#2469 - Brigham Buhler

Brigham Buhler is the founder and CEO of Ways2Well, a functional and regenerative care clinic, and owner of ReviveRx Pharmacy.www.ways2well.comwww.reviverx.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/joerogan Athletic Brewing Co. Non-alcoholic Beer. Fit For All Times. Athletic Brewing Company LLC. Milford, CT and San Diego, CA. Near Beer <0.5% alc/vol. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Joe Rogan?

  Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Great, good to see you, my friend.

• 0:14Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, we're back.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  My pleasure, always. Um, lots going on, man.

• 0:20Speaker 03

  There is a lot going on, per the usual.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  Well, I've got fucking allergies, dude, you hear me?

• 0:25Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, you sound stuffed up, I was gonna ask.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Oh, it's crazy. I was like, "Am I getting sick?" And then I worked out, I'm like, "No, I feel great." Like, physically, I feel great.

• 0:34Speaker 03

  I don't know what's spiking right now, do you know?

• 0:37Speaker 02

  I don't know, there's a bunch going on.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Everybody's got sore throats. It's crazy, they say you don't get it when you live here for like, a few years, and then you start getting it a lot. And I was like, "Pfft, I ain't getting it." And then about four years in, I started getting these horrible sore throats and stuffy noses. Is there a peptide for that?

• 0:55Speaker 03

  When I first moved here, the cedar killed me. I mean, because Houston doesn't have cedar, so it was pine trees in Houston, and moving to Austin, the cedar crushed me for the first like, year and a half, and then I got over it, my body just got used to it, I guess.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think my body has to get used to it. One thing that does help is colostrum. I take colostrum, that Amra.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can tell a difference?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Makes a big difference. Yeah, if you take it a lot, take it every day, stay consistent.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think all of that stuff, there's benefits that so many people overlook.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  I know. So, we were talking, um, what's the latest?

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Um, man, so I know you just had Secretary Kennedy on a few weeks ago.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  The latest is, uh, you know, hot off the press as of yesterday, um, I know the administration is still working diligently to reclassify peptides. I know that that kind of got unveiled on the podcast. Man, that has been a labor of love for the last two and a half, three years, whatever it's been that we've been trying to get this done. And I know I said this when I was on here six months ago, but I'm truly the most optimistic I've ever been, and with reason. I want to like temper expectations, but you know, the prior administration of the FDA put these things into place prior to Secretary Kennedy and this administration taking over. It was almost like a Trojan horse.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  They just planted this little bomb in the middle of everything and classified these peptides as dangerous. And so I've, for the first time in my life, over the last decade of 20 something years of being in healthcare, you know, the during, before Secretary Kennedy and this group of folks were in a position to drive meaningful change, they made these changes with the peptides. I submitted 17 FOIA requests, 17, to the FDA. They have never once responded to a single FOIA request, just asking for clarity about safety and why did we make this decision? And they're supposedly by law required to respond to this request.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  So to go from that environment where you're being stonewalled and you have no accessibility and no line of sight and no answers to anything, to being able to at least have a seat at the table and a voice is pretty revolutionary.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Well, it's just very helpful that he actually uses them, that Kennedy uses them, and he knows the benefits of them, and he's very educated on it. That helps a lot. Someone who's actually fit, takes care of himself, and uses peptides, and understands what millions of people know.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  I mean, there's millions of people right now that are taking peptides, and it's radically improved their health and their vitality.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  And I'm one of them. Yeah, and me too. Like, again, I was the typical American patient. I was on the cusp of diabetes. I was obese. I'm a former fat kid. You know, like, everything that was could be going wrong in my late 30s was going wrong because I had bought into the system and trusted the system and thought, hey, if I could get my blood work annually and I follow the doctor's rules, you know, the system's just not built that way. And that's where I think the nuances of peptides are really difficult for a regulatory body like the FDA. And so to systematically try to break it down for the folks that are legacy employees at the FDA, I've had that opportunity, thanks to this administration and Secretary Kennedy

• 4:30Speaker 03

  and his right-hand girl, Stephanie Spear, has been integral in setting meetings and trying to move the needle. Marty McCary, who's the head of the FDA, I had the privilege of knowing him before he took that role. We testified together at the Senate level. And Marty, he really is, I don't know, have you ever read his book? No. It's called Blind Spot. One of the things that I love is I philosophically agree with everything that Marty laid out. I mean, what he's saying is dogma and that medicine is so worried about defending their principles and where they stand, that they're essentially

• 5:10Speaker 03

  ignoring at times science and they're allowing dogma to rule the day, rather than letting a pragmatic, like, authentic, open-minded view change your perspective and lens on topics. And so even with this peptide topic, you know, when I had the opportunity to meet with Marty on this topic, he said, "Look, Brigham, I didn't really use peptides in my practice. I was a surgeon. You know, it's not something that I'm intimately familiar with, but I'm open to understanding and trying to research and get a better grasp." And some of the moves that this group of folks have already made at HHS, I don't know if you're following what they did with testosterone and hormone therapy, it is literally what you and I talked about at this point, I think, five years ago.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Where I came on and said, "All the shit you're being told on testosterone and HRT and hormones, men and women, is wrong. It's dogma, it's been debunked, it's not going to cause cancer, there shouldn't be black box warnings. The FDA has come to the consensus under this new leadership that that is the case. And they are working to remove the black box warning on hormones. They are working to remove the fear mongering around women's hormones and the Women's Health Initiative and all these things because we now know what we've been preaching for almost a decade is that these hormones are a crucial building block that allow us to drive health span. And a lot of the decline that we see in our body is because of the hormonal decline that occurs in our 40s and 50s."

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Could you please expand on the testosterone thing? Because one of the things that keeps coming up with people when I talk to friends that are older and I say, "Hey, you know, you should probably get your hormone levels checked and consider getting on TRT," or at the very least, getting on something like HCG that can increase your testosterone, it'll really vitalize your health. They get concerned with prostate cancer.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And this is the one that you illuminated and you've helped quite a few of my friends understand. So, please expand.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, all of the fear with prostate cancer literally comes from a study from the 1930s. And it was a urologist in the 1930s. The patient population of this study, when we talk about random controlled trials, there were three patients in the study. One patient dropped out, one patient was chemically castrated, the other patient was normal. So, the chemically castrated patient, meaning they have no testosterone. So, if you treat a patient who has no testosterone, and you take them from zero testosterone to normal testosterone, so to take them from, let's say, zero to 350, during that climb from

• 7:48Speaker 03

  zero to 350, you can increase theoretically the risk of exasperating a prostate cancer that's pre-

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Existing was the fear. But as you push past that level to optimal levels, you begin to insulate against the risk of multiple cancers. And all of the studies henceforth have shown, there is not one single study that correlates testosterone therapy to prostate cancer. With an abundance of caution, some urology practices for patients who have had radical prostatectomies are reluctant to prescribe testosterone. But testosterone in no way, shape, or form is causing prostate cancer. It's a receptor site thing. So the best way to explain it is you can only water a plant so much. Right? So, once we've saturated the prostate receptor sites with hormones, they're saturated.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  And then, when you push past that to an optimal threshold, you get the insulatory benefits of cancer reduction that testosterone appears to provide. And that's why the FDA is looking to change that label and get rid of the black box warnings on an array of different things that have been dogma around men and women's hormones.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  So this initial study, like, why was the one person chemically castrated?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  I don't know why. This is in the 30s. But since then, here's a really real world example. With the boom in testosterone therapy, if there was an increased risk in prostate cancer due to hormones, you would have seen a skyrocket in the amount of prevalence of prostate cancer in all of these practices that are using hormone optimization. You don't. You see the same prevalence that we saw prior to hormone optimization and the boom. And so, we have now seen, I think it's one out of eight men will develop prostate cancer. I can't remember the exact number offhand. And that correlates exactly the same into the patient population that is on hormones.

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• 12:31Speaker 02

  Well, the reality is like, everybody dies with some form of prostate cancer, right?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't know. I didn't know that.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've heard Huberman talk about that.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Like, you have a certain amount of it. It's just like...

• 12:45Speaker 03

  It really became dogma. I mean, the study is...

• 12:47Speaker 02

  But I don't understand about the study. Like, so what was the conclusion of the study?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  The conclusion of the study was if we treat, uh, men with testosterone, we'll see a rise in, uh, in, in the precursor hormone that we were worried could correlate to increasing the risk of prostate cancer.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  And was this only prevalent in this one person that had, was chemically castrated? Or was it in the other guy?

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Correct. The other guy who had normal testosterone levels had no increased risk. And you have to push through the threshold. So think you're at zero, and then you're watering the plant. Once that plant's watered, it can't take on any more water. So, from zero, no testosterone, which is chemically castrated, you're miserable, you have no sexual function, you're at increased risk of all these other chronic diseases that can kill you, um, but you're insulated from prostate cancer, because you have zero testosterone. As we begin to raise your testosterone level and saturate those receptor sites, theoretically, the concern was we're increasing the potential risk of exasperating of prostate cancer.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Well, so how was this whole opinion based on this one study from the 1930s and just repeated ad nauseam for decades?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it wasn't debunked, I think, until the 90s with, uh, famous prominent urologist, uh, Dr. Morgan Tyler, where he began to do research in his practice on men with prostate cancer. And he actually began to treat men with prostate cancer with HRT and track the results. And what he found was there was no increased prevalence of prostate cancer, and it didn't exasperate or create additional issues. And so that, it was debunked in the 90s, and then I would even go further to say, you launched, I think Pfizer launched testosterone cream in like 1990 something, I don't remember, and millions of men went on testosterone creams. If it was exasperating prostate cancer, you would have seen it then

• 14:33Speaker 03

  too. And so now, retrospectively, 100 years later, literally 100 years later, the FDA and our regulatory oversight bodies, um, are now changing their lens on men and women's

• 14:47Speaker 03

  HRT.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  It's just so crazy that doctors, I've heard doctors.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Oh, I know.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  You have to be cautious about the potential prostate cancer.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Like, where do you get this? Like, and then you tell them, well, there was a study. And so this is the study they're talking about?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  That is the study that everyone.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  One of them was kind of chemically castrated and.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  You got it.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  And that guy didn't even get prostate cancer.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  And so none of these, moving forward, um, uh, Dr. or Admiral Brian Christine is, uh, over the men's health initiatives over at the FDA, and he's a prominent urologist who has years and years of practice of using testosterone. Marty, I think, even covered, uh, hormone therapy in his book Blind Spot. Again, it's a prime example of the dogma of medicine. Um, myth becomes reality, right? And misnomer can be adopted and then it becomes commonplace. And now you go to lectures and symposiums where you hear some prominent guy on stage regurgitating what he was taught in medical school or she was taught in medical school. And then that dogma just perpetuates and it becomes almost urban legend, uh, which is crazy to think.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what it sounds like. That's what's nuts. It does sound like urban legend.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Another, another quote that like resonated with me from Blind Spot was Marty's book was literally, uh, i- it's confusing, uh, what was it? Dogma with consensus, right? When, when everyone, group think is dangerous when it is considered consensus because group think isn't necessarily consensus. It's peer pressure to adopt the values and belief systems of your peers and academia. And there's an immense amount of pressure to not stray from the herd, to stay within the herd, to, to back your peers, to don't, to toe the line. Um, and we've seen that for the last, what, 20, 30 years? Uh, if you step out of line and even, even back to, you know, originally what spurred this were peptides.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  I think a lot of what happened with peptides are that this system is built under an entire ecosystem. It costs $1 billion to $3 billion to bring a drug to market are the numbers that are out there, anywhere from $1 to $3 billion. Now, they're taking into account all the drugs that don't make it to the finish line. But if you really look at the true cost of bringing a drug to market, it's still at minimal $300 million to $1 billion to bring a drug or a, any sort of technology into the marketplace. Now, that whole ecosystem and structure was built around Big Pharma and the pharmaceutical

• 17:21Speaker 03

  cartels and their attempt to control what hits the market and to protect their patents and their technologies. And so that cost prohibitive process limits innovation and accessibility under the name of like protection and safety. But in reality, a huge percentage, I guess, one of the things that academia will say, or some of the naysayers around peptides will say is, you know, the issue with peptides is there's not human control trials. The issue with peptides is there's not enough safety data. We recently provided the FDA with over 800 different studies that have been done on an array of the, of the 19 peptides that were banned under the Biden administration.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  We've also made them aware that we've submitted 17 FOIA requests to the previous administration that were never responded to, just seeking clarity and answers. Where were you seeing safety issues? Because in clinical practice, we just weren't. And, and I can tell you at WasteWell now, we're at over 90,000 patients nationwide and peptides were an integral part of our, of, of the practice of WasteWell and we did not see a bunch of adverse events. The silence, I think, speaks for itself. I think a lot of it is dogma and confusion and the, the process itself of bringing a drug to market, where I was going with that is,

• 18:47Speaker 03

  I'm not asking the FDA or a governing body to pay for this for patients, right? It's a nuanced difference that I think even regulators are struggling to wrap their head around. We're not asking for Medicare/Medicaid dollars. We're not asking for TRICARE dollars. We're not asking for the federal government to mandate that employers and employer insurance programs cover peptides. If I'm launching a pharmaceutical drug into the market, I'm asking for everything but the kitchen sink. I'm asking for everybody else to cover the cost of my care and this medication. Peptides, proactive medicine, predictive medicine, preventative care, personalized medicine is all cash pay. It is outside of the existing ecosystem and structure.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  And I think that's what makes it so difficult to navigate for regulators because it's a new world to them. If I'm coming from academia, where I worked at a hospital where I billed insurances for the last 20 years, and now I'm working at the FDA where everything we do is giant pharmaceutical companies that love the existing ecosystem because it builds a moat around their ability to monetize drugs and chronic disease, there's a benefit there to play within that ecosystem. But if my goal is to bring innovative products to the market at a cost-effective price that the average person can afford with their own cash, you can't spend a billion dollars

• 20:13Speaker 03

  to do that, especially when a molecule is readily available in nature. That's where this gets so tricky with things like peptides and stem cells and all of these products. They've kind of been placed in this no man's land and they've been convicted of a crime they never committed. And the truth of the matter is, they were put in this no man's land because they just don't fit in the sandbox of what the system was used to.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so we should also clarify that when we're talking about peptides and peptides being dangerous, GLP-1s are peptides.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  This is a gigantic market right now. I mean, you're seeing all these ladies that look like they're cutting weight to make the UFC flyweight division. You know, it's, you're seeing everybody that it's on these peptides, it's losing weight. Like, I don't know if Oprah's on them, but she lost a ton of weight. I know there's, you know, there's a bunch of celebrities that you see that get Ozempic face.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so many, so many influencers too, on the academia side, go online and go, I just, I would never prescribe peptides because I'm a board-certified clinician and I only prescribe things that have science and data that back them. And, you know, a lot of times I'd say, man, you might just be uneducated on this topic and the nuances of this topic. In reality, most clinicians are prescribing drugs off-label, right? So, a huge percentage of medical practices use products off-label. It's indicated for one thing, or one patient population, or a dosage, or a chronic disease state, but clinicians have the autonomy and the authority to use that drug in a manner that it's not indicated for. And they do that every day.

