¶ Intro / Opening
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan experience.
¶ Initial Health Concerns and Peptides Outlook
Thanks for having me, Mr. My pleasure. Always. Um lots going on, man. There is a lot going on. Part of the usual. I got fucking allergies, dude. You hear me? Oh yeah, you sound stuffed up. I was gonna ask. I was like, Am I getting sick? And then I worked out. I'm like, No, I feel great. Like physically.
I feel great. But I'm I don't know what's sp what's spiking right now, do you know? I don't know. There's a bunch going on. Yeah. 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 And then about four years in I started getting these horrible sore throats. Is there a peptide for that? When I first moved here, the cedar killed me.
I mean f 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. One thing that does help is colostrum. I take coloss and that armra. Yeah, you can tell a difference? Yeah. Yeah. Makes a big difference. Yeah. If you take Yeah, I think all of that stuff there's benefits that so many people overlook.
¶ FDA's Peptide Reclassification Battle
So we were talking. Um what's the uh late? Um, man, so th I know you just had Secretary Kennedy on a few weeks ago. Yeah. Um The latest is uh, you know, uh 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 W 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.
Um, and I know I said this l when I was on here six months ago, but I'm truly the most optimistic I've ever been and with reason. I wanna 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. They just planted this little bomb in the middle of everything and classified these peptides uh as dangerous.
Um, 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. 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 seventeen FOIA. 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. 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. Well it's just very helpful that he actually uses them. That Kennedy uses them and he knows the benefits of them. Very educated on it. Someone who is actually fit, takes care of himself and uses peptides and understands what millions of people know. Yeah. I mean, there's millions of people right now that are taking peptides and it's radically improved their health and their vitality.
I agree one of them. Yeah. And and me too. Like I I again I was I was the typical American patient. I was on the cusp of diabetes. I was obese. I'm a former fat kid. You know, I like everything that was could be going wrong in my late thirties 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 I the system's just not built that way.
Um and that's where I think the nuances of peptides are really difficult for a regulatory body like the FDA. And so to like systematically try to break it down for the folks that are legacy employees at the FDF had that opportunity thanks to this administration and Secretary Kennedy and uh You know, his his right hand girl, uh, Stephanie Speer has been integral in setting meetings and and trying to move the needle.
¶ Challenging Medical Dogma and Hormone Therapy
Um, Marty McCarey, 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. Um and Marty, he he really is. I don't know if have you ever read his book? No. Uh 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 what he's saying is dogma and m that medicine is so worried about defending uh their principles and where they stand that they're they're essentially 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 top. And so even with this peptide topic topic
You know, when I had the opportunity to meet with uh 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.
Um, 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. 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 space. And a lot of the decline that we see in our body is because of the hormonal decline that occurs in our forties and fifties. Could you please expand on the testosterone thing?'Cause 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 H C G that can increase your testosterone. It'll really vitalize They get concerned with prostate cancer. Yeah. And this is the one that you illuminated and you've helped quite a few of my friends understand. So please expand. Um so
¶ Debunking Testosterone-Prostate Cancer Myth
All of the fear with prostate cancer literally comes from a study from the nineteen thirties. And it was a urologist in the nineteen thirties. The patient population of this study, when we talk about random control trial. 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 three fifty, um, during that climb from zero to three fifty, you can increase Uh in theoretically, uh the risk of exasperating a prostate cancer that's pre pre existing uh was the fear. But as you push past that level to optimal levels, you begin to insulate against
uh 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. Um with an abundance of caution, s some urology practices for patients who have had radic radical prostatectomies are reluctant to prescribe testosterone. But testosterone in no way, shape, or form is causing prostate cancer. Um it's a receptor site thing. So d 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. And then when you push past that to an optimal threshold, you get the insulatory benefits of uh 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.
I don't know why. This is in the thirties, 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 hormone, you would have seen a skyrocket in the amount of prevalence of prostate cancer and 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 it's I think it's one out of eight men will develop prostate cancer. I can't remember the exact number offhand. Um and it that that correlates exactly the same into the patient population that is on hormones. Well the reality is like everybody dies with some form of prost Prostate came. Uh I don't know. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
It's just like it really became dogma. I mean the study Well, but I don't understand about the study. Like so what was the conclusion of the study? 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. And was this only prevalent in this one person that had was chemically castrated or was it in the other guy?
Correct. The other guy who had normal testosterone levels had no increased risk. And that 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 a process. Well so how was this whole opinion based on
on this one study from the nineteen thirties and just repeated ad nauseum for decades. Well i mean it wasn't debunked I think until the nineties 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 nineties. And then I would even go further to say you launched, I think. Pfizer launched testosterone cream in like nineteen ninety 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 too. And so now retrospectively, a hundred years later, literally a hundred years later, the FDA and our regulatory oversight bodies um are now changing
their lens on men and women's HRT. But it's just so crazy that doctors I've heard doctors. Oh, I know. You have to be cautious about the potential prostate cancer. Yeah. Like w where do you get this? Like and then you tell them and well there was a study.
And so this is the study they're talking about? Three people, one of them dropped out, one of them was kinda chemically castrated and You got it. And that guy didn't even get prostate cancer. And so none of these moving forward, um Uh doctor 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. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. That's what it's not. It does sound like urban legend. I 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 groupthink isn't necessarily consensus, it's peer press.
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, twenty, thirty years. Uh if you step out of line and even even back to, you know, originally what spurred this were peptides.
¶ The High Cost of Drug Development and FDA Hurdles
I think a lot of what happened with peptides are that this system is built Under an an entire ecosystem It cost one billion to three billion dollars to bring a drug to market are the numbers that are out there. Anywhere from one to three billion dollars. 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 a billion dollars.
to bring a drug or a a uh any sort of technology into the marketplace. Now that whole ecosystem and structure was built around big pharma and the pharmaceutical 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 uh innovation and accessibility.
um under the name of like protection and safety. Um 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.
Um we recently provided the FDA with over eight hundred different studies that have been done on an array of the of the nineteen peptides that were banned under the Biden administration. Um 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. Um and and I can tell you at Wastewell now we're at over ninety thousand patients nationwide and peptides were an integral part of our of of the practice of Waste Well and we did not see a bunch of adverse events. Um 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 um I'm not asking the FDA or a governing body to pay for this for pay.
Right? It it's a it's a nuanced difference that I think even regulators are struggling to wrap their head around. We're not asking for Medicare, Medicaid doc. 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. And I think that's what makes it so difficult to navigate. For regulation. Because it's a new world to them. If I'm coming from academia where I worked at a hospital where I build insurances for the last twenty 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 uh 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 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, um And they've been convicted of a crime they never committed. Uh 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. Mm. Okay, so we should also clarify that when we're talking about peptides and peptides being dangerous. GLP ones are not.
