Fired by Elon, Meta & Wendy’s, Now Raising Millions for Hello Patient

*WARNING* Alex Cohen has one of the wildest founder journeys in tech. Fired by over 11 companies—including Elon Musk’s X, Meta, CrowdStrike, and even Wendy’s—he’s now the founder and CEO of Hello Patient, an AI platform transforming how healthcare practices engage with patients. In this conversation, Alex and Molly O’Shea dive into his underdog story, the viral parody videos that turned heads across the Valley, his 220k+ X following, why storytelling is the ultimate founder superpower, and yes, shares his latest experiments with peptides... Which all leads to Alex announcing Hello Patient’s $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, with continued support from 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, and Remus Capital. Building the future of conversational AI in healthcare. Hello Patient builds conversational AI agents that handle patient-facing workflows across phone, text, and web chat. Instead of patients waiting on hold, missing appointments, or navigating clunky portals, Hello Patient automates scheduling, reminders, follow-ups, and inbound calls. The system is already deployed across urgent care, ENT, behavioral health, med spas, and primary care, giving clinics 24/7 coverage while reducing missed calls and boosting patient satisfaction. With staffing shortages across the healthcare industry, Hello Patient steps in as the digital front desk—scalable, HIPAA-compliant, and deeply integrated with practice management systems. Highlights • The Underdog Story: Alex was fired 11 times before founding Hello Patient, a history that fuels his authenticity and self-deprecating humor. • Parody as Marketing: Launch videos parodying Humane and Sam Altman/Jony Ive weren’t gimmicks—they were strategic brand moments that drove massive inbound traction. • Fundraising Success: Hello Patient raised a $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, and others. • Healthcare AI Impact: Hello Patient powers omnichannel patient engagement—calls, texts, and chatbots—for urgent care, ENT, mental health, med spas, and more, solving staffing shortages and missed appointments. • The X Factor: With 220k+ followers, Alex’s shitposting persona is more than comedy—it’s storytelling that gives him investor access, customer inbound, and cultural relevance 1. Alex Cohen: https://x.com/anothercohen 2. Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ 3. Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠ Brought to you by: • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. As a Sourcery Listener you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s), white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, & access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. Visit: https://turing.com/sourcery • Kalshi—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: https://kalshi.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Chapters: (00:00) Underdog Story (01:40) Getting Fired 11 Times (02:38) Creating the Launch Video Parody (03:32) Recreating Sam Altman's Look (06:01) Reviewing Past Company Firings (10:41) Transition from Carbon Health to Hello Patient (13:02) Series A Fundraising Process (14:35) Storytelling, Social Media & Fundraising (30:03) Company Growth & Metrics (31:55) Technical Stack & AI Partnerships (38:08) Team and Hiring (41:53) Deep Dive into Peptides (46:23) Discussion on Weight Loss Peptides (50:36) American Food System & Health (53:03) Predictions on Jony Ive & Sam Altman's Device

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

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  This is a story Silicon Valley has never seen before. You were fired from Astronomer.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Yes, recently.

• 0:05Molly O'Shea?

  You were fired by Elon Musk?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Twice.

• 0:08Molly O'Shea?

  Meta?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yes, the D E I initiative.

• 0:11Molly O'Shea?

  CrowdStrike?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I do remember that one. It took down the internet.

• 0:13Molly O'Shea?

  What happened?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  I just pulled the wrong plugs in the server room and next thing you know, all of our customer websites go down.

• 0:19Molly O'Shea?

  I can understand why you got fired.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I think a lot of stuff shifted in Q1 of this year where everyone just got like comfortable with AI. If you go on Google and you search for dentist and you call and they don't answer, you're probably calling the next one and the next one and the next one. Until someone picks up, says they take your insurance, offers you an appointment and you book. And that means that that marketing funnel for them is really important. We build conversational AI for healthcare practices that exclusively deal with patient-facing communications. I think we're ways away from like Dr. GPT.

• 0:46Molly O'Shea?

  How far do you think we are from AGI?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  We're pretty far.

• 0:50Molly O'Shea?

  What's the date?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Like.

• 1:00Molly O'Shea?

  Alex Cohen.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Molly.

• 1:03Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Thank you. Flew out here just for this.

• 1:07Molly O'Shea?

  You flew out here just for this?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  No, we flew out here for the video, but it was perfect timing.

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  Fair. Okay, so we have a lot of announcements today.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do.

• 1:17Molly O'Shea?

  We need to talk about the big announcement. We need to talk about, I don't know what's bigger, the video or the announcement?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Hopefully the video. I think that's more exciting than the announcement. Yeah, yeah. Every time, every time we do a raise, it's like in conjunction with a parody video. So it feels like that's the thing to talk about.

• 1:35Molly O'Shea?

  Uh, we're also gonna talk about Hello Patient.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's important too.

• 1:40Molly O'Shea?

  Your underdog story. You've been fired by a lot of companies.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  How many now? Did you count?

• 1:46Molly O'Shea?

  I can count right now. I saved all of them. I went on Twitter and I looked it up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  It's a lot of companies. Yeah. Can't hold down a job.

• 1:57Molly O'Shea?

  Pretty brutal. And then we'll also talk about.

• 2:02Molly O'Shea?

  Peptides.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:03Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so for, to start things off, break down the video. What was the creative direction here?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  You know, when we initially launched November last year, so less than a year ago now, we parodied the humane video. It was like the perfect, I remember seeing that video where they, you know, they took out the little devices on the table and they put the pin on and they're just stale face and, um, you know, R I P humane, uh, rest in peace, but it was the perfect medium for doing a launch video where you have a phone on a table. And I had this like whole vision in my mind and I called up our video production agent. I was like, we need to parody this video. And now, um, here we are like nine months later, closing the series A. And I'm like, we need to parody another video. And like, what do we do? And the latest video to have gone viral with a bit of that like cringe element is the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive, I O announcement video. And so we, we originally were not

• 2:56Speaker 01

  going to do it. I actually was like, no, we shouldn't do this. We should do this like cool futuristic video showing like the medical receptionist before and then after. And very serendipitously, I was on a call with someone and she was like, I'm a massive shit poster on Twitter too. And we were talking about like launch videos and she was like, you should do another parody video. And I was like, yeah, I have like one idea in mind. And she goes, the Johnny Ive video. And I was like, all right, fuck it. We have to do it. And so literally three weeks later, it's recorded and shot and like two weeks later it's live. So here we are.

• 3:27Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  And I go all out for these. I mean, we've got the gray sweater that matches.

• 3:32Molly O'Shea?

  Let's see it. Do the fashion show. You're in the exact same outfit. This is insane.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  The blue gray jeans that I had custom picked out at Nordstrom. And then of course.

• 3:42Molly O'Shea?

  The Lego shoes.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  The Lego shoes, the classic Sam Altman Lego shoes that I had to go buy from Goat.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Uh, cause they don't sell them anymore. And so we've got the whole outfit down. Um, Jeremy Kaufman, our lead investor at scale. I literally went on eBay. I bought a safari jacket from Banana Republic. Like that's what Johnny was wearing in the video.