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• 23:00Speaker 02

  Well, this was the big challenge during COVID, right? With hydroxychloroquine and with ivermectin.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  That was the big challenge. And the real problem is that it interferes with the potential profits of pharmaceutical drugs that are approved.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  So if you give someone the option to take something that's off-label, that's less expensive, and then it finds out, they find out it's effective, that you'll get less, and then it gets public, you find out there's less people that are taking whatever pharmaceutically-approved drug.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Correct. And so what created this backlash or momentum against peptides, candidly, were the GLP-1 weight loss drugs. So I do want to put them in two different buckets, because there's the 19 peptides that got moved to the dangerous list with no clear answer from the previous administration as to why or how. But what I have seen, from being able to get behind the scenes and meet with lobbyists and legislators at the state and federal level, is the lobbying power of Big Pharma is real. Is real and it's intense. And it is not going away.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  It's a lot of money.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  And so, to put myself in the shoes of somebody, you know, like, I've gotten to know Chris Clump really well at the FDA, and Chris negotiated the most favored nation pricing on the pharmaceutical drugs with Lilian Novo and all these big conglomerates. And those companies definitively, you know, publicly and privately, are banging on the table of legislators and politicians and saying, "Look, we spent billions of dollars to innovate these drugs, we played within the rules of the system, and now these drugs hit the market, and you're allowing compounders and small, independent pharmacies to rip off our patents," right? And that's their stance, and they plant that stake way over here.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  If that regulator only hears that part of the story, it's a compelling story. You look at it and go, "God, man, poor Big Pharma, they spent all this money." But if you zoom out and you know the lay of the land a little bit more, which is hard if you don't come from this industry, the truth is always in the middle. So...

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Devil's advocate, of course you want to protect the patent rights of a company that spent billions of dollars to bring a drug to market. We've covered this before, though. The dirty secret is, a large majority of the drugs that come to market, come from the NIH. And Phase 1 trials are done at the NIH. The NIH is funded by taxpayer dollars. You and I are paying to innovate and create molecules, that then get licensed off to big pharmaceutical companies, so they can bring them through the FDA approval process. How is that legal? It's nuts. That is wild. Yeah, it's nuts. And so, I was trying to explain to, you know, the existing team at HHS, zoom out.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  The system, as much as you are being told failed, and let Big Pharma down, and allowed people to come in and infringe upon these patents, the truth of the matter is, the FDA sent out the bat signal, and said, "We can't meet the need of the American people. There is a backlog on these drugs. It's on the backlogs list. Can compounders make these drugs?" This has been a regulatory pathway that's been in existence for 30, 40 years. It happens all the time. So, compounders respond to the bat signal, begin to make these medications, to the benefit of the American people, during the shortage list, and then, you have these big pharmaceutical companies going, "Look, they're making our drugs, they're violating our patent."

• 26:32Speaker 03

  If your concern is that these companies didn't get the juice worth the squeeze from the patent, Eli Lilly 7X'd the value of their company. They're worth $800 billion. They are, they literally are worth more than most developed nations. This was the biggest blockbuster molecule in the history of the world. In the history of humanity, there has never been a drug that is this big of a blockbuster. The money was made. Fifty thousand times over. Nobody was harmed. But when I'm a legislator and I've got somebody telling me, "These guys hurt us to the tune of $7 billion." And I know that's what they're telling these legislators, because I've met with the legislators at the state and federal level.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  And then I have to go, "Well, hold on. The entire compounding sector only does $7 billion. GLP-1s were $2.5 billion. I know that's a big number, but that was when you were asking us to make these compounds. That number's not nearly as large today. And you also shut down 503Bs, which is half of the compounding industry's ability to make these compounds. The truth of the matter is, it's about $1.5 to $2 billion total that this industry was able to compound during the backlog in order to meet the needs of the American people. They're going to do $35 to $40 million in just GLP-1 drugs this year in revenue.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  So you're talking an accounting error for Big Pharma. And the reason I want to lay all that out is, I'm not here to argue about the GLP-1s. It sets a dangerous precedent. If Pharma Lobby's hard enough and they're able to get this done, like what they want to do, reclassifying all these as biologics, it allows them to extend the patent for 10 to 12 years. It's this whole shell game, but it sets precedent, like we covered before. And that precedent is dangerous. It's a slippery slope. Because if you do totally shut out compounders from their ability to make this for the American people, how long before they move to the next thing? And in one breath, you've got big pharmaceutical companies saying, I'll use Lilly again as an example, because they're the main culprit. Lilly is saying peptides are dangerous.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  They're getting the API from China. We shouldn't allow these compounders to make peptides. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly just signed a $7 billion deal to acquire a peptide company out of China. China. So Lilly's buying a peptide company from China while lobbying government officials and saying it's dangerous to use products from China and these compounders are dangerous and nobody's regulating it and there's just all this misnomer and dogma and it's confusing if you don't come from healthcare.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Well, it seems like it would be very confusing for a regulator, very confusing for someone who's not educated on this to get up to speed.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  100%. And they have so many initiatives and so many things they're tackling and then the challenge historically is when you're Big Pharma and I think it was like $31 million that that industry used in lobbying power last year as an industry, dollars equal accessibility, accessibility equals impressionability and impressionability equals outcomes. It's like trying to win a debate where I get one minute and the opposition gets nine minutes and in the one minute I've got to debunk all the lies that the opposition told. I don't even want to use the word lies. You can use facts, but like we've said before, they're, you know, like facts can be skewed when delivered inappropriately. If you say they cost us $7

• 30:08Speaker 03

  billion and we spent $3 billion to bring this drug to market and they're importing products from China and there's no safety nets and nobody's inspecting them and this is what we're worried about, this is dangerous and this is a liability to the American public. Politicians' ears are going to perk up, especially when you're lobbying them and funding campaigns and trying to influence those folks. But the truth is, yeah, if you take into account all the drugs that didn't make it and you want to cook the books, you can make it look like you spent a billion to 3 billion. You can also take credit for all the drugs that were launched out of the NIH that you bought the rights to and monetized for decades and then you can talk about safety, but in reality, there were recalls from both Lilly and Novo

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Nordisk. There are all sorts of array of issues and label changes and historically, even the FDA itself, this is one of the things with peptides that when I met, when I had the privilege of meeting with Marty McCary about, I said, Marty, if we're being honest...

• 31:08Speaker 03

  This is y'all's numbers. 60 to 80% of the drugs that make it through the drug approval process will have a major label change or recall. 60 to 80% of the medications that come through this process end up having a major label change or recall. What is a major label change? So they uncover, like, an example with antidepressants, they realize the suicidal ideation in teenagers, right? And they had to change that label and say, hey, not only is this only a fraction better than a placebo, right? Barely differentiates from placebo retrospectively. And not even close to exercise. I know.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  It's literally, exercise is six to sevenfold more efficacious than an antidepressant. How wild is that? Yeah. And then you go back to the science. The science was all cooked books. It was all said that it was serotonin related, and there was never a single study that correlated depression to serotonin. It was all dogma created by industry. And so, again, Marty talks about this in his book, so I know he's aligned with a lot of these viewpoints. When it comes down to peptides, though, it gets a little confusing because you're talking proactive, predictive, preventative care. If somebody's taking a peptide to optimize their healing, it's not a chronic disease-related issue. The system is built to monetize and profiteer off of treating the symptoms of chronic disease.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  It's become a prescription management system, not a healthcare system. And that's the big challenge. This is an entire paradigm shift that I don't know if all regulators truly understand. I think they're trying to wrap their head around it. I think Secretary Kennedy understands it. I think a lot of this movement in the American people post-COVID. Have fundamentally changed. Like, the view on the, from, that I've seen is, people do now question authority. People do now question, just because something came through the FDA doesn't mean it's safe. And just because something hasn't gone through the FDA approval process, doesn't mean that it's dangerous or doesn't work. A lot of times, there's a reason. Why, like, BPC 157.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  There's a patent out of Croatia, I believe, on that molecule. And that patent is, I think, the last three more years. Why would you go spend a billion to $3 billion to try and bring a drug to market that already has a patent? The other issue with, it is a short-chain amino acid peptide found readily in nature. And patent law makes it very difficult to patent what is naturally found in nature. And that is why the big pharmaceutical companies are struggling with their patents on the GLP-1s. They have patented dosaging and delivery mechanisms. They're not arguing against the patent. If you look at the lawsuits that they filed nationwide, they're arguing against people advertising.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  They're arguing against some of the things people shouldn't be doing, rightfully so. But they're not arguing against the patent.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Let me ask you this. So, just imagine, and I don't think this is a good idea, but imagine, if only pharmaceutical drug companies were allowed to make peptides, would they just become legal?

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, what would happen?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  They would be a giant business.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  It'd be a giant business, and it is going to be a giant business.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  The price would raise a little bit. But also, the availability would skyrocket, and you would start seeing commercials on CNN. "BPC 157 helps soft tissue injuries. Helps this, helps that." Then you'd show fit people at the beach jogging.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:42Joe Rogan?

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• 35:27Joe Rogan?

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• 36:12Joe Rogan?

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• 36:35Speaker 03

  And I agree with you, but the fear, and this is what I'm trying, I'm viewing it as there's three options, and these are the three things that I've seen. There's the traditional system, the sick care system. That system is controlled by insurance, big pharmaceutical companies, and regulators. Whether intentional or unintentional, this system was cooked. It's been cooked and baked for a long time, and it is the system that it is. And we know where that system got us. That system got us to 1.7 to 1.9 million Americans dying every year of chronic disease, more than every world war we've ever fought. It's got us to be the most obese and disease-riddled society in the history of humanity, and we spend more on healthcare than any other nation. So that's one option.

• 37:19Joe Rogan?

  Just that.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  And then we go...

• 37:20Joe Rogan?

  Just those facts are so crazy.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  It's nuts. And to think that to ask questions or to challenge that system is wrong, and that's where I am. So, again, I'm not, I'm not sitting here... I'm not trying to make this political because I really am not, I don't care conservative, Democrat, Republican, chronic disease doesn't care about your political leanings. It doesn't care. Like, disease and death comes for all of us. And my goal is how do we prevent it? How do we delay it? How do we drive health span? You don't do it playing whack-a-mole and treating the symptoms of a chronic disease. You get proactive, predictive, and preventative. And how do you do that? Well, you've got to be able to run diagnostic tests and tools. Well, the insurance companies shut that down and make that really hard to do.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  And so, in the healthcare system that exists today, in the insurance model, prescription management is the main goal of, of those models. And, and I've, I've said this time and time again, you've got to view health insurance in America like car insurance. It's there if you wreck the car. We are great at triaging and treating a catastrophic event. Heart attack, stroke, hospitals. You're in there, something catastrophic happens, we can triage that disaster and we can get you in and out of the hospital. We are absolutely an abysmal failure at preventing chronic disease and driving health span.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  And the only way to do that is to get proactive and predictive and personalized. And this entire ecosystem's just not built to do that. And so, my, my message and what I'm trying to work for is so much bigger than peptides. I don't want to die on the peptide hill fighting for this because it is a small sliver of what could be our healthcare establishment, right? When we look at biologics, when we look at gene activation, all of these different modalities that are on the table, large language models, artificial intelligence, tracking data in real time. We have the ability to truly drive health span now. If I have your genetic sequencing and your blood work and your biomarkers and your DEXA

