like i want every and i've said this before it kind of sounds cheesy but i want everybody to be able to be you know 80 years old and running around the backyard with their grandkids that's what i want you know and it's like live hard die fast yeah like that's what we all want and right now we are living hard on the the the you know carbohydrates and dying slow slow death sucks like let me die fast yeah when

you say that you mean like at the end of life at the end of life like you go to sleep you don't wake up yeah it's not like you're just ravaged by chronic disease for you know a decade or two decades before you die like that's a terrible end of life like finish strong yeah and it's something i've become more acutely aware of obviously we were talking before we hit record too like my son my oldest is reaching the age where he like can have conversations he's running around and i want to continue that like i'm in good shape and one thing we did over the last year is be joined lifetime fitness which is great for like families like the kids have a play area my wife and i can go work out um and that's something that we've made like a family routine

twice or three times a week i'll go four times a week but two or three times out of that four times the kids are in tow we're going together that's one small thing too it's like at that small age at an impressionable age you're saying oh dad's going to work out yeah stay in shape i love that yeah i mean my vision is like it can you you know we're called crowd health but in essence what we're doing is we're putting together little crowds of people who share some characteristics that, in essence, change their behaviors because I don't want to screw somebody in my own tribe, right? So Marty and I, you and I are both in the Bitcoin crowd.

Like, if I try to extract value out of that community, I'm screwing Marty and Parker and Will and all these people who, you know, are part of my people, right? Like, I'm going to act different in the way that I go and consume healthcare. And so I think it's important for us to put together these little communities because it's the way this is the way we've done it for hundreds of if not thousands of years right like we're in little tribes we take care of each other we don't want to screw each other because it ultimately will come back and impact us right but there's an a just an affinity for each other

too and so one of the things that i'm thinking about is like we've got our kind of founders crowd we have our bitcoin crowd you know and that's another crowd you know can we have like a um a metabolically healthy crowd or something like you know it's like hey if you're metabolically healthy you can be in this crowd and guess why the price the cost will be lower because everybody's metabolically healthy and then everybody might be like huh maybe i actually need to work on my metabolic health so i can be in this crowd right and so there's you know i think there's probably a trainer's crowd and a real estate agent's crowd and a i don't know a keller williams crowd like you know little little 10 little crowds each with 20 000 people in them and you know big enough to

be able to be viable but small enough to be like i know that there's other people that i know in my crowd so i'm going to change my behavior i mean we had a guy with colon cancer who came back to us i may have mentioned this in your last one but like he's like i don't want to screw i have colon cancer like this is a problem like help me but i don't want to screw the community like can you please find me doctors that will treat me at a reasonable cost and i'm like holy crap like this guy is in totally a position where he could be the victim and he is a victim of like just a raw end of the deal he's in his mid-30s you know and he's like he took the approach of being i don't want to screw the other people in my community and i'm like dang that's powerful yeah like that is a

change in behavior where if you're with health insurance you're like screw this like give me everything you know like i don't give a who i go to i mean the concept's thrown out a lot in bitcoin circles and sometimes it's beating a dead horse instead ad nauseam but that's it's very true like incentive alignment incentive structure yeah is important the incentive structure and health typical health insurance just purely doesn't exist it's just spend more we'll pay for whatever we'll print money to pay for it totally be as unhealthy as you want um where this you align incentives between community members and it drives outcomes like that yeah yeah and that's a pretty special special thing to watch so and the other thing i was i was

a little i mean without totally understanding the bitcoin community because i'm fairly new i'm three years in i you know that and you hear about the bitcoin community being like the self sovereign group you know which seems a little bit from the outside looking in not totally understanding it's like oh it's all about me but i what i've learned about this is it's like no no i'm i'm responsible for myself and taking care of myself and therefore i'm actually a way better member of the community right and so it's actually stronger communities because i'm like i know marty's like taking care of his business and i want to be in community with that guy right um and so it actually makes stronger relationships and stronger communities because people aren't