• 4:03Molly O'Shea?

  A Banana Republic jacket.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Banana Republic Safari style jacket. It's, it was very specific. Um, white linen pants and then like Chaka boots to match the boots. The one thing that I could not buy sadly was matching glasses. Cause I found out. Johnny had those custom made by a sungla- or an eyeglass manufacturer that only makes like 400 pairs of glasses a year, all custom made for like celebrities. So we went with Warby Parker for that one.

• 4:28Molly O'Shea?

  What's the point of raising this capital if you're not going to get the sunglasses?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  That feels like a bad use of funds after. I mean, I guess in the grand scheme of things, you're making an expensive video, like perhaps we go spend the $2,000 on glasses. But to my investors, we did not do that. So.

• 4:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, responsible.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Frugal.

• 4:44Molly O'Shea?

  Well, how does it feel to be Sam Altman?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  It's weird. I'm in the, I mean, now I'm in the right city for it, but um, you know, I posted like a selfie of me in the outfit into a group chat with like Trung and a couple other ship posters. And Trung replies, Sam Altman, if he could bench two plates.

• 5:05Molly O'Shea?

  That'll be good for our peptide segment.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Perfect. We should be recording this in Austin with the peptides and the lifting and like that culture in Austin. So I mean, Joe Rogan's there, Peter T is there. I don't think Huberman, is Huberman there?

• 5:20Molly O'Shea?

  He's a Malibu.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Okay. He's too good for Austin, but Austin's a massive like peptide. I feel like it's a massive peptide scene.

• 5:27Molly O'Shea?

  Part two, peptide testing.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Perfect.

• 5:31Molly O'Shea?

  I'll take some peptides and then I'll go to the gym with you.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they take a little bit longer than like a day to kick in, but like we'll get you on a like a three week cycle, four week cycle, and then by the end you'll be a whole new person.

• 5:41Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, great. I'm so excited.

• 5:45Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so I think we should just, let's talk about your underdog story.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:49Molly O'Shea?

  This is a story Silicon Valley's never seen before. Okay, so let's talk about the firing. You've been fired by 11?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  11 companies.

• 5:57Molly O'Shea?

  10, 11 companies? I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through all of these.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:00Molly O'Shea?

  It's pretty dramatic. I just, I never knew you could be fired from these before. I thought they had like tenure and stuff. Alex, you were fired from Astronomer.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yes, recently.

• 6:09Molly O'Shea?

  You were fired by Elon Musk?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Twice.

• 6:13Molly O'Shea?

  Meta.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yes, the DEI initiative.

• 6:15Molly O'Shea?

  Wendy's.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I don't remember getting fired from that one, but yes.

• 6:19Molly O'Shea?

  Remember what happened there?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:21Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my God.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  What was the tweet?

• 6:25Molly O'Shea?

  I just can't believe this.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:27Molly O'Shea?

  CrowdStrike?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I do remember that one. It took down the internet.

• 6:31Molly O'Shea?

  You took down the internet?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, by accident.

• 6:33Molly O'Shea?

  What happened?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I just pulled the wrong plugs in the server room and next thing you know, all of our customer websites go down.

• 6:39Molly O'Shea?

  I think you also stopped like flights around the world.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Yeah, it was big. That was a bad one.

• 6:47Molly O'Shea?

  The Harris campaign?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's an obvious, but yeah.

• 6:51Molly O'Shea?

  Rat didn't work out?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  No, no. Pushing her through the the primary didn't work out.

• 6:57Molly O'Shea?

  What about that interview on 60 Minutes?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  We tried to cut it out.

• 7:01Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it didn't work.

• 7:03Molly O'Shea?

  I can understand why you got fired.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:05Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. Yeah, you were also fired for being the DEI coordinator for the IRS.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was an interesting one.

• 7:15Molly O'Shea?

  Can you explain?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  I have to go back and look at the tweet to remember what I did there. I've been fired from so many jobs that I forget. Did you read it recently?

• 7:23Molly O'Shea?

  Do you want me to pull it up?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should.

• 7:25Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, let's pull it up. Your job was to make sure that men paid higher taxes than women.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Success.

• 7:32Molly O'Shea?

  Success. What was the other one you wanted to check?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Wendy's.

• 7:37Molly O'Shea?

  Let's fact check on Wendy's. Okay. You were the VP of Innovation who came up with the idea of surge pricing for menus.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:47Molly O'Shea?

  Wendy's poached you from BMW where you had a successful career leading the team that rolled out subscriptions for customers that you'd use their heated seats.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  That was a real thing that they did, that I did.

• 7:59Molly O'Shea?

  It's true. You did that.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:01Molly O'Shea?

  After Elizabeth Warren's tweet today, Wendy's leadership fired you immediately. They gave you three months severance. That's pretty good.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:09Molly O'Shea?

  Oh.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Unlimited spicy nugs for the rest of my life.

• 8:11Molly O'Shea?

  It was in the form of a gift card that could only be used on Frosties.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Oof, well, that's not the worst thing. I do love a good Frosty.

• 8:19Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Remember the Frosty keychains? I know we're going so off topic, but like they used to sell these Frosty keychains for like five bucks or something. And then every time you showed up to Wendy's, you could get a Frosty for either free or a dollar or something like that.

• 8:32Molly O'Shea?

  By having a keychain?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. It's like a keychain membership perk that they did. That wasn't my initiative, but

• 8:39Molly O'Shea?

  No, it's not.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  That was a thing that I had in high school.

• 8:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, well, that's good to know. Well, it said you you needed to take some time to reset before jumping into the next disruptive role.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wendy's is innovative.

• 8:52Molly O'Shea?

  And that you did.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Falling behind Chick-fil-A, though.

• 8:55Molly O'Shea?

  We didn't even make it through the list yet.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 8:57Molly O'Shea?

  You also got fired by Google.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:00Molly O'Shea?

  Do you remember?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  They've done so many things there that it's hard to remember. Which one was my fault?

• 9:06Molly O'Shea?

  You were laid off from Google. You were in charge of making the algorithms for Gemini as woke as possible.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Sounds like something that we would do over there. God, Gemini was really woke when it first came out, though.

• 9:19Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, they tested the limits.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:22Molly O'Shea?

  We needed to know.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 9:24Molly O'Shea?

  Implicit bias.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:27Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, and then we have we have two left. One of them was Twitter badge access.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yes, that was where this whole thing kind of this whole like shtick started was.

• 9:36Molly O'Shea?

  That was the original?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the original was Elon takes over Twitter, Internet's all angry at him. I don't remember why, but I used it as an opportunity to joke that like he locked himself out of the building and everyone loves a good shot and fruit story. And so they loved this idea that like Elon took over Twitter aggressively and then was locked out of Twitter. And so it got like 350,000 likes and Elon responds and he's like, thanks for letting us back in. And that was really that was like, okay, there's like something here with this format.

