The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Brigham Buhler On The Chronic Disease Epidemic & How Insurance & Big Pharma Are Failing America

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

#824: Join us as we sit down with Brigham Buhler – healthcare entrepreneur on a mission to revolutionize America’s broken system. As a founder of Ways2Well, owner of Revive Rx Pharmacy & Bioreach, Brigham is challenging the status quo with a healthcare model that prioritizes patients over profits through preventative care, transparency, & innovation. In this episode, Brigham pulls back the curtain on the corruption within the American healthcare system, exposing the truth behind the opioid crisis, misleading antidepressant prescriptions, & the hidden tactics of insurance companies. Get ready for this episode as we get real about what is really happening in the healthcare system & uncover secrets that they don’t want you to know! To Watch the Show click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To connect with Brigham Buhler click HERE To connect with Ways2Well click HERE To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE Get your burning questions featured on the show! Leave the Him & Her Show a voicemail at [phone]. To learn more about Ways2Well visit ways2well.com and use code skinny for 10% off the product line.  This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential Head to the HIM & HER Show ShopMy page HERE and LTK page HERE to find all of Michael and Lauryn’s favorite products mentioned on their latest episodes. This episode is sponsored by Cymbiotika Go to Cymbiotika.com/TSC for 20% off + free shipping. This episode is sponsored by Live Conscious Visit weliveconscious.com and use code SKINNY at checkout for 15% off your first purchase. This episode is sponsored by Momentous Go to livemomentous.com/skinny and try it today at 20% off with code SKINNY, and start living on purpose. This episode is sponsored by SAKS  Shop SAKS.com. This episode is sponsored by Addyi  Learn more at Addyi.com. Produced by Dear Media  

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential, him and her show. What if I told you the American healthcare system isn't broken, it's working exactly as designed to keep you sick, dependent and drowning in medical bills, but what if you could bypass it completely?

Today we're sitting down with a man who has spent his entire career inside the system, witnessed its corruption firsthand and decided to fight back. Brigham Bueller is the founder of Ways to Well, a company dedicated to proactive preventative wellness through comprehensive blood lab analysis. Brigham's mission is clear, to empower patients to take control of their health before chronic illness develops. He's not just talking about the problems, he's building the solutions to help you. From exposing insurance scams to dismantling corporate collusion, Brigham is here now to show us how to take control of our

health before the system does it for us. Get ready for a no BS conversation that might just change the way you see your doctor, your insurance and even your food. Brigham Bueller, welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her show. This is the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Expose the most fucked up thing about the healthcare system. Oh god. Let's kick it off.

Man, that is a deep, deep dark rabbit hole. We're going right in. So I was kind of telling you guys this before we went on, went live, but like how all this started was I was a drug rep and then I was a medical device rep. And the shit I saw was fucking mind boggling. I'm not allowed to cuss on this high like it's been done before it was wild and What spurred this journey was candidly being like having my our?

Practice of ways to well and working with some of these VIPs I would tell Tulsi Gabbard or Joe about what I saw and Tulsi's like you've got to tell the world and then one day Joe's like, you've got to tell the world. And then one day Joe's like, you got to come on the podcast and you got to tell people what you're telling me because I had no idea that it was this. If you want to talk about the wildest thing I saw, a lot of people don't understand this. Like you assume that because something's FDA approved, that it's safe, 90% of the products in the operating room have never gone through a human safety study.

They come in through a 510k approval process, which is just a fancy term for they never fucking looked at it. Like literally it's called a daisy chain. And so in the 80s, the FDA said, we are the food and drug administration. We don't have time to regulate like biologics and all of these products that are getting launched into operating rooms. We're going to create like this loophole that allows med device to bring product into the operating room under the guise of it's safe because there's something already in the market

like it. Okay. But that started in the eighties. So imagine a rotary phone versus a smartphone, right? And why that's important is technologies evolve rapidly. So like one real world example I could give you is I'm in the middle of heart surgeries with a brand new high-res camera. And every time the cardiologist would use the ablation device, which is just to cauterize a wound and stop bleeding,

the fucking camera would turn off. In the middle of an open heart surgery, hits the button, they're watching the screen to get the nuances of what they're doing, and the camera just turns off. Right, these are the type of issues that happen in the operating room that people don't know about, that never get reported because if somebody doesn't have a terrible event or die, it just

goes unnoticed. But like, it was the Wild West in the operating room. The other thing I saw, and I shared this story on one of the other podcasts before, but I was in a surgery at the Houston Zoo where they were using a shaver and a tiger and they were cleaning up like the tiger's knee using this ablation shaver device. Okay and it had green tape wrapped around it in a weird way and so I recognized that it was like a loner from a company and then jumped forward like two months later I'm in a human surgery and I noticed the surgeon using a shaver with this green duct tape wrapped around it and I thought there's

no way that's the same one that was in that tiger surgery, like two months ago. And I pull it and I look at the serial number and sure enough, it was the exact same shaver because a lot of these med device companies use loaner inventories that go out and they don't know whether it's going to a veterinary hospital or a people hospital or wherever. And then it comes back and they turn it over and they send it out as a loaner to another.

So the whole the whole premise of that is like even if it's FDA approved it is not what it's made out to be and that's with med devices. It's a whole nother racket when we get into prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals and all the other things that are going on out there. What were other crazy things that you saw behind the scenes were and where you just had your final breaking point and you were like, fuck this. I mean, the real breaking point was when I lost my brother to opioids. I mean, honestly, it was before that it was, hey, I see an opportunity here as an

entrepreneur candidly, like I don't want to sugar coat it. I looked at it and go, there's a problem. We're way over prescribing opioids. I could launch a compounding pharmacy that makes non-abusive, non-addictive opioids. I know all of these orthopedic surgeons throughout the state of Texas. I'm going to bring this non-addictive option to the table and give a life raft to people. But it was purely a business agenda. I'll be, I'll be honest.

Like I didn't believe in opioids, but it hadn't impacted my life. And when I lost my brother, it was different. It's, it's not, you'd never think it's going to happen to you. You never think that this corruption, this, how dirty and insidious the industry is would fall into your life. And then it did. And it changed my perspective. And even from myself personally, like my dad's diabetic, my mom's diabetic, everyone in my

family's obese, like candidly. And I was headed over the cliff of diabetes, metabolic disease, obesity. I was seeing a nutritionist. I was trying to train CrossFit was up at four in the morning because I had to be in the operating room by 7 AM and I was just trying to be fit and I was in the pit of despair. Like I say this a lot of times, like you just get to a point where you think it's just my genetics and I'm never going to beat it.

And it wasn't, it was that a primary care never looked at any of my blood work. Nobody ever did the deep dive. And I didn't understand why until I owned blood labs and then starting a blood lab and going out and educating clinicians throughout the state of Texas on like, Hey, don't prescribe an opioid. Instead, let's prescribe a non addictive, non abusive ketamine based pain cream. This is a life raft to not wreck your patients coming out of a surgery. But in addition to that, shouldn't we also be doing comprehensive blood work and uncovering the root cause of chronic disease and identifying these issues? Every doctor's like, oh yeah, it makes total sense. Let's start

implementing comprehensive blood work within six months. Those doctors got letters from the big insurance companies saying, if you keep pulling blood work on these patients, we will shit can your contract candidly telling them basically we'll put you out of business. And this is what patients don't understand. Your clinician is hogtied. Like they can do all they want, but they are restricted by the insurance carrier that you have because your insurance carrier is not going to allow them to do a deep dive on you. So from my personal experience, I didn't own a blood lab when I went through

my journey and it took me literally like I'm at 25% body fat. I'm almost morbidly obese, right? I'm pre-diabetic. I can't lose weight. I'm so tired and exhausted. My primary says, I don't pull those kind of bloodworks. I'm gonna refer you to a urologist. Takes me almost nine months to get in with a urologist. Then the urologist pulls my bloodwork. I get a bill from the insurance company for like $2,000

saying, we're not gonna cover your bloodwork. We don't think you need it. And my bloodwork uncovered issues that then we addressed and I went without changing diet Lifestyle workout routine anything Hand to God I went from 25% body fat to six. I had a six pack. I was shredded Again, this was like 13 years ago, but it changed my life How it changed well because my hormones were out of whack. And then people go, well, why were hormones?