in the community like oh that dude's a slacker like there's just this doesn't exist you know within i mean there's it's all spectrum but like you know it doesn't just a much lower probability of that in the bitcoin community than than others because you're almost like if you're the slacker you're like okay you're not taking care of your business so it's an incredible community that i've seen which is is is really neat yeah no that's the funny thing about the mischaracterization of like oh they're selfish i just want to get rich quick and it's like no i want to preserve my wealth and uplift my individual situation in this world which will then allow me to go out and help everybody else and you can't help everybody else unless you help yourself first

whether that's taking care of your body taking care of how you save your money watching the food you eat yeah you can't go out and lecture people if you're not doing it yourself yeah it's it's hard to be a victim within that kind of community like or play the victim at least it's like you have a lot of people being like all right dude like yeah something's going on like get your together let's go extreme ownership extreme ownership yeah something bad happened to you like you get cancer like it's yours you own it but guess what we're going to be a community we'll help you out like that's just like you just got the raw into the stick man like that sucks yeah and so do you think doctors are waking up to this like the power of the community i i i think

I think so. I mean, I've had so many people and this is a hard metric, right? Like you have such a huge following, like you get probably hundreds of new followers or whatever a day. Like, so it's not, doesn't really impact you, but like for us, we have, I don't know, 3000 people who follow us on Twitter. And so, you know, if we get 20 people who follow us today, I can still kind of look through them and see who they are. I'm seeing more MDs in the last probably 30 days that i've ever seen and i think it's probably because open enrollment you know people are interested you know but we are making a push out there into the the medical community and i got we got a lot of you know docs who are who are following us and i don't know maybe they're

following us to see what we're about and see you know if we're trying to screw up their their business or their administrators in hospitals who are pissed off it doesn't seem like it it feels like it's salt of the earth docs who are just interested you know interested in an alternative because they've been so just ravaged by health insurance well it's funny you mentioned that because we just recorded with mike benz who's the executive director at um uh the foundation for online freedom for freedom online and we were talking about the censorship industrial complex and really dug deep into the intelligence apparatus federal government apparatus that sort of embedded itself in private institutions to push censorship on the world and

one thing he said that really made me optimistic is i was like like what is the end goal like where do we go from here and he basically said like what we're what i think we're seeing is that there's gonna be like a lot of defections of people who are pushing the censorship industrial complex because the severity of the immorality of what they're doing weighs on them begin to defect you can easily see that happening in the health care industry as well people the enormity of just the lack of quality service and the high cost and the corruption that comes with the incumbent health insurance and health care system begins to weigh on individuals and all these systems are made up of individuals and they just begin to defect i think we're seeing

defections on the doctor side you're seeing it with direct primary care like that was one wave we're probably going to see some more waves we're seeing some things on the direct primary care being um kind of imitated in some of the specialty care too so we're seeing pediatrics um and so we'll i think we'll start seeing more and more of those defections away from the insurance system and so anybody who starts having insurance is going to have a much harder time finding docs these doctors are defecting to a private pay type of scenario so a consumerization of health care i think it's a great thing i think you're going to have struggle with health insurance right now i saw the wait for a neurology visit in the united states is now like six months what gastro is like

three months um what was the other one that was crazy that was like february or march was the first open ent ear nose and throat was like february or march was the earliest you could get get one and so i mean i think i think the shortage of docs defection of docs all these things are going to i think be um the fuel you know for additional consumerization yeah and so and defection of of individuals too yeah so we have a lot of people we think it's about 25 of our people actually are ditching opting out of their health plans employer-based health plans and saying screw this i don't want health insurance anymore and so and then in coming over to to crowd health which is which is cool yeah you know it's not brexit we're calling it health plant health

plexit health plan exit right i don't know it's not it's not resounding work on that one we're working on it um uh so anyway we're having a significant amount of people that are that are abandoning their their their health plans which is awesome i love it and it feels like uh similarly like the beef initiative it feels like one of the biggest hurdles to get over is is that i was in missouri at the bitcoin expedition a few weeks ago and i led a panel talk with rancher from indiana and he joined the beef initiative after hearing slim i think actually hearing the beef initiative referenced by adam curry on joe rogan and he just went onto the website and signed up and he said his numbers exploded just from adding his name to the site