• 10:07Molly O'Shea?

  So the last company you were fired from was Carbon Health?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  No, astronomer like a week or like a month ago, but like last real company, I suppose, Carbon.

• 10:17Molly O'Shea?

  Were you actually fired from them?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:19Molly O'Shea?

  No?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:20Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Sadly, the one real company I had, I voluntarily left in January last year.

• 10:28Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, and you did that to build?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Hello, Patient.

• 10:33Molly O'Shea?

  Hello, Patient.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:34Molly O'Shea?

  And raise lots of money.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  I didn't know that I was going to build Hello, Patient at the time. I left because Carbon. Materially changed as a business. We went from being a software-heavy company with a big R and D team and running healthcare clinics to just like, we need to run healthcare clinics only. And you can't like, most healthcare companies or groups or clinics cannot justify a big software team. And so when that happened and we went through a lot of recalibration, I still loved my time at Carbon. I never thought I would leave. But I wanted to do something besides go just like build urgent care chains. And so I think maybe like a month into that journey of figuring out what was next, I started playing around with voice AI products. Maybe it was like Cartesia at the time, or someone who had just come

• 11:18Speaker 01

  out with their first model. And I was like, oh, like, there's something here. And like, this is the thing that I try to automate at Carbon in 2021, when I had joined and took over the call center operations there. And so that was the impetus for like, hey, we should like, go build. And I had my whole team at Carbon, basically, who had left as well, or got laid off in different rounds of layoffs. And I was like, I have this amazing team. We know healthcare exceptionally well. I literally built all the patient engagement and patient experience and call center experience at Carbon. Like, this is the perfect thing. And then we raised around.

• 11:53Molly O'Shea?

  And you just raised around?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And now we raised another round.

• 11:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we raised 3.8 originally, then 8VC, we were like, maybe like five months, no, like four months in, and the partner Sebastian at 8VC, but we were like, doing a demo, I'm showing him how intricate like the internal tooling is. And he's like, do you want more money? And I was like, okay. And so we ended up raising a bit more. And then now fast forward, yeah, September.

• 12:17Molly O'Shea?

  This will come out in September.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. We've raised a $22.5 million Series A.

• 12:22Molly O'Shea?

  Congratulations.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 12:24Molly O'Shea?

  So what was the process like for the Series A? Who was involved?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I mean, from like investors or our side? I mean, we met with a bunch of firms, probably like 20 or 25 over the course of three weeks. It was a three-week process on ten. So I went out originally having like, I was out here in SF, having conversations with some folks, just kind of letting them know I was gearing up for a raise. And we had started to like, really grow customer traction and starting to sign more and more larger healthcare groups. Kind of that second week, we started to go into diligence. Had a data room, they went through all that and then um third week we got a term sheet and then we ended up signing the term sheet. Like literally the Friday of the third week.

• 13:05Molly O'Shea?

  Who led the round?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Scale Venture Partners.

• 13:08Molly O'Shea?

  And ABC participated?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of our original investors did. So the seed round was ABC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  The extension was or like the top up, whatever you want to call it, was also all three of them. Like they all kept wanting to do more. And then um this round like Scale wrote the largest check, but every single one of our investors took their full pirata. And then we took on a few more um like strategic investors. So we raised from Alumni Ventures, those guys are ex CBS Ventures. We raised from Lord David Pryor in the UK. He's gonna kill me when he hears that, but. He's great. He's uh he's the old um chairman of the NHS in the UK. And then we raised from Remus Capital, um smaller fund in Boston who's got deep private equity connections. And then um there are a few other like folks in the mix, basically.

• 13:58Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, that's pretty incredible. I mean, I think we also need to address the elephant in the room and the dramatic shift of vibe that just happened.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like immediate.

• 14:09Molly O'Shea?

  Immediate seriousness. This is what happens.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. When people go, how do you go from like, yeah, like shitposting to real life conversations, it's like flip of a switch.

• 14:19Molly O'Shea?

  Flip of a switch.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Molly O'Shea?

  Multiple personalities.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, might have an issue, but like that's a problem for future me.

• 14:26Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, but okay, so let's talk about that a bit. So how did you like manage posting and being like so strong with communications and and marketing? I guess like online written is like it definitely is your super superpower. How did how did that affect like any of these processes or even just like starting a company?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  I never thought I'd be like viral on Twitter. Um when I started posting.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  2018. I remember vividly the year because I was working, I had sold the first company or working for the acquiring company. They had like a no, a hard no on like social policy. And I always felt like locked up. I was like, I can't post anything. Like this is dumb. And, um, and I'd been on Twitter for a while as a reply guy before that. I deleted a lot of my old tweets of like replying to random VCs who were raising for the first company. I don't know. For whatever reason, I've always had a satirical, like terrible sense of humor. And it was like the perfect, Twitter was the perfect medium for just like posting dumb, satirical, either like stories or jokes or like a lot of it was self-deprecating humor. I kind of joked that Twitter is my stand-up comedy. Cause like I do, like I would joke about product managers and I am a, I was a product manager and like,

• 15:36Speaker 01

  people thought that was funny and I just kept doing it and doing it. And all of a sudden it would just like snowball. And yeah, here, I still do it for the love of the game. There's like no ulterior, ulterior motive with Twitter. I don't do it because I want like a million followers. I just like find it fun.

• 15:50Molly O'Shea?

  I think that's pretty, uh, that's pretty admirable.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's like made some good money throughout the years. I used to like ghost write for a few different companies during COVID when like they all had extra money to go spend.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  I had a brand deal with Butcher Box for a bit.

• 16:04Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  They would send me like free meat and pay me to tweet about the meat, which was fun.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  I've done some stuff with Eight Sleep. So like it's been good. I don't, it's not anywhere near a full-time job. I just like post whatever. I would just fire from the hip. There's no planning.

• 16:19Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. It's impressive. How many followers you have?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Two, just probably shy of 230,000.

• 16:26Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think your average like engagement is?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  The bangers, it's like, just saying that out loud, but the bangers is like five to 10K is like a good one.

• 16:37Molly O'Shea?

  That's likes?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, likes.

• 16:39Molly O'Shea?

  That's insane.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would say like whenever you see one sort of like trailing towards a hundred K, you know, it's a really solid one. The astronomer one, I think was like 200,000 likes.

• 16:48Molly O'Shea?

  I think you tweeted about astronomer like 40 times.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was like my soup. When there's an event like that, it's like the shitposting Superbowl, like all hands on deck. Everyone's just firing memes away. It's amazing. The group chats go crazy. And then I would say my average is probably a few hundred, like just, uh, it's always weird. I forget that I have 230,000 followers and, um, for a while, like originally when I was like really into it, I was getting stopped in person as I was going from like, Probably like a hundred to 200K was the most amount of appearances in real life where like people would find me. I was, I remember being at the bank in Austin and someone turns around and they're like, "Oh, you're Alex from Twitter?" And I was like, "How the fuck do you know who I am?" And, and I'm in a bank, like, that's weird.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And then I remember being at the park in my neighborhood and with my probably two-year-old at the time. And there's another dad on the playground. It's a Saturday morning. I'll like, never forget this. And he, after like five minutes of us both being at the park, he's like, "You're the neighborhood shitposter, aren't you?" And I was like, "Oh, I gotta move out of this neighborhood." So I, that's why I have a baby as a profile pic, because I like to try to keep a bit of that.

