#374 - Ex-Pharma Insider Exposes the $368 Billion Health Insurance Scam | Brigham Buhler

friggin thanks for coming bro man thank you for having me dude of course i'm so happy that jesse michaels was able to introduce us back in july when i was in austin oh i love your show it's funny we were talking right before i listened to you and jesse and uh joe rogan kind of broke me into this whole world but i love your podcast jesse's podcast they're phenomenal yeah dude Thank you so much. And it's been awesome to get to meet you over the past few months and chat with you about this crazy stuff. You have a wild back story. And to start this thing off, I think you should let people know the industry you came from and what you were doing for work back in the day, which led you down the path to where you are now with Ways to Well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a wild story. There's a Steve Jobs quote that talks about when you look back at your life and connect the dots. you'll realize that you were always exactly where you're supposed to be. And I don't know how to explain it. Even the bad things that have happened in the history of, like, where I was, everything put me in a position to know the things I know today that have allowed me to help, like, with the government and the lobbying and the fight against the corruption in the health care system. But I started out as a drug rep right out of college. Like, bright-eyed bushy tail. I went to University of Houston. They offered me a job to launch a drug that hadn't been announced yet. And, you know, I'm like a 20-year-old kid. And they're like, can you get out? Can you graduate in the next couple of months? So I like took 24 hours in summer school, did a bunch of stuff to try and get out of college early. And I got to launch Cialis in North America for a company called Eli Lilly. So I started out right out of school thinking that we were going to, you know, at the time, you got to think I'm 45. So this is 25 years ago, which is crazy to say. I thought I'm going to go out and I'm going to help people and I'm going to be a drug rep and I'm going to educate doctors on like cutting edge treatments and we're going to change the world. And you get into that and we can get into it, but that's not at all what that was. And so within a couple of years, I figured it out pretty quick for a kid that this isn't going to work for me. And I jumped out of that into med device. And I spent almost a decade working in the operating room with some of the best and brightest surgeons in America. And I got a look behind the curtain of the surgical market and the hospital systems and the insurance systems and how all of this is an intricate network that's intertwined. And during that time frame is when I lost my brother to the opioid crisis, which then led to me starting a pharmacy that built insurances and worked within the insurance framework, trying to provide non-abusive, non-addictive opioid alternatives to the American people. A no-brainer. Like, it's safer, it's better, it's cheaper. And what I saw, like, just shocked me. And from there, I evolved into realizing I wasn't going to be able to stay alive as an entrepreneur in an insurance model. And so it led to me building a pharmacy, breaking away, starting a cash pay pharmacy almost a decade ago, which was at the time, nobody did that. Like nobody had cash pay pharmacy. People are like, what are you doing? You're going to sell meds? Everyone has insurance. What do you mean we're going to pay cash? Because that whole COVID event hadn't happened yet and the movement towards preventative care hadn't happened yet. And I've been talking about preventative care, predictive medicine for almost a decade. And the reason I was doing it was, candidly, like, to paraphrase all of it, I saw that the ship was sinking, and I knew the only way to fix this was to build a life raft. And in my mind, the life raft was to get proactive, predictive, and preventative. You've got to take yourself out of the broken healthcare system, because under every rock I looked under in that system, there was another rattlesnake. It was terrifying what I saw from the surgical market to the drug rep market to the care that patients got to the collusion of industry to the power that they had over the hospitals. People think that if they have insurance and they trust the system that they're going to be taken care of. And it's unfortunate because I've said this before, but like if you use insurance and you go to the average primary care in America and you get the average blood work and you get on the average medication, don't be surprised when you die of the average chronic disease. Right. This system is not built to prevent. It's built to monetize and profiteer off chronic disease. And that's just the facts. Yeah, I've noticed that just from all the podcasts I've listened to over the past however many years it's been. listening to smart people and doctors talk about different types of metabolic health and exercise and like vitamins like the importance of all these things that your primary health physician doesn't really know much about and you know over the years like going to do my annual checkup with my doctor and like having these conversations with him and being like huh yeah what are you talking about like but how do those people know any of this stuff when they're seeing 100 patients a day. Yeah. And that model shifted. When I started out as a drug rep, that was the first thing I saw. The clinicians went from knowing the mother, the father, the family, traveling to that house with their little leather bag, and they had a vested interest in you, and they had a patient population of maybe 100 people. And as soon as the insurance companies took over healthcare, it went to where the average primary care has to see 40 plus patients a day. on average in America, they have six minutes with a patient. And the reason these numbers are important is how in the hell can I ever prevent your diabetes if I can't take a look under the hood? If I can't do a diagnostic workup that allows me to see where you're headed. So rather than waiting for you to become diabetic, like what we do at Ways Well today is because we're in a cash pay model. You and I were talking right before we got on the air for $500. We can do a comprehensive blood work. We can do a DEXA scan. We can do a VO2 max. We can do a full clinical workup. We can hook you up to an EEG and assess brain waves. If you come in depressed, anxiety ridden, overweight at a primary care practice, and they have six minutes with you, the first thing they're going to do is reach for the tool in their tool belt that's available. And that tool is a prescription drug. And that is why the average American is on four or more prescription drugs. We are the most chronically ill developed nation in the world, in the history of the world. But we have some of the lowest life cycle, lifespan expectations, even lower healthspan expectations. At the end of the day, you know, so often people can't understand why they can't figure out what's wrong with them. And it's because the system isn't built to fix what's wrong with you. is built to treat the symptoms of what's wrong with you and monetize that. And I can systematically break that down from every aspect of what I saw in over a decade of being in that space. Yeah. One of the most, I think I learned this from you actually, from one of your first podcasts on Rogan, was when you go into your doctor's office and you tell them you're self-pay, they automatically have to drop the price. Is that? Did I learn that from you? One of the things I talked about is if you go into a pharmacy and you have insurance. Yeah. They inflate it. Yeah, because, well, there's a gag clause. So I didn't know that. And the only reason I know this, there's so many people go, one of the things that's come out a lot, especially since I've been helping Secretary Kennedy and the Maha movement and trying to educate people on these nuances of health care is, well, that guy's not a doctor. How can he tell me? I'm not a doctor, but I employ doctors. I'm not a pharmacist. but I employ over 100 pharmacists. I'm not a chemist, but I employ chemists. I'm not a PhD, but I employ PhDs. And I have over 25 years of experience in healthcare. And I am telling you, the problem is not with the fish. The problem is with the tank. And when all the fish in the tank are sick and dying, at some point you have to ask yourself, what is in the water? The problem isn't the fish, it's the tank. And we've got to drain the tank. and the only way to drain the tank is to take yourself out of that ecosystem. So all the way back to what is the starting point? So everybody nowadays, candidly like 90, I think it's 90 plus percent of Americans get their health care through their employer. And what that means is you get your insurance through your employer. And so these insurance companies are driving your health care experience. They're deciding what drug you get, when you get it, and how you get it. And so as a retail pharmacy, this is why I had to move to cash pay. Your grandma would come in and I could sell her Metformin for $2 for a whole month's supply. Metformin cost me $1 for a whole month's supply. I'm just, I'm doing simple math. I think it's really like $2 and $5, but whatever. Let's just say it's about a 50% markup in a cash pay market. As soon as she tells me she has Blue Cross Blue Shield, or even if it's Medicare, Medicaid, those programs are controlled by private payers, by the PBMs. That's all outsourced. So even our governmental payer programs are controlled by the big conglomerates. They have a gag clause that says, I'm not legally allowed to tell your grandma that her cash pay price is $2. I swipe the card and it tells me $10. And I have to collect a $10 copay on a $2 drug. I don't get that additional $9. dollars, the insurance company takes all that money and I get like 10 cents and they get all the profits. And so fucking scam. Yeah. So you're paying every month for these treatments and that's why they'll switch you from one antidepressant to the next, from one cholesterol med to the next. And so often people would come in and go, what do you mean? My Lipitor is not covered. It's been covered for five years. And you're like, we're just the pharmacy. Like you're telling me my doctor changed your prescription? No, the insurance company did. And if you don't know the magic trick, if you haven't seen behind the curtain, the reason the insurance companies are changing the medication has nothing to do with what medication is best for you. It has to do with what medication is profiting them the most money. And even that's a little complicated, but I can break it down just so it makes sense. So it gets tricky, but there's a middleman called the pharmacy benefit manager and most people don't even know this exists is this what you used to be no i i just owned i owned pharmacies that build insurances so cvs would be a competitive you started when i when i broke off from being a device rep and all that i started a pharmacy i was explaining like when like i was asking like when you were a rep oh when i was a when i was a drug rep i called on clinicians and i educated them on medications okay and what i quickly learned in that space, and this is where it got dark, is when I first started, I launched Cialis, which is the Viagra competitor. Right. 