And this is a gigantic market. I mean you're seeing all these ladies that look like they're cutting weight to make the the UFC flyweight division. You know, it's you're you're seeing everybody that it's on these peptides, it's losing weight. Like I don't know if Oprah's on'em 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. Yeah. Well so many I 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 yet a lot of times I'd say, man, you you might just be uneducated on this topic and the nuances of this topic. Um
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.
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¶ Big Pharma Lobbying and GLP-1 Controversy
in your welcome kit with your first subscription. That's in one hundred and eleven dollar value at drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan. Well this is the big challenge during COVID. With chloroquine and with ivermectin. Yep. That was the big challenge. And the real problem is that it interferes with the potential profits of pharmaceutical drugs that are
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, then you'll get less and then it gets public, you find out there's less people that are taking whatever pharmaceutically approved drug. Correct. And so what what created this Backlash or momentum against peptides, candidly, were the GLP one weight loss drug.
So I do want to put'em in two different buckets'cause there's the there's the nineteen 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 in its intent. And it is not going away.
And so to put myself in the shoes of of somebody, you know, like I've gotten to know Chris Klump really well at the FDA, and Chris negotiated the most favored nation pricing on the pharmaceutical drug. With Lily and 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 uh independent pharmacies to rip off our patents, right? And that's their stance. And they plant that stake way over here. 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 farmer, 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 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 NIA.
And phase one 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 it's nuts. That is wild. Yeah, it's nuts. And so I was trying to explain to, you know, the the existing uh team at HHS, zoom out. The system as much as you are being told failed.
and let big pharma down and allowed people to come in and infringe up infringe upon these patents. The truth of the matter is the FDA sent out the bat signal and said, We can't meet the me 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 uh ex in existence for thirty, forty 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. 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 you're I'm a legislator and I've got somebody telling me, these guys hurt us to the tune of seven billion dollars and I know that's what they're telling these legislators because I've met with the legislators at the state and federal level. And then I have to go, well, hold on. The entire compounding sector only does seven billion dollars. GLP ones were two point five billion dollars. 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 thirty five to forty million dollars in just GLP one drugs this year in red.
So you're you're talking an accounting error for big pharma. And the reason I wanna lay all that out is I'm not here to argue about the GLP ones. It's it sets a dangerous precedent if if if pharma lobbies 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 ten to twelve years. Uh it's this whole shell game, but it sets precedent like we covered before, and that precedent is dangerous. It's a slippery slope.
¶ Pharma Hypocrisy and Regulatory System Flaws
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 Lily again as an example because they're the main culprit. Lily is saying peptides are dangerous. They're getting the API from China. We shouldn't allow these compounders to make peptides. Meanwhile.
Eli Lilly just signed a seven billion dollar deal to acquire a peptide company. Out of the China. China. So Lily'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. Well it seems like it would be very confusing for a regular Very confusing for someone who's
not educated on this to get up to speed. A hundred percent. And they have so many initiatives and so many things they're tackling. And then the challenge historically is When your s big pharma and I think it was like thirty one million dollars that that industry used in lobbying power last year as an industry, uh
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. Now don't even want to use the word lies. You can use facts. But like we've said before, there you know, like facts can be skewed.
when delivered inappropriately. If you say they cost us seven billion dollars and we spent three 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.
A politician's 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, you you if you take into account all the drugs that didn't make it and you wanna cook the book You can make it look like you spent a billion to three billion. Y you can also take credit for all the drugs that were launched out of the NIH that you bought the rights to and monetize for decades.
And then you can talk about safety, but in reality there were recalls from both Lily and Novo Nordisk. There are all sorts of array of issues and label changes and historically Even even the FDA itself, this is one of the things with peptides that I when I met when I had the privilege of meeting with Marty McCary about, I said, Marty, if we're being honest. 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. So what is a major label change? Um, so they uncover like uh an example with antidepressants r uh depressants. They realize the suicidal ideation in teenagers, right? And they had to change that label and say, Hey Not only is this a few
Only a a fraction better than a placebo, right? Barely differentiates from placebo retrospectively. And not even close to exercise. I know. It's it's literally s 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 S R I S uh 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. It's become a prescription management system, not a health care system. And that's the big challenge. This is an entire paradigm shift.
that I I don't know if all regulators truly understand. Um 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. Like the view on the m 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, there's a patent out of uh Croatia, I believe, on that molecule. And that patent is I think lasts three more years. Why would you go spend a billion to three billion dollars 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 ones. They have patented dosaging and delivery mechanisms. They're not arguing against the pat
If you look at the lawsuits that they filed nationwide, they're arguing against people advertising. They're arguing against some of the things people shouldn't be doing, rightfully so, um, but they're not arguing against the patent. Let me ask you this. So Uh 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?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean well what would happen business. It would be a giant business and and it is going to be a business. But also the availability with Skyrocket.
¶ The "Sick Care" System vs. Preventative Health
And you would start seeing commercials on CNN. B P C one five seven helps soft tissue injuries. Yeah. Helps this, helps that. Then you'd show fit people at the beach jogging. Yeah. Yeah. And that w I'm I I agree with you, but the 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. Um there's the traditional system, the sick care system. That system is controlled by insurance, big pharmaceutical companies, and regulated.
Whether intentional or unintentional, the system was cooked. It's 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.
And then we go just those facts are so crazy. It it's nuts. And to think that to ask questions or to challenge that system is wrong. And that's where I am so uh again, I'm not I'm not sitting here D 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 spans? You don't do it playing whack-a-mole in 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. 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 spans.
¶ Predictive and Personalized Longevity Medicine
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 Hellspan now. I if if I have your genetic sequencing and your blood work and your biomarkers and your DEXA and your VO2 max.
And I put all that into the AI algorithm and we begin to track you in real time in your thirties, we are gonna 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's 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 and which is insane. And it is because we're a prescription first society, right? And 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 forty 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 one. And they push them out the door. And they probably put them 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 gonna run you through a battery of diagnostics. So many men come in depressed. You're not really it's not it's not not to trivialize your depression. 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 one. He's five hundred pounds.
You know, and they would have put him on a battery of drugs. When Jelly Roll came to us, it was like we're gonna make this simple. We gotta fix your insulin, we gotta fix your hormone. That's it. We're gonna get your estrogen under control, we're gonna get your insulin under control, we're gonna get your inflammation under control, we're gonna put winds on the board, and we're gonna methodically walk you through that.