30 million men are diagnosed with low T a year. We have a chronic health crisis in this country. And we can go all the way back to what I learned in the Senate hearing about our diet, our lifestyle, our food, the toxins in our food. It's so staggering that you understand like the average male testosterone level right now is half of that of our grandparents, half, right? We have a chronic health crisis occurring in this country and it's affecting our fertility. Like the men in America are

on the cusp of infertility. Like our sperm counts are at 37 million per whatever, which comes down to essentially once you get below 37, they put you on fertility drugs. And a lot of that, you know, cause we do this show and talk to all sorts of different people, a lot of that burden gets put on the women and they fail to even look at the men a lot of the time. And so we think that, you know,

women need to go through IVF or whatever they need to do. But a lot of time it's actually the man and the male. A hundred percent, like a huge percentage of the time it's the men and it's both. Women are struggling with fertility too, but it's the same problem. I, so my line of sight as a device rep and in a pharmaceutical rep. So right out of college, I was a drug rep and I got a look into that world. I did that for two and a half years, almost three years. I left that and I did surgical sales where sales where I got to work with some of the

best and brightest surgeons in the country, learn about cutting edge surgical procedures, sports medicine related injuries, like a lot of athletes and football players. And I loved it. It was fascinating. And then from there, I got into starting my own businesses. And that's when I began to understand. I saw behind the curtain and it was like, oh my

God, the insurance companies are controlling everything. Like when you get care, how you get care, whether you get a surgery, whether you get a C-section or you have a vaginal birth, like all of that is dictated by reimbursement rates to hospitals where the hospital then needs to plan out their day and maximize their revenues. And so that affects your OB-GYN, that affects the spine surgeon, the neurosurgeon, the orthopedic surgeon, and it's a constant racket for them to get reimbursed and paid. So I know you've been super involved for a long time, but now especially recently with Maha in relation to the American healthcare system in general,

what are like the two or three big buckets that you see to be most problematic with the current system? The biggest one, and it's funny because even Trump's talking about it now, is the PBMs. And so like that people don't understand that there's a middleman, they're calling it a middleman called the pharmacy benefit manager. Okay. This is where I first got my look. I owned pharmacies that attempted to build insurance companies. Your grandma comes in, gives me her insurance card.

I swipe it. It tells me what I have to charge her. Right. And so I may swipe it and I have a drug that costs me $2 that I would sell to her for $4. I have a gag clause when I own pharmacies that would not allow me to tell your grandmother that the insurance company is price gouging her. They would charge her $10 for a copay on a $4 drug. I don't get to keep that money.

That money goes immediately back to this middleman called a pharmacy benefit manager. Okay. So pause. So you, your cost is two. They make you charge 10. You're only allowed to keep four, which is like, that's how you make it. I don't even get the four. It's usually they take like $7 and I get paid less. Grandma pays more and the insurance companies get the gap.

And you're not allowed to mention that price gouge to her, but they get the lion's share of that transaction. Correct. Okay. And that's one sliver. Now I'm going to peel back the layers to the onion because once I show you the magic trick, it's all going to make sense. So one of the things I tell people is they so often say, healthcare is broken, healthcare

is broken. And I said this in front of the Senate, healthcare is not broken. The healthcare system is rigged and we're the ones fitting the bill. And it's more than money. We're paying in human lives and human capital. 1.7 million Americans are dying every year of chronic disease. 90 percent of chronic disease is preventable. We could be delaying how many memories, how many dinners with loved ones, how many lost family members,

because the system is so captured. And so what do I mean by that? If we look at these pharmacy benefit managers, these middlemen, they were established in the 80s to fight on behalf of me and you to drive down the cost of prescription drug care, to go out and negotiate with big pharma and frankly take a bat to it and beat them up and get the prices down so we can afford our medications. What happened is the big five insurance companies went out and bought them. They literally acquired these middlemen back in the 80s. And nobody stopped and said like, this is a huge conflict. That's my like, no, it's in any other industry. It's a kickback like, this is a huge conflict. That's my, like,

I know it's in any other industry. It's a kickback. So here's what they did. As soon as they made the acquisition, rather than negotiating down the cost of prescription drug care, they negotiated up the cost of prescription drug care. And so I'll use weight loss drugs like ozempic, for example, right? Big hot button, GLP-1s. Big topic on this show. Yeah, if I walk you through the history of GLP-1, it'll blow your mind. GLP-1s were created and innovated by the NIH,

the National Institute for Health. Funded by our taxpayer dollars, we paid to create this innovation in this cutting edge molecule. Then it's licensed with royalties to Big Pharma, where Big Pharma then, so there's two GLP ones. The main one is lilies and trisepatite here in the United States. So the trisepatite compound was funded by us, the taxpayers.

Then it's licensed to Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly brings it to market via the FDA. Then rather than selling it to us for a fair price, they establish what's the max price they can sell it for. Then they go meet with the big PBMs and the PBMs go, we want you to sell it for even more. Charge us $1,500 a month, right? Knowing that a big rebate is going to go back to the PBM. And so as I explained it, it'll make sense. Imagine a drug, just for simple, let's use insulin. That's a more impactful drug. It's been on the market 30 years. Insulin used to cost $130 a vial. Okay. Now the average wholesale price in America,

I think was up to $300 something dollars. For simple math, let's just say it costs 200. The PBM rather than saying we want to get it for, you know, 100 said, charge us 400. Right. I'm using loose math just to give the example. They never pay the 400. So that middleman, that PBM then gives the bill to the insurance company that owns them United, let's just say, and they show me and you this drug cost us $400 a month, but it didn't.

They got a $200 rebate that they hold at their holding company, the PBM. And so why that's important is you have now aligned the insurance company's goals over the last 25 years to not get us off prescription drugs, but to put us on prescription drugs and to monetize chronic disease. So UnitedHealthcare made 360 billion dollars last year in revenue, billion with a B. Sixty percent of their revenue came from the PBM. Well, came from them fucking us on our prescription drug prices. So they want everyone on Zembec.

They want everyone on all the drugs because they're monetizing that. And then people go, well, that doesn't make any sense because the insurance companies cover it. No, monetizing that. And then people go, well, that doesn't make any sense because the insurance companies cover it. No, they don't. I'm telling you, they show you and me that they paid 400, but they really paid 200. Okay. Now multiply that times 12 months and now realize that your employer, because 90% of

Americans are insured by their employer, ends up getting that bill at the end of the year. And United sits down with a guy like me who employs 300 people or Cigna or Etna or Blue Cross. Well, it's funny because like running this company, I look at the insurance premiums every year and like, listen, like I want my team to have access to health insurance, but like you don't even realize it's like those premiums go up and up and up. And by the way, when, when new medications come out and they start to, and people, and they're popular, and I gotta like be careful, I say this, the premiums get even crazier and they get bigger and bigger.