36-hour Viagra. Mm-hmm. Everybody loves you. It's a dalafil, right? Yeah. Yeah. And when you're selling that, it's fun. There's not side effect. Everybody loves it. You're like Elvis walking in there because it was when it first launched. It was the biggest drug. And meanwhile, I'm just walking in and high-fiving doctors while the toe fungus girl's sitting out there waiting for three hours because nobody wants a doctor about toe fungus. Oh, my God. And so I was like the hottest thing in town because I launched the new drugs. The Williams Pialis. Yeah. And so I joked on Rogan like dick pills were where the money was at. Everyone loved to talk to you. They wanted it for their buddies. They wanted samples. Yeah. It was fun. And I was a 20-year-old kid. And so that was the fun side of that. And I did that for almost a year and a half. But at one point I got reallocated, relocated to Houston, Texas, Texas Medical Center, where they shifted my focus to mental health drugs. And that was where I first started to see the darkness of being a drug rep. I literally got call sheets that told me who the biggest prescribers were in a geographic region. I knew every drug that doctor prescribed the week before. The pharmaceutical companies have all of this. And my manager would say, you go find that person and you become their best fucking friend. And you find a way to grow the patient population. We need to sell more antidepressants. This is just how it worked. And as soon as I was in that job, I didn't even make it a year. I started looking to get out. I just couldn't do it. And I'm sitting there. I remember the epiphany clear as day. I was sitting in a training with a psychologist who was educating or psychiatrist who was educating us on the prescription. And we're going over placebo versus at the time it was Prozac. And it was like a 3% difference in efficacy. Placebo was almost as efficacious as the antidepressant. Wow. And I remember asking, why is placebo so close? So now, jump forward 30 years later since antidepressants hit the market. Rates of depression are at an all-time high. Rates of suicide are at an all-time high. Deaths of despair at an all-time high. Everything across the board, mental health-wise in America, is the worst it's ever been. When we launched antidepressants 30 years ago, they said we are going to end depression. We are going to stop depression. Do you know what the current prescription rates are of these antidepressants are? Oh, a huge amount of Americans are on it. Have they continued with the trajectory? They've continued with the trajectory, and it's an ecosystem that's built in. And the dirty secret is we were sold on that depression is a serotonin issue. You don't have enough serotonin in the brain. And if we can upregulate your serotonin reuptake inhibitor, we can spike your serotonin levels. Do you know where that comes from? It's the craziest thing ever. There has never been one single study. There has never been one single autopsy. There has never been the ability to quantify serotonin levels in the brain that statistically show that antidepressants are working at a chemical level. So you go, wait. Then how did they come up with that? Pfizer developed a questionnaire alongside one of their consultants who at the time ran the American Psychiatric Association for America. And they tasked him with a questionnaire about depression. All of these are diagnostic tests that are question based. There was never it was a theory that got written into history as a reality. But the reality of the matter is we have no evidence that it is a serotonin-related issue. That's insane. That's like taking a questionnaire to figure out what your cholesterol is. Exactly. Yeah, that's my – and so furthermore, even to this day, exercise and sleep outperform antidepressants. Somebody, if they just go for a walk, it's going to astronomically outperform antidepressants. Yeah, here's the trends on all – I mean – and it's a growing market and it's a booming market and it's a market that has been marketed and perpetuated and beat into the heads of primary care since they were in med school. Yeah. And they think and I'm not saying your doctor thinks they're doing wrong. Your doctor believes in the system that trained them. But who built that system and who funds that system and where does their continuing education come from? It's all bought, paid for and developed by the very companies that have the most to benefit by you being on a prescription drug. And that is why you've seen a boom in prescription drugs. Today, the average American is on four or more prescription drugs. The average American is on four or more prescription drugs. So explain to me how that downstream works or that stream, the incentive. The players. So you have the physician on the bottom floor. Yep. Then there's you. You're collaborating with the physician or meeting, taking them out to dinner and stuff like that. and then you work for the pharmaceutical company that's selling these antidepressants. Correct. What kind of kickback goes down to the doctor for prescribing this? Do they get quotas, or how does that whole system work? No, so at this point in time, even back when I was there, they were already starting to crack down, and so they developed basically the Advened rules, which are saying that people think this was a government regulation. It was not. The pharmaceutical companies went to the federal government, and said, hold on, hold on, we'll regulate ourselves. We'll create guidelines. You guys don't have to come in and regulate us. We all agree that we'll play the same game by the same rules. We'll put checks and balances in place. We won't take guys on vacations. We won't take them on ski trips. We won't send them on these extravagant trips anymore. We'll limit what we pay them as a consultant, all of those things. The reality of the matter is you have a lot of expense accounts and budgets, and that clinician's reaching for a tool in their tool belt and the tool available to them is what's covered by the insurance and what have I been educated on. Okay, well, when you're the device rep or the drug rep that is in that clinic every week and you're the person bringing the lunches and the dinners and taking that clinician out, I became really good friends with most of my doctors and then I'm being educated by the corporation and the corporation's telling me we have to stop depression in its tracks. We have to stop depression in its tracks and they bring in psychologists and psychiatrists that are funded by the company that educate you and help you grow a market. You're doing a good thing. You do. It's not that all these reps are thinking, oh, I'm going to do a bad thing. And so one of the examples of one of the most evil things I saw is they talk about off-label. And you do training as a 20-year-old kid and you do all these online modules that say, I will not promote off-label. I will never promote off-label. And all this is Document it at the company level. Then they would bring in a super charismatic neurologist from some university like Stanford that'll come in there and start telling you where all they're using the medication off label in their practice. And they'll go, you know, we've just vindicated for depression, but where we saw a lot of benefit is in this subset population. And this is a big population in America. And then you're at dinner with your doctor drinking wine on a Tuesday night. and you're like, they're asking, Brigham, I want to write more of this, but I just don't know where. I don't really see the patient you've laid out for me. And you go, do I tell them about what that psychologist said or that psychiatrist? Do I tell them what that professor from Stanford said? Maybe I'll just tell them and let them decide. They can do what they want with it, right? And those seeds are planted everywhere, and then they're watered and nourished, and then that leads to more prescriptions. And right or wrong, that's just the nature of the beast of that ecosystem that you're living in. and then you go to the other players. So if we were to break it down by players, there's the doctor who in all honesty is in a captured system doing the best they can to navigate that system. Right. If I'm a clinician and I went from, I have six minutes with you. I literally have got to get out of that room as fast as I can. Susie comes in, she's overweight, she's depressed, she's got anxiety. Okay, I just met with Brigham. He told me about this anxiety med. There's a script and she's depressed. Here's an antidepressant. Okay, and I'm just throwing whack-a-mole at you You're trying to fix the problem, and I've got to get off and get into the next room. And that's how that whole system has been built over the last 30, 40 years. Wow. And so the problem with that is it's going to lead to more and more prescriptions, which is great for Wall Street. It's great for the big pharmaceutical companies. It's not great for the patient. And so, like today, if somebody were to come into a practice like WasteWell or any practice, any cash pay medical practice, on average, we spend 45 minutes with a patient. We do a comprehensive analysis that usually at minimal includes blood work, a DEXA, and a VO2 max. None of those things would be allowed in a traditional health care system. Even blood work. People go, no, no, my primary care pulls blood work. Or women will go, no, no, my OBGYN pulls blood work. No, they pull a minimal panel. Right. And the way I know that is I also owned a blood lab where I went out and I