Because people think that this is the other challenge, even where I was going earlier, even in the longevity space, the preventative care space.
¶ Ways2Well's Patient-Centric Cash Pay Model
It's already becoming what Big Pharma was. And this is one of my really big heartburn. You've got two pathways. See that the 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 Atia's a hundred 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. Well ninety-nine point nine nine percent of America can't afford. And then you've got the hymns of the world. that are going the route of a pill mill. Like candidly they're
It 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. 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 you get him get him on a weight loss drug and you hope and 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.
So in real time we're able to capture how are you trending? Um we even added a scale that ties into the app that'll allow you to manage your uh not just your BMI, but literally almost like a DEXA with like a one to two percent variability rate. We can tell you how much lean fat, how much visceral fat, has 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 ADEXA. 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. Like to me. Everyone again, when I came on here whatever uh I think it was five years ago by now, Joe, nobody was doing cash pay plug.
Now everybody's doing cash pay 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 going to 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 health care journey, not the first step. 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. I think the problem is like you're an actual good dude. You're an actual good
And I'm trying. There's a lot of days I don't know. 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 profit.
And i you know, it's so fucking hippie to say this. The root of all evil. It's it's real. Yeah. 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 Ways 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 b I know I see the look on your face when people get better. I love this. I know you do. I already love it. I know you do. I mean twenty something years, man. And uh when we started this, I she's my Jiminy Cricket because Even if I ever wanted to make it about money, she's never making it that she's such a patient care advocate. And
And I we I said and she said, if we always make this about people, there's gonna be days we lose, there's gonna 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 think can't thank you enough. But
you know, you can't onboard twenty thousand people overnight and then people are like, Oh, you guys suck. Y'all are like everybody And it's like, no, man, we just even as we're growing, I'm th this is again back to that dogma of like How are companies like HIMS scaling nationwide? They're PE backed. BlackRock is one of their biggest investors. HIMS is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate marketing firm. They're not a compound.
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 plasmapuresis 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 true and in in and ha 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. 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. 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 him out the door? And that is one of the challenges of even this emerging market is people are compromising pretty quickly.
And and even this market I see the flaws. And those flaws are gonna bring out the naysayers and those naysayers are gonna use the bad a actors and the bad examples to crucify the industry.
¶ Super Bowl Ad Controversy and Industry Damage
And I'm banging the drum a lot against hymns right now, but i I 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 one 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 do they violate the law? What'd they do? 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, politicians from all different walks of life. came out saying this is unacceptable, all of these people making black market peptides and GLP ones 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 Nordis 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 compound. They're a multi-billion dollar marketing firm. There's no way this was an oversight or a mistake. This was by design.
And then what happened is the largest run probably in the, I don't know, in the last decade of any stock price. uh hymns is shot through the roof because they inked the deal.
with Novo and said, now we're gonna 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 All the while while they have an agreement.
with this pharmaceutical drug company. You got it. The deal was done within two weeks. So the backlash came, a huge uproar against ba and this is I 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 act.
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. So the deal is a good thing. And then a week later they make this announcement. And the stock roars and you know, everyone goes, Oh, congrats hymns and it's like, No, this was
I I and we'll find out because there is a there's a huge class action lawsuit now, an antitrust lawsuit that's going on. I think Lee Rosebush and uh his firm brought it forward. He's a uh A guy who's academically trained, uh, I think ran the m uh the clinic at the Mayo clinic, ran the lab, he's a pharmacist, he's a a law degree, all these things. And he's in 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. But even if it does get uncovered, what's gonna change? But no one's gonna pay attention. It'll it'll it'll be a blurb in the news. It won't even be in the news.
Yeah. You know, it'll be online somewhere. 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 it and and again, separate from peptides, separate from compounds, you get into the whole world of biologic.
¶ Building a Parallel Healthcare Life Raft
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 bag 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 line with the FDA. I have just a more n I mean, I I hate to concede, but I have a more nuanced lens on They're trying to navigate an absolute nightmare. of regulatory land.
of, you know, the lobbying power, the impression, the the half baked truth. 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. That's a whole fundamental different when you're talking about even like t let's shelf peptides for a second and say stem cells.
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 rack.
You build a life raft parallel to the exist 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. Yeah. That was a bad example. Well, I think well, and the c the question is, which model is gonna be better for humanity and which model is gonna take cost out of the system. Right. 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 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 it's a kiss of death.
Why would I want to wait ten 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 uh improve the progression of a chronic disease or an ailment.
I just don't think the government should stand in the way of that. And the reality is that the momentum of the current health care system is so strong the vast majority of Americans are gonna use that anyway. Yeah. Like y the m most people like I mean how many people are listening? Still a small percentage of just America. Yeah. The the vast majority of people are just going to trust their doctor and they're gonna do what they've always done.
They're not gonna be aware and it's gonna be business as usual and those companies are still gonna grow. Yeah. It's just they're so greedy, they want all of it. Yeah. Like by saying they're losing seven billion dollars. Well, how much did you make? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing. Athletic Brewing Company's non-alcoholic beer is a total game changer. The first time you try it, you're like,
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Right. They cost you$7 billion. You made$800 billion. Your market cap is eight. You seven X'd your company. Novo Nordisk three or four X'd their company. In a literally a three-year time frame, 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, i in in a way like so to over regulate based off and th and that's that's the argument with the GLP ones in one bucket, my argument, you know for allowing compounders to continue to make these patient specific
are 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 uh who maybe can't uh Handle the uh delivery mechanism. I mean there's dozens of different reasons why you would want to provide an alternative life raft. Um Can you explain the titrate up and titrate down thing?
¶ Dangers of Unregulated Black Market Peptides
Yeah, so historically the GLP ones came in preset dosages. Right. Um and so patients did not have a way to uh titrate up or down. And so a lot of clinicians who wanted to microdose. would use a compounding pharmacy to prescribe those medications and allow patients uh more flexibility on how they dose their GLP one. Because some of the catastrophic side effects come from a large dose. Correct. Um now As this thing evolves, the question becomes, where do we go with this? Right? Because
Uh essentially most compounding has has shut down GLP ones, five oh three Bs, 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 the weight loss drug. So it's now limited down to just five O three A's, which are patient specific, which is like what I do. Like we make medications unique to the patient, personalized medicine. Um and so that's a much more niche.
uh percentage of the market. And again, even that, you're talking in the heyday, maybe two billion dollars for the whole industry. Right. Um on a company that's, you know, worth eight hundred billion dollars and seven extra revenue. Everything's gonna be okay. Like everyone's gonna be okay. Patients had accessibility and affordability. Uh 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 that. So
What do you think is the best way forward? If you were if you were in charge of Yeah. with accessibility and there's an issue with black market. Correct. Right. There there's an issue with people buying peptides online that are not even what they say.