• 39:33Speaker 03

  and your VO2 max and I put all that into the AI algorithm and we begin to track you in real time in your 30s, we are going to know years before a chronic disease ever shows up on your doorstep. The cancer that you get in your 40s started in your 30s. You know, the diabetes you get in your 30s started in your 20s. All of this is preventable. All of this is preventable through diet, lifestyle and nutrition. We're not under prescribed. I think that's pretty abundantly clear. The average American is on four or more prescription drugs. Like, we can't prescribe our way out of this. Is that a real number? Yes. The average American is on four or more prescription drugs? And which is insane. And it is because we're a prescription-first society, right?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  And we've covered this before, so I hate to beat a dead horse, but like when a primary care has six minutes on average with a patient and they're limited in what tests they can do and what diagnostic tools they can run and a woman comes in and says, hey, I'm 40 pounds overweight, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm sad, I'm all these things. Their first move is to go, okay, well, we got to get your cholesterol under control. We got to get your insulin under control. I'm going to put you on a weight loss drug. Let's put you on a GLP-1. And they push him out the door and they probably put him on an antidepressant because those are the tools in their tool belt. But if you were to come into a longevity-based clinic, we're going to run you through a battery of diagnostics. So many men come in depressed, you're not really, it's not, not to trivialize your depression.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  It isn't that you're depressed, it's that you have a hormonal imbalance and your hormones are so wrecked that you're obese. Are you obese because your hormones are wrecked or are your hormones wrecked because you're obese? You know, sometimes that's going to take a nuanced approach and time to uncover, but we do know we can fix that, you know? And we know that through fixing those things, there's going to be a cascade of benefits that lead into other areas of your life, like Jelly Roll is a prime example. If he were to go to a primary care, they would have immediately put him on a GLP-1. He's 500 pounds, you know? Right. And they would have put him on a battery of drugs. When Jell-O came to us, it was like, we're gonna make this simple. We gotta fix your insulin, we gotta fix your hormones. That's it. We're gonna get your estrogen under control, we're gonna get your insulin under control,

• 41:46Speaker 03

  we're gonna get your inflammation under control, we're gonna put wins on the board, and we're gonna methodically walk you through this. Because people think that, this is the other challenge even where I was going earlier, even in the longevity space, the preventative care space, it's already becoming what Big Pharma was. And this is one of my really big heartburn. You've got two pathways. See, the first, the three pathways, the first is the traditional system. The second is the cash pay model. Okay, well, that's kind of merging into two different arenas. You've got the Peter Attia's 100 something thousand dollars to be my client that only the richest Americans can afford, and you're gonna get top-tier care, and I'm gonna provide concierge medicine.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Well, 99.99% of America can't afford that. And then you've got the Hems of the world that are going the route of a pill mill. Like candidly, they're, it isn't about quality of care, it isn't about helping patients solve a problem, it's about monetizing a medication and putting a weight loss drug or a peptide as fast as possible in that patient's hands so you can monetize the patient. To me, that's no bigger, different than Big Pharma. And so my vision for the future is, how do we combine the best of both worlds? How do we take that nuanced concierge care, make it affordable, make it scalable, and make it truly drive health span? I, I don't think the issue is the arrow, the issue is the archer.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  It's the people controlling these systems and always trying to make it about money and quarterly earnings and an exit and a strategy. But if you pivot and you make it about people, and you make it about how do we help this person? The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. And Jelly is a perfect example. If you were in a traditional model, he would come in and you would sell him a weight loss drug, and that's the end of your journey with him. You get him on a weight loss drug and you hope for the best and you push him out the door. In our model, we're there to be a passenger alongside you, using large language models, wearables, and all the things we're bringing into the business to track, diagnose, and optimize where you're at in real time.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  So in real time, we're able to capture, how are you trending? We even added a scale that ties into the app that'll allow you to manage your, not just your BMI, but literally almost like a DEXA with like a 1% to 2% variability rate. We can tell you how much lean fat, how much visceral fat, how much subcutaneous fat. And anyone who's a member gets that scale, scans it into the app. That combined with your VO2 max, if you come into the clinic, we can cross-reference it with a DEXA. The app will do its own algorithms to see how different it is. And now in real time, from your home, you can track all these modalities. And you can track how you're trending on more than just blood work.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Like to me, everyone, again, when I came on here, whatever, I think it was five years ago by now, Joe, nobody was doing cash-paid blood work. Now, everybody's doing cash-paid blood work, and I think it's great. But it isn't the Holy Grail. That's just one marker in a sea of markers. One diagnostic measuring stick in a sea of diagnostic measuring sticks. So the future for me is, how do we make it affordable? And how do we make this where everyone can afford it? One of the things we're gonna do is put our money where our mouth is. You're gonna be able to load your blood work from anywhere. I don't care if you got it at your doctor, your primary care, if you got it from Hims, if you got it from Function Health, doesn't matter. If you want a nuanced approach and help on your healthcare journey, not the first step,

• 45:25Speaker 03

  you took the first step, you did the blood work. Now, what do you do with that data? What do you do with that information? Even in the longevity space, where I was going with that is so many companies are trying to, let me monetize this blood work, let me monetize this test, let me monetize this peptide. But what we should be asking is, how do I help this patient? How do I help this person? Because if you help that person, they tell the fucking world.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  I think the problem is, like, you're an actual good dude. You're an actual good person. And

• 45:58Speaker 03

  I'm trying. There's a lot of days I don't know.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  But you are. I know. I've known you for a long time now. And you really are doing what you're saying. I know you could be making a whole lot more money than you're making. And I know you're not money driven. But that's not the business of healthcare. That's not the business of all these different companies. When they exist, especially if they're public, if these are public companies. They have an obligation to their shareholders. They have to maximize their profits. And, you know, it's so fucking hippie to say this. The root of all evil. It's, it's real.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  I mean, that is a real thing. Like, there's nothing wrong with money. But there is wrong with the motivation that comes with money. That you put money above everything else. I mean, I know Waste to Well is doing great, and I know you're making plenty of money. But most companies are only trying to do that. Whereas you are trying, legitimately trying to make people. But I know, I see the look on your face when people get better.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  I love this.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  I know you do.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  I really love it. And like Denise and I said from day one, I've known Denise, I mean, 20 something years, man. And when we started this, I, she's my Jimmy Cricket. Because even if I ever wanted to make it about money, she's never making it. She's such a patient care advocate. And, and I said, and she said, if we always make this about people, there's going to be days we lose, there's going to be days we win. But if we always make it about people, if we make people our northern star, that is our secret sauce. And it doesn't mean we're perfect. Like, look, every time I come on here, we get blasted because we grow so fast. And it's a blessing, and I can't thank you enough, but, you know, you can't onboard 20,000 people overnight, and then people are like, oh, you guys suck.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Y'all are like everybody. And it's like, no, man, we just, even as we're growing, I'm, this is again back to that dogma of like, how are companies like Hems scaling nationwide? They're PE-backed. BlackRock is one of their biggest investors. Hems is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, marketing firm. They're not a compounding facility. They're not a medical practice with brick and mortar clinics that are trying to truly innovate and that are into things like biologics and plasmapheresis and all the things that we're trying to do. I can't compete with the scalability of that, but what I can compete with and I can destroy is the quality. Because if we provide quality care and we make sure that we scale at a level that is

• 48:28Speaker 03

  true and holds integrity to the patient relationship, that's one of the biggest things I saw. I even came on here and there's things that I've gotten wrong. I thought the fastest way to scale and to meet the needs of the American people is AI. And I still believe that. But where I got it wrong and where I think the nuance is important is I've had this epiphany, AI is a tool. But like all the other tools, at the end of the day, everything always starts with people. Everything. The entire human experience doesn't exist without people. So like, there is never going to be anything more meaningful to a person than another human supporting them, caring for them, and being in their corner.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  And that is the importance of a clinician relationship. And having clinicians that are employees of an institution, not hourly people who are paid to hop on a call and on a Monday they're pulling babies and on a Tuesday they're a testosterone expert. That is what a lot of these telemedicine companies are now. And it may provide accessibility, but is that optimal care? Is that preventative care? Or are we back to that same conundrum of, how do we make a quick buck? How do we get this guy on a bunch of peptides or girl on a bunch of peptides and we push them out the door? And that is one of the challenges of even this emerging market, is people are compromising pretty quickly. And even this market, I see the flaws. And those flaws are going to bring out the naysayers.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  And those naysayers are going to use the bad actors and the bad examples to crucify the industry. And I'm banging the drum a lot against Hims right now, but I tried explaining this to Secretary Kennedy Administration. Hims did a Super Bowl ad where they made claims and they used the, literally the GLP-1 brand name of Novo Nordisk drug. And violated the law. And I, and I told the administration, there is no way that a multi-billion dollar conglomerate would make this mistake. This is the equivalent to somebody coming into your living room and taking a dump on your dining room table and you assuming that it was an accident. How did they violate the law? What'd they do?

• 50:39Speaker 03

  You're not allowed to, uh, so when you're compounding a medication, you have to use the compounded name, the generic name, not the, the molecule's name, not the brand name. So it'd be like saying, we have Kleenex for cheaper than Kleenex, right? And we have the exact same compound. It's technically, is it the same molecule? In theory, yes, but in marketing, one, you're not supposed to market, uh, if you're, if you're compounding, you're not supposed to market direct to consumers like Big Pharma does. So there's a lot of like guidelines. They spent the money, they got the patent, all of this. The reason that's important is that Trojan horse was set. It created an extreme backlash from regulators, both senators, congressmen, congresswomen,

• 51:24Speaker 03

  politicians from all different walks of life, came out saying, this is unacceptable. All of these people making black market peptides and GLP-1s and marketing direct to our consumers and violating patent laws and infringing upon these pharmaceutical companies. All of that shakes out. Statements made by all these varying politicians. And then what happens within a week? Hems inks a deal with Novo Nordisk to bring the pharmaceutical drug to their practice and have a sole source agreement. So they, they set a landmine in the middle of all compounders. And I'm trying to explain to the administration, you gotta understand, they're not a compounding, they're a multi-billion dollar marketing firm. There's no way this was an oversight or a mistake.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  This was by design. And then what happened is the largest run, probably in the, I don't even, in the last decade of any stock price, uh, Hems is shot through the roof because they inked the deal with Novo and said, now we're going to provide you with the, uh, brand name of the drug after they had set this landmine off in the middle of all of these compounders. And so the reason that's important, Joe, is There are bad actors doing things that I think are doing them by design to damage the industry and to create a battle cry and a resistance against the folks who are trying to follow the rules and navigate a very narrow pathway forward where these peptides and these treatment modalities are available to the public.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  All the while, while they have an agreement with this pharmaceutical drug company.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  You got it. The deal was done within two weeks.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  So the backlash came, a huge uproar against, and this is, the reason this is so important is I was literally doing calls with the administration to go, hey, I get why Big Pharma would be upset, and they should be. And I get why you, the administration, would be upset, and you should be. But please do not punish an entire industry sector for one bad actor. And at the time, I was scratching my head going, this just doesn't make sense. Why would they do this? They're gonna get hammered. They will not win this in the court of law. This is a terrible idea. None of it's adding up.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  So the deal must have already been in place.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  And then a week later, they make this announcement, and the stock roars. And, you know, everyone goes, oh, congrats, Hims. And it's like, no, this was, I, and we'll find out, because there is, there's a huge class action lawsuit now, an antitrust lawsuit that's going on. I think Lee Rosebush and his firm brought it forward. He's a, a guy who's academically trained, I think ran the clinic at the Mayo Clinic, ran the lab. He's a pharmacist, he's a law degree, all of these things. And he's in this industry and in this sector. And he's asking a lot of questions. And I think his firm filed a lawsuit against Hims to try and uncover what really happened there.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  But even if it does get uncovered, what's gonna change? No one's gonna pay attention.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  It'll, you know, it'll be a blurb in the news. It won't even be in the news.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  You know, it'll be online somewhere.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Well, the main reason I want to give that tidbit of information is regulators and politicians are looking and going, God, man, yeah, these guys did bad things. No, the guys that were doing the bad things already inked their backroom deal and rode off into the sunset. So now what is left for the rest of the industry and where does this go? And that's a slippery Slope and again, separate from peptides, separate from compounds. You get into the whole world of biologics and the future of biologics and stem cells. And creating a regulatory pathway. And again, Secretary Kennedy, he tweeted this, I think before or right when he took over. Save your back, save your records and pack your bags. Your war on stem cells and peptides are over. And I, I can tell you from my meetings now further down the Rhine with the FDA.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  I have just a more, I mean, I hate to concede, but I have a more nuanced lens on. They're trying to navigate an absolute nightmare of regulatory landscape. Of, you know, the lobbying power, the impression, the, the half baked truths. Where does the truth lie? Well, this is how this entire system's built. Well, this is what we know. Well, we don't really know cash pay. Well, we don't really, right? The whole model is get a drug approved. It costs billions of dollars. Now we've got to lock in that patent. Now we've got to let these companies make a bunch of money on it because they innovated it. And we've got to get it on insurance formularies, Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  That's a whole fundamental different when you're talking about even like shelf peptides for a second and say stem cell therapy. My whole mission statement on all of this is to build a life raft. Right? Henry Ford said it. If we would have asked, if he would have asked clients what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Right? I'm not going to the FDA going, guys, how do we solve this problem? I think the FDA has enough of their own problems, just trying to manage the system the way it is. My vision is you build a life raft. You build a life raft parallel to the existing, much like Uber did with taxis. And you let this go this way and you dry drag race it against this way. And let's see who can prevent chronic disease. Well, the problem is it killed taxis. That was a bad example.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Well, I think, well, and the question is which model is going to be better for humanity? And which model is going to take cost out of the system? And so I would tell a regulator, a congressman, a congresswoman, anybody who will listen. Guys, my model costs you nothing. I'm not asking for taxpayer dollars. I'm not asking. Asking for any sort of indication where I can bill insurance companies or I can bill Medicare, Medicaid, or TRICARE. What I'm asking the federal government to do is to trust the sacred relationship of a clinician and a patient and to allow a patient to have sovereignty and autonomy over their health. If I'm Brett Favre and I'm diagnosed with an advanced stage of Parkinson's disease and

• 57:15Speaker 03

  it's a kiss of death, why would I want to wait 10 years for something to make it through the FDA approval process that could change or save my life today? And if I have the means to pay for those things and the accessibility in a clinician who thinks that they have an answer to slow or help potentially improve the progression of a chronic disease or an ailment, I just don't think the government should stand in the way of that.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  And the reality is that the momentum of the current healthcare system is so strong that the vast majority of Americans are going to use that anyway.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  It's not like it's going to completely disrupt the system. Like, most people, like, I mean, how many people are listening to this? You know, I mean, it's still a small percentage of just America.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  The vast majority of people are just going to trust their doctor and they're going to do what they've always done. They're not going to be aware and it's going to be business as usual and those companies are still going to grow.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  It's just they're so greedy, they want all of it.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Like by saying they're losing $7 billion. How much did you make?