marketed to primary cares in Texas. And I educated these clinicians in Texas on the importance of doing comprehensive blood work. Because if you're going to put somebody on a medication, shouldn't we at least know where they stand physiologically? Right. Shouldn't we uncover if there's some sort of hormonal issue that could be causing the depression or anxiety? And the answer is absolutely yes. But when they try to do that, the insurance company go, whoa, what are you doing? No, no, no. We don't want you pulling all that blood work. No, you're allowed to pull five panels. Right. Go back and pull five panels. If you keep pulling comprehensive blood work, we're going to terminate your contract. And so clinicians throughout the state of Texas got nasty letters telling them, if you continue to pull blood work, we will fire you as a clinician for Blue Cross Blue Shield or Cigna or Aetna or United. And the problem with that is most Americans are covered by their employer and five insurance companies cover 90% of the coverage in America for the average American. So five insurance companies are controlling all access to what gets tested, what gets looked at. And that is not based off what's best for you. It's based off them hitting their quarterly earnings and quarterly profits. I just don't understand why they would be so hesitant to want more blood work because if they got more blood work, wouldn't that just be more opportunity for them to prescribe more shit? Or is it just because it's too expensive? Well, think about this. The blood work, surgeries, a lot of these things are costly to the insurance companies. Right, right. And if I'm an executive at UnitedHealthcare and I look at it and I go, hey, Brigham is pre-diabetic. I know that if Brigham progresses to diabetes, on average, it's going to cost us seven to eight times the cost annually to keep him alive and functioning. You would think, wow, let's prevent the diabetes. Let's not prevent the progression. The dirty other analytic they have is that the average American switches employers every two and a half years. And so if me doing these workups and these tests or this surgery or whatever is going to hurt my quarterly profits today, I can kick the can down the road, deny the test. Less than 10% of patients object. So in America, less than 10% of patients fight the insurance company and reapply to the denial. And so most of the time, 90% of the time, the insurance company is able to push its will. And then if you go on a prescription drug, they're monetizing the prescription drug. So insulin is a revenue generator for the insurance company. And so here's how that worked. Yeah, this is where this gets crazy. It's a little nuanced, but it's the truth. And this is one of the things I've testified at the state level, at the federal level. This is one of the things that they're talking about trying to fix, but they've been talking about trying to fix it for 20 years. Yeah. So in the 80s, the government said, oh, my God, we need to develop an advocate for the average American. We've got to protect these consumers. So they came up with the idea of developing what's called a pharmacy benefit manager. The pharmacy benefit manager's job was to go out and negotiate with the big pharmaceutical companies to drive down the cost of a prescription medication to make it affordable for me and you and our grandparents and our loved ones. In the 90s, in late 80s, the big five insurance companies went out and it worked for a little bit. But like everything, no good deed goes unpunished. So then in the late 80s and early 90s, the insurance companies went out and acquired these middlemen. So now the middlemen don't exist at all. All of the major PBMs in America are owned by either United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, or CVS Caramark. And that's an important differentiator because as soon as they captured those entities, they stopped negotiating down the price of drugs and started negotiating up the price of drugs. And so you go, wait, how does that make sense? If I'm Blue Cross Blue Shield and Brigham goes on insulin, don't I have to pay for that insulin? Isn't it me paying for that insulin? And this is where the shell game begins. They put insulin on a balance sheet saying that it costs them $600 a month. And that's what they show at United. But what you don't know is their middleman negotiated a $300 rebate that goes to the PBM. So they go to Eli Lilly and they say, rather than selling me insulin for the $300 you were selling it for, sell it to me for $700 and give me a $300 rebate. Right? And so then at the end of the year, well, they go, well, that doesn't make sense because they still pay for it. No, they paid $400 less than they're showing on the balance sheet because they got the rebate of the $300. Does this make sense so far? Yes. Okay. At the end of the year, a company like mine who employs over 600 people has to sit down with the insurance carrier where you settle up. And I told you earlier, 90% of Americans are covered through insurance through their employer. So at the end of the year, it's the employer that covers the holding cost of all those medicines. And that is how UnitedHealthcare has gone from what it was 20 years ago to doing $368 billion in revenue. $368 billion in revenue. Roughly estimates are anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of their revenue came from pharmacy benefit managers. It is a cost center for them. It is a major cash flow revenue source for the insurance companies. And now you go, they have all these levers to pull. So one lever is we're going to pay you less to see patients. Now you have less time with a patient. What that means is you can reach for the tools as fast as you can. Now you can't really do the deep dive. So now the average American went from being on one or two drugs to being on four drugs. All four of those drugs have rebates. All of those rebates go to your middlemen. All of those rebates go to your cost center that is now a profit center that now adds up to your quarterly earnings. And now I'm a new CEO at United or Cigna or Aetna, and I'm looking at it going, we've got to perpetuate the lie. And we can't stop it because I'm not going to be the CEO that dies on this hill. And I don't know if you saw, they've been doing Senate hearings about this and congressional hearings. And they literally ask everyone in these executives from these pharmacy benefit managers to raise their hands if they also own pharmacies. And they're all raising their hands. Raise your hands if you also have gone out and acquired primary care practices. They all raise their hands. And so one of the largest. This is the worst part of capitalism. It's bad. It's bad and it's dark. And so what people don't realize is a lot of the primary cares in America used to be private practice, right? So when I was a drug rep 25 years ago, most of these doctors were mom and pop doctors that were independent. That shifted in the 90s, the 2000s, and to today, whereas I think it's over 90% of primary cares are now employees of major institutions. Yeah, right. Like the physician for my kids are employees of this company called BayCare, which is a huge hospital. I mean, I don't know much about it, but I know all like the main, there's like tons of offices just around western Florida. Yeah. So here's a real world example. United Healthcare, juggernaut company, owns the PBM Optum. Optum negotiates rebates with pharmaceutical companies. Those rebates are held at Optum. UnitedHealthcare also is now one of the largest employers of primary cares in North America. They've gone out and acquired practices. I think it's like 26% or 27% of the primary cares in America are employees indirectly of UnitedHealthcare. What? So United is setting the policies, the protocols, the procedures, the reimbursement rates, when, where, and how things get covered. And then you look at it and go, okay, so the average American is on four or more prescription drugs. We shouldn't be shocked by that. And the most simple analogy I use for people is this. You have to start thinking about your health insurance like you would car insurance. It's there if you total the car. It's really good. And I believe our health care system is really good at critical care, at surgeries, at catastrophic events. Where it is set up to fail you is preventative care. Where it's set up to fail you is preventing the chronic disease. they will not allow your doctor to typically get proactive predictive and preventative because almost every one of those modality you can't go let's go let's break down even what i said if you were to come to waste well how would if you came in and you said i'm depressed i have anxiety i'm gaining weight and i have no energy and no libido in a primary care practice they're going to write you an antidepressant they're going to write you a viagra right and they may even put John Ozempic if you're overweight. Right. And that's their solution. Why? Because I have six minutes with you. And I know the insurance is going to tell me, go fuck yourself as the doctor if I try to do a DEXA. A DEXA is not indicated in America for preventative care. It's used to assess bone mineral density. The only way the insurance is going to cover that is if you're an elderly woman and you've already had signs of osteoporosis. But what can that tool be used for in a cash pay model? With a DEXA scan, I know your visceral fat, your subcutaneous fat. I know your bone mineral density. I know all of these stats. I know how much muscle is on your left calf versus your right calf, your right bicep versus your left bicep. It gives me a full comprehensive analysis of you today at the physical level. If you combine that with a VO2 max, I know your cardiovascular health. Now, if I combine that with comprehensive blood work, I have all of your biomarkers where you are at the biological level on over 70 different markers that are crucial for me to see what's going on with you at a much deeper level. Now I can cross-reference all of those things and I can begin to predict and model out all cause mortality and chronic disease risk. And I can get proactive, predictive, and preventative. and with a very high statistical probability, I can prevent the chronic disease rather than waiting for you to get the chronic disease. Right. But in that other model, the doctor's got six minutes. He knows the insurance won't cover it. He or she knows all that. They're doing the best they can to navigate