Like there's certain peptides that have a physiological response when you take'em, like uh CJC Ipamorolin. You could feel it when you take it. I know people that have bought stuff online, they say, I don't think this stuff is legit because it's not doing it. I take it. I don't feel that you know that weird flushing response. They don't feel it at all. Um and they've asked me for advice and I'm not sure. No, I love I love that you asked because I I actually had had the privilege of of giving this
you know, message to uh m Marty McCary at the FDA and and also Chris um Clump who have been receptive to at least hearing the other side of the equation. And and there to be clear, when it comes to peptide, Chris, Marty, Stephanie, S uh, Spear, uh, Bobby, all of them are aligned. Like peptides, I'm being told are done. It's just a matter of when. Um, I don't have that timeline, but it's a huge win. If it because it goes so much bigger. I cannot stress, Joe, how close.
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 the FBI has shown up at these people's doors. And if Kennedy wasn't the secretary And if the Maha movement hadn't started it's over. It's over. It's over. So if the if Kamala Harris wins
¶ State-Level Progress in Healthcare Freedom
It's totally yeah. And on that note, e even here in Texas, this is where this is crazy. Um I've gotten to know several of the congressmen, congresswomen, uh Lacey Hole's a congresswoman here in Texas, uh Senator Colhurst, I th I believe she's over the health care committee for the Senate. Senator Colhurst 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. Um, which is crazy to think. So when I laid this out for uh for uh m Marty, um one of the things I explained where
That here's what the naysayers will say. We don't want it to be the Wild West. You're gonna 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 seven billion dollar number where they're cooking the book. is they're not telling legislators that a lot of that is gray and black market. Four out of five.
Meaning there is no clinician in the chain of custody. The v majority. The majority of the yeah. The majority of this cookbook seven billion dollars is black market. Correct. And the and and again, even in the black market. And yes. And I wanna be clear, I'm not even in the black market, I know and I've validation tested and done independent validation testing of m a lot of these companies. And some of them are efficacious, some of them are real, and some of them are not.
Roughly. Um a large percentage is off, like i and sometimes dosed higher, you know. So think about if you were to get like a GLP one and you're injecting a dosage that's two X. 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 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, 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
in the laws of the land to push a illegal compound into a marketplace. I'm just telling you how this is gonna play out. I'm not hoping this for anybody. And this was about eight months ago and now it's happening. Now the FBI has shown up at multiple gray and black market peptide facilities. If we're being honest, it's 100% because of Red or True Tide, the next blockbuster GLP one that is in the work.
Uh and explain that? Yeah. So retrutide is a is a triple agonist being developed by Eli Lilly, and so it hits three different receptor sites. It has less muscle wasting, uh 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. Um, it's not commercially available. So i it we get 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 So we've never made it because we're a compounding pharmacy that has to follow the laws of the 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 uh five times in four years. The states have been in my building every year, and I'm in forty seven states. So almost every state comes we're literally in an inspection all the time.
Um, 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 uh ingredient manufacturers. What does APR stand for? Uh it's pharmaceutical ingredients. It is just the base product used to compound a medication. Um
None of those checks and balances happen in the gray and black market. Again, it's not saying that all those guys are bad. But regardless whether it's a good thing. A hundred percent. There's there's no regulation, there's no checks and balances. So it at the very least leaves the door open. Correct. It leaves the door open and If I am uh 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 Chat GPT, but now Chat GPT and all the large language models have shut that down. 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 the amend 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 action. Um, 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 and a compounding pharmacy under the right guidelines regulating the space.
Because we know peptides are safe. Like they are safe. They they're n 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 uh safety and 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. And if you do that. Overnight, as much as I hate to say this, you make these big pharmaceutical companies exact.
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. Um and the only argument against that is, well, peptides don't have enough robust uh Human clinical trials with safety dates.
And then you go down that topic and I'm like, guys, you do realize, like we said, like sixty to eighty percent 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 time I've been on here. Every single ninety percent of the products in the operating room never had a human safety study. They were all brought in through the five ten K approval process.
Doctors are using things every day in practice that are either off label or not validation tested or have no human safety study. 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.
Because it 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 y 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 and and uh quality products under with the 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. Well it seems like such a reasonable concession. You cut out the black You regulate stem cells and you regulate peptides. You regulate everything that's being done through compound farm.
Everybody wins. I agree. That's the that's the message that I've had, and I think that's the thing. Correct. They want only them to win. Correct. So any profit that you make or any compounding pharmaceutical in their mind is stolen. Correct. Which is wild. Yeah. And and that's that is the big challenge is the future of this regulatory pathway, and that's where I wanted to get into the state. And and this is something that what we saw with with the food law.
When we testified at the state level for the food program, for the SNAP program, for the school lunch program trying to align the 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.
Uh, Texas passed the bills, three different bills around food and food initiatives and label changes. and protecting children. Uh Arizona followed suit. I think Florida fought 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 um get 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. Um, the state of Texas is already raring to go. So the state of Texas passed the Compassionate Use Act, which says if you have a chronic disease or any sort of uh chronic health issue, you have the right to try.
Um so the reason where it's almost like marijuana law, without getting too nuanced. The states, if you 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 uh and and respect the rules of the land. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. So Texas did this. Utah did this. Florida did this. Uh and I just testified in Arizona two weeks ago on the stem cell bill in Arizona. Uh
Senator Janae Shamp called me and said, Can you come out and and help testify and can we do what you guys have done in Florida and some of these other states? And uh 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 and we've also submitted um I we submitted a citizen's petition to the FDA around stem 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. Um, if it is an adverse event, it's flu like symptoms and it impacts basically ten to fifteen percent of people. Uh 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 balance.
How do you fix that? You fix that through creating a regulatory pathway with proper uh 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 accessible care.
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? To 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 and and 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. Um like an example is
Stem cells historically, one of the uses for purified amnion was burn victims, right? Or wound management and diabetes. 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 amnion and all of these products. And that's what happens. in real time. So a lot of what we're living is the continual dogma of this broken ass system. 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. Um, 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, uh soon to be Arizona, and Utah. And so there is hope'cause at the state level it's moving.