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:22Joe Rogan?

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• 59:07Joe Rogan?

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• 59:28Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? Well, that was my point, like so. Right, they're not losing any money. If you give those, if you give those bad facts to a politician or a regulator, they go, oh my god. Right. They cost you 7 billion. You made 800 billion dollars. Your market cap is 8, you 7xed your company. Novo Nordisk 3 or 4xed their company. In a literally a three-year timeframe. These are some of the most rich and powerful companies in the world. Your patent worked. It worked. It upheld. You prevented regulatory landscape from coming in and people taking a piece of your pie. In fact, I would argue it worked too well, you know, in a way, like.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  So to over-regulate based off, and that's, that's the argument with the GLP-1s in one bucket. My argument, you know, for allowing compounders to continue to make these patient-specific. Or you need to allow patients to be able to titrate up and titrate down and avoid catastrophic muscle wasting. What about patients who have allergies? What about the next time these things go on a backlog? What about a patient who maybe can't handle the delivering mechanism? I mean, there's dozens of different reasons why you would want to provide an alternative life raft. Can you explain the titrate up and titrate down thing? Yeah, so historically, the GLP-1s came in preset dosages. Right.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  And so patients did not have a way to titrate up or down. And so a lot of clinicians who wanted to micro-dose would use a compounding pharmacy to prescribe those medications and allow patients more flexibility on how they dose their GLP-1. Because some of the catastrophic side effects come from a large dose. Correct. Now, as this thing evolves, the question becomes, where do we go with this? Right? Because essentially, most compounding has shut down GLP-1s, 503Bs, which B stands for bulk, like, big mass production, I can sell big bulk items to hospitals or to clinics. The government's come in and said, they're not allowed to make the weight loss drugs

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  anymore. So it's now limited down to just 503As, which are patient-specific, which is like what I do, like, we make medications unique to the patient, personalized medicine. And so that's a much more niche percentage of the market. And, again, even that, you're talking in the heyday, maybe $2 billion for the whole industry, right? On a company that's, you know, worth $800 billion in 7X their revenue, everything's gonna be okay. Like, everyone's gonna be okay. Patients had accessibility and affordability. And I think the battle cry from the big pharmaceutical companies is a little misleading, if you don't know the nuances of all of this.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  So, what do you think is the best way forward? If you were in charge of regulating?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  There is an issue with accessibility, and there's an issue with black market.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Right? There's an issue with people buying peptides online that are not even what they say they are. Like, there's certain peptides that have a physiological response when you take them, like, CJC ipimorlin, you can feel it when you take it.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  I know people that have bought stuff online, they say, "I don't think this stuff is legit, because it's not doing anything once I take it. I don't feel that..." You know that weird flushing response?

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  They don't feel it at all. And they've asked me for advice.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  No, I love that you had... Because I actually had the privilege of giving this, you know, message to Marty McCary at the FDA, and also Chris Klump, who have been receptive to at least hearing the other side of the equation. And to be clear, when it comes to peptides, Chris, Marty, Stephanie, Spear, Bobby, all of them are aligned. Like, peptides, I'm being told are done, it's just a matter of when. I don't have that timeline, but it's a huge win. Because it goes so much bigger. I cannot stress, Joe, how close...

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Preventative longevity-based medicine was to being done. Because if you shut down all compounders throughout the country, and they've already gone after the black and gray market, the FBI has shown up at these people's doors.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  And if Kennedy wasn't the secretary, and if the Maha movement hadn't started.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  It's over.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  It's over.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  It's over.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  So if Kamala Harris wins.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  It's over.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  And on that note, even here in Texas, this is where this is crazy. I've gotten to know several of the congressmen, congresswomen. Lacey Hall's a congresswoman here in Texas. Senator Colehurst, I believe she's over the healthcare committee for the Senate. Senator Colehurst was looking at forming her own FDA for Texas. That's how serious that was getting because they knew that of everything that's happened, where this would continue to head, and states were looking to potentially hedge their bet to protect their state citizens from the federal guidelines that could be restrictive or preventative for care. Which is crazy to think. So when I laid this out for Marty,

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  one of the things I explained were that here's what the naysayers will say. We don't want it to be the Wild West. You're going to grandfather in peptides and give people accessibility to peptides, and that would be the Wild West. And my answer to that is, we are living in the Wild West. Today is the most dangerous time it has ever been in the history of peptides. Peptides have grown legs. The cat's out of the bag. Everyone knows what they were. They got a taste of the efficacy and the benefits. And patients aren't going to stop using them. So right now, four out of five peptides being filled are being filled through gray or black market solutions. When Eli Lilly and Novo throw out a $7 billion number, where they're cooking the books, is they're not telling legislators

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  that a lot of that is gray and black market. Four out of five. Meaning there is no clinician in the chain of custody.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  The majority.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  The majority.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Majority of this cookbook $7 billion is black market.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Correct. And again. Even in the black market. Aren't even real. And yes, and I want to be clear, I'm not, even in the black market, I know, and I've validation tested and done independent validation testing of a lot of these companies, and some of them are efficacious, some of them are real, and some of them are not. What is the percentage, roughly? Um, a large percentage is off, like, and sometimes dosed higher, you know, so think about if you were to get like a GLP-1 and you're injecting a dosage that's toux what it should be, right, you could have muscle wasting or all sorts of catastrophic events. And this is just because of a lack of regulation? Correct, there's no regulation, there's no regulation, there's no oversight, and

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  these companies attempt to operate through a loophole, and that loophole is they claim it's for non-human use. Um, I actually had a call with a really prominent peptide company and their CEO who's an Ivy League guy, and I get on the phone with this guy and he's wanting to huff and puff and tell me how I don't know what I'm talking about, and that he's safe, and that he has written legal opinions, and that he knows what he's allowed to do and not allowed to do, and I said, "Well, I can tell you from history, what I've seen, you are using influencers to advertise for human use. You say on your label, 'non-human use,' but the second somebody has an adverse event, and has something catastrophic happen,

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  ODs or dies, the DOJ is going to show up on your door, and when they do, they're going to subpoena you, and when they do, they're going to uncover that you were paying influencers to advertise these products for human use while putting on the label they're for non-human use. So you were knowingly and willingly circumventing the safety and the laws of the land to push a illegal compound into a marketplace. I'm just telling you how this is going to play out, I'm not hoping this for anybody, and this was about eight months ago, and now it's happened. Now the FBI has shown up at multiple gray and black market peptide facilities, if we're being honest, it's 100% because of Reddetrutide, the next

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  blockbuster GLP-1 that is in the works, uh, and- Did you explain that? Yeah, so Reda True Tide is a triple agonist being developed by Eli Lilly. And so it hits three different receptor sites. It has less muscle wasting, much better safety profile, lower side effect profile, but people drop substantial amounts of body fat. And that drug is not on the market. It has not made it through phase three trials. It's not commercially available. So we got a letter as a compounding pharmacy, under the FDA guidelines, telling us it is illegal if you make this and we will come after you. So we've never made it because we're a compounding pharmacy that has to follow the laws of the

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  land because the state and the federal government inspect us. Right before we came on, I was telling you, the FDA has been in our building five times in four years. The states have been in my building every year and I'm in 47 states. So almost every state, we're literally in an inspection all the time. There are plenty of safety nets. We independently third-party verify every dosage. We buy API from what's called the green list. The green list is a list established by the FDA that tells us you can buy these pharmaceutical ingredients from these ingredient manufacturers.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  What does API stand for?

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  It's pharmaceutical ingredients. It's just the base product used to compound a medication. None of those checks and balances happen in the gray and black market. Again, it's not saying that all those guys are bad or that their product's bad. But regardless-

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  They're not regulated.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  100%. There's no regulation, there's no checks and balances.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  So at the very least, leaves the door open.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Correct. It leaves the door open and if I am a patient who wants to get on a weight loss drug and I can just buy it online and not have to go to a doctor and not have to go to a clinic and get blood work and I can just buy it, there's no doctor, there's no pharmacist, it's drop shipped to my house. What's even scarier though, is there's no dosing instructions. There's no way to reconstitute it. There's no explanation of how to reconstitute. Because once they're teaching you how to reconstitute and mix it, they're taking part in medical administration. And so these companies have avoided all of that. And people were using things like ChatGPT. But now ChatGPT and all the large language models have shut that down.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  So now what you have is American people buying random product online with no guidance, no oversight, no clinician in the chain of custody, no, no checks and balances, no state or federal regulators. We are living in the Wild West. So my message to Marty and if you want to fix this, how you fix it is you bring back where we were prior to the mistake of the Biden administration where they pulled these peptides from the market with no, no safety data that can support their actions. And you put it back in the hands of trained clinicians. You require people to go through the process where they have a clinician and a pharmacist

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  and a compounding pharmacy under the right guidelines regulating the space. Because we know peptides are safe. Like they are safe. They're 200 peptides are found naturally occurring in the human body. These are raw elements that are readily available in nature. The question is sterility, efficacy and safety. And through the proper checks and balances, we can minimize most of those side effect profiles and optimize positive outcomes. But it requires restoring, restoring law and order to the land and implementing things the way they were before the mistake happened. And that, that's all I've been trying to argue. There's a way to fix this.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  And if you do that overnight, as much as I hate to say this, you make these big pharmaceutical companies ecstatic because you just got rid of four out of five weight loss drugs that were being filled with no clinician. And you do push it in a way back to the traditional system with the checks and balances that these regulatory bodies are so worried about. And the only argument against that is, well, peptides don't have enough robust human clinical trials with safety data. And then you go down that topic and I'm like, guys, you do realize, like we said, like 60 to 80% of drugs have a major label change. These are the drugs that make it through. Separate from that, every product that's in the operating room, I've covered this every

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  time I've been on here. Every single, 90% of the products in the operating room never had a human safety study. They were all brought in through the 510K approval process. Doctors are using things every day in practice that are either off-label, or not validation tested, or have no human safety studies. It is commonplace in medicine every day. So to make it this big to-do that all of a sudden it's dangerous, the most dangerous time we're living in is right now with no checks and balances. If we get this done, you've now built a regulatory pathway that provides affordability, accessibility, personalized medicine, predictive care. It is such a big win beyond a peptide.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  Because it candidly saves the industry. I can tell you, owning clinic, owning a telemedicine company, owning all of these things, none of that machine works if we can't create products that help people. Right? And so, quality, products that are available without quality are even worse than quality products that aren't available. You know, and those were our two options right now. It's like, they can't get a quality product, and then we can't sell the quality product. But this change will allow us to sell safe and quality products with the proper checks and balances. And it also builds a regulatory pathway that I think sets us up for long-term success with things like stem cells.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  Well, it seems like such a reasonable concession. You cut out the black market, you regulate stem cells, and you regulate peptides, you regulate everything that's being done through compound pharmacies, everybody wins.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  I agree. That's the message that I've had, and I think that's where we're headed.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  The pharmaceutical drug companies want everybody to win.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  They want only them to win.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  So, any profit that you make, or any compounding pharmacy make, in their mind... Is stolen from them.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:14:24Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Which is wild.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that is the big challenge is the future of this regulatory pathway. And that's where I wanted to get into the state. And this is something that what we saw with the food lobby. When we testified at the state level for the food program, for the SNAP program, for the school lunch program, trying to align the state with the new goal of the food pyramid and the new food guidelines and get back to eating real food, healthy food, instead of feeding kids crap all day in school, the states picked up the torch and ran with it faster than the federal government did. And the reason that's important is we've now learned the offense. Texas passed the bills, three different bills around food and food

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  initiatives and label changes and protecting children. Arizona followed suit. I think Florida followed. Multiple states followed suit, which creates a trade win that allows the federal government to pick up what state legislators have done and mirror those bills. So I say that because I am already working at the state level to do the same thing here in Texas. So my hope is that the federal government and the FDA get this done with peptides. And then the next step would be can we do the same thing with biologics and stem cells, which are amazing tools in the tool belt to drive health span and help prevent chronic disease. The state of Texas is already raring to go. So the state of Texas passed the Compassionate

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  Use Act, which says if you have a chronic disease or any sort of chronic health issue, you have the right to try. So the reason, it's almost like marijuana law, without getting too nuanced. The states, if you have a clinic within the state and you manufacture the product within the state or compound within the state, in theory, you can administer within the state. And even if the FDA has a different stance on it, the state can have its guidelines and you can fall within the rules and regulations of the state and still honor and respect the rules of the land. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. So Texas did this. Utah did this. Florida did this. And I just testified

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  in Arizona two weeks ago on the stem cell bill in Arizona. Senator Janay Shump called me and said, can you come out and help testify? And can we do what you guys have done in Florida and some of these other states? And right now, it passed through the House and it's on to the Senate and the Senate will most likely pass this bill. And so I say all that to go, the states right now are able to move faster and more nimble than the federal government and the states are building safety nets and checks and balances that will still allow patient accessibility at the state level. The problem then becomes if we can get the federal government to follow these same guidelines and we've also submitted, we submitted a citizen's petition to the FDA around stem

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  cells that basically mirrors the Florida law. And the whole message is exactly what you and I have just covered. Guys, these things are safe. The risk of an adverse event is minimal. If it is an adverse event, it's flu-like symptoms and it impacts basically 10 to 15% of people. All of the major adverse events you've been told about stem cells come from improper chain of command, improper chain of custody, and improper checks and balances. How do you fix that? You fix that through creating a regulatory pathway with proper checks and balances, proper chain of custody, and a clinician involved in the chain of command. If we do those things, you are going to be able to provide patients with affordable,

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  accessible care of products that work, that are safe, while the federal government can work through, do we make this a billable product down the road? Do we build this into the insurance model? For me to go fight to build this into the insurance model is a monumental task that I don't have the bandwidth to take on. And I also think it's the wrong move. I really do. I don't want to be part of that model. I want to build a life raft that allows patients to make decisions. And the second you put this in an insurance model or a government payer model, everybody is castrated. The decisions are made at the insurance level and at the government level and it just becomes this nuanced, challenging thing. Like, an example is...