• 17:56Molly O'Shea?

  Is it a baby?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  It was like me as a baby.

• 17:58Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, okay.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, like me as a toddler, however old I was in that photo. Just because like then less people recognize me in real life. And they'll see me on things like this in the launch video and like, I don't, I don't generally, like, if you see me in real life, like, say hi. I don't think it's awkward. I just don't want it to happen that often.

• 18:12Molly O'Shea?

  I get that. So how does that translate into a competitive advantage for being a founder or CEO?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  It's really just like access to anyone. I can DM anyone and they'll write back usually. And so that's probably the biggest thing is, either I can put an ask out into the wild and like someone will connect. I've had like multiple billionaires reach out to be like, I can do the help you with X, Y, and Z thing. And so, I think it's just like that. It doesn't really help from a recruiting perspective. Besides, I think, when people know about my Twitter and then they actively come interview, they kind of get a sense of what the culture is like. And like, we have a shitposting channel internally in Slack. And so I think it helps with some of that. But yeah, mostly just like network.

• 18:52Molly O'Shea?

  Did you have any issues with investors fundraising or at all from the beginning?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  No, it actually probably helps fundraising. I think like you have to really get at storytelling to like actually do the posting. And I think that translates to storytelling, the vision and the pitch and even like selling. I fucking, I love sales. It's my favorite thing to do. And so it helps with, I think they kind of get the vibe that you can tell a story to anyone. So it really helps there. Funny enough, like during this recent round with Scale, they do background checks on all their founders and they go like deep. And apparently, Jeremy, our lead investor, gets a call from their, like, I don't know if it's their GC or someone. I don't know if I should share this, but whatever. I don't think he'll care. And they were like, "Did you know Alex has quite an online social presence?" And he was like, "Yes, I know."

• 19:38Speaker 01

  He has some posts out there.

• 19:39Molly O'Shea?

  Bad if he didn't know.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it helps. I mean, like, literally, since our launch video, like, majority of our traffic has come inbound now, like, to our website and, like, even healthcare providers reaching out. I'll get the occasional, like, chief growth officer at a dermatology group is like, "I love your LinkedIn posts and your Twitter posts." And, like, I think that there's this misconception in healthcare that everyone's boring and stodgy and, like, has no sense of humor. And that's probably true if you're a patient.

• 20:05Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  It's not true if you're, like, in a business relationship with them.

• 20:09Molly O'Shea?

  That was what my next question was gonna be is, like, how does this translate to them healthcare and healthcare sales?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  I mean, indirect, I mean, definitely the LinkedIn is like, I love posting on LinkedIn. I hate LinkedIn as a platform, but it's amazing for posting and meeting people. But all the folks who end up, that we end up working with that know me from Twitter and LinkedIn, like, just think it's funny. It kind of, and then most of the folks who don't know me are just, like, not online, and that's fine, too. They just don't know that this entire persona exists.

• 20:37Molly O'Shea?

  Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, shipping away at it with fees, Brex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20x the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same-day and even same-hour

• 21:20Molly O'Shea?

  liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Hims, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid, trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. Okay, so now we have to shift into our serious, serious.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  That wasn't serious.

• 21:44Molly O'Shea?

  We'll be more serious.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:46Molly O'Shea?

  So let's talk about HelloPatient.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Molly O'Shea?

  Let's talk about the company, how you started, what you're providing now, how it's evolved.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:53Molly O'Shea?

  Start with one of those questions.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I'll give the high level real quick and then we can go into any part of it. That's interesting, but in a nutshell, we build conversational AI agents or whatever you want to call them. But conversational AI for healthcare practices that we exclusively deal with patient facing communication. So that means that if you call inbound to a clinic, we want to answer the phone. If you want to run a campaign and reach out to a patient and get them in for a missed allergy shot, like we want to call outbound to or text outbound. So we do phone texting and now we have a chatbot that lives in our customers' websites and that can have a whole chat experience with a patient. So we are full omni-channel inbound and outbound exclusively for healthcare, exclusively for patient-facing workflows.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  So if a provider reaches out to us and they say, hey, can you call United Healthcare and like go appeal all my denials or go like try to get a prior authorization done? That's not the work that we do.

• 22:47Molly O'Shea?

  Taking a step back and talking about the broader landscape of technology, especially in a regulated, paper-driven industry like healthcare, what has this process been like and are you seeing more adoption now like much easier?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so everything kind of shifted beginning of this year. I think like ChatGPT has what 800 million weekly active users now. That I think actually expanded the Overton window for providers getting comfortable with, oh, there's this chat experience that I could see working with my patients. And then they started to experiment with OpenAI's or ChatGPT's voice models, right? They can just like talk to OpenAI. Grok, like you can now talk to your Tesla. We had, we were on a call and someone was like, this doesn't sound as good as like my Tesla Grok. And I was like, yeah, because it's on like a low. Anyway, I argued him about that, but I think a lot of stuff shifted in Q1 of this year where everyone just got like comfortable with AI and comfortable with the voices.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  The voices and latency and the intelligence finally got to a minimum acceptable place where people said, okay, I want to experiment with this in my clinics now. And so we're seeing, I wouldn't say like mass adoption yet where everyone's like, I need this and I need it now and go roll it out to my 500 clinics. But they're like, I know I need to do something in AI, like who am I going to choose to be my partner? And roll like conversational AI out in my practice.

• 24:12Molly O'Shea?

  What's the sales process like for you?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Typically, we will do an initial call, like learn everything that we can in 30 minutes about a practice. Figure out like who's the buyer on the team. We also just hired our director of sales and she's fucking incredible. So we're very, we poached her from a medical supply company. Then after that, usually like do another call with a demo and then we'll put together like a real POC for them. So we'll go scrape everything from their websites. We'll go like scrape their booking flows, go scrape their services. And we'll go build an agent, put it behind a phone number and just send it to them. Be like, just call in, like share it with the team, call in, text in. This is not a hundred percent, but it's like 70% of the experience that you'll get. And that last 30% is actually the hard work of doing an integration with their practice management system,

• 24:55Speaker 01

  with understanding all their triaging flows. So like, let's say, for example, we do a lot of work with the ENT groups today. Like ear, nose and throat doctors. And so if you call in for a sinus infection, like what are the triaging paths that we need to ask you to determine, is this an urgent thing? Or can we schedule a routine appointment? But if you call in for like hearing loss, is that an immediate thing? Then that might require like an appointment with an audiologist and then doing a like a hearing exam. So there's like a lot of nuance to that last 30% of how you get it right with an agent over the phone.