I do believe Secretary Kennedy and Chris Klump and Marty are very open minded and receptive to this. They are very uh progressive and they do see the challenges of this system. Marty covers it in his book, like I said. So I'm more optimistic than ever. That we are gonna get st if we get peptides done, the next step is to begin to work the citizens' petition to see if we can do the same thing for these biologics and make these things affordable and accessible for everyone.
And The thing that's helping the moment momentum I think is that so many people know people that have had stem cell treatment. Mm and have had amazing results, like with injuries that they just couldn't recover from. Yeah. And unfortunately some of'em had to go to Panama and had to go to Tijuana and Columbia and all these different places where it's legal. Yep.
That's uh 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. One hundred percent. I've 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. I can't even start this conversation. Well, and what's amazing though is I'm telling you we're we Um Having got to know Senator Coalhurst and and Lacey Hole, the representative here. We'll get it done in Texas. Like it's coming. It's it the the new bill that we're gonna s uh submit in January, I feel confident that we will uh expand upon the existing uh legislation around uh 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 uh it n not even this administration. I feel very confident this administration is going to get a lot of these things done.
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. Um, but I think it's crucial that we fight for sovereignty and autonomy over our health. and and continue to push. Um I can tell you at the state level, um, I'm very, very bullish that it it will happen. And what Florida saw is a three hundred million dollar
uh infusion of cash into the state of Florida built all around this because it's now a medical tourism destination. And that's that's my message to these senators and and congressmen and congresswomen in Texas is we have a legitimate opportunity. To do what you did with the food bill and the Maha 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. D 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. And not have to have a passport. Yeah.
I mean'cause this is what's going on. This is why people are going to Panama and all these other places. Yeah. They mean they they're desperate and so they're willing to leave the country. Yeah. A hundred percent. It it would be a way easier to just hop on a southwest flight. Come to Austin, pretty easy. Yeah. A lot easier. And it should be available. And what's really amazing to me with uh 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. Yeah. We've never spent more on healthcare. We've never been more fucked up. Yeah. And at one point in time does someone say, Hey.
This system sucks. Yeah. And but they don't want to. They don't want they resist this radical change and this appeal to authority of 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've fucked this whole thing up. How are you trusting them still? When w with 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 wanna rip the band aid off and do something different?
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.
Can't qualify for military service. It's it's nuts. 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 it's not that I'm not saying that. 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 be in in place as is. Because it's very profitable for them. But it's just not good for us. Correct. And it doesn't mean it can't be profitable still. Yeah. It's just you have to have a workable functional model that benefits the American people and benefits health.
I agree. And that 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. Preventative health care instead of sick care. You got it. Sick care that is perpetual and never ending and ultimately leads to a catastrophic series of side effects. You got it. And I I tell people the difference is with a peptide or something preventative, you're coming in and we're optimized.
Right. So, you know, I've taken things like dihexa, you know, for me personally, I'm not advertising this for other people and it but it's like it a hundred percent improved my neurocognitive function. It a hundred percent 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. And approving efficacy, unfortunately, with the model is a multi-billion dollar process. 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. Because 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. 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. Right. And this is important point now 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. Well hold on. If you understand the law of the land, the patient has the right to take their prescription wherever they want. Even if they come two ways too well, we may prescribe it
And we send it to me a 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. But you're not gonna force people to only get that money. 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 got to 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, 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 healthspan and monetize your health. To help you want to be a willing participant because you feel so good in your mental, cognitive, physical function, your skin, your complexion, what we see is somebody start. 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 he was on the phone with him this morning, he's running five miles talking to me on the phone. This was a guy who was five hundred 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 V O2 Max, we're tracking you via wearables, all of that vertically integrated in real time. And then we're culminating that data across the patient population. So imagine when I get to a point We're tracking all these data analytics. We know that every man with a gene marker of P452 who went on testosterone saw a market improvement in RIM 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 gotta have the peptides, you've gotta have the biologics, you've gotta have the diagnostic tools like comprehensive blood work. Another huge missed thing in in healthcare and I believe is gene sequencing. less than one in one thousand people have ever had their genome sequenced. Um, i we've only sequenced, I think, one in a thousand animals. Genetics is on the I is in the infancy of what it's going to be.
Um and a real world example is that is somebody like Gordon who we've been trying to help. Um and sorry, I n I 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 broscience 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, twenty two years stem cell research, Harvard and Sari Stem Cell Institute, uh Mari Dazawa, uh, who discovered muse cells from Japan, um, and is one of the pioneers in stem cell research. Mari is an absolute badass. Uh Dr. Deutscher, uh Stanford graduate, uh 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.
¶ The Future of Gene Sequencing and Human Optimization
Yeah. And I want uh I want you to talk about those two. Yeah. I would love to. Uh before I lose the g real quick on the genetics, because I'm super excited about this. So one of the things we're building into the X. So the next generation of the app, which will come out in a few weeks, um, we're just trying to improve on the simple simplicity of use, the ability to get refills, vertically integrating into a pharmacy, because so often patients will fill a prescription
It'll 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 chat bot 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 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 gap. 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 gonna 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 destigmatizing these treatments and building a pathway that everyone can afford. 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 i is a g 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 Dr. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and he worked brilliant. Worked for DARPA, uh tons of experience at the bench.
in in the lab doing genetic research. Um, 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 we're in the we're in an era where we can build real life X-Men. Like we we can build X Men. There's a gene uh What? Yeah. I mean there's 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?
Uh it'd be interesting. I don't I haven't I didn't dig in with him on that. But you would a hundred percent think it's gonna change your BMI because your bone mineral is gonna be much thicker and more dense. Whoa. But the future to me was that is I'm telling you the future run through walls. But the trade-off is not being able to do that.
Yeah. Well I can barely swim right now as it is, man. So here's what's wild. Where where one of the things that he's enlightened me on, because I don't 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 at Ways Dowell 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 ten million that makes your tendons uh more dense and more resilient. So stronger More rigid tendons that are able to res 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 ruled density is higher. That's why his bones don't break as easily. 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'cause 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. 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 uh that makes his gut health uh 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 uh 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 um are all in that gene. They're all in the software.
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 Ways2 app. So alongside with, you know, the VO2 Max, the DEXA, go get those anywhere.
I don't care 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.
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 crayone 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 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? 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 deck.
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 gonna know all that. How much atrophies on your left bicep versus your right bicep? Um all of those things. Like Liam Harrison was just in, uh y y I know you and Liam are buddies, uh He he was shocked because he has that one bum knee.
um from all those years of moit tiding and 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 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 factor uh fracture risk.