never met slim it's awesome just like heard it on joe rogan's podcast put it i think there's like a similar thing that could happen here in health care it's just like the knowledge of doctors or patients understanding that this model exists just hasn't permeated yeah it needs to be exactly just like how do you create a network whether it's via crowd health or beyond crowd health that enables people to know that this option exists in the first place yeah we need i mean everybody's looking for that joe rogan moment right like one mention on joe right down the street can i know he's here in austin uh one one mention joe rogan can change your business you know so that moment's going to come as you just got to like continue to build and build and build and we're adding

you know thousands of people over the next few months we're going to get there like there there's going to be a point where people are not looking at this as like and the same thing is happening with bitcoin i think is not like this weird alt alt kind of solution but is actually the obvious solution yeah i'm pulling out my phone because i want to like back up what we're saying with some actual data here which is somebody reached out to me over the weekend without disclosing uh exact names say why they were looking for a crowd health referral yes they're getting charged 250 per month by anthem next year like their costs are going up and they're looking to get on the crowd so probably a pretty good deductible too yeah yeah so we would make tons

of sense for that person is that a single person uh a man with a family yeah yeah i mean i think we would make tons of sense yeah yeah that's just like their monthly bill which goes on top of their deductible on top of the deductible deductible is probably five to eight or something like that yeah so that's like yeah i mean it's three grand economic the economic makes tons of sense yeah it's whether or not you can get over the hurdle of like okay this is i've been so again psyop thinking insurance was the only way i could do this like am i willing to take that that plunge you know and more people like you and safe and jimmy and you know all these people who are members of crowd health being like hey this like this is working for me you know like i think we

can get that bitcoin community you know rallying around us you know it's it would be awesome yeah i mean i've seen it it works it works it works i've used it you've used it um many people you know the other thing that's crazy too is the people who are members of crowd health like because I see on the back end who are actually members, like blow me away. Like the people who are like standing up to the tyranny of, you know, government intervention. Like a lot of those folks that you see on Twitter that have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers are members of Crowd Health. I can't say who they are because that would be, you know, anonymity. But like, I'm like, oh my God, like I called my inside sales guy. I was like, is this who I think it is? He's like,

yeah dude that's who you think it is i'm like that's awesome you know and i'm like i'm i'm crowdfunding bills because i still see them all and i'm like oh you know marty you know crowd funded this person's bill today so you could have your bill funded by marty and safe and you know brie love and natalie and like all these people who remember jimmy and all these people who are members of crowd health like y'all are actually helping each other like this is not just a saying like the money goes directly from you to them right and it's a really cool cool thing that actually helping our members directly yeah it's uh yeah it works both ways yeah like totally i've had some of my family health care bills paid and i've helped others pay them as well yeah

there's a there's a special thing to know that like your money is going directly to somebody else yeah like you know on a monthly basis hey i'm helping a pregnancy or i'm helping you know a guy with colon cancer or whatever or a kid with the rock in their ear a kid with a rock in their I think I think we we described that one as an ear nose and throat procedure or something it was yeah I think that was the way that it was described. I don't know if we said rock in the year Although we probably should have they've been funny But yeah, it's really cool to know that your money is not going to some big organization Yeah, again is we take our we take 50 bucks a month. That's that's the only revenue we get

Yeah, it's like a subscription fee because we didn't want any of those perverse incentives that you know health insurance plans pay, because we would ultimately, even though I feel like I've got a good heart, like, you know, the love of money is the root of all evil. Like, I think if there are incentives to see something to make more money, you inevitably will take that incentive. Like, it's hard not to. So we wanted to build everything. It's like, the incentive is not to make more money here, because we're fixed at 50 bucks

a month, right? So that's the way that we did it. Health insurance plans, like, they actually are incentivized for you to be sick. Like, people don't understand that. You know, it's like, they make more money when you're sick. Like, that is crazy to me that people will still buy into that system. So, you know, and so the incentives do motivate behavior. We as Bitcoin understand that.