• 25:27Molly O'Shea?

  You cover many different verticals. I'd love for you to go through those and then also like share how they differentiate, at least which ones you're seeing more growth and adoption with.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  So the verticals in healthcare that we operate in today are urgent care, primary care, ENT and allergy, mental and behavioral health, med spas, like those are kind of the big five for us. We're starting to do more work in vision care. So like your optometry groups and then starting to do a little bit of work in dental. And like what they all share in common, there's a lot of patient choice. If you go on Google and you search for dentists and you're looking for a new dentist, like. And you usually are yearly to get a cleaning or something like that. And you call and they don't answer. You're probably calling the next one and the next one and the next one until someone picks up, says they take your insurance, offers you an appointment and then you book. And that means that that marketing funnel for them is really important. And so all these specialties share that characteristic where patient choices,

• 26:23Speaker 01

  it's just like very abundant and you're fighting for those clicks. And like, if you have a 30% missed call rate in your clinic, you are missing a bunch of just like free patient volume that's coming to you.

• 26:34Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have to get different regulatory clearances for each one? Like what's?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  No, there's no like individual specialty regulations we have to jump through, but we do have to be HIPAA compliant. We do have to sign BAs with every customer. We hold like very high liability insurance. And so, and then we bear a lot of risk in terms of we can never leak patient data. We can't give an AI like unfettered access to an electronic health record system. And so there's a lot of things that we have to do to protect patient data, which we do. And we try to save as little as possible to our systems. Like, I don't want all the patient data living on my, like, on my, in my databases, basically. And so, anyway, we sign all those agreements and then we bear risk there. We also bear risk when it comes to like telephony communication laws. And so making sure that we're not like calling people at midnight or texting them at 3am or 10 times a day.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  So there's a few different like regulatory hoops to jump through.

• 27:28Molly O'Shea?

  How do you measure the impact?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  From an inbound perspective, it's pretty straightforward. It's like you were at 80% answer rate, now you're at 100%. You know, you can kind of attribute appointments to us. If we booked the appointment, you know it came from us. But I would say more importantly, it's like that answer rate, patient's not waiting on hold, like they're happier now. And then on the outbound side, it's very clear. Like those are hard ROI use cases where we're saying, you have 10,000 patients at your practice, let us call them all, you know, to go and like get them scheduled for their next appointment. And if we booked that appointment, like we did that marketing campaign and we essentially like contract the conversion.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  In today's high-speed business world, staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission-critical challenges, no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit turing.com/sourcery. Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's turing.com/sourcery.

• 28:37Molly O'Shea?

  On the broader scale of the healthcare market,

• 28:42Molly O'Shea?

  what are you seeing the impacts with more digitization of services? And even for this, like, what do you envision, like, your goal?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I think we're still pretty far away. Like, I feel like administrative work is still the number one spot to go, like, deploy AI. Like, all the clinical decision-making pieces, there are companies going after that. I just think that that's a much, like, there are actual regulatory things you have to solve for that. Like, an AI is not a licensed clinician. It's not credentialed. Like, who ultimately bears risk for making the wrong diagnosis with a patient? And, or like, missing an urgent diagnosis? And so, we really prefer the administrative function. We don't try to do the clinical function. It's always like, hey, this is an urgent issue. Let's transfer you to the front desk. And so, I think we're a little bit of a way, ways away from, like, Dr. GPT and an AI being your doctor and, like, sitting in the clinical workflows.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  But ultimately, I think, um, I don't even know if there's necessarily a cost-saving aspect that's important yet. There's just a staffing constraint. And so, when you talk to every practice, they're like, I literally cannot hire front desk people. I cannot hire call center people. There are not enough qualified folks who want to come in and work with us. And so, you are augmenting the existing staff that they have.

• 29:59Molly O'Shea?

  Talking about, okay, you just reached, reached a new milestone. How do you think about growth within the company? Like, what are the metrics that you've recently hit and how are you measuring them?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I mean, we're doing like tens of thousands of conversations per day. I'd love to get to like millions of conversations per day. And that's just a function of how many clinics you can deploy at or how many like, I guess, campaigns you can run on behalf of these healthcare clinics. And so that's really our next 12 month goal is just to scale to thousands of clinics live with us answering the phone when it comes inbound, us doing all their outbound campaigns. That's really how we, it's very clear how we measure success in that regard. If we are having a bunch of resolved conversations independently of a human being involved, then we're doing our job well.

• 30:47Molly O'Shea?

  What's the pricing strategy?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  It like, it's always in flux. You're trying to like, figure out how a clinic wants to pay. We just got super undercut on pricing for a small group. Like they were already working with a, not going to name the company and give them free PR, but like they were working with them and they were just like, yeah, we'll do it for 200 bucks a month. And, and I started, just spent that 20 minutes just asking their practice manager questions. At that point, it was clear we weren't going to compete for like 200 bucks a month. And she's like, yeah, we get 2,000 calls per month. And I'm like, wow, if you find someone who's going to do eight thou, they had four clinics, so 8,000 calls per month for like $800, like you have the best deal in the market, basically. Anyway, so we price, depends on the type of practice, either per clinic, per month, we'll just handle everything.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  It could be based on patient volume and just like a per, per patient, per month fee to do all their member and get all their patient engagement. It could be usage based where they're like, hey, I just want to pay. If you're going to send a hundred thousand texts from me, like, let me just pay for that. And so it really depends on the customer. And right now it's a bit more custom than we'd like it to be.

• 31:50Molly O'Shea?

  How did you set up your tech stack and like, where are the most costs from that?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  We have a pretty deep partnership with OpenAI like they at their core. I guess I'm Sam right now, but we have a partnership with ourselves. No, we, we use OpenAI mostly for our like models. They are still by far best in class, like the smartest models in the market. We've tried Gemini, Claude and Anthropic are a little bit too slow for a phone call, unfortunately.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  So we, we've tried, those are really like the three that you would choose from and Llamas. Like we've tried it. It's impossible. Like it does not do things properly. Yeah. So anyway, we use mostly OpenAI and then for the voices, we'll use either Cartesian or 11 Labs or a combo of the two. And then for like transcription, we'll use DeepGram. And so that's really like the vendors that we buy and then everything else like integrations into the EHRs and the practice management systems. It's all us, like how you configure an agent to understand the right context in any point in time when you're saying like, hey, you take my insurance. Oh, by the way, I need to make an appointment for this thing. That's all like very custom orchestration under the hood. So we do that entire layer.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  We have a telephony partner who like handles, of course, the phone calls and, and texting, but like what goes into the call and how that works is all us.

• 33:11Molly O'Shea?