You know, your hip fracture risk. How do we preserve bone mineral density? It 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. Um all of these things and with with what this FDA is doing with men's health and women's health and fertility and the direction it's headed, I really think we're we have the potential. If we pull this off to enter a a golden era of health care. 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. 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 health care 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. 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 want to have normal ho hormones when you can have optimal hormones? Right. Normal bone mineral density when you can have optimal bone mineral density.
Let me ask you this about the gene stuff. Uh 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 gene? 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.
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.
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 two hundred years and they think this protein could be one of the keys to driving human health span and longevity. And it's basically the premise is can we synthesize and utilize this?
uh gene to turn on the gene in humans and have us secrete the and and produce a higher level of this protein or this amino acid? And would it drive our health span and reduce our risk of cancer? 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 that.
Right. And so even if we attempt to fight the evolution of science, I think we're gonna look back in a decade and go, I cannot believe we put people on petrol chemicals to solve problems. Because we're gonna be able to go in and turn off or on a gene and fix that problem. Right? A at at the cellular level, at the biological level, you're gonna be able to fix and remediate so many of these issues.
Um th 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. Or when you look at the uh The phallostatin, you know, w that they're using in cattle. That's just a gene signal that tells your gene, hey, turn on and you're gonna put on muscle.
And for a six to I think it's a six to twelve month timeframe, that statin that fall statin 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. So this this um Jamie, bring back up that thing with the bone mineral density.
D does it prevent you from being able to swim just'cause you're heavier? Is that the idea of the thing? Like think about French bulldogs and bulldogs can't swim. Uh because they're so dense. Well pit bulls can swim. Yeah, pit bulls can, but French bulldogs and uh English Bulldogs will will drown. Really? Um yeah, they don't have enough arm strength and muscle mass.
They're so dense and heavy. Is that what it is or is it their legs are so short? It's both. They don't have the ability to move then to move enough momentum of that denseness of their body composition. Like being in the pool. He's a team. He's smart. Well Marshall's like soft. Marshall's very soft. He swims like a fish. He loves swimming. That dog just he could swim for hours.
That's so funny. Yeah, my friend she 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. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. So I would imagine also there would be so was this. Not a lot of information to pull off of that. Unable to swim is weird. But I don't even know who posts. But is it because it's more difficult to swim? That's it's because you're heavier? Because like my kids can swim. You know, because you know
You know what I mean? My daughter, my fifteen year old might weigh a hundred and twenty pounds or something like that, one hundred and fifty. I weigh like two oh four. I go in the water. I just sank. I I can't float. Yeah, it's well you don't have any body fat either. It's dense. It's all muscle and bone. It's a struggle for me to swim. Yeah. You know, but I I wonder like if is it So if your bones or have more h or they're more hollow
Does that help you swim because they're more hollow? Like does that aid you? 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 twenty 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 s share an ancestor with the Galapagos tortoise with the Greenland shark. Greenland sharks don't develop cancer. They live five hundred to six hundred 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 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? Um what's the side effect determined?
So individuals with uh unexplained HBM had an excess of sinking when swimming. What is that number? Seven point eleven three six what does that mean? Adjusted odds ratio with ninety five percent confidence. Mandible and large so it says excess of sinking when swimming. So it just seems like it's more difficult to swim. Yeah, you're more dense. It's more difficult for me to swim. Many may harder harbor an underlying genetic disorder affecting bone mass.
specific to that, you know. This is stuff that's like in its infancy, but I just think it's fascinating. Right. Um well that Brian Shaw dude, that guy can't swim. There's no fucking way. That guy must sink like a rock. Cause didn't he have like the most insane bone mineral density tested? They said his bone mineral density is one of five hundred million.
So there might be like what, eight people, ten people on Earth that have that? Yeah. That's so crazy. And that I mean, but that's probably genetics and also training. Right. He's obviously a strong man, so he's been lifting. So they've done um Devin Lorette. Do you know Dev? Sure. Okay. So Dev yeah, Devin came into the clinic. He's done his gene sequencing. Um and it's crazy. Like the guy has So many genes that are just
statistically impossible. It's like, was this guy built in a lab? Like to arm wrestle. It it's crazy. Like he d 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 n 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 seven point whatever. But we don't know what code our body's running on. But here's the question. These genes are inherent to you from birth or is anything a a result of training?
The genes are inherent to you at birth. So the thing is, epigenetics and epigenetics are impacted by your body by activity, right? So you may have a predisposition to uh Developing cancer cells, right? That's unfortunate, but you may have that. But that doesn't mean definitively you're gonna 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 forties where you begin that initial decline and the cascade effect. This uh gene mutation seems to also have a other side effect of vision loss. Mm. Yeah.'Cause it causes some eye. Interesting.
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. Um these aren't things being utilized in medicine today. Um but this is the direction of the future. I r 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. Right. Certain variants in LRP five gene interfere with eye blood vessel development.
causing familial exudative What's that word? 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.
¶ Discovery and Unique Properties of Muse Stem Cells
Yeah. Uh 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 and I know I think you know where I'm going with this, in in my entire time in healthcare is uh the Muse stem cells. Yeah. Um So d I don't know if you want me to talk a little bit about that kinda. Um so d for the listeners
Um, I 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 gonna change the world and I'm like, Oh, yeah, 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 sub phenotype of stem cell that we think is gonna change the world.
And uh so I called Doctor White, uh, you know, who's my chief science officer and 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 Deswana and uh in h and hear her lectures and tour the lab and kind of see what she's been doing since two thousand ten. Um we reviewed all the research, all the data, all the literature. And it was mind boggling.
Um, so Ian and I hopped on a plane and went to Japan back in September and uh sat down with Mari and she was gracious enough to break uh break down all of her research, answer Ian's questions. And I'm gonna 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 it just seems too good to be true. Um, and after sitting through those lectures and Mari uh enlightening us on all of her research and what she's seen.
I left there with Ian and he looked at me and was like, If this is real, this is going to change everything. in the regenitive space. And Ian, I think, won Regenitative Scientist of the Year last year in North America. He was was won some uh a big award for this space. And Ian uh is a stem cell scientist. And y 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 tr to try and break it down in like layman's terms is Muse stands for uh multilineage and the S E of Muse stands for uh stress enduring. So what does that mean in like real world talk? Um, Mari in her book 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 two percent of stem cells. So stem cells that are already a very minute amount of the cells in our body have a subset phenotype called mute. 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 at take'em off the petri dish and put'em back in cryo preserve. She thought she'd go in the next day and everything would be dead. When she went in because the sales 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 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 Mews. And so without getting too in the weeds, uh, I'd love to like break down what it is, what makes it unique, and why it's so prominent. if you're game. Yeah. Because it's super cool. Um
First and foremost in medicine they say uh 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 MSC. Traditional stem cells are extremely safe. And I've said this on your podcast before. Uh doctor Kaplan, who discovered traditional MSCs in 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.