And even so, like, if CrowdHealth is successful and you can get a good network effect, it could be very good business. Yeah, yeah, for sure. We'll be profitable in March of next year, which is pretty good. congrats for you know being around for two and a half years being getting profitable and we still have lots of money in the bank so you know we're we're in really good shape really good shape in fact yeah well that's parker talks about it a lot too that's that's how you know it's not bullshit we talk about in the context of like sustainable energy like nothing is sustainable unless it's profitable right if you're reaching profitability within three years like it is a

sustainable business right yeah well we'll be profitable at somewhere between seven and eight thousand customers so you know if we hit our ten thousand by the beginning of the year we'll be we'll be profitable but seven to eight thousand is where we'll hit profitability yeah so you know and so you know with the funding environment right now and just macro funding environment sucks i mean it's just totally evaporated you know we've been very safe in terms of how we spend our money and so you know we'll be profitable yeah probably end of first quarter beginning of second quarter maybe but somewhere in there so it's it'll be feel good to not you know draw on cash every every month yeah that's important and it's hard that's another thing like a bitcoin standard

drive so when we see it at 1031 like when your opportunity cost is like not being able to accumulate bitcoin or revenue like you're going to focus on getting profitable as quickly as possible yeah i mean that's what we've had to do that's all startups right now they got to figure out out how to get profitable yeah interest rates go to five and a half percent and uh really really pauses the uh the train of easy money that has created this mirage over the last two decades yeah yeah so let's get uh yeah i mean honestly disclaimer crowdhouse is sponsored the pod but it is because i um i only like to advertise companies that actually use crowdhealth works it's better model it's better experience like if you're out there during this

open enrollment season you're sitting in that boardroom they're throwing all these options at you they're very expensive not very straightforward or clear i know it could seem like a big jump but i did it with me my whole family it's worked great for us and it's a lot of peace of mind you meet good doctors you have conversations with crowd health to help you figure out all right how do i navigate this discussion for this bill and stuff like that it's just like you actually understand what you're buying in the health care system now which before with typical health insurance you really don't yeah you're just like giving a bill they handle it and you don't understand anything that's going on yeah i think that the the cool stat and i told you this i think

it was six months ago, or I mentioned this to you. And at that point, I'm going to get the numbers a little bit wrong, but it's gonna be close. It's gonna be in the ballpark. At that point, I had been on your podcast twice in like a year and a half or something. So we didn't have had a relationship for almost two years. And we had signed up using your code TFTC. I think we had signed up like 500 people at that time, four or 500 people, something in that range. And it was like two had left like two out of 500 right oh and that was over a year and a half or two years something in that range i can't i don't remember exactly what the stat was but like you lost two over that period of time with 500 like and and i think those two people left because they're you

know their employer paid all of their health insurance or something like that and so they're like i just can't do it i'm like i can't argue with you like i still think health insurance sucks and you're making a bad decision but like it's hard to make you know the economic thing that's pretty darn good yeah pretty darn good so i guess what's that saying is like people who've come have enjoyed it um and they feel like they are a part of a of something bigger you know and so that's great and go go to look at our trust pilot reviews like these are all verified by trust pilot we have like 122 reviews and three suck so out of the 122 you know i can go into each one of those three and it's like how we didn't really screw that up it's more like we had a pain in the butt

you know member but um three out of 122 is not bad it's less than three percent less than three percent that's an a plus that's an a plus i'll take a 97 on a test any day a lot of times you you go to those reviews and you see them like all you know like fives you're like something's going on here you know we have like two ones and a two or something like that it's like okay well we're not perfect yeah so come and join us man if you guys are out there and we'd love for you to join us and i i mean again this is don't trust verify andy's in here every day grinding i've seen it it's not somebody that's the thing again with this health care model like what's going on like it's a scam they're just taking your money out doing andy's in here every day working

a full day putting in the work talking to people you started your own podcast it's last time you were on how's that going by the way it's fun yeah it's fun we've had some interesting characters on We had Dr. Malone on recently. We had Dr. Malone. It's going to be released next Monday. Okay. And we had a really good chat. I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this to you.