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Stem cells historically, one of the uses for purified amniotic was burn victims, right, or wound management in diabetics. So what happened? Orthopedic surgeons started billing wound injuries in order to get paid from the insurance companies on an ACL. Well, that only takes a year, six months, before the insurance companies ring the bell and go, wait a second, dude. This person billed us a million dollars on wound management and they're an orthopedic surgeon. What is going on? Right? You just committed insurance fraud. And now you've created this counterculture movement against stem cells and purified amniotic and all of these products. And that's what happened in real time. So a lot of what we're living is the continual dogma of this broken ass system.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  And it creates this trade win that doesn't die. I mean, this was a decade ago and now none of this stuff's covered from insurance, none of it has an FDA indication, and all of it's kind of put in this gray no man's land, even though it's used in practices every day throughout the country. And now you can legally use these treatments in states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, soon to be Arizona, and Utah. And so there is hope because at the state level, it's moving. I do believe Secretary Kennedy and Chris Clump and Marty are very open minded and receptive to this. They're very progressive and they do see the challenges of this system. Marty covers it in his book, like I said.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  So I'm more optimistic than ever that we are going to get, if we get peptides done, the next step is to begin to work the citizen's petition to see if we can do the same thing for these biologics and make these things affordable and accessible for everybody.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  And the thing that's helping the momentum, I think, is that so many people know people that have had stem cell treatment and have had amazing results, like with injuries that they just couldn't recover from.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  And unfortunately, some of them had to go to Panama and had to go to Tijuana and Colombia and all these different places where it's legal.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  And that's, yeah, I can't tell you how many people that I've talked to that have an injury and say, hey, I'm thinking about going to Tijuana. What do you think? And I say, it'll help you 100%. I've talked to my dad, he went. I talked to my uncle, my grandma went, this person went, that person went. They had results that they never achieved doing any other things. Why is this not available here? I'm like, oh, man, it's a long story.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  I can't even start this conversation. I have to go.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  Well, and what's amazing, though, is I'm telling you, we're, we, having got to know Senator Colhurst and Lacy Hall, the representative here, we'll get it done in Texas. Like, it's coming. It's the new bill that we're going to submit in January. I feel confident that we will expand upon the existing legislation around patient right to choose. Because I think it's important to begin to hedge against the power of Big Pharma and to try to build out a model with peptides and other things that we include in this bill at the state level, just in case. You know, just in case, not even this administration. I feel very confident this administration is going to get a lot of these things done.

• 1:23:40Speaker 03

  But then what happens as soon as there's a change in power down the road? And how many years can you fight this lobby? Right? It's still alive and well. It's not going anywhere. But I think it's crucial that we fight for sovereignty and autonomy over our health and continue to push. I can tell you, at the state level, I'm very, very bullish that it will happen. And what Florida saw is a $300 million infusion of cash into the state of Florida, built all around this. Because it's now a medical tourism destination. And that's my message to these senators and congressmen and congresswomen in Texas is, we have a legitimate opportunity to do what you did with the food bill and the Maha

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  movement around these initiatives, to drive home these same initiatives on longevity and preventative base care in the state of Texas. We have an opportunity to turn Texas into a medical tourism destination. Can you imagine how many people would visit Austin if we truly do build a proper regulatory pathway with all the checks and balances where people can confidently fly down here and know that they can get these treatments?

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  And not have to have a passport.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  I mean, because this is what's going on. This is why people are going to Panama and all these other places.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  They mean, they, they're desperate, and so they're willing to leave the country.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. A hundred percent.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  It would be a way easier to just hop on a Southwest flight, come to Austin, pretty easy.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  Lot easier and it should be available. And what's really amazing to me with the Maha movement is watching people scramble to find some sort of narrative as to what they're doing is dangerous, or what they're doing is bad, or what they're doing is somehow or another not the way we should be going. Ignoring those facts that you laid out. We are the wealthiest country in the world. We are the sickest country in the world. We've never had more money. We've never been more sick.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  We've never spent more on healthcare. We've never been more fucked up.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  At one point in time, does someone say, hey, this system sucks?

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  And but they don't want to. They don't want, they resist this radical change and this appeal to authority. These people that are in control of all these various organizations, they know what they're doing. They are the experts. We should trust them. They fucked this whole thing up. How are you trusting them still? When, what you just said with sixty to eighty percent of them have either major label changes or have the products removed. You think about all the different adverse side effects that are very, very well known from various pharmaceutical drugs. All these different things. How many times does this have to happen before you just want to rip the Band-Aid off? And do something different?

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  It's, it's tough because, and people misunderstand, I think they misunderstand even what you and I are saying. Because I hear so often people going, okay, it's a conspiracy theory. They want to keep you fat and sick and monetize chronic disease. And there's malicious intent. I'm like, no. What I'm telling you is this system was born in captivity. It's broken. There's special interests that are able to influence accessibility and affordability of care. Those decisions have cataclysmic, cataclysmic effects on our health as a nation and on our national security. How many men can even qualify for military service right now?

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  Seventy-one percent of young kids can't qualify for military service.

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  It's, it's nut. And then you look at how many can't even do, I think, I don't remember what the number, it was something staggering. Like the average American can't do two pull-ups or something like that. And then you see Secretary Kennedy rattling off twenty something pull-ups at the airport. Which is nuts. But it's not that, I'm not saying anyone-

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  It's not a conspiracy. It's just, they are extracting enormous amounts of money. They don't want to stop extracting enormous amounts of money. They want the system to remain as place, in place as is. Because it's very profitable for them. But it's just not good for us.

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  And it doesn't mean it can't be profitable still.

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  It's just you have to have a workable, functional model that benefits the American people and benefits health.

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  I agree. And that's where I'm like, guys, we don't have to, I'm not saying, if you want to run this system the way you're running it, and reform it where you can, I get that. But I also think there's an immense value in building a life raft, just in case. Just in case, why is there any pushback to building a cash pay model? With a pathway that allows patients to access medications with their own hard earned cash?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Preventative healthcare instead of sick care.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  You got it.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Sick care that is perpetual and never ending. And ultimately leads to a catastrophic series of side effects.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  You got it. And I tell people, the difference is with a peptide or something preventative, you're coming in and we're optimizing you. Right? So, you know, I've taken things like Dihexa. You know, for me personally, I'm not advertising this for other people and, but it's like, it 100% improved my neurocognitive function. It 100% improved my data recall and retention. It moved the needle. And I'm paying with my cash to use something that is doctor prescribed. And why do I need anyone else's approval for that? I understand the need to protect the American public with safety. And that's where I think improving safety is important. But the second part of the equation with the FDA is approving efficacy.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  And approving efficacy, unfortunately with the model, is a multi-billion dollar process.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Those checks and balances are crucial when you do a set it and forget it healthcare system. What do I mean by that? You put somebody on Lipitor and the doctor doesn't see them for another year and that patient is blindly trusting that clinician. That is the insurance model. The cash pay model is an educated patient, patient who's taking their health into their own hands and you better believe me when I say if you don't put a win on the board, they're gonna fire your ass. Cause it's their money. Nobody's gonna take a peptide month after month after month if they don't think it's doing anything. Right. Because they're using their money, not taxpayers money, not an employer's money. Right?

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  The checks and balances are there through the consumer market because it's, it has more integrity than the traditional model. Because this is the only model where if you don't produce for the patient, you're fired. You can't fire your clinician in the insurance model because the insurance model tells you where to go. And this is important, sorry, I'm ADHD, but I'm thinking about this. One of the things that a regulator mentioned to me was, again, I hate to keep bringing up these big pharmaceutical companies, but they were lobbying saying, there's a problem. Guys like Brigham, they'll own the pharmacy, but then they also own clinics and that's vertical integration and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's not fair to a patient. Hold on. If you understand the law of the land, the patient has the right to take their prescription

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  wherever they want. Even if they come two ways to well, we may prescribe it and we send it to me, to my pharmacy because we compete on price and I'm going to make this as cost effective and as beneficial to the patient as possible. If I can't compete in an open market and make this affordable and approachable for you, take your prescription somewhere else. But I'm gonna provide quality, efficacy and cost. And I'm gonna beat you. Right, you're not gonna force people to only get that. Correct. And what people don't understand is in the insurance model, a patient is told, "You're not allowed to go to this doctor. You gotta go to this doctor because they're within your plan." And then they go to that doctor, and that doctor goes, "What pharmacy do you want it filled at?" Well, it doesn't matter if it's CVS or Walgreens or wherever.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  The patient's gonna have the same price because that price is controlled by the PBM, which is the insurance company. And then that PBM is monetizing that drug through rebate programs. It is a totally different system that captures a patient, controls a patient, and monetizes chronic disease. My goal is to help you drive health span and monetize your health, to help you want to be a willing participant because you feel so good and your mental, cognitive, physical function, your skin, your complexion. What we see is somebody starts and it's not, they start thinking they want to lose weight. Guess what? As soon as a guy like Jelly loses that weight, now the guy, I was on the phone with him this morning.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  He's running five miles talking to me on the phone. This was a guy who was 500 pounds, man. This is a guy who couldn't walk up his driveway. And now he has life again. He's bow hunting. He's like getting into these hobbies and these things. When he goes and spends money on a peptide, it's not because it's pseudoscience or it doesn't work. It's because he's a living example of the impact it's made on his life. And he is knowingly and willingly opting in to continue to see how far he can push this healthcare journey and how much more optimal he can get. And in real time, unlike traditional medicine, we are tracking all of this shit. We're tracking you via DEXA. We're tracking you via the O2 Max. We're tracking you via wearables. All of that vertically integrated in real time.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  And then we're culminating that data across the patient population. So imagine when I get to a point, in a dream world, what I want is 10, 15 million patients nationwide. We're tracking all these data analytics. We know that every man with a gene marker of P452 who went on testosterone saw marked improvement in REM sleep. Right, this is all the type of data we can extrapolate. But to do that, you've got to have the tools. You've got to have the peptides. You've got to have the biologics. You've got to have the diagnostic tools like comprehensive blood work. Another huge missed thing in healthcare, and I believe, is gene sequencing.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  Less than 1 in 1,000 people have ever had their genome sequenced. We've only sequenced, I think, 1 in 1,000 animals. Genetics is on the... is in the infancy of what it's going to be. And a real world example of that is somebody like Gordon, who we've been trying to help. And sorry, I know I'm dumping a lie. I want to be clear. I'm not a doctor, right? I'm just a guy who's trying to solve problems. And everything that I talk about today is not me being a bro-science or me trying to be an influencer, or the things that people try to say. Everything I discuss comes from my mentors. And my mentor is my Chief Science Officer, Ian White.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  22 years stem cell research, Harvard and Sari Stem Cell Institute. Mari Dazawa, who discovered Mew cells from Japan and is one of the pioneers in stem cell research. Mari is an absolute badass. Dr. Deuschler, Stanford graduate, stem cell research longevity specialist. Ryan Rossner, PhD, worked for DARPA. I'm talking to brilliant people. And I'm doing my best to learn and distill down what I'm gathering from these folks in a manner that's digestible for Neanderthals like myself. That's all I'm trying to do.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  You guys at Ways2Well are also incorporating a bunch of other therapies. And I want you to talk about those, too.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would love to. Before I lose the... Real quick on the genetics, because I'm super excited about this. So one of the things we're building into the app... So the next iteration of the app, which will come out in a few weeks, we're just trying to improve on the simplicity of use, the ability to get refills vertically integrating into a pharmacy. Because so often, patients will fill a prescription, go to a pharmacy they don't know, then they come back and they go, "Well, where am I in the refill? And where is it out in the process? And when does it get to my house? And what about this? And what about that? And I can't remember what the doctor said on the phone." That was the whole point of Alan, the chatbot that I showed you years ago. Alan is a resource in your pocket. And Alan is there to pull from your medical records, to pull from your chart in real

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  time, to answer any question about what happened on that phone consult with that clinician, because all of that's annotated and put into the system and documented. And so Alan is there to help answer and fill in the gaps. And where I was going with this earlier is through large language models and AI, we're going to be able to scale concierge medicine. We're going to be able to scale it in a way like never before, that allows patients to get that high-touch, high-quality care, but for pennies on the dollar. Like, my goal is to make this as cheap as possible, so everybody can afford it. And that's the goal with stem cells, too. But it starts with regulatory pathways, and de-stigmatizing these treatments, and building a pathway that everyone can afford.

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  And so, one of the things we're looking to add to the app is gene sequencing. There are 20,000 genes. Most people don't have any clue what genes they have. And the reason that's important, and what my buddy Ryan Rossner will tell you, he's a geneticist, is your genes are the software that are telling the computer how to run. Is this the guy that I met at? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.