  Because you're so ingrained and you're actually using the tools that are going to create AGI. How far do you think we are from AGI?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  We're pretty far. I, I think, um, you know, and I probably don't understand the definition. My definition of AGI is probably a lot different than just like, hey, this thing is like artificially generating its own intelligence. But for me, it's like, they're still not smart and like they are really dumb without the right context, right? And that's pretty obvious, but it's garbage in, garbage out. And so I don't yet see how an agent that isn't like very explicitly customized for the work that you're doing, goes to something that just like understands what to do anytime in the near future.

• 33:54Molly O'Shea?

  What's the date?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Like five years, seven years.

• 33:56Molly O'Shea?

  Five years, seven years? Okay.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  At least my, my bar of like where I like, my bar is I can just tell an agent, your job is to be this medical receptionist. And here's a bunch of raw information about their practice and here's access to their systems. Like go figure it out. It won't do that, right?

• 34:16Molly O'Shea?

  Really? So if that's AGI, what do you think about superintelligence?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's above my pay grade.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I'm not working on that or else I guess I'd have like a billion dollar your offer from Zuck right now.

• 34:31Molly O'Shea?

  Fair, fair. Maybe you'll get fired from Health of Patient.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. And then go join, you know, Zuck and go build Lama to be good.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 34:43Molly O'Shea?

  The legacy industry, how are you seeing this being adopted by legacy incumbents? Are you seeing any of that? Like, who are you competing against?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Everyone has their own flair of it, I would say, right? Like, historically, when you look at the EHR market, and that's Electronic Health Record market, that's epic. Oracle Health, which used to be Cerner, you have Athena, you have ModMed, you have Dr. Chrono, you've got ECD Clinical Works, you've got, like, there aren't that many, but there are, there is a long tail.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Those companies were never designed for patient engagement, which is why it's so shitty when you try to go book with your provider today, or you get a notification that you have a bill due. It's because they were never designed to be patient first. They were designed to actually be billing first. It's not even provider first. Charting is a means to an end to get to like, how do I bill for this visit? Because they want to collect on the billing revenue, essentially. And so, look, I think, you know, Athena will have their own version of bidirectional texting. Maybe some of it's programmatic. I don't, I think they're pretty far from that. I think ModMed will have their own version of this, but I think we still have a two to three year head start to like really get good and engrain and go sell and be like best in class at patient engagement, because they're really, that last 10% really does matter.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  It's not that, it is easy to go do an outbound call. You can use any one of the 10, like, agent builders today to go trigger an outbound call to a patient. It is really hard to do that and follow the workflow of a practice precisely so that you get to the right outcome for that clinic.

• 36:14Molly O'Shea?

  How did you get so interested in all of this?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  When I joined Carbon, I was in this like weird spot where I'd quit my second startup. So we'd raised money for startup number two, had a big co-founder falling out. I quit.

• 36:26Molly O'Shea?

  Was it also in healthcare?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  No, it was like prosumer SaaS. We were building, it doesn't matter that much. We were building like this natural command line for non-developer. It would have been a lot easier with ChatGPT today or like OpenAI, but. Imagine like an OpenAI experience, but it connected all your SaaS tools behind the hood and you could do things without leaving the experience that you were in. We raised a couple of million dollars for that. Co-founder falling out, I leave and then I end up getting recruited by Carbon because one of our angel investors at that company became my boss for four years. And so I knew when I joined Carbon, I wanted, this was like peak COVID. It was November 2020. And I was like, I just want to do something meaningful and like healthcare is the most impactful thing that I could be working on at the time.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  And so I joined Carbon and then I just like fell in love with working on healthcare software, which not a lot of people say, I suppose, but I do actually genuinely love working on this stuff.

• 37:21Molly O'Shea?

  That's great. What do you imagine the future of healthcare software to be in like the next year, five years?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I think in the next year, even like five years, it stays mostly the same from a like core platform perspective, like the EHRs aren't going anywhere. Epic has a complete, basically like oligopoly over the entire space. Mod Men and Athena are massive companies. Like, I don't think anyone is unseating them in the next three to five years, but after that, who knows, like an AI first, an AI native VHR that does all the work we're doing, plus scribing, plus billing, like who knows where that goes at some point.

• 37:56Molly O'Shea?

  You mentioned a bit about your team in the beginning, but how big is your team today and how is the composition?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  I guess as of the few offers that have accepted, we're like 15 or 16 people. About half engineering, few on sales, head of design, agent architects, which are actually like the core of what we do. So they write, yeah, so they like write the system prompts for the agents to understand and do all this work. And then operations is like the other couple of folks.

• 38:24Molly O'Shea?

  Are you hiring with this raise?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:27Molly O'Shea?

  What are you hiring for?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, agent architects is a big role for us. It's basically, Shawnee's going to kill me when I like butcher it. She runs that, but like the essentially like it's a mix of prompt engineering with data science and like a natural, like almost like an NLP background, but someone who we, I consider them are forward deployed engineers because what a Shawnee is doing all day is like sitting down with their practice manager and saying, walk me through like this triaging flow. Like you said that you want to see people for, you know, Hearing a refitting, what does that actually mean like fundamentally when you want us to book the appointment? So that person is like very embedded within their practice and working with them. So we're hiring that role. If that's interesting to like new computer science grads

• 39:10Speaker 01

  and folks like that, that is a really good role for them. Implementation is more of your like technical project manager, someone who's gonna then go like take that agent and deploy it to 100 sites. That just requires a lot of logistical pieces. Always hiring full stack engineers, always hiring sales. I am trying to hire my head of marketing who can hopefully like really vibe with me at my levels of like stupidity when it comes to doing marketing ideas. And yeah, those are and then who else is solutions engineer in Mexico City? We're building a small team in Mexico City that's doing all the like practice integration. So those are really the big roles right now.

• 39:49Molly O'Shea?

  Thinking more about the actual organization itself and building this as the founder, what was the biggest challenge that you've faced to date?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  In which part?

• 39:59Molly O'Shea?

  Building the business.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it's that's probably the easiest question. It's like agents are still not reliable. And that's kind of goes back to the whole like when you think AGI is gonna happen, like I'm seeing these things in production, trying to do real work. And that's always the hardest thing is getting them to follow the things that you tell them to do. You almost need this balance between a deterministic workflow, like a step one, step two, step three with these inputs and these inputs and these outputs and whatever to a mix between that and just this thing that can have full conversations, which is random.

• 40:32Molly O'Shea?

  Sorcery is very honored to be sponsored by Brex.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:37Molly O'Shea?

  Brex is all about spending smarter, moving faster and performance. Do me one of two things, I could give you a medal card.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:44Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know if you're a customer, but we will make you one.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Okay, we can switch from the other guys.

• 40:50Molly O'Shea?

  You will.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:53Molly O'Shea?

  So instead of just giving you one today, I thought I would give you something that you like, because you like health. I thought I'd give you a David bar.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. That's almost as good as a gold Brex card. It is gold.

• 41:07Molly O'Shea?

  It is gold.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:09Molly O'Shea?

  And David is also a customer of Brex.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Wow. Well, fudge brownie flavored bar. Did you hear the controversy with them recently, though?