a difficult system. They put you on the meds. They hope for the best. They push you out the door and you come back in a year. Right. Fatter, sicker, more depressed. Right. Because they're just throwing shit against the wall. Well, like the crazy difference between folks that want to figure out a way to optimize their lifestyle or to live longer or to feel better, to look better, and people that get stuck in this normal system, this meat grinder that is like the health insurance companies and primary care physicians that are owned by insurance companies, is like the people that actually have the time and like the resources to do that. And like most people that live like nine to five, like work nine to five jobs, don't have time, they're dealing with their kids, they're dealing with daycare, whatever it is. Like these people, this isn't on the front of their mind. They're just like, oh, God, we got to do our yearly doctor visit. Let's just go do it. They don't think twice about it, nor do they have the time to be educated about it, which sucks. Yeah. No, it's tough. And everyone's just trying to make it through the day. Yeah. And so the problem with that is you don't drive your car and not put oil in it. Right. You don't drive your car and not change the oil. You don't drive your car and not rotate the tires. You don't drive your car and not put gas in. If you did that, you wouldn't be surprised when the motor blows up. But you also don't expect the insurance company to rotate the tires to change the oil and to add gas. You take autonomy and sovereignty over that and responsibility for that. And what's tough is we don't do that with our health. and we only get one body, you can always buy another car. You can't buy another body. How much do you spend on alcohol? How much do you spend on a mattress or a bed or a house or a car? These are things you're in for a minute today. You are in your body 24 seven from the day you enter this earth to the day you leave it. And you've got one body. Stop fucking putting your body at risk in the hands of these scumbags that are going to monetize it as another cattle call. And I'm sorry to be that blunt, but that is where we're at. It is catastrophic. Like the average American is riddled with disease, metabolic disease, diabetes. They're obese. Most men under the age of 30 can't qualify for military service. Our fertility rates are plummeting. We are literally on the cusp of being infertile as a species. Yeah. And we could get into like the food systems and all the things I've testified since helping with Ma. Yeah. Because that was mind blowing to me because even me, my personal journey is at 35 years old. I told you before we came on air, my dad's diabetic. My sister's diabetic. My brother's diabetic. My mom's diabetic. I was 25% body fat on the cusp of obesity, on the cusp of diabetes. I was doing CrossFit every day. I went and hired a nutritionist. I was trying to do what the nutritionist told me. And then finally, my insurance wouldn't cover a urologist. And that's the other problem. It's an obstructionist mindset. So for you to get testosterone in an insurance model, right, to get preventative care in an insurance model because testosterone is considered a lifestyle drug, for you to get that. In America. This isn't the case overseas, right? Yeah. No, no. it's crazy and so here you would have to get referral now this is changing too because of the most recent guidelines from the fda right this is something i talked about on rogan six years ago right like the myth about testosterone causing cancers the myth about women's hormones causing cancers and ovarian cancer all that is exactly that it is dogma it has been debunked it is not true. And there is quantifiable plethora of data that proves otherwise. If testosterone was causing prostate cancer, we saw a boom in the amount of men on testosterone starting in 2000 when Pfizer launched its testosterone cream. We would have seen a skyrocket in the amount of prostate cancer. Right. More men are on testosterone than ever before and prostate cancer rates have stayed the same. Wow. So it's less than 8% of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. There is no correlation between hormone optimization and prostate cancer. In fact, it's the exact opposite. And that's one of the challenges of healthcare. So often they are practicing 20 to 30 year old medicine, especially if you're in the insurance model, because the insurance is dictating every test, every single thing they can do. And so your doctor doesn't have the tool in the tool belt. It's hard to build a house if you don't have a hammer. Right. And they don't have the hammer. So how can they help you build the house? Because the insurance company is not giving them the hammer. And so it's so convoluted and complicated and complex, but there's ways to do it. Why are things like testosterone and these other ways of optimizing hormone therapy such like – why are they ignored by pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and not pushed more like these other ones? Is it because they can't patent it specifically to themselves? Yeah, a lot of like Ozempic versus testosterone. You would imagine testosterone would be prescribed a lot more than something like Ozempic. Yeah. So a lot of the hormone stuff is dogma. And what I mean by that is like even the testosterone study that that if you talk to somebody who went to med school even five years ago, they were taught that there is a correlation between testosterone and the risk of cancers. That study comes from a 1930s study. I think it was Dr. Huggins. He did a study of a patient population of three people. One guy dropped out of the study. One guy was chemically castrated, meaning he had no testosterone. And then the other guy had testosterone. When they boosted his testosterone, they saw his PSA went up, which in theory can increase your risk of prostate cancer. However, what they didn't follow him through was once he got to an optimal level. And so the reason that's important is if you're low, like if you have pre-existing prostate cancer and you're chemically castrated, taking you from chemically castrated to having testosterone will increase your risk of prostate cancer. Oh, okay. But as soon as you go past being low to being optimal, it reverses. And now it reduces your risk of prostate cancer. Oh, wow. And so the goal is to get you to an optimal testosterone level and it insulates you against most forms of cancer because you're healthy. Right. And when you optimize your health, you're going to put on a more lean muscle mass. You're going to reduce visceral fat. You're going to improve bone mineral density. You're going to improve cognitive function. You're going to improve energy level. Now you're feeling better. All of that leads to motion and mental health. And now you're outside. It's fascinating. It's a lot of kids. Yes. And there's a cumulative effect of all of this stuff. And sometimes we don't see the forest through the trees. And so there was a dogma there. And then over time, I think that dogma became accepted protocol. but even back to your discussion about the glp1s i would go back and say why why is your primary care so willing to reach for a glp1 or so willing to reach for insulin i can't tell you how many primary cares have told our patients that we treat now at waste well they go why i talked to my primary care about peptides and they said i don't know what you're talking about or they said peptides are dangerous i don't know anything about them they didn't train us on peptides you shouldn't be messing with peptides. Insulin is a peptide. The GLP-1 drug is a peptide. You just know the peptides that insurance are covering. And how do we decide what insurance covers? You decide it because it's gone through the FDA. And how do we decide what drugs make it through the FDA? That's controlled by the big pharmaceutical companies because it costs over $250 million to bring a drug to market. And the only way you're going to bring that drug to market is if you can patent the molecule 250 million dollars what why does it cost so much because it's built that way right and that's the other where's all that money go so i i i had the privilege of testifying in front of the senate and i broke down the broken health care system and i gave my lens as an entrepreneur in health care and one of the things i said to them is there's a fate there's this this famous speech from eisenhower where he talks about the military industrial complex that everyone knows about. And he warned the American people of what would happen if we allow the military industrial complex to infiltrate and control our government and our three-letter alphabet organizations and our institutions. There's a second half to that speech that nobody ever fucking talks about, where he warned what would happen if we allow our healthcare institutions and our scientific communities to be infiltrated and controlled by private industry. And this is what's happened. Who funds all of the major universities? Who funds most of the researches of PhDs? Who funds most of these things? It's the big pharmaceutical companies. Who has the most to gain by making it difficult to bring a drug all the way to market? It's the big pharmaceutical companies. So let me give an example of, let's just say a peptide theoretically. If I'm a big pharmaceutical company, you can't, you're going to have a very difficult time as a biotech or healthcare startup bringing a drug all the way to market without running out of capital. So inevitably, most drugs get captured by one of the big five pharmaceutical companies before they ever come to market, and then they monetize it, bundle it up, get it through the FDA, and we're off to the races. Right. Because they already have the relationships. And the protocols and the procedures and the pathways. Wow. Wow. And so your clinician is intimately familiar with what they can have covered. And so I can break that. Like in orthopedic surgery, to this day, most orthopedic surgeons go, you can't get stem cells in North America. You can. It's just not FDA approved. You can. It's just not going to be covered by insurance. And how do we decide what's covered by insurance? You have to go through this entire FDA approval process, and then you have to create a bill code, and it has to be indicated for a certain treatment modality, right? And so back to testosterone. Why is testosterone not covered by insurance? It is if you're