And you're right. Like I didn't even look at it like that, but a lot of the times a company like this or another company is footing the bill for this without, like, and you just do it. But there's, there's, there's not a lot of, like my thought process is like, well, you have to do it. And you gotta make sure your people are ins, and you just do it. But there's, there's, there's not a lot of like my thought process is like, well, you have to do it and you gotta make sure your people are insured and you gotta

greatly. And that's everyone's thought process and then you're trapped. And so the answer would never work on the individual level. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what's crazy. So the, the average American is now on four or more prescription drugs. This is average American four or more prescription drugs. We know that roughly 30% of the profitability of the drugs are being made and held at the

insurance companies. Here's another dirty secret, the opioid crisis. When I was out educating doctors and saying, hey, I want to layer this so you can understand how bad the insurance companies are, there were three options. If you're going to prescribe an opioid, we should pharmacogenetic test. It's a simple cheek swab. It's going to tell me if you're a slow, fast, or moderate metabolizer. It's going to tell me if you have a propensity to be addicted. It's going to tell me if you have a propensity to OD. It's a blueprint for success. If you're going to prescribe this compound, you should do that. Secondly, and these aren't my standards,

these were the Obama administration's standard of care for opioid prescriptions. Secondly, you should toxicology screen this patient. Are they abusing cocaine or any other substances, barbiturates, are you creating an addict? And then are they diverting these drugs? And then third, write an alternative. Don't write the opioid, write the pain cream

or something else that's non addictive, non abusive. All three of those were systematically shut down by the insurance companies. They quit covering toxicology screens. They quit covering pharmacogenetic tests. They quit covering alternatives. And you look at that and go, why? At the time, I didn't understand the why.

And this came out recently, I don't remember which state just sued the payers, but what they found is roughly 30% of the price of the volume of profit of an opioid went to the insurance companies. So they were implicitly monetizing drug abuse and they were incentivized because we've now aligned these insurance companies to profiteer off of chronic disease, not cure, prevent or stop chronic disease. So what kind of pushback do you get? Does the insurance companies want to shut you down? Where's your bodyguard, man?

Yeah. Like you going on Rogan five times and discussing this and how vocal and clear and articulate you are, there's got to be like, what is happening behind the scenes? Are they trying to just shut you up? Insurance companies. Yeah, before when I was in the insurance model, they put us out of business and that's partially why I have an axe to grind. Like, truth be told, I had to look 150 people in the eye and say we came up short because we were trying to work within the insurance framework and you realize, oh my God, they're never going to let people get accessibility to preventative, proactive, personalized care.

And anybody who's kind of not toeing the line, they just put out a business. Done. So what's the pushback? Do you have people like coming for you or sending emails? The pushback now is less insurance because they really have no way to get to me other than to litigate and let's litigate because what I'm telling is the truth. Like, come on, let's go to court. I would love more than anything to show in the court of law

all the corruption, collusion, and corporate capture of these insurance companies. The only battles I've faced is candidly like Lilly and big pharmaceutical companies attempting to sue us at our compounding pharmacy and then use their influence to drive articles that are just total fabrications. And then you can't get those articles removed.

And that happened after we testified in front of the Senate. Literally two days later, we testify in front of the Senate. Two days later, this hatchet job article comes out that's like Joe Rogan guest humiliated with FDA recall. And it's trying to say that we recalled like 3000 vials, all of it's just not true. Like, we have a compounding pharmacy, and it's one of the biggest in the country. And I can walk through how compounding pharmacies work, but it's FDA improved ingredients, validation tested

before we ever mix them. It's then independently third party verified that it's exactly what we say it is and those products are shipped. If we have any concerns, we proactively shut down lots or samples or whatever. So the FDA has been in my compound and pharmacy literally four times in 18 months now, four times in 18 months. Look at Big Pharma. Big Pharma has 2500 manufacturing facilities that the FDA has not stepped foot in in five years.

With tiger knee hair on the knives. I think it's such a... It's nuts. I've been... I was talking to this reporter the other day and she was talking about... One of the things that she was excited to bring up with me is how I've been supportive of Bobby Kennedy. Yeah. And like that, it's like a little bit of like a, oh, well, that's like a tarnish.

And I was like, well, you know, I'm super excited about it because for the first time in a long time in this country, health is becoming the forefront of conversation. Guys like yourself are leading a lot of that. But I find it so interesting because in the past, I'd be like, Oh, do I got to worry now about this being written and they're going to write it in a way that's, that's unfortunate. And it puts me in a bad light. But then I was like, you know what?

We live in such interesting times now where I think a lot of those platforms because of mediums like this, and I'm not personally taking credit, but there's people that have pushed these kinds of conversations, unedited, organic, without any other interests, besides getting information to people, where these are now starting to displace a lot of those kind of legacy media outlets and the narrative, and they just don't hold as much weight anymore. We used to read a piece from one of those publications

or see a piece in one of those news outlets, they used to hold a lot more weight. Now I think there's a lot of hesitancy around a lot of the stuff that takes place, a lot of the journalism that takes place. And they've, they've just lost a lot of the credibility because of some of the influences you're talking about. So I thought to myself like, you know, regardless of how it's written, I honestly don't even really care anymore. And I think we're in such interesting times now because these conversations are

taking place, those platforms are losing credibility, more people are now stepping up, people like Bobby and yourself are able to now get in. And like, I think the country's in a position now where real change has the potential to take place more so than any other time in the last 50 years. How did Bobby Kennedy reach out to you? Like, how did you get involved with what you're doing? So it's, I think I told you all this story before, and I don't know if I said it when we were on the air, but I would tell Joe, like when he'd come in for treatments,

Rogan, I would just share with him the crazy shit I saw in my time as a device rep and a drug rep, and then explain to him the insurance companies and how they're monetizing chronic disease and all these things. And Joe invited me on the podcast after that at one point, and I had never done a podcast. One of Bobby's people heard the podcast. And this is what's crazy. Even growing up in Texas, I've never voted Republican.

And I grew up in Texas. I've never voted Republican. I believe in humanity. I'm team humanity. I'm not left or right. I don't care who's gonna solve our problems and who's gonna have integrity and be able to not be bought and sold, you know, for the whoever's the highest bidder. And so long story short, I did Joe. I think at one point I get a phone call from somebody on Bobby's team saying, hey, Bobby's going to be in Dallas.

He'd love to sit down with you if you've got time. He wants to pick your brain on some of the stuff you said about the insurance companies. So I drove to Dallas and to his credit, like he rolled up his sleeves, sat down with me. This is when he was the presidential candidate still and talked to me for like 30 minutes. And then like a week later, his team messaged and said, hey, Bobby wants to have you on the podcast. And he was trying to wrap his head around the PBMs. He's like, explain to me the PBMs again.

I don't have a PBM. I have an insurance company. And I'm like, yes. And you have a PBM. And they bought the PBM. And that PBM is a hidden middleman that allows them to hide profits and move levers to trick you into not realizing that they're price gouging you because they go, oh, that's not

us. That's, that's the PBM. And so that's how that conversation started. And then he just, it was just a dialogue. He was very interested and seemed very genuine about wanting to try to fix this and understand how corrupt it is. And then that led to the podcast, which then led to him asking for a follow-up meeting and I flew up to California and we went on a hike in I think Laurel

Canyon or that area, it was beautiful. But we just went on this hike and talked about everything. And then a week later, I got invited to testify in front of the Senate and that's. And then the rest is history. It's kind of evolved into like somebody who was never political, kind of getting wrangled into some politics. But this is why I, like, you know, again,

like people make everything political these days because everything is just, I think it's headlines and this is what people are interested in. But I don't see, even going to COVID, I don't see how far we've gotten with health that it's become like health has become political. Like every single human should be interested in feeling better, living longer, taking care

of their loved ones, taking care of their children, making sure they're not dealing with chronic illness and disease that's avoidable. And so that's why I'm super loud about it because even when I'm going back to that story I told you just a minute ago with the report, I'm like, why is this not a bipartisan thing that everyone's screaming from the rooftop?

It's because they've made everything political and you have to pick a side. I hate the idea of having to pick a side just because. I do too. It's a bummer. And that's what I said in front of the Senate. I said, this is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue.

People are dying. We can turn our head the other way. We talk so much about war. We have lost more American lives in one year than every war we've ever fought. In one year, and nobody's talking about it. And then you'll find out from these nutritionists and these people that are way more brilliant than me, like Chris Palmer from Harvard is explaining that 5% of our brain by

weight is now microplastics. That depression, anxiety, and deaths of despair are at an all-time high, greater than that of the great depression. And then I look back to my time as a drug rep 20 something years ago, when we launched Prozac and how we were told Prozac and antidepressants were going to save the world, they were going to cure depression and help with all of these mental health issues. And 25 years later, where are we?