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• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  And he worked brilliant, worked for DARPA, tons of experience at the bench, in the lab, doing genetic research. The stuff he did for DARPA was crazy. I mean, when he starts telling you, you know, one of the things he said is, "We're in an era where we can build real-life X-Men." Like, we can build X-Men. There's a gene editing injection that can make your bone mineral density eight times stronger. What? Yeah, I mean, there's... Like, you could do that? It's that you can't legally do it in the US right now. Are they doing that in China? These are things that they're doing. Are they making Russian super soldiers right now? This is the challenge. It's China and Russia are pushing the envelope with all these things. Does that change your body mass? It'd be interesting. I didn't dig in with him on that, but...

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  But it'd have to, right? You would 100% think it's gonna change your BMI, because your bone mineral's gonna be much thicker and more dense. You'd probably be a lot heavier. Yeah, so it's gonna change your DEXA scan and your readings, yeah. Whoa. But the future, to me, is... I want that. I'm telling you, the future is... I wanna run through walls.

• 1:38:56Speaker 05

  Just a random Google on that. It's a Reddit post that says there's a mutation that causes bones to become eight times denser than normal, but the trade-off is not being able to swim.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Well, I can barely swim right now as it is, man. So here's what's wild... I sink like a fucking stone as it is. It's a real problem. Where one of the things that he's enlightened me on, because I'm not a geneticist, I don't know anything about that world, he's like, "Dude, if you do a gene sequencing test on a guy like Gordon Ryan, maybe there's a gene that's causing him to have these stomach issues." So we run the full gene sequencing on Gordon. It weighs to well, and it comes back. And, you know, offhand, I remember there's a couple of really interesting stuff. Gordon has a gene... That is like one in 10 million that makes your tendons more dense and more resilient.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  So stronger, more rigid tendons that are able to, are more resilient to damage. Boy, does that make sense? Yeah, he has that gene. He also has a gene that makes his propensity to have bone mineral density higher. That's why his bone mineral density is higher. That's why his bones don't break as easy. Those are some of the positives that are in his firmware, his software that's running the biology that is Gordon Ryan. Now, some of the downside, and this is, this is a really cool one because we've been trying to help Gordon with this gut health issue for years and it's this constant battle of, you know, he's getting staff, now he's on antibiotics, now his gut health's wrecked again. A lot of that comes down to he has a gene marker that puts him at a predisposition to get staff. He has a weakened immune system.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  So now he's in an environment where he's being exposed to a chronic issue and he has a predisposition to not be resilient to that issue. And then he also has a gene marker that makes his gut health more acidic. And so these are like rare genes and he happens to have these anomalies. So it's like in one hand, he has this perfect, won the statistical lottery genetic traits that put him in a position to potentially be an amazing grappler and athlete, but then he has this Achilles heel of his predisposition to infections and his body's gut health and gut biome issues are all in that gene, are all in the software.

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  And so the premise that Ryan and what we're trying to evolve and build out is 20,000 genes. Most people don't have any clue what any of their genes are. We're taking all of the knowledge that Ryan and these geneticists have and we're trying to automate it using the large language models and AI and build that into the Ways to Well app. So alongside with, you know, the VO2 Max, the DEXA, go get those anywhere. I don't, I'm not trying to sell you these things. I just want the information so I can help you. I don't give a shit. Go get your blood work from whoever. If you can get insurance to cover it, do it. If you can get insurance to help you with a VO2 Max or a DEXA, do it. They're not, they're not going to, but shop it. Find the best place for you.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  And then if you have that data, when we launch the new app, we can load all that into the large language models. We can load in your gene sequencing. We can begin to look at you at a much broader level to try and figure out where are you headed and why? What gene dispositions do you have? And how do we help you navigate that? That's predictive medicine. That's personalized medicine. And nobody's doing anything with genes right now. It's, it's crazy. Everyone, we just got people sold on being able to do blood work. And people are acting like that's the holy grail. And like, I'm a believer in blood work, but it's a snapshot of you in time. Right? That's a moment of you in time. What, what did you eat that day? How did you sleep the day before?

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  When did you take your testosterone? Like, there's a million variables that can throw off your blood work. You can't lie on a DEXA. I mean, that's a real analysis of your visceral fat, your subcutaneous fat, how much fat's packed in around your organs. We're going to know all that. How much atrophies on your left bicep versus your right bicep? All of those things, like Liam Harrison was just in, I know you and Liam are buddies.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  He, he was shocked because he has that one bum knee from all those years of Muay Thai. And then fighters just started picking off his knee. What's crazy is he thought he would have less muscle on that knee than that leg than the other leg. Because he's overcompensated and trained it so much, he had more muscle mass on the bum leg than on the, what he thought was his strong leg. And so he was like shocked by that. But it's fascinating because it's just data, right? And that data gives you the ability to navigate. And it gives us a blueprint. Because now with that data, I know things like, we know how much bone mineral density you're gonna lose year after year, once you reach a certain age. We can begin to quantify that and, and model out your vertebral risk fracture risk.

• 1:43:50Speaker 03

  You know, your hip fracture risk. How do we preserve bone mineral density? Like, it allows us to quantify, are the hormones and these things helping preserve lean muscle mass, keep the body fat off, and optimize bone health? All of these things, and with, with what this FDA is doing with men's health and women's health and fertility in the direction it's headed, I really think we're, we have the potential, if we pull this off, to enter a golden era of healthcare. I really believe that. But it is gonna require thinking unorthodox, it is gonna require a cash pay model. I don't think we can overhaul a system and build in all these different modalities. I don't think we could get it done in a decade. You know, I really don't.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  And then how many lives are lost in that time? That's where I'm pleading for, let's build a cash pay model that is a life raft, that's an alternative, and let's build a pathway that makes sense, that maybe is a more nuanced approach to driving health span. Because I know for a fact, Secretary Kennedy has said, his goal is to leave a legacy that transitioned our broken sick care system into a healthcare system. Into one that prevents chronic disease, rather than monetizing chronic disease. That has literally been the mission statement since the day we opened our fucking doors.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  I'm like, that's all we're trying to do. And I love it, because then you get into the fun shit, like, where do we go with all this gene activation? And where do we go with like, the ability to optimize humans? Right? Rather than just trying to keep you from being sick, we should strive to make you superhuman. I mean, that's really my belief, like, why do you wanna have normal hormones when you can have optimal hormones?

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Normal bone mineral density, when you can have optimal bone mineral density.

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  On all of these things.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  So, let me ask you this about the gene stuff. What, what do they do? So, if they find out that you have an issue, you have some sort of a genetic issue that prevents you from doing X, Y, or Z, what can they do with your genes?

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  So, it varies by gene, but it gives us, it gives us the reason to try and understand, oh, okay, this is why this has been a repetitive issue.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  And it begins to give you answers to the test. So you're not taking a shot in the dark. And those answers will allow us to hopefully tailor and develop nuanced treatments. Now, the future is they're able to turn off and on genes like a light switch. Um, I don't know if you saw like they just, uh, there was a whole article about they discovered that whales have a protein unique to whales and they live over 200 years. And they think this protein could be one of the keys to driving human health span and longevity. And it's basically the premises, can we synthesize and utilize this, uh, gene to turn on the gene in humans and have us secrete and produce a higher level of this protein or this amino acid? And would it drive our health span and reduce our risk of cancers?

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Um, all of those things. So the question becomes as we evolve, uh, what genes can we turn on and turn off? You know, what does the regulatory landscape of the future look like in America? China and Russia are already doing these things. Right? And so even if we attempt to fight the evolution of science, I think we're going to look back in a decade and go, I cannot believe we put people on petrol chemicals to solve problems. Because we're going to be able to go in and turn off or on a gene and fix that problem. Right? At, at the cellular level, at the biological level, you're going to be able to fix and remediate so many of these issues. Um, that's all they're doing with the bone mineral density is they're turning on a gene that tells you to increase your bone mineral density.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  Or when you look at the, uh, the folostatin, you know, that they're using in cattle, that's just a gene signal that tells your gene, hey, turn on and you're going to put on muscle. And for a six to, I think it's a six to 12 month timeframe, that statin, that folostatin gene will be turned on and you'll put on muscle. Um, and then at the end of that, that it gets turned back off. So it's like temporary turning on a white light switch and then that light switch will, will eventually revert back.

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  So this, this, uh, Jamie, bring back up that thing with the bone mineral density. Does it prevent you from being able to swim just because you're heavier?

• 1:48:09Speaker 03

  I'm assuming that's what that's saying because you're adding so much weight and mass to the body. Like think about French Bulldogs and Bulldogs can't swim, uh, because they're so dense.

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  But pit bulls can swim.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, pit bulls can, but French Bulldogs and, uh, English Bulldogs will, will drown.

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, they don't have enough arm strength and muscle mass. They're so dense and heavy.

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  Is that what it is or is it their legs are so short?

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  It's both. They don't have the ability to move the, to move enough momentum of that denseness of their body composition.

• 1:48:37Speaker 02

  Cause little Carl's jacked. You ever see Carl?

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  Carl is like a little-

• 1:48:41Speaker 05

  He hates the water though, didn't I not like being in the pool?

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  He's a tank.

• 1:48:44Speaker 03

  He's smart.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  Well, Marshall's like soft. Marshall's very soft. He swims like a fish. He loves swimming.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:51Speaker 02

  That dog just, he could swim for hours.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  That's so funny.

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, he doesn't have any-

• 1:48:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, my Frenchy loves water, but, uh, he, he can't swim. So he'll go in the shallow end, but he's smart enough to not get off the step. Like he, he, he knows.

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:49:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  So I would imagine also there would be, so what's this saying?

• 1:49:09Speaker 05

  I'm just looking at the comment. This didn't have a link or anything. It was literally just a picture of an X-ray. So like not a lot of information to pull off of that.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  Unable to swim is weird.

• 1:49:18Speaker 05

  But I don't even know who posted it.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  Because it's more difficult to swim?

• 1:49:21Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Because you're heavier? Because like my kids can swim.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  You know, because, you know, I mean, my daughter, my 15-year-old might weigh 120 pounds or something like that, 150. I weigh like 204. I go in the water. I just sink. I, I can't float.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, well, you don't have any body fat either. It's dense. It's all muscle and bone.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  It's a struggle for me to swim.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:44Speaker 02

  You know, but I, I wonder like if, is it, so if your bones are, have more, or they're more hollow, does that help you swim because they're more hollow? Like, does that aid in swimming?

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  What's so fascinating to all this to me is, so then you've got, so getting to meet all these different scientists, right? You got Ryan who was working for DARPA and then I know Ian who's been 20 years of- stem cell research and Ian in his book talks about that we share a common ancestor and I've covered this before but Ian hypothesizes within our genetics we share an ancestor with the eternal jellyfish we share an ancestor with the Galapagos tortoise with the Greenland shark Greenland sharks don't develop cancer they live 500 to 600 years the jellyfish lives eternally all of those black boxes are within us if we can find those through gene sequencing and we can identify

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  which gene is doing that in the animal kingdom and cross-reference that to our own genetics the question then becomes can you either insert that gene into humans or is that gene available and can you turn it on and

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  and what's the side effect

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  correct

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  so individuals with unexplained HBM had an excess of sinking when swimming what is that number 7.1136 what does that mean adjusted odds ratio with 95% confidence mandible so it says excess of sinking when swimming so it just seems like it's more difficult

• 1:51:13Speaker 03

  yeah I think it just makes

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  because you're heavier

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  yeah you're more dense

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  it's more difficult for me to swim

• 1:51:18Speaker 05

  associated with dysplasia

• 1:51:20Speaker 02

  skeletal dysplasia that's not good right

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  what is this I'm thinking of hip

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  many may harder harbor an underlying genetic disorder affecting bone mass

• 1:51:31Speaker 05

  this was just a study based off of a high bone density this wasn't specific to that you know

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  and this is

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  which just makes sense that they sink more

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  this is stuff that's like in its infancy but I just think it's fascinating

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  right well that Brian Shaw dude that guy can't swim there's no fucking way that guy must sink like a rock because didn't he have like the most insane bone mineral density tested they said his bone mineral density is one of 500 million so there might be like what eight people 10 people on earth that have that

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  yeah that's so crazy

• 1:52:04Speaker 02

  and that I mean but that's probably genetics and also training right he's obviously a strong man so he's been

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  yeah there's and there's crazy so they've done what is it Devin Lorette do you know

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  yeah sure

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  okay so yeah Devin came into the clinic he's done his gene sequencing and it's crazy like the guy has so many genes that are just

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  Statistically impossible. It's like, was this guy built in a lab?

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  To arm wrestle.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  It's crazy. Like, he has that same tendon gene, he has the bone mineral density gene. He has some very, very unique genes. And so, part of this is just like, the knowledge and the excitement of what can we do in the future? I don't know, but today, I think, you know, knowing your software that you're running on, it's crazy to think that everyone knows which version of the iPhone software they've got. You got 7-point whatever, but we don't know what code our bodies running on.

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  But here's the question. These genes are inherent to you from birth? Or is anything a result of training?

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  The genes are inherent to you at birth. And then you do have epigenetics, and epigenetics are impacted by your body, by activity, right? So you may have a predisposition to developing cancer cells, right? That's unfortunate, but you may have that. But that doesn't mean definitively you're going to develop cancer. It just means you can now make lifestyle and behavioral changes to minimize. So if you have a predisposition to that, you probably shouldn't smoke cigarettes all day, right? We should probably try to, if you have a predisposition to weak bone mineral density, right? We should probably make sure that we never let your hormones drop in your 40s, where you begin that initial decline and the cascade effect.

• 1:53:49Speaker 05

  This gene mutation seems to also have a other side effect of vision loss. Because it causes some eye vascular issues.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this is one, this is one example of genes that they were looking at, I think, at DARPA and some of these other projects. These aren't things being utilized in medicine today. But this is the direction of the future. I really do believe that. They're gonna, they're going to solve a lot of these genetic traits and be able to figure out how to turn off and on these traits.