considered clinically low. How do you get a diagnosis of clinically low? A primary care is typically not going to give you that. So you go to your primary, and this is the system that I... They're not even going to give you that blood test? If they get an initial low reading they going to refer you out to an endocrinologist or a urologist Got it And then that in this system can take anywhere from six to nine months to get in with that doctor And then your insurance is typically going to deny it And you're going to have to have your primary care write a letter and argue with the insurance company. Now I can finally go to my, this is exactly my experience. Primary care goes, yeah, everything looks good. He wasn't even looking at my testosterone. Never had pulled my testosterone. I'm 25% body fat, high cholesterol on the cusp of diabetes. he was going to put me on a pre-diabetes medication and some of these other things, but never looked at my testosterone. And then it's like my, it was my nutritionist who said, you need to go to a urologist. So it took me about six months to get my primary care to get me in with a urologist. Then I go into the urologist and you have to go fasted and you have to do a blood draw. Then it took two weeks to get that blood work back. Then the blood work comes back and my testosterone was 90, which is crazy. you have to have two fasted blood draws before my insurance carrier would cover it, which is pretty common. So then I have to wait a few more months. Like you corroborate the first one? Yes. Then I come back a few months later, get another blood draw, test low, and then at that point I get an explanation of benefits in the mail, an EOB, that says we are going to cover this full blood draw. You're on the hook for $300 of it, right? And so in that insurance model where I've paid for that care, they still leave me holding the bag of shit. I'm paying for my blood work. I can do that blood draw today literally with a 45-minute consult with a clinician that's an expert in hormone optimization for $500. What were you paying for? It's the same exact trap you saw at the pharmacy with the metformin. Along the way, the insurance company is monetizing all these things. And Luigi, the guy who killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO, he wrote, delay, deny, depose. Delay. You obstruct the care. You tell them you're going to have to go get another blood draw. You're going to have to get approval or prior authorization before we'll let you go to the urologist. Deny. You now got your blood draw. We're not going to cover it. You owe us half the money from the blood draw. And then depose. If you step out of line as a clinician, you're going to end up in a lawsuit in litigation where they're going to make your life hell. There's so many checks and levers that these insurance companies can pull that it makes it very complicated and very difficult. One of the things I explained to Tucker is people say it's just so hard to understand what my insurance covers. or I got this explanation of benefits and it's really confusing and I just don't understand how are they making money and where's the money hidden and blah, blah, blah, blah. Because the margins, literally the margins are made in the mystery. The margins are made. It's intentional. It is by design to make it deceptive and confusing. So the burden is on you, the patient, and you get frustrated and you give up. Because if you give up, that's less revenue that they have to spend. That's less cash that goes out the door and more revenue that they get to keep. And the harder they make it for you to get surgeries, for you to get predictive preventative care, the more prescription drugs you're on. And the more prescription drugs you're on, the better the quarterly earnings and quarterly profits. And all of this ecosystem is built that way because it is now built to hit quarterly earnings and quarterly profits. It's not built to get proactive, predictive, and preventative. is there any way to throw a wrench into that into those gears and blow up this whole system is there any hope i think what i've said all along is all i've tried to do is solve problems like i literally looked at it and i go okay i've got a pharmacy they're not letting these people fill these prescriptions i'm going to build a cash pay pharmacy and i'm going to compound all the medications that insurance refused to cover so that's how i started my pharmacy revive I would get a book, like literally almost like a phone book every quarter from the insurance companies with all the new drugs they're not going to cover. And then I would take that book and I would go to my pharmacist and I would go, which one of these things can we compound? And so then we would start compounding all the things insurance weren't going to cover. And that's how we started the pharmacy. Then you go to blood work. I owned a blood lab that built insurances. And I went out and I educated the doctors on the blood work. Okay, well, then the doctors got letters saying you can't pull the blood work. So then I said, we're going to have to move to cash pay on blood work. So I went out and I moved my lab to being a cash pay blood work lab to drive down the cost. And now I can charge you the real price. I can charge a real price that's cash affordable for the patient. But the catch was, and again, this is eight years ago. This is nine years. This is prior to COVID. So nobody, everyone still believed in the healthcare system at this point. And I was out banging on doors and going, hey, we can do your blood work for cash. What? I have insurance. Why the hell would I pay cash? Why would I use my money to do blood work? Right. And I'm like trying to educate them on all of this complicated, multifaceted stuff to explain why you've got to build your own life raft. Now I feel like the world's woken up and it's crazy how many blood lab companies are out there. Yeah. So even the evolution of my company, the next phase for ways to well is I don't care where you get your blood work. If you if you've got blood work from a primary care, bring it. You got blood work from Merrick Health. Bring it. You got blood work from 10x. Bring it. We're here to be a resource. And we're here to help you with the last mile. And so through loading your blood work into our AI and our algorithm, if you've got a DEXA from somewhere, load it in. You've got a VO2 max from somewhere, load it in. I'm not here to sell you modalities. I'm here to treat the root cause. And the only way I can treat the root cause is to identify the root cause. And all I need are the tools. And so I don't care where you get it. My goal is to make this as cheap as possible. I want every single American to be able to afford this. Like what you said earlier, how many people are just trying to make it through the day? They're running their kids to soccer and baseball and they're tired and they have very little time in their life to deal with all this stuff. We've got to make it easier, faster and better. And that's why at WasteWell, originally we rolled out mobile phlebotomy. We send somebody to your house. We pull your blood. Now we've got your blood work. It loads into the algorithm. That's all in your pocket. That's amazing. Your console's over the phone. Everything's mailed to your house for pennies on the dollar. And so that was the original vision, and that's still the vision, and it's evolved astronomically to where now it's like, hey, we'll even take other people's blood work. Like if you've got blood work from a competitor, from somewhere, and you just don't feel like you're getting the answers you need, load that blood work. If your primary care has put you on a bunch of prescription drugs and you don't feel like they're analyzing your blood work, load it in. And I think large language models like ChatGPT and a lot of these are going to help people because now the power is going back to the patient. The knowledge is going back to the patient. It's not this authoritarian regime where you've got to rely on your primary care to give you answers. The answers are in your pocket. They're in your phone 24-7. Now, these pharmaceutical companies have to be seeing this happening. They have to be seeing the rise of the grassroots folks like you who are doing this the right way and other people who are doing similar things to you. And they have to be coming up with some sort of a strategy to combat this, right? Yes. And obviously they have more money than God. And the scariest part of it is they also have control over media, the Internet, YouTube. You know, it's only until recently where you can do podcasts like this and you don't get in trouble on YouTube for it, which is terrifying, bro. Yeah. So, like, what do you think or what do you have you experienced as far as, like, pushback from these companies and, like, what they're trying to do in the government with lobbying and all that? The lobbying power is intense. I mean, it is as intense as it gets. When you first get into the YouTube stuff during COVID, I mean, they banned our account multiple times for WasteWell. We couldn't grow on social. And then I legally, because a lot of what we do is off-label, I can't brand and I can't advertise. One example is the first time I went on Rogan, two days before I go on Joe's podcast, the merchant company shut off all of our credit card ability. And they had $400,000 of the money that had been paid to us sitting in a merchant account. And the way those merchant accounts read is if you dispute them or litigate, they have the right to just take the money that's in the escrow account. And we weren't making that. That was like all of my profits. And they could have taken all of months worth of profits because it gets siphoned out at a certain date. Every like 30 days or whatever, they would move the money back to us. And so all this money was sitting there. I have no access to it. You banned me from being able to bill future credit cards. What year was this? This was during the COVID stuff. And it was because. Before you went on Rogan. Yeah, literally two days before I went on Rogan the very first time. And then I go on Rogan and we have an influx of all these patients and we have no way to bill them. We have no way to onboard patients because our credit card merchant won't allow us to bill or collect because they said we were advertising peptides and stem cells and those aren't FDA approved. And so they can shut down your – it's just like the marijuana trade. They