Deaths of despair at an all time high, chronic illness, cancer rates, all time high. We are one of the sickest countries in the world, but we spend more on healthcare than ever before. Something's not working. And I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat. I'm not political as much as it's kind of become political, my thing is like we just have to work together and we can't let it get captured by the right. It has to be, it's

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and it's definitely a medley of different things, but I would say collagen is one of those tools in my toolbox. So enter LiveConscious. LiveConscious, okay, there's over 5 million bags sold. There's more than 58,000 five-star reviews. Live conscious collagen peptides have delivered revitalized and younger looking skin from millions of women. They've also received tons of love from the top

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just so you guys know. And there's zero additives. It's also 100% non-GMO. So it hits all the bullets that you want hit with collagen. Exclusively for him and her listeners, you can visit weliveconscious.com and use code SKINNY at checkout. You get 15% off your first purchase.

Again, that's code SKINNY for 15% off your order, results in 90 days or it's free. Quick break to talk about Momentous. One of the hardest things to figure out in the vitamin and supplement space is which companies you can trust. There's so many companies in this space that take advantage of consumers.

They don't go through the right certifications. They use poor ingredients and they're able to slip through the cracks because there's very little regulation. This is why Lauren and I have been such big fans of Momentous for so long. They invest in NSF certification, meaning every batch is tested for heavy metals, harmful additives and label claim accuracy. It's the reason they're trusted by all 32 NFL teams in collegiate sports and team dietitians all over the country. Lauren and I have had Jeff, the founder of Momentus on this podcast, talking about all of the efficacy around their products and all of the incredible supplements

that they offer. Some of the standout favorites are their creatine. We've been talking about creatine on this show for years now. It's so important for men and women. I think Momentous has the highest quality creatine on the market. They also have an incredible omega-3 supplement. I take it every single morning, first thing in the morning. And what I love about Momentous is they also have these single formula supplements. So instead of packing a bunch of different supplements and vitamins into one pill, they have single formulation so you can get the accurate dosage. One other product that I need to call out is they have these sleep packs that I travel with every single time I travel, they help me go to sleep. I also use them at home and what I love is they come in these individualized packets so every single night you just have a perfect dosage of a perfect sleep

supplement stack. So check them out. I know there's a ton of information out there. If you're looking for a supplement vitamin brand that you can trust, Momentus is the one for you. Go to livemomentus.com slash skinny and try it today at 20% off with code skinny and start living on purpose. Again, that's livemomentous.com slash skinny. Out of everything you've seen, what do you think is making people sick? Like if you were to, is it the toxins? Is it EMF? Is it what to give us all? So what's tough is it's a buzzword, but I do go back to corporate capture. If you look at what happened, big tobacco in the eighties as they got regulated, went out and captured big food.

I don't know if you know that Cali's exposed that a lot. I don't know if you all have had Cali on yet, but Cali does an eloquent job of laying out. Big Pharma went out and essentially gobbled up big food. And so most big food is now owned by what was big tobacco. And the food became more processed, more addictive. You know, we have, we in the 70s or 80s had 300 ingredients in our food. Now we have over 10,000. And we're going to have more because Michael just read me an article that

Said that the food industry the fast food industry is creating a chemical to put into our food That negates Ozempic so if you're on Ozempic and you eat a cheeseburger You're gonna be able to eat it fine. What people need to understand is We're going to be able to eat it fine. What people need to understand is... She's so fucked up. So messed up. These companies have so much money and they're not just going to lay down without a fight.

And they, you know, are, they're unfortunately reporting to their shareholders. And yeah, like something like Ozempic or whatever comes out. And now they're figuring out like, how do we combat this thing? And the challenge is we've, we've removed all the checks and balances. So where I'm going is start at our food. Okay. We know the food's corrupt. We know it's flawed.

We're trying to fix that. That's a huge bear to unwind. If we just put regulations in place that like, that's what we testified in front of the Texas state Capitol last week. There's a huge uproar from, you know, H-E-B, Buc-E-S, they don't want it to be public, but they're fighting just adding labeling, just saying, hey, some of the ingredients in this food are not approved in Europe and Canada. All the Texas state is saying is we are not even going to make you remove it.

What we're asking is for you to disclose it so that people can make conscientious decisions on what's best for their health, and they at least have the knowledge. Knowledge is power. There's a pushback on just that. So then you go to the health system. Okay. Well, if the insurance companies are monetizing prescription drugs, which they are, they have an incentive, and big pharma is monetizing huge Buku dollars off prescription drugs. And one way I can show you that is UnitedHealthcare's doubled its revenue over the last four years. If you look at the insurance industry, the five big insurance companies are four times the fucking revenue of big pharma.

Four times the revenue. They are the 800 pound gorilla that nobody but me is talking about. And I don't know why. I really don't. I think a lot of people just don't know. Yeah. And then so you have big pharma, big insurance. They control when, where, and how you access healthcare. So they control if your primary care can look under the hood, if they can even do a deep dive. So now your primary care in America is corporately captured. They cannot, like I explained this, you have to start thinking of your health insurance like you do your car insurance.

It is there if you wreck the fucking car, right? For something catastrophic. It is not there for preventative maintenance. It's not gonna rotate the tires, change the oil, look under the hood. As much as your primary care may have the best interests at heart, they are somewhat restricted by what they can do because the insurance company is going to say, no, I don't

want you to pull comprehensive blood work. No, I don't want you to get proactive and predictive. We don't do preventative medicine here. Right? Because, and when you understand the why, there's so much money in chronic disease. Why are you going to cure something that prints money for you? And then by the time you go over the ledge and you need a surgery, here's the other dirty secret.

They have all the analytics on this and Gary does a great job of breaking it. Brekka does a great job of breaking this down. They know statistically that the average American is going to switch jobs every 24 months, which means you become a different insurance carrier's problem. So if Joe Bob is headed towards a heart attack, and I can just make a bunch of money off putting Joe Bob on a bunch of fricking prescription drugs, kick the can down the road, hit my quarterly profits, look like a champ for Wall Street, knowing that Joe Bob's going to be Cigna's problem.

Cause you're saying if Carson Lee, say you'll never leave me Carson, but you're saying if he were to leave in like in a year, he goes to another company, they're likely with another insurer. Now he's insured by that company, this other company, the obligation's not there anymore. And now it's another company. And so they just keep doing that over and over. Most of your expenses in healthcare, like big expenses occur after age of 65, right? Most of your surgeries and big outcomes. Well, guess what? Now you're the taxpayer's problem. Now you're on Medicare. You're typically not insured because you're not in the workforce anymore. And so where I'm getting at is these insurance companies, we've now built a self-fulfilling prophecy. Insurance and big pharma have to hit their

quarterly earnings every quarter for Wall Street and has a fiduciary duty. Their CEO, their decisions, their choices have nothing to do with driving health span or health care outcomes and everything to do with maximizing profits. So you're saying the thing that's making us the most sick is essentially Big Pharma? It's the big industry. Okay. It's literally there's so much money in us being sick, there's no incentive to get us well. Right.

Let me switch gears a little bit here, but stay within the same subject line. I know like one of the notes we have here is that claimed denials are soaring right now. Why is that? Right. Why is that happening in this moment in time? So that's always been a challenge. What you'll see is United healthcare, the kid Luigi, he hit on the bullets, he wrote

delay, denied to pose. If you methodically like break down what he means he wrote, delay, deny, depose. If you methodically break down what he means by that, they delay your care, like me, right? I was chronically low testosterone, miserable gaining weight, couldn't get answers from a primary, delayed me getting in with a urologist, then I finally get in with a urologist,

they deny my blood work, so now I'm out of pocket on my blood work, right? And then it's like you're everything's an obstructionist mindset. So UnitedHealthcare led in denials, I think it ended up being over 30 something percent, almost 37% last year of claims denied. And the sad part is only a fraction of people fight the denial, like less than 10%. So let's say that you need a knee surgery. I know if I'm the guy running analytics for Blue Cross Blue Shield, if I deny your knee surgery,

there's a 10% chance you're gonna fight me. So my first line of defense is deny, deny everything. Kick the can down the road, this guy may wait 18 months, and then he's another insurance company's problem, or he's the federal government's problem. There's no money down the road. This guy may wait 18 months and then he's another insurance company's problem, or he's the federal government's problem. There's no money in the surgery. So they can deny it for every 10 people they deny, there's only one person that's going to push back.