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  Right. Certain variants in LRP5 gene interfere with eye blood vessel development, causing familial exudative...

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  What's that word?

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  Can lead to vision loss.

• 1:54:32Speaker 02

  Vitroretinopathy, which can lead to vision loss. Mutations can cause varying clinical presentations ranging from asymptomatic high bone density to severe skeletal fragility or blindness. Whoa.

• 1:54:46Speaker 05

  Calling that a fever is pretty tough.

• 1:54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:52Speaker 03

  One of the, man, so one of the other, you said, treatments that we're doing, one of the things that I think is the most exciting thing that I have come across, and I know, I think you know where I'm going with this, in my entire time in healthcare is the MUSE stem cells.

• 1:55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  So I don't know if you want me to talk a little bit about that.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  So for the listeners, because of you, candidly, I get approached all the time from scientists, from doctors, from people going, hey, I've got this thing that's going to change the world. And I'm like, sure you do. And you just never know. So I had a company reach out and they're like, hey, we would love to meet with you. We have a subphenotype of stem cell that we think is going to change the world. And so I called Dr. White, you know, who's my chief science officer, and I have him vet these folks. And he's like, man, I don't know, it sounds too good to be true. They're like, we would love for you guys to fly to Japan, meet with Mari DeZwana, and

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  hear her lectures and tour the lab and kind of see what she's been doing since 2010. We reviewed all the research, all the data, all the literature, and it was mind-boggling. So Ian and I hopped on a plane and went to Japan back in September and sat down with Mari, and she was gracious enough to break down all of her research, answer Ian's questions. And I'm going to be clear, like, we went there to debunk this shit. We thought there's no way that this is what she's presenting. It's just, it just seems too good to be true. And after sitting through those lectures and Mari enlightening us on all of her research and what she's seen.

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  I left there with Ian and he looked at me and was like, this, if this is real, this is going to change everything in the regenerative space. And Ian, I think, won regenerative scientist of the year last year in North America. He was, won some, a big award for this space. And Ian is a stem cell scientist. And, but these MUSE stem cells are such a rare subset phenotype of stem cell. And so, the best way to explain it is, um, to try and break it down in like layman's terms is MUSE stands for multi-lineage, and that SE of MUSE stands for stress enduring. So what does that mean in like real world talk? Mari in her book,

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  where she writes about these cells and how she discovered them, she was in the lab, she had, she kept coming across this small outlier subset of stem cells that appeared to have a lot of unique qualities, but they were less than 2% of stem cells. So, stem cells that are already a very minute amount of the cells in our body, have a subset phenotype called MUSE. She had to rush out to a dinner, where, in Japan, where she ended up eating sushi and having sake, and forgot to put the cells back, take them off the petri dish and put them back in cryopreserve. She thought she'd go in the next day and everything would be dead. When she went in, because the cells don't last overnight. She goes in the next day, and to her surprise, all of those subset phenotype of cells were still alive. A large

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  majority of them were still alive. And she thought that can't be possible. And that was in 2010. And that's what began her research into what are MUSE. And so, without getting too in the weeds, I'd love to like break down what it is, what makes it unique, and why it's so promising. If you're game. Because it's super cool. First and foremost, in medicine, they say, do no harm. Right? And so, when we're lobbying and trying to educate these politicians and these regulators on the safety profile of traditional MSCs, traditional stem cells are extremely safe. And I've said this on your podcast before, Dr. Kaplan, who discovered traditional MSCs.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  And an open letter to the scientific community apologized and said, I should have never called them stem cells. Because the problem with these cells is they don't differentiate. They don't become anything. That only happens in a Petri dish, but in the body, they just signal to damage and then they transfer their mitochondria and they temporarily give your body an environment to heal faster and to recover. So they aren't truly regenerative in that they don't become a tendon. They don't become a neuron. And there's pros and cons to that. The pros are they don't become a cancer cell. And that's the concern with pluripotency. And so the holy grail of what people have always looked for with stem cells, where could

• 1:59:25Speaker 03

  we, for lack of a better term, fuck with these cells enough in a Petri dish to create pluripotency where they can become something, but prevent tumor genetic behavior, where they don't become a tumor or don't become a cancer. Lo and behold, in 2010, what Mari discovered was this ultra resilient subset of stem cell that holds those exact traits. It was in us all along. It's always been in us. This wasn't created in a Petri dish. This is biology. This is the stem cell answer that has eluded scientists for decades. And it is so exciting because the multilineage, what does that mean?

• 2:00:08Speaker 03

  Multilineage just means these are pluripotent cells. Pluripotent multilineage is a bunch of fancy science talk for they can become anything. So the way I explain that is, you and I talked about this years ago. Orthopedic surgeons would go, you know, I use bone marrow stem cells and I don't really get good results and I think that you can't get real stem cells because those cells have an identity and when you take bone marrow, the cells have already become a bone marrow cell and they're not going to differentiate and become something. So here too for they can't heal.

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  There is some truth to that. They couldn't, they could just help regenerate, or help, I guess, optimize your body's healing through bringing down inflammation and potentially transferring mitochondria into your old tired weary cells. Where these cells are fundamentally different, is think of it like a kindergartner. A kindergartner can be anything. The world is that child's oyster. If they want to grow up and be a doctor, they can be a doctor. If they want to grow up and be an astronaut, they can be an astronaut. The traditional cells that doctors and clinicians have been using in America, they're already grown up. They've already chose their identity. They already went to med school and they decided they're a doctor. You can't put those in the body and have them become something, because they've already developed their identity, their

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  phenotype. These cells will literally go into the body and take on the phenotype of any damaged cell. That, what is so amazing and crucial about that to understand is, if they come across a torn tendon cell, they become that tendon cell. If it's a bone marrow cell, they become a bone marrow. If it's a neuron, they can become a neuron. And the process that they do it through is also pretty fascinating. It's a commonly known process, but phagocytosis, don't say it three times fast, I could get cancelled, but like, phagocytosis essentially, and even in that layman's term is like, think of it like a Pac-Man. This is how Mari described it to me, because she knows I'm an idiot. And she's like trying to break it down in a way I

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  can digest. She's like, I want you to think of a Pac-Man, think of a damaged cell like a neuron. This Pac-Man's gonna go up, gobble up that neuron through the process of phagocytosis, and take on all of the characteristics and code of that cell. Meaning, it will become a young, healthy version of the damaged cell. So, one, these cells are extremely safe in that they're non-tumorigenic. In studies, these cells had no, never became tumors in any of the studies that are ever done. Furthermore, they treated mice that had pre-existing cancer.

• 2:02:49Speaker 03

  They did not only not exasperate the tumors, in many of the studies, the tumors shrunk. And I'm not here to say like, it's gonna cure cancer or anything like that. The message is... Traditional MSCs are already extremely safe. And these MSCs appear to be even as safe, if not more safe. And the only knock on traditional MSCs in real-world application, when utilized appropriately, is they have an immunomodulatory, immunoh, immunity response, essentially where 10% to 15% of people will get flu-like symptoms. And that's with traditional MSCs. Which is a very low safety profile.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  What you saw, like, effective safety profile. What you saw with the MUSE cells in trials is 0%. Literally, right now, nobody's even getting flu-like symptoms. And it's because these MUSE cells go above and beyond, like, the ability to navigate your immune system and go into immunomodulating your immune system. So what do I mean by that? Mari did a study where she took mice, sutured in human livers, into the mice's liver. The mice should reject that and die. They implant MUSE cells in, and the liver will accept the human liver for a period of time. They eventually rejected the liver, but it's able to immunomodulate.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  So think about this for, a simple way to explain it is, the whole process I broke down before, like, when a mother's pregnant, that baby is technically a foreign body in the mother. So what in science stops that mother's body from rejecting and killing the baby and her immune system attacking the baby? The answer is MSCs. The answer is the juices of life that allow that mother's system to immunomodulate and not turn on the baby. So, not only does it build up the mom's immune system and helps the mom reduce inflammation, reduce, like, her risk of chronic disease and all mortality cause is at an all-time low while pregnant. The risk of cancer is at an all-time low while pregnant.

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  All of this goes back to MSCs, and now we believe potentially MUSE cells. And so, they're safe, they're non-tumorigenic, they immunomodulate, meaning your body's not going to reject these cells, you're not going to have a huge risk. What's crazy is they're already using it in plastic surgery. This is what I saw. They would take, historically, instead of, women were using fillers. And the reason they use fillers instead of fat is fat lacks angiogenesis, and those fat cells die, and a lot of times, the success rate's not as high. So what they're doing in Dubai and these other nations is they're using MUSE when they do a reconstructive surgery to reduce the risk that you have an immune response that rejects the fat tissue.

• 2:05:41Speaker 03

  So it encourages the body to accept that tissue and then helps those cells build themselves back into your system and immunoregulate. So think about it for the future of like organ transplants, what this could mean if the science holds in practice of what they're seeing. But for the sake of conversation today, the point of saying all that is extremely safe, no risk of tumors, non-tumorigenic, immunomodulating, meaning your body's not going to turn on it, it's not going to cause any sort of inflammatory response or flu-like symptoms. So one of the safest versions of stem cells we've ever seen, and the traditional cells are extremely safe themselves. And then you get into the pluri potency.

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  I mean, this is the first cell, other than the cells that have been altered, that can truly become something. And then the fourth and final thing that's really amazing about these cells is their honing abilities. So traditional MSCs, what we've been using at WasteWell for the last five years, even with the great success we've had, they literally have a 3 to 5% engraftment rate, meaning 3 to 5% of those cells make it to the site of damage and begin the healing process in the site of damage. And think about the results we've gotten. Now, look at MUSE.

• 2:07:05Speaker 03

  MUSE have a 15 to 30% engraftment rate. MUSE are literally half the size of traditional MSCs, and they have the ability, when administered intravenously, to pass the lungs and make it to the site of inflammation and damage. They hone in at a much stronger rate than traditional MSCs. So the way to think of it is like, you're taking a heat-seeking missile that's able to find exactly where the S1P, SP1 inflammation damaged cell is, it's the signal that a cell sends out, "Hey, I'm damaged." These MUSE cells will navigate straight to those damaged cells, through phagocytosis,

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  absorb that cell, take on its phenotype, and be a young, healthy, vibrant version of that cell. And all of this occurs within three days. So that's why you're seeing such crazy results in Dubai and overseas. And these are the treatments that are coming into the U.S. that are going to be manufactured here on U.S. soil and utilized in states right now like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and the states that have built pathways that make this approachable for people. The hope is that we can build a regulatory pathway at the federal level that will allow accessibility to. Because what is definitively clear is these treatments, even the old MSCs and purified

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  amnion and Wharton's jelly and all those things, there's no arguing that they're extremely safe. I mean, there's 30, 40 years of data on these products. They are safe. They are available in nature. They occur naturally. The question is, how efficacious are they? What disease states can they help with? And how much can they move the needle? And that's where this gets tricky, because the FDA doesn't want people out there making claims. And I understand that, because there's so many people who are snake oil salesmen. And my thing is, I'm not here to make a claim. I'm just here to say accessibility is important. Because for the people who don't have any more lifeline left, who knows what this could do for them?

• 2:09:07Speaker 03

  For the patients battling some sort of neurocognitive issue, these cells are able to pierce into the midbrain. I mean, and I have all these, Jamie, a bunch of these studies I have listed on Ways to Well's website, just so I'm not throwing random stuff out there. I think I listed seven or eight of Mari Dazalwa's studies that back everything that I'm saying. But the premise is, the future's bright, and I think that Muse will be an integral part of what we see here in the United States in the future of biologics.

• 2:09:44Speaker 00

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• 2:10:41Speaker 02

  When we're talking about genes, these obviously are in the body, these cells. Is there a potential future where they could just turn these things on and not have to add exogenous stem cells?

• 2:10:56Speaker 03

  So here's, the problem is you have a precipitous decline as you age, right? And so just like what we're seeing with peptides, you have a certain amount of these and as you age, they appear to decline. The other thing that, this is crazy, so you've got this scientist, Dr. Dominic Deuschler out of Germany, brilliant guy, Stanford trained, went to Stanford, did research at Stanford, went to Harvard, University of Munich, crazy background, 14 years of stem cell research. He catches wind of what Mari's doing and he had been working on a study going, "There appears to be this weird subset of stem cells that I can't figure out what they're doing, but they're not there in diabetic patients.

• 2:11:40Speaker 03

  When I look at patients that are diabetic, they don't have this subset. So what is this subset and what is it doing?" But he couldn't figure it out. He was on the cusp of figuring it out and then he meets Mari and goes, "Oh my God, you literally figured out what the fuck I've been trying to solve for the last 14 years." The reason is, these patients are diabetic and their system is so chronically riddled with inflammation and all these issues. The environment, or whatever it is, their lifestyle caused the decline in basically the end of these cells. All their ability to heal was used up.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  Is that part of the reason, other than just blood flow and the other challenges of diabetics? It could be one of the under-causing attributes that are causing these diabetic patients to heal poorly, to be chronically inflamed. So, it could be part of that equation. But what's fascinating is it also declines as we age. So you're going to see way more of these at birth, way less of these in your 30s, probably nonexistent by the time you're in your 40s and 50s. And so if we can take these cells, these goodies of life, and we can administer them proactively and preventatively, they even did mitochondrial testing. I don't know if that study's released yet.