Um, and there's pros and cons to that. The the pros are they don't become a cancer cell. And that's the c concern with pluripotency. And so the holy grail of what people have always looked for with stem cells were could 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 genic 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? 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 the you you can't get real stem cells because those cells have an identity and when you take bone marrow the the cells have already become a bone marrow cell and they're not going to differentiate and become something. So heretofore they can't heal. There's some truth to that.
They couldn't, they could just help regenerate uh 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 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 it's a commonly known process, but phagocytosis, don't say it three times fast, like you get cancelled. But like
Phagocytosis, essentially, in in in even in that lame's term, is like, think of it like a Pac-Man. This is how Mari described it to me. Um, because she knows I'm an idiot. And she's like trying to break it down in a way I 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 tumorgenic. Um in studies. These cells had no never became tumors in any of the studies that are ever done.
It furthermore, they treated mice that had pre-existing cancer. 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 MSEs in real world application when utilized appropriately is um they have an immunomodulary modulatory uh immunomod.
Immunity response essentially where 10 to 15% of people will get flu like symptoms. And that's with traditional MSC. Which is a very low safety profile. What you saw uh like effective safety profile. What you saw with the Muse cells in trials is zero percent. Literally right now, nobody's even getting flu like symptoms. And it's because these mu cells
go above and beyond uh immunos 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 mu 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. So think about this for
A a simple way to explain it is the whole process I broke down before, like when a mother's pregnant, that baby is a 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 MSC. The answer is the 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 and all mortality cause is at an all-time low while pregnant. Um the risk of cancers at an all-time low while pregnant. All of this goes back to MSEs and now we believe potentially MU cells.
¶ Therapeutic Potential of Muse Cells
And so They're safe, they're non tumor genic. Uh they immunomodulate, meaning your body's not gonna reject these cells. You're not gonna have a huge risk. What's crazy is they're already using it in plastic surgery. This is what I was talking about. They would take Uh historically instead of fill p 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 MUS when they do a reconstructive surgery to reduce the risk that you have an immune response that rejects the fat tissue. So it encourages the body to accept that tissue and then helps those cells build themselves back into your system and uh immunoregulate.
So think about it for the future of like organ transplants, what this could mean uh 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, uh non-tumor genic, um immunomodulating, meaning your body's not gonna turn on it, it's not gonna 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 pluripotency. I mean, this is the first cell uh other than the cells that have been altered um that can truly become something. Um, and then the 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, um
It i even with the great success we've had, they literally have a three to five percent engraftment rate. Meaning three to five percent 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 got. Now look at Muse. Muse have a 15 to 30% engraftment rate.
Mews 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 S S one P S P one uh
Inflammation damage cell is it's it's the signal that a cell sends out, hey, I'm damaged. These mu cells will navigate straight to those damaged cells. Through phagocytosis, 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 th that's why you're seeing such crazy results in Dubai and overseas and these are the treatments that are coming into the US.
um that are gonna be manufactured here on US soil and utilized in in states right now like Florida, Texas, Arizona and the states that have built pathways that make this approachable for people. Um the hope is that y we can build a regulatory pathway at the federal level that will allow accessibility too because What is definitively clear is these treatments, even the old MSCs and purified amnion and Wharton's jelly and all those things, there's no arguing that they're extremely safe.
I mean, there's thirty, forty 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,'cause the FDA doesn't want people out there making claims and I understand that,'cause there's so many people who are snake oil sellers.
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? For the patients, you know, battling some sort of neurocognitive issue, you know, these cells are able to pierce into the midbrain. I mean, and and I have all these Jamie, a bunch of these studies I have listed on Ways to Wells website.
Just so I'm not throwing random stuff out there. Um, I think I listed uh seven or eight of uh Mari Dazawa's studies. Um that back everything that I'm saying. Uh but the premise is, you know, the future's bright and I think that Muse will be an integral part of what we see here in the United States and the future of biologic.
¶ Muse Cells: A Golden Era for Regenerative Medicine
When we're talking about genes, the these obviously are in the body, these these cells. Is it is there a potential future where they could just turn these things on and not have to add exogenous? Stem cells. 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.
Um the other thing that this is uh crazy. So you've got this scientist, Dr. uh Dominic Deutscher. out of uh Germany. Brilliant guy, Stanford trained, Harv went to Stanford, uh Har did research at Stanford, went to Harvard, um University of Munich, crazy background, uh 14 years of stem cell research.
He catches wind of what Maury'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. 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 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 and the and and basically the end of these cells. All their all their ability to heal was used up.
Is that part of the reason other than just blood flow and the other challenges of diabetics, it could be one of the under uh uh uh under causing uh attributes that are causing these diabetic patients to heal poor. to be chronically inflamed. So it 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. And so if we can take these cells, these goodies of life.
and we can administer them proactively and preventatively. Um they even did mitochondrial testing. I don't know if that study's released yet. Um 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. Whoa. And so I'm not saying that it reverses aging, but in these studies, it appears to have extreme mitochondrial benefits, um, 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. um 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 twenty ten. They started using it in human patients in twenty nineteen.
Um, these products are being used every day in Dubai and uh overseas. People are flying over there and paying buku dollars to these clinics to get treatments with Muse cells. Um 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 they said he's done. Pull the plug. Harvest his organs. Um
Dominic was able to get a hold 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. Take his organs, like he's done. The n the the neurologists are like he's done. There is no brain Uh 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 uh with with children who were born with encephalitis. Um and what they saw is
a is these children who are left untreated will definitively have uh neurocognitive issues and and defects, the mental retardation. Um the children treated with Muse within eight days of birth All of those children had normal brain function. All of them. And so the studies beyond the and then you get into you know what they saw in heart.
what they saw in uh myocardial infarctions. Like you just go down the list and and there's so much promising data. Um and there's a decade worth of Um it just hasn't made it into the US yet.