And so they'll delay it. But now here's the other caveat. If you're not getting the knee surgery, what are you getting? You're getting the prescription drugs. To manage the pain. To manage the pain. And they're monetizing that. So there is an incentive to delay, deny, and obstruct your ability to get care.

I mean, I'm just telling you what the system's built to do. Why are there not more people who have worked in this system speaking up? I mean, I definitely think they are. You know what's staggering is so many clinicians after I did Joe's podcast, it was not like this guy's full of shit or it was, it was overwhelmingly positive support. It was surgeons and doctors and nurses saying he's not lying. This guy's telling the truth. Like this is so broken, but they're in the system. Right. And so for them, it's so hard because it's like, they go, what do I, what am I going to do? Well, also I can imagine going to medical school for

like eight years and all the stuff you have to go through and you get there and then you see this and it's like, it's messed up. Listen, it's hard to, to stand up and, and be loud at the risk of, of, you know, drawing too much attention and putting your business in jeopardy or family in jeopardy or just getting, you know, unwanted attention. Think about how many people are just like in private lives or just like scared to have confrontation with people in their personal life. Now you say like, let me invite that confrontation

from the world and let me add a layer of super powerful companies and government entities that don't want this information out there. It's hard because even testifying in front of the Senate, like I literally was giving a message of unity, of like working together. I'm like, I'm not here to represent the right. I've never even voted right. I'm here to represent people. People are dying. People like my brother are dying because of the choices people in rooms like this make every fucking goddamn day. And you're making these choices. Why?

Why are you letting these people do this to the American people? And that was my message. And then the next day, the Hatchet Job articles come out and we systematically, like randomly a week later, Joe's like, come on the podcast again. And we did, and we broke down. We looked up articles where people were bashing

the Maha Woo Woo Caucus, like, and making fun of us and saying that, you know, I had no right to present because I'm not a doctor. And it's like, I never claimed to be a doctor. I want to talk about that. I'm sure you know Next Health and Darshan. Do you know, do you know him who started Next Health? There's a Next Health here in Texas. Is it the one in California?

That's the one in California. Okay. I'm aware of those guys because they do preventative care and that's a VIP client. That I mentioned it to you is because he started as a doctor. He became a medical, full medical doctor at 21, started training at 15, and became like one of the youngest medical doctors, surgery on. And through that process, he realized he wasn't healthy.

He just came on the show and taught, so it's nothing new. But he said in all his years as training to be an MD, nobody taught him about nutrition, nobody taught him about how to be healthy. This was all new information to him. And so when they, when it drives me nuts, when people say, you're not a doctor, talk to a doctor because doctors don't get this kind of training that we're talking about.

They are taught you're sick. Here's the thing you can do. You need a surgery. Here's how you do it. And a lot of times they're put down a line of a certain kind of profession or a certain kind of field. And so even him as an MD was saying, doctors don't know this stuff. And I'm, you know, Casey's talked about that too.

Like this is not something you're taught about in medical school. They don't have any nutritional training. They, you know, like, let's go back to antidepressants. Their training on antidepressants is built by industry, right? Their CME credits are built by the drug companies. So they're teaching them how life-saving antidepressants are, right? Now, 20 something years later,

all the statistics we just talked about, retrospective study of over 75 of the biggest antidepressant studies found that they don't differentiate from placebo. 85% of the effects are placebo. And then furthermore, 50% of people relapse that do get benefit. There's increased risk of suicidal ideation and violent thoughts. Most of the mass shooters that have occurred in the United States have been on antidepressants

or antipsychotics. It numbs the emotions. There's this huge risk factor, but what they don't teach those clinicians is that exercising 20 minutes a day has double the efficacy of an antidepressant. And you don't get taught that. And it's not the clinicians fault. They literally are trying to navigate. They spend their day trying to get reimbursed and paid. I hate to say that. And I think most clinicians would tell you that if they're in the insurance model, they're just beat to hell.

And they're like trying their damnedest to help you, but they have to see 40 plus people a day. They have to do something that's billable. They can't go fringe and go do something that doesn't reimburse. So like half the stuff we do at Ways2Well wouldn't get covered by insurance. Like let's say you come in and you say, I'm depressed, I have anxiety, I have a hard time sleeping. What would you recommend? Well, step one, let's look under the hood and do a comprehensive blood panel.

Step two is let's spend 45 minutes to deep dive into that and explain to you where you may have, whether a magnesium, a zinc, do you have a methylfolate detox issue? None of those tests would be covered by insurance. None of it. So you have it like cancer screenings. We have a cancer screening that can identify over like pretty much every type of cancer up to seven years in advance at stage zero. Why would we not use this in traditional medicine? You know, or like, Well, that's what he was saying. And listen, I imagine if you go into the medical field, one of the reasons you go into it is to help people and, you know, and, and provide a service.

But I think people in that field, when people are screaming, like, got to talk to a doctor, you're not a doctor. Like, I think they need to be honest about what they're taught in that school. And if you're not taught about these things and preventative care and how to be healthy as yourself, then, then I think we're not having an honest conversation, right? Because I wouldn't go to an accountant for wealth advisement. I would go to them to figure out what I need to do to fix my taxes, right? There's different specialties.

And I just think that like, you can't just say just because someone's a doctor that then they know everything about how to take care of yourself. It's also siloed. And that's what's tough. They've built a system that has siloed the doctor to where one doctor just does knees, another doctor does shoulders, another doctor does GI. And so you get caught on the merry-go-round where a primary care goes, oh man, that's out of my wheelhouse. You need to go see an OB-GYN. Then you go to an OB-GYN and they're like, oh, I don't touch that. I got to send you something. Right? And you get bounced from person to person to person, because nobody's looking at you holistically, but biologically, you're one biological life form. Everything is intertwined.

And so where I go with that is it's so easy to put somebody on an antidepressant, but did you ever look at their blood work? Are they deficient in zinc and magnesium? Are they deficient in vitamin D? Do they have a methylfolate detox issue? All of these things can increase anxiety, depression, agitation. Do they have a hormonal imbalance? If they do, what caused that hormonal imbalance?

Did you ever get a family history? Did you ever have the conversation? And I'm not throwing stones at the clinicians. They're doing the best they can, but they're set up for failure. Gary Brekka just told me that if you are taking, and I don't want to say this wrong, but they're set up for failure. Gary Brekka just told me that if you are taking, and I don't wanna say this wrong, but I think prenatal with folic acid in it, it actually contributes to postpartum depression and anxiety.

If you have the gene mutation. If you have the MTFHR. And if you don't know that you have that and you get on a folic acid supplement while you're pregnant, you think you're doing something so great for the baby and for yourself. And then you get, then you have the baby. Was it folic acid or folate? I want to, well, look it up, look the episode up, you guys, if you're listening

to this, I'm not a doctor, but the point is, I should wear a shirt that says that. But the point is, the point is, is if you don't have that information. Yeah. But if you don't have that information and then you get postpartum anxiety and depression, it's like afterwards. And it's from that. He was basically saying, if you don't have that information, do it and you get depression, it's almost guaranteed it's because of that.