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  If it is, I'll add it to the website, I'll find out from Mari. But they did a mitochondrial function test. One IV bag administration took one and a half years off the mitochondrial age. Whoa. And so, I'm not saying that it reverses aging, but in these studies, it appears to have extreme mitochondrial benefits, which would logic to reason as to why we're seeing such phenomenal results with these treatments. And where even, and I'm still a huge proponent of all of the traditional stuff we've been using. We've seen miraculous results with all of these different modalities. But I look at Muse and go, this is the holy grail of what we've been trying to find. And Mari did it. Like, she found it, she discovered it in 2010.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  They started using it in human patients in 2019. These products are being used every day in Dubai and overseas. People are flying over there and paying buku dollars to these clinics to get treatments with Muse cells. In fact, one of the sheiks of United Arab Emirates, or one of those, his son got in a car wreck. He literally was in the hospital. They, this is a true story. They said, "He's done. Pull the plug. Harvest his organs." Dominic was able to get ahold of the hospital, the German scientist, and say, "Hold on, can you guys do a call with Mari? I may have a solution." They treated a kid who had been comatose, non-responsive.

• 2:14:32Speaker 03

  Take his organs, like he's done. The neurologists are like, he's done. There is no brain here anymore. They treat this kid with intravenous MUSE cells and his brain function has come back. He's not talking, but he's responding to his mother. He's moving his hands. They're no longer looking to harvest his organs. And this is a catastrophic example. But in a more real world, relevant example is in Japan, they used it with children who were born with encephalitis. And what they saw is these children who are left untreated will definitively have neurocognitive issues and defects, the mental retardation. The

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  children treated with MUSE, within eight days of birth, all of those children had normal brain function.

• 2:15:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  All of them. And so the studies beyond that, and then you get into what they saw in hearts, what they saw in myocardial infarctions, like you just go down the list and there's so much promising data. And there's a decade worth of it. It just hasn't made it into the US yet. And these are technologies and science and modalities that are going to be adopted in the near future, at minimal at the state level, and then hopefully at the federal level. Because they're already looking, we know, like I said, Secretary Kennedy's looking to open the regulatory pathway for stem cells. And MUSE are just

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  a subset of that same class, but an even safer, more efficacious version from what we're seeing in all of the trials.

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  And what's so exciting is that as more research develops, more of these things are going to emerge.

• 2:16:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:16:18Speaker 02

  They're going to keep, the gene therapies, MUSE cells, it's going to continue to compound.

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  Well, and then you've got guys like Ryan who go, if you could take a MUSE cell, and a cell that could be anything, right? And it already has, it's ready to learn. What if you can take a MUSE cell and you can teach it to be exactly what you want it to be? And then you administer that cell into the body, but you've already given it its commands. You've already taught it that it wants to be a doctor, right? It wants to be whatever it is. Maybe you make sure that it's a neuron. Again, I'm way over my skis on this part because I'm a business guy. I'm just breaking down what the scientists are saying. And all of it is exciting and promising to me. Because, again, we've had such phenomenal results with traditional MSCs.

• 2:17:06Speaker 03

  You know, with traditional, and all MUSE are, are this subset phenotype of super soldier cell. They're more resilient. And so the second part of MUSE is stress enduring. So what the whole point is Mari has a chapter in her book called sake and science. Because through drinking sake, she realized that there was an element of the science behind this that she would have never uncovered had she not gone to that dinner. She would have never realized that these cells appear to be ultra resilient. They can ship these cells at room temperature and they're viable for weeks. Whereas traditional cells, we've got to keep cryopreserved and ship on dry ice.

• 2:17:47Speaker 03

  So from an administration standpoint, from a logistical standpoint, from an efficacy standpoint, from a safety standpoint, all of this could be so game changer. So then the next question just becomes, how do we build a regulatory pathway in this in this country that allows accessibility so that Americans aren't having to go to other nations? And the states, some of the states are doing it. But ideally, it would be optimal to work with the federal government to build those same pathways at the federal level, now that the states have already jumped on board.

• 2:18:20Speaker 02

  God, that's so fascinating. Such a cool time.

• 2:18:24Speaker 03

  It is awesome. I'm telling you, the stuff, it's hard because, again, I'm not a clinician. I don't ever, I'm not, I don't want to make claims. I don't want it to be, I am very excited about this, but I want to temper my excitement because I have to be cautious to say, I don't want to give people false hope. You know, we don't know. The science is very early, but it is very promising on a lot of different things. And we've already had immense success on orthopedic injuries, knees, shoulders, elbows, using traditional MSCs that can't differentiate, right? They're just transferring mitochondria and temporarily putting your body in a position to heal. These MUSE cells differentiate. So they literally are regenerative cells that become the broken cell that allow your body to heal.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  I mean, and what we do with that and what the future holds with that, the sky's the limit.

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 2:19:19Speaker 03

  And that's where I just think eventually we're going to get to a point where it's like, do we really prescribe everyone petrochemical drugs to fix problems? Because the genetic side of the world and the stem cell side of the world and the biologic side of the world and all of these things. And then you break in the large language model side and wearables and the ability to track in real time.

• 2:19:40Speaker 02

  But also, this is where you're going to find the resistance because there's so much money in the petrochemical drugs.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and this is what's challenging with the stem cell stuff even. Like, if, if they don't work, people are not going to spend their hard earned paycheck.

• 2:19:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  Right? And that, that's the challenge. Like, I understand the FDA stance on safety, and, and again, the historic FDA stance on, not even this new administration. This new administration has made it clear. Their plan is to open up the regulatory pathways on peptides and stem cells and cash pay products. And to figure out a pathway that makes sense for the American people while still honoring the safety and integrity of what they're trying to implement on a grander scale. But do we need to go through the level of rigorous, you know, multi-billion dollar process on something that can't really be patented? Or if it's safe and the safety profile is proven and it's readily available in nature,

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  does it make sense to grandfather these treatments in and to allow patients compassionate use? Right? If you're battling a chronic disease and you're going to die, what is the harm in seeing if this can help? If, if you're battling dementia or Alzheimer's, you know, that's another huge one. Like, traditional MSCs are too big to pass the blood-brain barrier. MUSE MSCs can be internasally administered and immediately go into the blood-brain barrier. And in trials, they were able to see the MUSE cells 18 months later lit up like a Christmas tree in the midbrain. The reason that's important is midbrain is where Parkinson's and so many of these neurocognitive

• 2:21:22Speaker 03

  disease states reside and where most of the dysfunction is occurring. And so. Yeah, there's a lot of promise. I'm excited about it. I think Muse are going to be a big opportunity here in America to drive meaningful change. It's just a matter of, you know, when and how they're available and to what capacity. You're going to see these things springing up at the state level. They're already happening all over outside the United States. It's just a little bit different market here with the regulatory landscape.

• 2:21:54Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's so frustrating is that they are being utilized effectively overseas.

• 2:21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:00Speaker 02

  And you think about how many people do have people that are in the hospital, do have chronic illness, do have these problems that could be fixed here.

• 2:22:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:08Speaker 02

  And like, let's get it going, guys.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  I'm telling you, man, like it's

• 2:22:13Speaker 02

  Such an exciting time.

• 2:22:14Speaker 03

  It's super exciting.

• 2:22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:16Speaker 03

  It's super exciting. And hopefully it's not too boring for the listeners. It's just, it's complicated stuff.

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  It's fun. It's exciting. It's not boring at all, man. Don't apologize. Is there anything else you want to cover?

• 2:22:25Speaker 03

  Now, the other is just, you said some of the treatments. You know, one of the ones that I heard Dana White talk about, and he had said, well, you got to go to Mexico, is plasmapheresis. Like, we have plasmapheresis here in Austin, Texas. We use it, we added it to the clinic, I guess, three months ago. Plasmapheresis is also known as therapeutic plasma exchange. Essentially, we run your blood through a dialysis machine. It's been used for over 50 years. It's used at the Mayo Clinic. It's used at all of these various academic institutions. It just hasn't been used for longevity, right? And in an insurance model, where you're trying to get a reimbursement rate, you've got to have an indication. But

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

  in a cash pay model, and this is where the world is your oyster, in a cash pay model, a clinician and you, the patient, can make a decision that you want to get proactive and predictive, and you want to run your body, your blood, through a plasmapheresis machine, and basically isolate out, within the plasma itself, the liquid, are all the inflammatory markers, all the leftover bad stuff that you don't want in your blood. So for me, as a 45-year-old male, I've got 45 years of all the attrition and stuff that's in my system. You get 70% of that out through one therapeutic plasma exchange utilizing the plasma foresis machine.

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  And so what we'll do is we'll extrapolate out systematically your plasma and replace it with young, healthy protein called albumin. And then where we go an additional step at WasteWell is we're developing a protocol where we also add in the MSCs and peptides and all of the things that are missing from albumin, right? So there's two different train of thoughts. And I have these listed too, Jamie, on the website. There's a bunch of different studies. Plasma foresis has been studied for over 50 years. It's just not been utilized for longevity and preventative care. It's used more for systematic inflammatory issues.

• 2:24:31Speaker 03

  There's even a bunch of fascinating studies around Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's and dementia is so inflammatory related. So there's a bunch of fascinating stuff on that. But the premise of plasma foresis is think of it like an oil change for your body. We're going to take out 70% of all the bad stuff that's floating around in your blood. We're going to replace that blood with young, healthy albumin. And then, you know, what we're attempting to do is stack it with our own protocol where we add in MSCs, extracellular vesicles, all of these cellular goodies that are readily available at birth that have a precipitous decline as we age.

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  What is this? Can serial therapy, lower right corner, plasma exchange, remove synthetic chemicals from humans? So is this like BPCs and that kind of shit?

• 2:25:17Speaker 03

  What it's, yeah, what it's doing is, the goal is to remove all the extra stuff that's in your system that you don't need. And this study's pretty interesting because it breaks down what they saw. Here's a real world example. Our mutual friend, Philip Franklin Lee, and I asked him if I can talk about this.

• 2:25:35Speaker 02

  Look at this. Compounds such as bisphenol, plasticizers, and phthalates. Endocrine disruptors are associated with the intake of ultra-processed foods due to, at least in part, to their packaging material. So this is the stuff that Dr. Shannon Swans talked about that are endocrine disruptors.

• 2:25:52Speaker 03

  So crazy. Philip, and he's talked about this on his podcast. Philip came in. Chronically tired, super low testosterone. I can't remember the exact number. He talked about it on his podcast, but he was shocked at how low his testosterone. It was like 80 or 90. It was really, really low. We did a microplastics test and he had the most frickin' microplastics that we've ever seen. Well, he eats all that sushi and it's always wrapped in plastic. I know. And so, we ran that test and then it was through the roof. And it scared him. And Phillip stopped drinking out of plastic bottles, took a very like measured approach to trying to be aware of how much plastic he could inadvertently be consuming.

• 2:26:35Speaker 03

  And then we ran him through ways to well protocols. Not only can we quantify it through his testing, which I think he posted on his Instagram, we quantified how much we reduced the level of microplastics. Phillip's testosterone, without being on any testosterone, is at 1,200. Whoa. All of that inflammation and shit that was in his system was causing chronic inflammation, chronic fatigue, running down his immune system and causing all of these cascade effects that led to him essentially having a low testosterone level. How many people out there are having similar problems? That's what it's like. Like so many people come in and go, "What do you have that can help me?" And this is what's challenging too.

• 2:27:18Speaker 03

  This is another thing I want to point out about the challenge of like not making claims or understanding the nuance. We saw this with the psychedelic attempt to get psychedelics through the FDA. One of the things that they wanted to do in the psychedelic trials was provide psychiatric, was the integration. So you come out the other end of a mushroom journey and you talk to a therapist and you walk through what you experienced to process your thoughts and emotions. The system's not built to do that because now you're taking two different things and attempting to build a Bill Master code and get an indication. Well, if I'm united, I'm gonna go, "Well, how do I know it wasn't just the therapy?" Or maybe it was just the mushrooms. Why am I paying the therapist?

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  Right. Right? And so that's one of the challenges when people go, "What do you have for microplastics?" What's tough is a lot of people come in and they go, "Hey, man, I'm gonna do the Hockit and I'm gonna do the plasmapheresis and I want to do MSCs and I want you to bring down my inflammation." And so, so many people are doing multiple modalities. What I'm saying is, is working, but which one is the needle mover? Or is it an attrition of all of them? You know, that's where this gets tough. And that's where I want to track and do a better job of like tracking and quantifying individuals who just do one test or one treatment or one aspect of what we're doing at Ways to Well. Which one's moving the needle the most? Because so many people want to try everything, right?

• 2:28:48Speaker 03

  They're already here, they already flew in. So they're like, yeah, let me do this today, this tomorrow, this. And then they all report back and go, I'm feeling phenomenal. I feel the best I've felt, but they did five things. So I don't know which one was the one.

• 2:29:00Speaker 02

  Does it matter?

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:01Speaker 02

  As long as it's providing a benefit.

• 2:29:03Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:29:04Speaker 02

  It's good to know, but.

• 2:29:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:06Speaker 02

  Listen, man, thank you so much for everything. I'm so happy you're out there and this is so exciting.

• 2:29:11Speaker 03

  No, thank you.

• 2:29:12Speaker 02

  All this stuff is so exciting and I'm glad we have another opportunity to talk to people about this shit because it's really impactful.

• 2:29:18Speaker 03

  Dude, you're the man. And if you wouldn't have had me on here to talk about this, I wouldn't have got to meet Secretary Kennedy and we wouldn't be in a position. And I will, I will tell you, not being hyperbolic, if you weren't here and fighting for peptides and accessibility and you hadn't given me a platform, I don't know if anybody would be helping this administration navigate all this. I really don't. There's so many people on the opposite side of the aisle that it's a tough thing to navigate. And it takes somebody who knows and has been in the industry enough to explain it, hopefully in a way that resonates where we can get things done. But we'll see.

• 2:29:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's exciting.

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:59Speaker 02

  Exciting stuff. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you.

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  Appreciate you.

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  All right. Bye, everybody.

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