• 41:15Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Apparently, these things are not 150 calories. They're more.

• 41:20Molly O'Shea?

  There's usually like a 20% delta for any nutritional.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  But they're like 220 calories or something like that.

• 41:25Molly O'Shea?

  They're above it.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:28Molly O'Shea?

  What are you gonna do?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Tis David.

• 41:29Molly O'Shea?

  You know, all the men eating these bars.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  They're, they are good, though. I just got into them recently. So thank you for the David bars.

• 41:36Molly O'Shea?

  You're welcome. I got you two.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 41:38Molly O'Shea?

  I got you three.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Three, but I ate one. I was hungry. I just got here from the airport.

• 41:41Molly O'Shea?

  I know. That's why I got you.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, but more importantly, we're gonna talk about peptides.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Let's get into it.

• 41:48Molly O'Shea?

  What do we start with? What's the starter pack for peptides?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Well, so I do work with a longevity doctor. I want to shout him out because he is amazing. So if you go on Instagram, you can find Dr. Vass, V A S S. Vassiliou is his full name or first name. I work with him. He's like my virtual longevity doctor and he is who actually really got me into peptides. And I went through this whole hormone optimization, I would say, like, journey, starting beginning of this year, so January of this year, and went on TRT, which is testosterone injections. I had lower than I wanted test free T and total T. So that was like, step one was we tried some natural stuff. It was like, fine. Then I was like, just like, let me inject things. And so then we started injecting things.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And TRT is life changing, but we started to like experiment with some peptides. And so I think it really depends on what you want is kind of the first thing. And so for me, it was like muscle recovery, growth, like muscle growth,

• 42:52Speaker 01

  better sleeping, things like that. And so I started with CJC 12, they all have these crazy, like crazy names, but CJC 1295. Epimorulin, which is, it basically like signals to your brain to produce more IGF-1 and like growth hormone essentially, so it helps with muscle growth and all that. I'm on another cycle of that now, so you're supposed to cycle these things. I've tried BP, oh my god, BPC 1295 for like repair. So I actually had a bunch of, I like tore something in my back, or not tore, but like I injured, strained something in my back and I couldn't get it to go away with chiropractic and all this stuff. And so I just started doing BPC and it went away in like three weeks.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  There's TB 500, I have not done that yet, but a lot of people swear by that for similar, similarly like muscle recovery essentially and like ligament recovery. There is DSIP, which is deep sleep inducing peptides. You can take that and it helps like reset your natural circadian rhythm. I've always had bad sleep, so I did a cycle of that. It was like marginally better than just taking a lot of like melatonin and stuff.

• 43:56Molly O'Shea?

  Did you measure it too with like?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I track everything. So I have the Oura Ring, I have the eight sleep and I know a lot of people get mad at me on Twitter for like tracking my sleep and saying, oh, don't drink before bed because like it fucks up your sleep. But I enjoy tracking those things. And so I did track my sleep on DSIP and off it and slightly better deep sleep, but like didn't notice anything materially different. Yeah, those are like most of the ones that I've personally tried. There's other things like Guku and some other like weird names for things that I haven't done. I'm in a group chat with a few bros who all do like peptides, TRT, all that stuff. And one guy does like nine of these a week. He's crazy. Yeah, and then there's one for, you mentioned this earlier, but like for getting tanned and that's melanin.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  That one is, from what I understand, kind of unsafe, so maybe don't do that one, but it will put like more melanin in your body so that you become tanner naturally, basically.

• 44:51Molly O'Shea?

  Why is it unsafe?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  People have had like weird allergic reactions to it.

• 44:55Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, really?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. They also got it probably from sketchy places and none of this stuff is regulated as part of the problem as you, there's a bunch of sites that sell peptides. I don't recommend just like Googling and buying the first one that comes up. I think there's ways to do some research to see purity and all that, but my doctor orders it through a compounding pharmacy that'll make it.

• 45:17Molly O'Shea?

  Do you take these like, do you inject them daily, weekly, monthly? How does it work?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Some are daily, some are, um, like the deep sleep one and CJC are both nightly. You typically do five days on, two days off. TRT, which is not a peptide, but again, I think every guy like over 30 should get tested for their hormone levels and then decide if they want to do it. It has downsides, like it drops your fertility to zero. It can cause acne. Yeah, because your body stops making its own testosterone.

• 45:45Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm off it right now because we are going for a third kit and so.

• 45:51Molly O'Shea?

  Good luck.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  We'll see if that works. But, um, I promised my wife, I was like six months in and I was like, look, like I'll go get tested. If I'm infertile, I'll go off TRT. And then I got tested and I went off TRT. And so, and I want to go back on it as soon as we do have the third kid. So, but every guy I think should be tested in a way, the pros versus the cons. I think peptides are kind of gray area. Like no one really knows long-term if they are safe. Um, the general science says that they should be safe, but none of us will really know until they do some real studies.

• 46:23Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think about all the weight loss peptides? Cause now I think there's like three classes.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. That's the other one that I do.

• 46:28Molly O'Shea?

  You do that?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, microdose, uh, trisepotide.

• 46:31Molly O'Shea?

  How much do you do?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Like a tiny amount once a week and it just like blunts all the food noise. And, um, I think that those are like miracle drugs.

• 46:39Molly O'Shea?

  What's a microdose?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  So the starter dose of any of them, whether it's like Ozempic or WeGo, uh, they're all kind of the same, but like Ozempic, WeGo, BZepbound is, uh, or Manjaro is like two and a half milligrams, grams, I don't know, one of the two. It's like two and a half, um, per week and I do half of that.

• 46:58Molly O'Shea?

  Half?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Half the starter dose.

• 47:00Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Once a week.

• 47:01Molly O'Shea?

  One of my friends was telling me about a newer one called like Rega.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Regagutide or something like that. Yeah.

• 47:09Molly O'Shea?

  RGG or like GGG or something.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of my best friends did it. It like was helpful, but then it raised his blood pressure, made his sleep kind of bad. So he went off of it, but.

• 47:19Molly O'Shea?

  Is that Brian Johnson?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Brian's my best friend. Brian does way more stuff, although he's like, obviously testing his body every single day. I actually love the work that he's doing. I know he's a master marketer at his core, but I think someone's got to experiment with everything.

• 47:35Molly O'Shea?

  I think it's fascinating.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think he looks good. A lot of people don't like the way he looks, but I think he looks great.

• 47:41Molly O'Shea?

  I was like.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  He looks super healthy.

• 47:42Molly O'Shea?

  Were you at Hereticon?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  No, I never get invited.

• 47:44Molly O'Shea?

  I like had just seen him for the first time at Hereticon and like this was before he started dressing differently. He just had started dressing differently. And now he dresses like a.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Like 20?

• 47:56Molly O'Shea?

  18 year old.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:57Molly O'Shea?

  But it's fine, whatever.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:00Molly O'Shea?

  But I saw him there and I was like, oh, he doesn't look that bad.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:04Molly O'Shea?