can shut down your banking. They can shut down your access to billing and collections if you're not in their ecosystem. And they can do it in an array of different ways. So and then you also get shut down on social media. Like we've been banned so many times on on Instagram and different things because we do peptides and peptides aren't FDA approved or you do stem cells and stem cells aren't FDA approved. And if some kid thinks you're making a claim, they can just come and hammer you and make your life hell. And that's how I ended up on Rogan. I was literally breaking down for Rogan, the corruption, the collusion and the corporate capture. and one day because he was a patient i was just talking to him when he's in the clinic and we had developed a relationship over maybe a year and a half and one day he goes come on the podcast i'm like dude i've never done a podcast you shut the fuck up it's two guys talking just come on the podcast and so i remember going on there terrified and like it was just terrifying and it led to getting to know a lot of politicians getting phone calls from all over the united States with people who were firsthand had experienced the things that I was talking about. I mean, I'm talking congressmen, congresswomen, state attorney generals who were digging into these insurance companies, whistleblowers, you name it. And at this point, I've helped multiple states with the pharmacy benefit managers and the way that they're getting price gouged. Like in the state of Ohio, they uncovered, I think, $230 million in health care fraud through the PBM, meaning drugs being marked up, drugs that should have been a fraction of the cost are causing their governmental payer programs exorbitant expenses, and that's one state, one year, and that's not even a large state. Now multiply that across the United States and think about how much fraud, waste, and abuse is occurring. It's astronomical. That's terrifying. Yeah, but the other thing, today, like real world today, Most of the pharmaceutical companies have been lobbying the FDA pretty hard to shut down peptides. And as of about a year ago under the Biden administration, they passed a regulatory plan that essentially eliminated overnight 19 blockbuster peptides that were being used every day. Things like BPC-157, the Wolverine molecule, TB-500, thymus and alpha, even, I mean, you name it. I heard they were trying to put the kibosh on fish oil. Yeah. Fish oil supplements. Yeah, it's everything. It's nuts. I mean, it is so much stuff that they have regulated. Is fish oil considered? They're not. No, it's considered a supplement, so you can still get it. But what they did is they, the FDA essentially in a vacuum, banned 19 peptides. And so that's all happened over the last three years. Real world data. I have submitted 17 FOIA requests to the FDA. 17 about these peptides. They are legally required by law to respond within a certain time frame. I think it's like 90 days. Do you know how many requests they've responded to? Zero. Zero. You got a response from the CIA. Yeah, exactly. Not a single FOIA request. And so here's another example, the GLP-1 weight loss drugs. They grew so fast that the big pharmaceutical companies couldn't keep up with the demand of the American people. And these drugs were originally indicated as a diabetic medication, meant to be helping poverty-stricken communities, people with severe diabetes. Right. But when every housewife in Malibu is taking it to lose 10 pounds for spring break, you couldn't get it anymore. So then the prices just kept going up. At one point, the average retail price of a GLP-1 drug in North America was $1,300 a month. Whoa. $1,300 a month for a medication that we could compound and mail to your doorstep for under $200. The federal government released guidelines saying this is now put on an emergency backlog list. can compounders please make this drug? We can't meet the need of the American people. Diabetics are not able to get their medication because so many Americans are taking this weight loss drug. So we go out and we start compounding those drugs because we were asked to by the FDA. What happens? Within months, even though we were asked to compound this drug, Eli Lilly sues us. Now you have to litigate against Eli Lilly in the court system. And Eli Lilly says, and they lobby the FDA, You can't let these guys make this. We've got to shut these guys down. These drugs are dangerous. These are compounders. This is a dangerous drug. What they're not telling you is we buy our ingredients from the same place as Eli Lilly. We compound it to the exact specifications that are the protocols we're supposed to. We independently third-party verify every single ingredient. We then independently third-party verify every single batch, and we batch check. and we have all of these safety calls, protocols, and procedures to make sure that what we're providing the patient is as safe and as efficacious as possible. So Eli Lilly files lawsuits against all the compounders throughout the United States. We've now litigated those lawsuits. All of them? Almost every single one. It wasn't just us. And so we've litigated those cases in the court system. And the judges have asked Eli Lilly to provide the data of danger and side effects and adverse events. In every court case across the United States, they have not been able to provide any of that data. In fact, in one of the cases against a large telemedicine company, they went to Reddit forum chat rooms as their data. And they showed that to the judge. And the judge said, if Reddit forum chat rooms are the best you have, get out of here. But the problem is, if you give information and you pressure these politicians and you can spin a narrative and you have accessibility through your lobbying power, you can paint the narrative without the data and then you've got a politician going well all i know is these gray and black market peptide companies are making or violating patents and they're doing this and they're doing that and it's like no you don't know the history the fda asked these compounders to make this then eli lily sued the compounders and now all of this is in litigation costing people hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to defend a medication that we were asked to make by the government in the first place. So are you still under litigation with this? We actually, in the state of Texas, the judge just threw the case out with prejudice, meaning that Lilly and Novo and these big companies are not allowed to refile these lawsuits against us. But they're still suing all these other compounding pharmacies, and there's huge lawsuits going on, and the lobbying power and rhetoric has gone through the roof, and they're the real reason that we lost those 19 peptides years ago. But there's no safety data to back it. And even with what they're saying with the GLP-1s, they have no safety data to show that this is a liability or a risk. It's all back to that marketing and that spin. And who are the masters of marketing and spin? The pharmaceutical companies that built the entire antidepressant market, created the SSRI market, created the opioid crisis. Own the media. Own the media, fund the media, fund the narrative, control the message. I think they spent $32 million last year in lobbying power in D.C. I mean, they're one of the biggest lobbyists out there. And then who else is? The big five insurance companies. And these entities are intertwined. Because guess what? If you fill a compounded GLP-1 for $200 cash, guess who's not making the 30% rebate? Your insurance company. guess who's not getting the sticker gouge that they're used to the big pharmaceutical company and so this create and get and then even let's go a step deeper which starts to get kind of crazy guess who's not getting 250 million dollars to bring that drug to market the regulatory oversight bodies that make money off fee schedules and structures to evaluate and assess studies That's the FDA. So the FDA is built into the ecosystem. If they don't have that process, that's how they fund the operation. And so there is an incentive to have a lie agreed upon. Yeah, they rely on those big pharmaceutical companies for their existence, which is fucking crazy, dude. Yeah. What is the difference as far as the standards that you have to follow or the safety or the cleanliness protocols of the facilities when it comes to a compounding pharmacy versus one of these big pharmaceutical companies? Yeah, that's interesting too. So this is a very common misnomer. Um, people assume if something's FDA approved, that it's safe and that it's been vetted and that it's had human safety studies and that we're good to go. You're safe. It's an FDA approved product. I can systematically dismantle that. And I'm going to in the next one minute through facts, data and the reality. And I actually argued with a high ranking FDA official about this very topic. Okay, let's start on the surgical market because I told you I had a lot of experience working in the surgical market. If you look at every single surgical product that goes into the operating room, I'm talking pacemakers, implants, women's health products, men's health products, neurological products that are going into your brain, joints. What percentage of those products do you think had a human safety study? I don't even want to guess. The answer is less than 10%. 