Like imagine if you just had that information and knew not to, and you to take a different one because you had that intention. When you see people's blood, cause you've seen a lot of people's blood, what do you see though is like crazy? Is it the metals? Is it the metals? Is it the toxins? Is it the is it the what do you call it the methylated? I don't know how you guys it's everything honestly Everybody's low on vitamin D. Okay, right. We were all told stay out of the Sun Sun blog Everyone I mean a huge percentage of people are low on vitamin D a huge percentage of people are wrongly put on cholesterol meds

are low on vitamin D. A huge percentage of people are wrongly put on cholesterol meds, you know, which then creates a cascade effect and they end up being on four or five meds. And as you work through what we just talked about earlier, you go, oh, now I understand why insurance is pushing this and your doctor's reaching for the tool that's in their tool belt. And so the biggest, the biggest crime committed of all is that they've obstructed your clinicians' ability to provide real healthcare. The doctors here that are in the insurance model of no fault of their own can have the

best of intentions, but they are going to be captured and it's going to be very difficult for them to ever truly drive healthcare because the system's not built to do that. It's built to crank out prescriptions, grab the closest pill bottle and solve the problem. And so it's tough for them versus guys like Gary or any of these facilities like WasteWell that do a deep dive. Looking under the hood and having the dialogue

with a patient in itself is life-changing. Like, I know y'all had Bert on, Bert on, like Bert Kreischer look, like, just him knowing his health and being able to be a driver along his health is a big difference. Like I think one of the challenges I have with traditional medicine is it is academia versus the layman and it's very dictatorial where it's like, I'm the boss and you do what you're fat. Here's a cholesterol med. Well, no, let's talk about you as a person and identify what got you here and give you a blueprint or even Ozempic. It's such a blockbuster drug because candidly, it's an easy win for a doctor. You come in, you're overweight, you have a metabolic disease.

I'm just going to prescribe you ozempic. It's going to get the weight off, but they don't really have the conversation. And so all the side effects you're seeing are because you're not talking about titrating up, titrating down. You're not talking about how much protein you need to be consuming per day to preserve lean muscle mass. You're essentially giving somebody a chemical straight jacket that allows

chemical anorexia and then they cannibalize muscle, get ozempic face and butt and like start just deteriorating and eventually it can even tear into bone mineral density. But that is not to say the drug is all bad or good. The issue isn't the arrow, it's the archer. Like if you have a nuanced conversation and you explain to somebody, Hey, I'm going to prescribe you a Zempik, but I want us to titrate up and down accordingly, and I want us to be slow and methodical about this. And we have to talk about diet, lifestyle, and nutrition. Cause prescribing a GLP one or a weight loss drug without talking about diet,

lifestyle, and nutrition is like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos. Like you're not going to get anywhere. Because prescribing a GLP-1 or a weight loss drug without talking about diet lifestyle nutrition Is like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos. Like you're not gonna get anywhere It's so counterintuitive But they're not they're just cranking out ozempic prescriptions And then all these people are getting sick and they're getting sick because nobody's fucking talking to them So can we talk a little bit about your approach? Because I think it's fascinating say I was to come in to work with you, Ways to Well, I was going to come. And I say, oh, you know, I got this gut issue. I don't feel good.

I'm not sleeping well. Where do you guys first start with a patient to understand their story a little better? What's the first few things you do? Every single patient is unique and different. And so that's part of personalized medicine is understanding it's not a one size fits all approach. There are basic diagnostic tests. I got to tell you, if you have blood work, as long as it's comprehensive, I don't care

where you got the blood work. As long as we can do a deep dive and assess you, like that is one of the, I think comprehensive blood work, a DEXA scan. And for those people who don't know what that is, it's just a full body scan that tells us how much lean muscle mass you have, how much visceral fat, how much subcutaneous fat, and it tells us your bone mineral density, right? And then a VO2 max, or let us tie into your wearable. If you give me those three things, I can begin using large language models to project out all cause mortality risk. And then the goal is to drive that down.

So I hear Gary talk about, he thinks we'll live to be a hundred and something. And like Peter Attia talks about this, if we really want to drive lifespan today, like real world facts, you have to start by driving health span. And how do we drive health span? We drive health span by getting proactive, predictive, and personalized. We assess you at the biological level. We assess you at the physiological level, your lean muscle mass, your visceral fat, all of that. Now I have all the data I need to help you build a blueprint to drive your health. I would treat you totally different than I would

a 30-year-old or a 50-year right? Because somebody in their, like, let's say early sixties, now we've got to really focus on bone mineral density, preserving lean muscle mass. Like people are so worried about losing fat that they forget. Like one of the biggest risk factors is your loss of muscle as you age. If we can keep muscle on your body frame and keep your bone mineral density high, And that involves starting treatment early. Like they scared the hell out of men and women with hormone optimization. With the Women's Health Initiative, they terrified women.

Most primary care in America to this day still tell men that testosterone could cause cancer. Testosterone does not cause cancer. Like that has been debunked a thousand times over. It is one of the most life-changing things you can do for a man over the age of 40 who's chronically low. Because if we can intervene, we keep your lean muscle mass on. We reduce your body fat, your visceral fat, your subcutaneous fat, your organ fat, all this stuff that leads to metabolic disease, heart attack, stroke,

cancer, diabetes, all the things that we get, that we evolve towards as we age. And so depending on lifestyle, age, habits, epigenetics, like all of it, like there's a battery of tests we could do, but it also depends on budget, right? That's the big challenge. Like if everyone could do every test, we could get so proactive and preventative. And that's where I'm pushing the government. Like you need to give people HSA benefits and give them the autonomy and sovereignty to make their choices. And what peptides are you seeing right now that you think are really great?

I know you know a lot about peptides. Yeah, I think, well, the peptides are phenomenal. Hormone optimization is phenomenal, especially for people over the age of 40. If we had, like, let's just walk you through, let's say we had your blood work, a VO2 max and a DEXA. How much blood? We're tied into your way. Well, it depends on what all we're pulling, but a comprehensive panel would probably be like 10 of these little vials. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why, but it's

a snapshot of you in time. What I'm envisioning in the future, and I'm not, I'm just spitballing here, but the future is going to be every morning somebody takes a pill, that pill's sending your biomarkers, your blood sugar, your insulin level, all of that to your wearable or smartphone, and we're tracking that 24 7. So we don't have to do any blood. That's what I think the future will be. Today, we're taking your comprehensive blood work, we're taking a DEXA scan.

I know that you've got, let's just say 130 pounds of lean muscle mass. You could ask the AI, hey, I want to lose 10 pounds of body fat without losing muscle. It's going to know how much lean muscle mass you have. So it's going to know that you need to eat 125 grams of protein at minimal to maintain lean muscle mass. Are you guys using AI right now? Some of that stuff is fucking crazy. It's wild for the ability to assess data and it even analyzes your blood work

So what we're talking about with clinicians even with me like, oh my god, I don't even know what we're at now I have 300 employees. We have MDs nurse practitioners all of it The AI is the training wheels because it assesses the blood work algorithmically and computes out different risk factors based off the more data you give us. And then helps guide the clinician on optimal outcomes and optimal behaviors based off your genetics, epigenetics, your DEXA, your VO2, your how, how well you're sleeping, your REM sleep, your deep sleep, the more data you

give us, the better the AI is and the better we can help drive health span. And then that that empowers our clinicians to have like an extra resource instead of them asking, how are you sleeping? They know how you're sleeping. How are you eating? They know how you're eating, right? We can see it all in your blood work. It's so funny. There's guys that will come in or girls that will come in and be like, oh, I eat clean. It's like, you know, you don't we can tell. work. It's so funny. There's guys that'll come in or girls that'll come in and be like, Oh, I eat clean.

It's like, no, you don't. We can tell. Like it's so obvious. Like you can't see like a McDonald's happy meal. Can you? No, no, but you can see like a lot of guys, especially don't want to admit their own hormone optimization. It's still like this four letter word to them for some reason.