Um and these are technologies and science and science and modalities that are going to be adopted uh in the near future at minimal at the state level and then hopefully at the federal level because It's they're already looking, you know we know, like I said, Secretary Kennedy's looking to open the regulatory pathway for tr for stem cells and Muse are just a subset of that same class
But an even safer, more efficacious version from what we're seeing in all of the trials. Aaron Powell And what's so exciting is that as more research develops, more of these things are gonna emerge. Yep. Well and then you've got guys like Ryan who go, W if you could take a muse cell and you a cell that could be anything, right? And it already has it's 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 m you make sure that it's a neuron. Um I'm I again I'm I'm I'm way over my skis on this part'cause I'm a business guy. I'm just breaking down what these scientists are saying and all of it's i i is exciting and promising to me because again, we've had such phenomenal results with traditional MS.
you know, with traditional M and all Muse are are this subset phenotype of super soldier cell. They're more resilient. And so the the second part of Muse is uh stress endurance. So what the whole point is Mari has a chapter in her book called uh sake in 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 sales we've got to keep cryo preserved and ship on dry ice. Um, so from an administration standpoint, from a logistical standpoint, from an efficacy standpoint, from a safety standpoint. All of this could be so game changing.
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. Um in the state some of the states are doing it, but I d ideally it would be optimal to work with the federal government to build those same pathways at the federal level. Um now that the states have already jumped on board. Such a cool time. Dude, it's awesome. I'm telling you, and the stuff I I it's hard because
Again, I'm not a clinician. I don't ever I'm not I don't wanna make claims. I don't want it to be I I am very excited about this, but I wanna temper my excitement. Because I i 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 mu cells differentiate. So they literally are regenerative cells that become the broken cell that allow your body to heal. I mean, and what we do with that and what the future holds with that, the sky's the limit. It's amazing. And that's where I just think eventually we're gonna 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. But also this is where you're gonna find the resistance because there's so much money in Yeah. Well and this is what's challenging with the stem cell stuff even. Like If if they don't work
people are not gonna spend their hard earned paycheck. Right. Right. And that that's the challenge. Like I understand the FDA's stance on safety. 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. um and to figure out a pathway that makes sense for the American people um while still honoring the safety and integrity of what they're trying to implement uh on a grander scale.
Um but do we need to go through the level of rigorous uh you know, multi billion dollar process on something that can't really be patented, um, or if it's safe and the safety profile's proven and it's readily available in nature. 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.
¶ Plasmapheresis and Microplastics Removal
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 inter 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 disease states reside and where most of the dysfunction is occurring. Um and so Yeah, there's there's a lot of promise. I'm excited about it. I think Muse are gonna 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. Um you're gonna see these things springing up at the state level. They're already happening all over outside the United States. Um it's just a little bit different market here with the regulatory landscape. Overseas. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And like let's get it going, guys. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm telling you, man. Such an exciting. Yeah. It's super exciting. And hopefully it's not too boring for the listeners. It's just it's complicated stuff. So I want to try to break into it. It's not boring at all, man. Don't don't apologize.
Is there anything else you wanna cover? No, the the other is just uh you said some of the treatments. Um you know, one of the ones that I heard Dana White talk about and he had said, Well, you gotta go to Mexico um is plasmaphoresis. Like we have plasmapheresis here in Austin, Texas. Uh we use it it we we added it to the clinic I guess three months ago. Um
Plasmapheresis is is also known as therapeutic plasma exchange. Essentially we run your blood through a dialysis machine. Um it's been used for over fifty years. It's used at the Mayo Clinic, it's used at all of these various academic institutions. Uh it just hasn't been used for longevity, right? And in in an insurance model where you're trying to get a reimbursement rate, you've got to have an indication. But 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 your blood through a plasmapharesis 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 forty five year old male, I've got forty five years of all the attrition and stuff that's in my system.
Um, you get seventy percent of that out through one therapeutic plasma exchange. um utilizing the plasmapharesis machine. And so what we'll do is we'll extrapolate out uh systematically your plasma and replace it with young, healthy protein called albumin. Um and then where we go an additional step at Wastewell is we're developing a protocol where we also add in the MSCs and um all and peptides and all of the things that um
are missing from albumin, right? So there's two different train of thought. Um, and I I have these listed too, Jamie, on the website. There's a bunch of different studies. Plasmapharesis has been studied for over fifty years. It's just not been utilized for like longevity and preventative care. Uh it's used more for uh Systematic inflammatory issues. There's even a bunch of fascinating studies around Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's and dementia is so inflammatory related.
Um, so there's a bunch of fascinating stuff on that. But the premise of plasmaphoresis is think of it like an oil change for your body. We're gonna take out uh seventy percent of all the bad stuff that's floating around in your blood. We're gonna 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 um MSCs, extracellular vesicles, all of these cellular goodies that are readily available at birth that have a precipitous decline as we ate. What is this? Can serial therapy, lower right corner, uh plasma exchange removes synthetic chemicals from humans? So is this like B P Cs and that kind of shit? Um what it's yeah, what it's doing is um
It's it's the goal is to remove all the extra stuff that's in your system that you don't need. And this study is pretty interesting because it breaks down what they saw. Here's a real world example. Our mutual friend, Philip Franklin Lee. Um and I and I asked him if I can talk about this. Look at this. Compounds such as bisphenol, plasticizers, and phthalate.
Yep. Endocrine disruptors that 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 and endocrine disruptors. So crazy, Philip. And he he's talked about this on his podcast. Philip came in.
Chronically tired, super low testosterone. I think 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 eighty or ninety. It was really, really low. We did a micro plastics test and he had the most frickin' micro plastics 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 Philip stopped drinking out of plastic bottles, took a m very like m measured approach to trying to be aware of how much plastic he could inadvertently be consuming. And then we ran him through ways to well protocol. Not only did 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. Phillips testosterone, without being on any testosterone, Is at twelve hundred.
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. 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. This is another thing I wanna point out about the challenge of like
not making claims or understanding the nuance. We 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 uh What's 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 experience 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 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? Right. Or maybe it was just the mushrooms. Why am I paying the therapist? 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 Hocket and I'm gonna do the plasmaphoresis and I wanna do uh 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 needle mover, or is it an attrition of all of them?
You know, that's where this gets tough and that's where I wanna 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 Wayste Wealth.
Which one's moving the needle the most?'Cause so many people wanna try everything, right? 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 felt, but
¶ Closing Remarks and Gratitude
They did five things, so I don't know which one was the one. Does it matter? Yeah. As long as it's providing a benefit. So it's good to know, but Yeah. Listen man, thank you so much for everything. I'm so happy you're out there and this is so exciting. All this stuff is so exciting. And I'm glad we had another opportunity to talk to people.
It's really impactful. Dude, you're the man and if if you wouldn't have had me on here to talk about this, I 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. I i 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 I really don't. There's so many people on the opposite side of the aisle.
uh 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. Well, that's exciting. Yeah. Thank you, man.