92% of the shit that has gone into the operating room for the last 20 years has never had one single human safety study. Not one. And you go, how is that possible? because in the 1980s, the big medical establishment lobbied the FDA to establish what's called the 510K approval process. What that said is if you can show a pre-existing technology that exists in the operating room, you can daisy chain your technology into the operating room. Why is that important? That's like saying if I have a bell telephone on a cable at my house and now I have an iPhone that's a fucking rocket ship in my pocket, It's the same piece of technology because you daisy chained a daisy chain, a daisy chain, a daisy chain, a daisy chain. That's like saying a Tesla is a Model T Ford. Right. Right. The evolution of technology is rapidly progressing. And why is that important? Man, I can tell you in my time in the operating room. I have seen people die in procedures that will never be reported, that will never get reported to the FDA. 100%. Because what happens is the hospital and the big medical device company will put together a package deal for that family. And they will pay the family. And they will all sign in DAs. And they'll shut it down. So it doesn't become public. And so one real world example in my sin in the operating room, we launched high res HD cameras. And when the first high definition came out into the operating room and you're in the middle of a critical procedure, I was standing in a heart surgery. And every time you're using the camera to look at a screen and do this heart procedure, every time they would cauterize, the fucking camera would turn off. You're literally in the heart valves and the camera go and just shut off. They had never validation tested the chipset to be used against electrocautery. So as soon as the electrocautery would engage, it would turn off the fucking chipset of the camera. So they're flying blind. Flying blind. Oh, my God. What happened? And this was a glitch that never got discovered because they never did any of these safety studies. And then you can go, I mean, I can give you literally dozens and dozens and dozens of examples. There was a product called Esher. there was a where they go in and put an implant into the uterus. But what they didn't realize is they did studies about putting them in, but they never did studies about putting them out. So what if a woman wanted to reverse it? Well, now her uterus uteral wall had grown into it, and it was literally causing women to lose their fertility where they could never have children. And all of these things happen like every day. Yeah, that would in that implant would grow into the woman's body where she couldn't have the procedure. She couldn't remove it. And so she'd be infertile. And one of the companies created a joint, and this is a true story too, which is kind of funny, because they don't ever do these human studies, the joint after about a year would start squeaking. So you would walk and go, and how the lawsuit came up is a guy was having sex with his wife. This is a legit story. And his hip was squeaking the whole time. And so he filed a lawsuit because he had like this squeaky hip. But the only way to fix that is to rip the hip out. Right. And these are some of the more like funny stories. But I also saw, you know, there was like a shaver that was used to shave down tissue. And they had changed it so many times over its evolution of 20 years. What they didn't do is take into account you've got to be able to clean the shaver and clean out the tissue that flows through this cannulated piece of device. and the tissue was building up in these shavers, and these shavers were being dispensed all over hospital systems, and it's the theory of clean dirt. You cook and sterilize these shavers to kill the bacteria. But if there's a big old clump of tissue from an infected patient stuck in the middle of a cannula straw that you can't see because you can't see down into the straw, that tissue could harbor an ultra-resilient bacteria, and it happened, and it killed people. And there are examples after you see it. So, one, 510K approval process. Well, that's the most, that's like the number two or three cause of death in the U.S., right? Number three cause of death is medical misdiagnosis and misuse. That's why I'm fucking terrified of hospitals. Now you go to the drug side of the world. And this is my discussion with this high-ranking official at the FDA because he said, we don't have any double-blind, placebo-controlled FDA trials on peptides. Right. And I said, that's because peptides occur naturally in nature. They're a short-chain amino acid, and we cannot patent a peptide. It's human patent law. You can try. Why is Big Pharma not winning its lawsuits on the GLP-1s? Because they're peptides. It's readily, you can patent the delivery mechanism, you can patent the dosage. You cannot patent the molecule because the molecule is available in nature, right? And so that's the problem with peptides. It's a new world. That's the problem with stem cell therapy. It's a new world. You can patent the delivery mechanism or a protocol or a procedure, but you cannot patent the molecule. because the biological molecule comes from nature. It's already there. And so there's challenges around that, and you won't win in patent law. So let's look at even drugs. Sorry, I know this is a lot. I went way off the top on the 510K, but let's go back to drugs, which is the main point because that would be a competitor to a peptide is a drug. 60% to 80% of the drugs that have been approved by the FDA will have a major recall or label change. 60% to 80%. 60, a coin toss. Right. Even after going through your human safety studies and all your data, it's a coin toss. Furthermore, when you look at human safety studies, if you already have a preexisting study around safety and you apply for a new indication, meaning you grow the patient population, which is what I told you my whole job was as a drug rep, right? This is indicated for depression, but we think it may work in anxiety. Okay. Well, anxiety is a different patient population. Anxiety may impact a different subset of the human population, and that subset may have a different response to this modality. So one example I'll give you is opioids. Polynesians and Hawaiians can't absorb opioids. So they don't get any therapeutic benefit from an opioid. They're an outlier. They can't absorb them? They absorb the negatives of it, but they don't get the therapeutic relief. It's a gene defect. Polynesians and who? Like Hawaiians and Polynesians have a... Oh, just them. Yeah, for whatever reason, opioids do not provide the pain relief typically in those populations, but they're still addictive, and they still wreck the endocrine system, and they still cause all these other crazy side effects. And so how did OxyContin get into the market? Prior to OxyContin, they used codeine, and they had the cotton delivery system. And so it was codeine in the cotton delivery system, and the premise was codeine was time released, which reduced the likelihood of becoming addicted. The patent was going to expire and they were running out of time to innovate a new drug. So the Purdue Pharma family said, we've got to bring a new drug to market. We're losing our cash cow. They go out and they find a new opioid called Oxy. But what they didn't tell the American public is Oxy is eight times more addictive, abusive, and habit-forming than codeine. It was a nuclear bomb, and they were able to lobby the FDA commissioner at the time to allow them to grandfather in the safety data of their codeine product based off the cotton delivery system. And the message was, this is time-released. It can't be abused. It can't be addictive because it's time-released. but they never had, they didn't have any positive addiction data. They were able to basically just talk their way into it because of their pre-existing relationship. The commissioner of the FDA rubber stamped it, gave them an indication for pain relief and put in the label, the goose that laid the golden egg, which said it's less likely to be addictive, even though it was eight times more likely to be addictive. Pushed it into the marketplace, created the opioid crisis. Millions of Americans die. And then guess who made 30% of that money and has never been mentioned? The PBMs. All this data is out there. 30% of the money went back to the insurance companies. They've gotten off with this scot-free this entire time. Nobody ever talks about those guys. They just talk about the pharmaceutical companies. And the reason that's important is when I go back to when I was trying to push non-addictive, non-abusive pain creams, The insurance companies would say, no, put them on an opioid. And now you know why. Wow. Because 30% of their revenue was coming from the opioid. So they had no reason to keep you off the opioid. They had every reason to put you on the opioid. Why would you not want somebody on a pain cream? Because it's compounded. And guess who doesn't make money off a compounded drug? Right. The insurance companies and the PBMs. And so it all just comes full circle. Yeah. Here's the worst part of all. Guess who the commissioner of the FDA went to go work for 18 months later? Purdue Pharma. Purdue Pharma. 90% of the commissioners. This script just writes itself, bro. It's nuts, dude. And 90% of the commissioners of the FDA have gone to work for the very industries that they're supposed to regulate. 90%. And all of this infrastructure is still in place today. Yes. And through COVID, this whole infrastructure has been there. The whole time. And then you look at what happened with the COVID vaccine. And then you look at what happened with the childhood vaccine schedule. Yeah. And then you just keep looking, and every rock you look under is another rattlesnake. Can you explain to me what's going on with pediatricians and the vaccine schedules, where there's something going on where, in their practice, they have to have a certain percentage of their patients vaccinated, or else they lose some big cash bonus? Yeah. Yeah. So what, like I said earlier, a lot of these primary care practices have been consumed by corporate conglomerates. And so they're no longer a free working employee. They're a free working clinician. They're an employee of an institution. And so let's give an example of like, I think Kelsey Siebel. I don't know. Do y'all have Kelsey Siebel here in Florida? Kelsey Siebel is a huge healthcare conglomerate that went out and bought up a bunch of primary cares, but they also own the hospital. And so the premise is if you vertically integrate as a healthcare institution and you own the primary care, you are the first point of contact for a patient. What's earlier than a primary care? A pediatrician. So if you own the pediatric practice and you own the primary care practice and they all roll up under the parent company, that's the hospital. And now you've vertically integrated. If a little kid gets injured, they go to your hospital, right? Because that's where that doctor, their primary, their pediatrician is going to refer them. That's where that primary care is going to refer you if you go is the hospital that owns and pays their check, right? And so it's a way to capture a market and capture a patient population. Those hospital systems and institutions buy vaccines at a wholesale price point in bulk. And so if I'm some huge hospital institution, I won't name names because I don't want to get sued. If I'm some huge hospital system and I'm going to buy five million