And it's like, look, man, if you're over 40 and you're in great shape, a lot of guys are probably optimizing their hormones. We've had guys like Mark Sisson come on and he's talked about this, but he says he started much later, he's been vocal about when from your perspective, do you find it to be appropriate for men to think about hormone replacement? So hormone replacement versus hormone optimization. If you're somebody in your twenties and you have a healthy hormone level, you should not interfere with that in any way, shape or form.

Right. I am not an advocate for that. But if you're in your 30s and you are already chronically low because of our environment and the microplastics and our diet and our nutrition and our lack of sleep and our stress and our anxiety and social media and all these things like I told you earlier, our testosterone levels are half of that of our grandfathers. If you've had kids and you're past the point of having children, then it's a discussion worth potentially exploring. If you haven't, there are other alternatives that don't require hormone replacement like HCG will spur your natural testosterone production and oftentimes with younger men we can get your testosterone where

it needs to be using HCG. The downside is it's going to increase your sperm count and you are going to be more fertile. I've had enough sperm. I can't take any more sperm. The sperm is enough for me. It's like a pinata of sperm. So people, people will write into me and be like, I know you're on hormone. And my thing that I respond to every time is like, I'm not, but it's not a matter of not. It's a matter of when for sure I will do it at some point. And if now's the right time, I would for sure do it. I think I say that to you. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, so my whole thing is like, I know there's going to be a time in my life where absolutely for certain, I will engage with these practices. I'm 30, turning 38.

Yeah. You know, I've got- So you're still young. I'm trying to figure out the right timing of it and also the right- Your testosterone's good for me. But I think it's important for like men to not be ashamed. Like, listen, we are living longer than we've ever lived before. I mean, most people in the past, you didn't make it past 40.

Like that was old age. If you optimize your hormones within physiological norms, that's what I want to be clear about. All the horror stories you're told are people pushing it beyond physiological normal limits. So like you hear the balls shrinking or something, that's like someone going way too gnarly. You're doing more than what you should be doing, right? So let's say you were at your age, I would say, look, if you came in and your testosterone was

200, which is low, anything below 350 is considered low clinically. But in reality, you got to think in the 80s, we were walking around at 1500, right? And so now men are half of what they used to be. And as you get below 350, all your risk profiles go up, increased risk of diabetes, increased risk of atherosclerosis, increased risk of like Alzheimer's dementia. All these things start to go up with low testosterone. It's, it is, there is a correlation to these chronic diseases. If we can get you above 350 into the normal range,

we drive down the risk factor of all those chronic diseases. We put on lean muscle mass, we protect bone mineral density. And now when you get higher, right? And you start going above like physiological norms, that's when you start getting acne, balding, you know, it depends on your genetics too, like everyone's different. Some guys may have walked around at 1500, right? In their prime, like Navy SEALs, special operators, those guys probably had really high levels

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Why did a woman who was on testosterone tell me that she grew like a small penis? Like on her clavicle? Well, that's because no. Yeah, he said it's... Yeah, no, you will. Women should not be taking outside of physiological normal levels of testosterone So if a woman goes over let me just get this straight so I can just like unpack this Yeah

If a woman goes over the testosterone amount her clit is gonna grow into a mini like it's gonna look like it can cause enlarge Yeah, it can cause the clitoris to enlarge and that means somebody's not monitoring that woman or prescribing a dosage that makes physiological sense. But I don't want to scare women out of testosterone because women are at a huge, like, especially once you reach over the age of 40, it's not just your estrogen and your hormones, your female hormones. Women have higher, have more testosterone than they do estrogen. They don't realize that.

It's not what men have. You're not at the physiological level of a male, but you have more testosterone than they do estrogen. They don't realize that. It's not what men have. You're not at the physiological level of a male, but you have more testosterone than you do estrogen. Estrogen is just the female hormone, but you still need testosterone because if you lose testosterone, you begin to lose bone mineral density, you begin to have increased body fat, all the things we talked about, low libido. So if you manage it right though, I guess is my question, if it's managed right at the right though, I guess is my question. If it's managed right at the right amount, you're not gonna grow like-

Correct. All those adverse events, all the negative things you hear are people going outside of physiological norms or people pushing the envelope. Do you like that pellet thing? And you see it a lot with fitness girls. I've heard the pellet. No.

That's what I- The reason I don't like the pellet is there's, if you have an adverse event, there is no removing the pellet, if you have an adverse event, there is no removing the pellet, right? You have to wait it out. So let's say all of a sudden, let's say you're a man and you put in a pellet and you start getting nipple sensitivity.

It can cause gynecomastia where you may start developing boobs, like because your body's producing estrogen to try and counterbalance the testosterone or your body's converting the testosterone into estrogen. And there's no taking that pellet out. So then we have to prescribe you something to just battle the estrogen levels. But if you're a woman, like this is a true story, not my clinic, but we used to make the pellets at my pharmacy. And we had a woman who was at a practice in Houston, Texas that got a pellet, didn't disclose to the doctor that she had a family history of

stroke, right, then got a blood clot. Doctors were terrified of it becoming a stroke, which is the risk factor, and her hormone levels were through the roof because the doctor put in a pellet that was too big of a dosage and didn't know how her body was going to metabolize it. And so she was getting huge spikes of hormones that could increase her risk of that blood clot causing a seizure or stroke. They had to wait it out and put her on like a watch and like monitor this woman. And that's where I don't like the pellets.

It's terrifying because if something does go south, there's no fast course correction. You're kind of just stuck waiting it out. And so that's why I would, I'm not to say all good or all bad for to each their own. You know, we don't use the pellets at Ways to Well. We focus more on topicals or injectables that allow the patient to tailor to their unique needs. The big thing here though is that you're working with someone who's monitoring this stuff and I, you know, every time this topic comes up on the

show, especially for, I guess men and women, but for young guys, I'm like, you don't just want to start getting this stuff without all the things we're talking about and doing all these things without working with a professional clinician, because that's where things, those are all the stories we all hear about are things going astray. Which again, there's so much nuance to this stuff is like these can be incredible tools and resources if done right and could be huge problems if done wrong.

You nailed it. Like everything, ozempic, the weight loss drugs, thyroid medicines, everything is a tool in the tool belt. But a hammer in the wrong hands is a deadly weapon. Like it doesn't mean that everyone should be doing it. And I'm not here to tell you to do or not. Everything is risk and reward. If we're going to do a pharmaceutical intervention, like let's discuss it. Let's deep dive.

Let's understand the pros and cons and let's embolden and empower you, the patient, to drive your healthcare journey. That's the beauty of not being in the insurance model. It's a conversation. The doctor's going to sit down with you, spend 45 minutes, go through the pros and cons and walk you through systematically why they're making the recommendation they're making. And you'd be shocked how many people like I hear Gary talk about this too, and I respect the hell out of it. So often it's people with just mineral or vitamin deficiencies. And it's creating this other cascade of issues that they thought they were going to need an antidepressant or an

anti-anxiety. And it's like, no, you're just chronically deficient on XYZ. And if we fix these things, I think we can fix the symptoms that you're experiencing. Before you go, tell us your favorite transformation story of someone who's come to Wastewell and like they changed their whole life from getting their biomarkers tested. Oh, man. I mean, there's so many amazing people like I mean, Jelly Rolls talked about us helping him. No, I don't know that. Tell us about Jelly Roll. He's just he's just an amazing guy. I can only share kind of what he shared, but he works his ass off, man. And it's about putting wins on the board. And that's kind of where I've debated with Joe on some of this.

So many people instantly think that somebody's on ozempic. Jelly said, I don't want to do it because I don't want an asterisk next to this. I'm going to work my ass off and I'm going to dial my hormones in and I'm going to work my tail off to get this weight off And he's down. I think 85 pounds. He said he's gonna be on the cover of GQ Yeah, he's the man and he's such a good guy We joke about it all the time There's no matter like anyone now that does does you know goes through a weight loss journey of any kind and no matter what?