  People are kind of crazy.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they're mean on the internet.

• 48:07Molly O'Shea?

  They're mean and it's also just like an easy thing to.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:10Molly O'Shea?

  But he's not.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  No, I think he looks great. Like he's, he's in great shape. He looks healthy, like his whole like facial complexion looks good and like jaw structure, all that stuff. I mean, I know he's done, from my understanding, he's done some like fillers and things like that, but generally like hard to achieve that look without doing a lot of longevity stuff to your body.

• 48:31Molly O'Shea?

  What else? Are there any other crazy ones?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  We could talk about like real steroids, but I don't have any, I don't have any experience with those. Or I'd be much bigger right now. I mean, yeah, they are, but.

• 48:41Molly O'Shea?

  What happens with human, like, uh, what is it? HGH?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, human growth hormone.

• 48:46Molly O'Shea?

  When people get like the puffy.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:48Molly O'Shea?

  Is that a real thing? It makes your organs bigger?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 48:51Molly O'Shea?

  You don't know?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  No, there's, oh, there is one other peptide. I'm gonna, if I get this wrong, the internet's gonna make fun of me, but like they're HIV positive, I think. And like it, when they're going through treatments and stuff, it helps reduce fat around the, like fat around your organs, basically. Um, and that one is regulated by, hold on, I gotta get the name of this or it's gonna bother me.

• 49:11Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Testa morelin. That's it. So.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Testosterol is a peptide that is particularly effective at reducing visceral fat. And that's the fat that like surrounds the organs, basically. And so, and originally, yeah. So testosterol was originally used for patients who were going through HIV treatments. And they were like basically putting on visceral fat from the treatments. And so, but you can use it as a longevity drug as well. And that one is like FDA approved. If you have, if you are going through those treatments and most of us, I've done that one too.

• 49:44Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think that like, everyone's gonna have to start taking these?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  I think they're safer than probably most pharmaceuticals. And so it's really a question of like, what do you want to put in your body? If you had to choose, I don't think anyone needs to necessarily choose to do any of this stuff. But I don't know, if you're like optimizing for, I guess longevity and like fitness and things like that. I know so many people who are like on peptides at this point.

• 50:10Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. I just, me and my friends over the weekend, we were talking about like just the state of American health. And how it just, no matter what the bar is set at a really bad place because of the food system. We can get into microplastics and everything, but the food system is actually so bad that one of my friends, when she moved here, she gained like 50 pounds because just of the food.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  From where, where did she move from?

• 50:34Molly O'Shea?

  China.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 50:35Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Another friend moved from, I think like Mexico and actually gained weight when they moved here too.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, our food is, our food system is completely fucked up. Like, we're all just eating processed foods all day. I don't know if it's all the microplastics. I just think generally like food lobbies have caused our food system to just be horrendous. And so you just don't know what you're eating when you put it in your body.

• 50:57Molly O'Shea?

  And it messes up your hormones, which is why.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you go on peptides, yeah.

• 51:02Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  I mean, that's why the GLP-1s, like the ones that everyone knows about, which are, you know, your Ozempics of the world are so popular is because we have this obesity problem. And it's like the one thing that offsets the food system. And so, yeah, I think generally if our food system was better and people weren't overweight and like struggle. And I think you struggle to lose weight because it's really hard to eat clean.

• 51:25Molly O'Shea?

  Really hard.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:26Molly O'Shea?

  It's really hard.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I don't think people should be judged for taking it either. I think there's a lot of like stigma around it and people are like, you cheated at losing weight. And it's like. I don't see how it's different than taking creatine to put on, you know, water weight and build some mass and like taking other, it's just another supplement.

• 51:42Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I've had many friends, like especially women, like for women, hormones are just like a beast. Like it is horrible. But they, they do this and then they see effects like almost immediately and they're like, why didn't I take this sooner? Like I've been busting my ass at the gym for like five years and I haven't lost any weight. But then they do this, it regulates their hormones, it gets everything in place.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  That was me on TRT. Like I think I've had a hormonal imbalance for years. Like if you, I can show you photos of me like in my twenties, but I was like pudgy, super round face. I couldn't lose or gain any weight. I couldn't lose weight if I wanted to. I couldn't put on muscle and like, I finally, as I hit like late twenties and started to eat better and track macros and do all those things, I like finally dropped a lot of the puffy like hormonal related weight. And then it wasn't until I was 32 and like went on TRT that I was like, oh my God, is this what it's like to go to the gym and put on muscle? And I didn't take an absurd amount. I took like literally a clinical dose and it was within three months I started to actually see definition for the first time.

• 52:44Molly O'Shea?

  That's incredible.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  And I was weightlifting for years, like CrossFit, weightlifting. My diet wasn't always like locked in, but I don't think it needs to be completely locked in to also see benefits and I just wasn't seeing any.

• 52:57Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, what device do you think that Johnny Ive and Sam Altman will announce?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  I think it's going to be a pair of glasses. I think like that's the only form function that my, again, like Johnny gen- genuinely like understands the future, I think of, God, I'm like going into acting mode, but like he, uh, he genuinely understands the, um, like hardware. And so there may be something crazy that I'm just like not aware is even possible to do, but I think the most obvious one is like some form of glasses that have.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  AI built in.

• 53:32Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, okay. Um, did you want to talk about Sesh at all?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 53:36Molly O'Shea?

  Now that we have some airtime?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Do you want to try one before we leave?

• 53:39Molly O'Shea?

  Uh, try a nicotine pouch?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:42Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  No?

• 53:43Molly O'Shea?

  No way.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  It is also 8:30 PM.

• 53:45Molly O'Shea?

  I've never done one before.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Sesh is a HVC portfolio company that I particularly enjoy partaking in.

• 53:51Molly O'Shea?

  This is not paid endorsement.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  This is not paid, although they send us a lot of Sesh, so it's great. And the whole office is addicted to Sesh. They're sending us a fridge to put our Seshes in to chill the pouches.

• 54:03Molly O'Shea?

  Is that like a better experience if you chill them?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  I haven't tried it yet.

• 54:06Molly O'Shea?

  You should, that sounds good.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Hmm. Um, there's mango, very great flavor if you're craving some fruitiness. I have wintergreen. Good, it kind of like is a gum replacement. And then mint, again, another like, it's kind of like having a mint in your mouth. And so, and I find I do the small, like the lowest dose they make is four milligrams. That's all I do, probably like two times a day. And it really helps you lock in.

• 54:35Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  It's a weird habit. I never, I never really touched nicotine in my life until a bunch of engineers joined our team.

• 54:42Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  They were all addicted. I was like, oh, they're productive, so they must be doing something right.

• 54:46Molly O'Shea?

  You didn't get it from the gym? You got it from engineers?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  No, literally like software engineers.

• 54:50Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, wow.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:52Molly O'Shea?

  Well, Alex Cohen, it was lovely to have you on today. Thank you so much.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  I'm glad we got to do this finally.

• 54:58Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.