Like, we stayed out of, like, the vaccine thing. I feel like everybody's talked to him about the vaccines. Yeah. Like, the thing we talked about, which I thought was interesting, was, you know, he had a decision point where he knew something that if you were to go public with it, it was going to change his life and probably not for the better. Like, he was going to take some heat, you know. or do you stay on the path in which you can kind of just keep making great money he had a great consulting business like you know like stay on that comfortable path so when you get to that fork like how do you make the decision you know so we talked a lot about that moment in time where

he had to make a decision you know and i think a lot of us especially in the bitcoin community like we get to those forks and we're like man i can press the easy button here or i can take the harder road it's like okay what do we want our lives to look like yeah the harder road life or the easy road life it's funny you say that because we're gonna have a lot of those decision trees coming in our future in bitcoin and i worry that a lot of people are gonna hit the easy button not gonna be easy hit the hard button it's gonna be worth it because particularly as it pertains to bitcoin when it comes to overarching regulation and kyca ml compliance um it's gonna be of people that hit the easy button but that could really lead us down a terrible path yeah hit the

hard button it's gonna be worth it along it's this high time preference versus lowest time preference like view of the world right and i and i think this kind of goes back to the doctor conversation that we had too like i think bitcoins are low time preference people generally bitcoin doctors will take the low time preference which i think we want to in a high time preference doctor is take meds now it'll get rid of your symptoms, but I'm not going to deal with the underlying issue. The low time preference doctor will say, no, no, we need to figure out the issue. And you may have symptoms for a little bit longer, but we're not going to get rid of those symptoms because that's actually the body like doing what it needs to do to take care of itself. Right. Like, and so I think

that the same thing applies with some of these decisions. Like we have a high time preference society and we have to hit the easy the hard button over and over and over and over again to be able to i think survive and to thrive over a long period of time by hitting the hard button like we got to hit the hard button you know and so parenting a lot of times we have to hit the hard button right bitcoin our monetary policy we got to hit the hard button like it's going to be painful for a period of time but we got to hit the hard button you know so it's i love bitcoiners because you got to hit the hard button you can go to your employer tomorrow and sign the little sheet of paper and get a little insurance card and go to the doctor and lay down an insurance

card and then not have to worry about it until the explanation of benefits shows up that's the easy button like pick the hard button and do something a little bit different different learn a little bit of something about the healthcare system works learn why insurance sucks and it's really incentives are totally perverse like that's the hard button you know and so it's like we should start a podcast the hard button like what are all the things in life in which if we pass the hard button we would be thrive you know way easier am i gonna go have my kids you know skittles from halloween tonight that easy button right am i gonna you know have something actually really good for me hard button you know um although it's good steak which i think

is on the plate tonight it's gonna be an easy button and it's still good for me so we're having a chicken fajitas tonight we had steak last night it was delicious numbers again like even hitting the hard button and going the extra step to learn about crowd health and understand the model it's reaching parity in terms of convenience with the insurance model yeah it will be beyond parity we'll be 10x better yeah at the end of this year yeah with with the the lightning will be awesome it might be a little bit funky in the beginning and i think bitcoiners okay with it understanding that like lightning can be a little bit funky you know um and so they'll they'll understand it they'll be hopefully give us a little bit of grace but it'll still the fundamentals

will will work like they have for the last almost three years yeah so stick with it um give us some grace we're working with breeze on the wallet hell yeah yeah um so they're kind of the back end tech we're using their sdk you know so we didn't have to do any of that everybody it feels like within the community you know they're highly regarded in terms of yeah i mean that sdk is one of the the most robust and they've been working on that for a while yeah and they got some really cool stuff going on in the back end that allows some of the payment processing things to work really really nicely so um and we're making you know strides and lightning too so um i think as that happens as we mature a little bit more it's gonna be 10x better than than health insurance just in

terms of like the payment system yeah you know so it'll get better we're gonna win freaks we're to win because of people like you andy hitting the hard button doing the things to bring these better models to the market it's extremely important thank you i'm an extremely happy customer member appreciate it from community member extremely happy community member thanks for your support thanks for all those folks out there on the the bitcoin world that have supported us um yeah just super appreciate it um and let's let's let's win it's open enrollment you have a decision to make over the next few months hit the heart button tftc you get uh 99 bucks for six months it's pretty damn good and you're automatically enrolled in the bitcoin community

so the bitcoin crowd do it join crowdhealth.com slash tftc mid-roll we call that a mid-roll in the industry andy i'll uh i'll probably see you tomorrow in the office yeah for sure thanks brother peace and love freaks Thank you.