Everyone's like oh, I know I'm gonna like give birth and like lose away from the baby people are gonna be going to be like, oh, Zempik, you can't, I mean, it's, that's just what everyone's going to say. It's everywhere. But the most inspiring to me is, and we haven't got to touch on it yet, but is truly the, the biologics and the cellular options. Like the, the stem cell space is so life-changing for people. So life-changing. I can't even like- Let's talk about it for a little bit, because again,

I think this is another area where we've had people come on the show that have had great experiences, and then we've had people like Dr. Josh Axes come on and had, like, he had a rough time and then he actually finished it, ended up turning it around with stem cells again. But if people even start to think about some, like, where do they even begin to research and find resources that point them in the right direction?

It's really tough because here no stem cell treatments are FDA approved, right? And that doesn't mean they're good or bad. What it means is nobody's paid $350 million to run it through the FDA and get a placebo controlled trial on a biologic that you can't patent. You can't patent human nature. You cannot patent biology. And so the reason that these products aren't all like in an FDA approval process, the truth is as soon as one has an indication, anyone else could just go and

extrapolate the same exact cells. Cause you're taking a healthy birth, healthy mother, pre-planned C-section. And I want to explain that too. I'm not telling people to go get a c-section. I went on another podcast and people are like, this guy is telling people to... I'm telling you what the government says. I'm just telling you the regulations. The regulations require it to be a pre-planned c-section. They take the discarded afterbirth, which is the placenta and the umbilical cord. And within those are the goodies of life. Like when a woman's pregnant, your heart grows by 30% in the third trimester. Your risk of cancer, diabetes, all the chronic diseases we've talked about are right now

at an all-time low. As much as you are keeping the baby alive. The baby is keeping you alive those cellular goodies Cytokines exosomes extracellular vesicles scaffolding all of these like little building blocks are Flowing through your body keeping your body healthy. That's why women have the pregnancy glow That's why people talk about how good their skin. You have it. Thanks. Your skin looks great. You're gonna have to stay pregnant. We're just gonna keep you. But so all of those as we age,

there's a precipitous decline in all of these cellular goodies. And so if you fall as a little kid and you scrape your knee, you heal really fast. If you fall as an 80 year old woman, you may have a scab for three months. You may bruise, you may never heal. It takes forever. So if we take those goodies that nature, God, whatever you

want to call it, gives us, and we extrapolate out from the umbilical cord in the placenta, all of these building blocks of life, all we're doing is giving you those building blocks for a six to eight week time period. But that's if it's done like correct, right? What if it's done wrong? So what they were worried about before, and this is where it gets super confusing, this is during the Bush administration. They were thinking that they were going to be aborting fetuses and taking aborted babies

and extrapolating out stem cells. So that's why it's got to be the pre-planned C-section stuff. And then they were saying, you know, we don't want you cloning humans. They were worried that they were going to be cloning humans in a petri dish and that they were going to enhance the cells that way and then manipulate the cells to create super soldiers and super humans. So I understand all the reservations 20 years ago. The truth of the matter is, and then the last caveat is they were worried that these cells

would go into the body and become something. Right? Oh my God, if you put billions of these MSCs, what if they go in the body and become a cancer cell? They do not become anything. That's what we know now, 20 years later. And so scientists, doctors are still struggling because they're candidly like behind the people who know what's going on or the scientists at the

bench, the PhDs that are working in the lab that are testing these things every day. Dr. Kaplan is who identified MSCs and discovered them. And he has since released an open statement to the scientific community about three years ago saying I should have never called them stem cells. I should have called them signaling cells. And so I want to tell you that because here's why that's important. We put those cells in your body. Think of it like a construction site. For you to build a building, you need the brick, the mortar, the wood, all the raw elements

to build the building. But you also need the blueprint and the plan to build the building, but you also need the blueprint and the plan to build the building. So now as we age, we lose those ingredients. That's all peptides are. Peptides are short-chain amino acids and signaling cells. MSCs, stem cells, are nothing more than birth-derived tissues that are signaling cells. So we're going to put billions of signaling cells in your body that find their way to a gonna put billions of signaling cells in your body that find their way to a site of inflammation, that then signal to your body, like me, 44-year-old cells,

to come to the site of injury. When my cells show up, 44 years old, tired, weary, all those things, it transfers its mitochondria into my old cells, making my cells young again for a period of time. And then those baby cells are gone. Within a few days, they're out of your system. mitochondria into my old cells, making my cells young again for a period of time. And then those baby cells are gone within a few days. They're out of your system.

But your cells are essentially supercharged with fresh, healthy mitochondria battery packs. In addition to that, you're getting a plethora of all of the goodies that we've lost as we've aged. You're getting cytokines, exosomes, extracellular vesicles, scaffolding, all the stuff that's at a sky high rate when you're a little kid, you're getting it back. So those signal cells, like, if you hurt your knee as a 44-year-old man and you potentially use

some of these therapies, and then it's able to tell those cells to signal to heal your knee the way you would when you were younger. You got it. And it's giving you all the goodies to allow that healing. To stay strong. And that's where peptides are a great additive like BPC157, some of these short chain amino

acids that can help with tendon strength, joint health, all of it. And so some of the most, you're not allowed to make claims. So here's, when they say you can't get stem cells in the United States, what they're saying is you cannot clone, you cannot manipulate. It has to be a minimally manipulated tissue. You cannot advertise or make claims, which is crazy. So you're really limited in what you can say. So most people don't even know these things exist because the FDA has made it so hard. So people think they've got to go to Panama or somewhere else to get this. You do,

if you want them to clone and manipulate and expand the cells in a Petri dish, but there's really no need to do that because what nature gave us works so great. Like it really does. Like they're so efficacious and effective at like certain types of injuries like knees, shoulders, joints, elbows. I mean, we helped Aaron Rodgers with his Achilles. He talked about that and even included us in the documentary, which was super cool of him. But if it wasn't for Aaron Rodgers and Joe Rogan, I don't think anyone would even know that anything about stem cells in this country. I really don't. Well, I think the conversation is opening up and starting to happen more. And again,

this is like why I love these mediums so much and why we do it is because you are not going to be delivered this information in a quick sound bite on a mainstream media platform that's not riling people up and angering them and making them scared. Like it just doesn't sell. So like, you know, with the rise of these platforms and conversations with people like yourself,

I think people are going to start looking at this. And that's why I'm so excited about what you guys are working on. Because I think for the first time we were going down a path for a long time where I believe a lot of the conversations that we've had today would have been prohibited, like they would have just, a lot of the shut would have been fully shut down even with peptides, right? There was like getting to a place where pharmaceutical companies wanted to control a lot of that and shut a lot of that down.

And I think now there's an opportunity for a lot of this to open back up. A lot of what's happened with the cellular space, the biologic space is again, it's big pharma pressuring the FDA, forcing it out of the marketplace, trying to make it hard for patients to get accessibility because it is an amazing treatment option for orthopedic related injuries. You know, it's not going to regrow a tendon. It's not a miracle. I tell people, this is not a miracle.

It's not magic, it's medicine, right? I thought it was gonna make me like six, two. Yeah, it's like within reason. You guys can use code skinny for 10% off all products on ways2well.com. Where can everyone find you? Pimp yourself out in the brand. That's fun.

Ways the number two well is our website. And then our Instagram is also weighs the number two well. My Instagram is just my name, brigham.Bueller. And that's it. I will tell you this. You will be back on this show. Open invite anytime. You're great.

We could have gone a hundred directions. We normally go an hour and we went definitely over that. You're great. Thanks, Brigham. I'm getting those stem cells after. I don't, oh my God. All of my favorite products, mouth tape, brow peptide to grow my brows and lashes, the ice roller, and even the caffeinated sunscreen can be found

on shopskinnyconfidential.com. You guys, if you have not tried mouth taping, you have to try it. And while you're on the site, that brow peptide has changed and transformed my brows. Go to ShopSkinnyConfidential.com to check out all my favorite goodies. Thanks for listening and see you next time.