dollars in vaccines this year and I know I can make it ten million dollars, it's a five million dollar revenue stream. Right. I build in compliance programs that incentivize my my pediatricians to make sure that they have a certain compliance schedule. And so you bonus your employees for compliance. But indirectly, what you're really bonusing them for is revenue because they're generating revenue. And this is all going to come out because I'm helping several states sue these various institutions to uncover this. And we have the whistleblowers and all of this to prove it. And it's the same model I showed you earlier with the PBM. So it's a little bit different. Vaccines aren't typically controlled by the PBM because they're earlier in the stage of care. And they're not a continual revenue source like a prescription drug. But the vaccines are purchased in bulk by hospital systems that are usually the ones administering this at birth. And so then your clinician is trying to keep you, you know, whether it's the birth schedule or then you get to the pediatric practice, they want to make sure they keep you on schedule. And I'm not here to say, like, what I've learned with the pediatricians is they mean well, but they were born into this system where they are candidly, I don't know, they're just brainwashed. They're brainwashed to believe that this is real, that we need this. Oh, my God, if we don't give this kid Hep B shot, like he's going to die or she's. No, they're not. Is your child abusing intravenous drugs or having sex the day they're born? If both parents don't have Hep B and the child's not going to be exposed to dirty needles or sexual intercourse, why are we giving them a Hep B vaccine? And the plethora of all those vaccines combined, there are, regardless of what you're told, there are always risks, rewards for every medication on the market. And then you take it and you put it in the tiniest of humans when they're at the highest risk, when they're the most susceptible, and you bombard their immune system with a huge amount of foreign substances, including metal contaminants, aluminum, all sorts of things that are in these vaccines. even at the most stringent levels, there's still contaminants and aluminum-based products in these injections. And all of that leads to an immune response, an inflammatory response, issues with their absorption rate of certain vitamins that are important in brain development. And that's partially why this administration is questioning, is there a correlation or causation with autism? And it's to be determined. And we're going to see as more and more data comes out. Well, it's crazy. It's interesting you've used the term brainwashed to describe some of the people that were born into this system. They could be good people who mean well. When I question this stuff, because I have kids, and I bring them in to get their checkups, and the pediatricians are constantly like, how many are we getting the shots today? Are we getting the shots today? And they know when I walk in that they're not getting shots, but they keep pestering me about it. And when I have to try to explain to them why they look at me like I'm the brainwashed one. Like I'm the psycho brainwashed kook, right, that's not wanting to give my kid however many, what is it, 70-something vaccines they're supposed to get before they're like six or something? It just keeps growing. Over 70 vaccines are on the schedule. And even when my latest daughter was born, they were like looking at me like I had three heads because I was opting out of this hepatitis B vaccine. And then a month later, it comes out, thanks to Bobby Kennedy, the CDC no longer recommends the hepatitis B vaccine. But I'm sure there's like hospitals, like you were explaining, those vertically integrated health care corporations that have the hospitals and the health care clinics and the pediatricians under their wing that if your baby is born in their hospital, they're still going to probably push all that stuff on you, right? They're not. And it's even the same with the flu shot. It's just the flu shot is vertically integrated at every hospital system too. And every rep that goes into that hospital system is told, hey, you're not allowed to come in here unless you get the flu shot. We're giving flu shots downstairs if you want to go get one. So even like I've seen a lot of positive things go through the FDA recently through Bobby Kennedy, like recommending, not recommending these hep B vaccines. is there, when it comes to the incentive, like that top-down incentive for the providers to get all of those vaccines used up by their patients, is there any effect to that system at all? Like is there going to be any sort of like pushback against that to where they're not going to be legally allowed to do that? Not that I'm aware of. I think the main thing is you're giving you and this is where people get fanatical about this. Yeah. Your insurance and this entire system will still allow you to get the vaccines. If that is your choice for your child and you want them to have every single vaccine that used to be on the schedule, you're still allowed to do that. Right. Nobody's stopping you from doing that. What they did was build a safety net that allows the people who don't believe in this model, who question this model, especially after what we saw with the MRNA vaccines and COVID. Like, do we trust this system and do I want to put this little child through this? Sure. Or am I skeptical on things like the Hep B vaccine? Like, I don't think anyone's arguing that there's not tremendous value in vaccines. But when you give the keys to the castle over to industry and you turn the blind eye, you will see time and time and time again that ultimate power comes ultimate corruption. You cannot allow these people to operate without checks and balances. I say you have to keep honest people honest. Right. Because right now, if we don't continue the vaccine schedule with our kids, they can kick us out. Right. They don't have to see us anymore. Yeah. I know the state of Texas is actually, and I don't know if other states are going to follow suit, the state of Texas is attempting to make that illegal. That should be illegal. At the state level. Yeah, 100% should be illegal. Because they do not want to allow clinicians to ban a child from a practice to force that child to get vaccinated because in reality there is a financial incentive for that institution. Right. And I'm not saying that that's what the pediatrician's driving factor is. My experience with pediatricians is they were born and raised in that system, and they are blind believers in academia. And when you talk, it's the same thing you and I talk about with pyramids or anything. Right, right. The academics struggle to break that dogma. Right. I mean, look, let's go back to the hormones. It was seven years ago by now that I was on Rogan talking about how we were misled with the Women's Health Initiative. We were misled with men's testosterone. The FDA, who stood behind all that shit for the last 60 years in the Women's Health Initiative for the last 20-something years, came out under this administration, under leaders like Marty Makari and Bobby Kennedy, and they finally told the American people the truth. All of that was wrong. It was all wrong, and we're changing our protocols, and we're changing our way of doing this. And we now are recommending that women should absolutely not be scared of estrogen and men should not be scared of testosterone. And there is immense value in treating that. And here's why that's important. It's not just a statement. Regulatory landscape changes reality because primary cares in America wouldn't prescribe a testosterone. A primary care in America was scared to put a woman on estrogen because they were told that it was the boogeyman. And they are rule followers by nature. They're licensed at risk. So I understand and have empathy and compassion for how difficult that job is. And the world is shifting under that clinician's feet every fucking day. And they're just doing their best. Like there was a study done from Harvard. Do you know how long they estimate it takes before what a clinician learned in medical school is antiquated? In this new evolving world, 18 months. By the time you get out of medical school, the world's changed so much that everything you learn is almost antiquated. I heard Huberman talking about this on a podcast with Rick Rubin. It was Huberman, Rick Rubin, and Jack Cruz. It was a fucking little electric podcast. I think Huberman was saying this guy, Eddie Wang. I always forget his last name is Wang or something like that. Anyways, he's like a neurosurgeon at Stanford. And he was saying that like 80 to 90% of the medical literature is outdated or proven wrong now. Eddie Chang. Eddie Chang. Yeah. And this is like one of the world's top neurosurgeons. So if it's like that in neurosurgery, imagine what it is down the chain with everything else. It's just because it's like this rigid institution. Yeah, and it's tough. And I would like to think that it's benign. Like, I would wish that I could tell you that I believed that it was inadvertent. And I'm not saying it's not inadvertent or accidental for the clinician. But there are forces at work here, at play here, that are pushing agendas. And one example I can give you is the Women's Health Initiative. Like I told you, I was a drug rep right when that launched. And even though I sold Cialis, my secondary drug was an osteoporosis drug called Avista. Who needs osteoporosis medications? Women who are postmenopausal who are not on estrogen. So who were some of the major funders and pushers and backers of the Women's Health Initiative that terrified women away from going on estrogen? the big pharmaceutical companies that had the most to gain by a woman not being on estrogen and instead now she has to go on an osteoporosis med and so there was osteo there so there was a brand called fosamax made by a company called Merck There was a brand called Avista made by Eli Lilly These became blockbuster drugs because you got rid of the estrogen You got rid of the silver bullet that was preventing the cascade effect of decline. Now they go on an osteoporosis drug, but that doesn't fix the hot flashes. So now you've got to put them on a hot flash drug. and now they're on a hot flash drug and an osteoporosis drug and now they're having hot flashes osteoporosis vaginal dryness no sex drive all of these other issues now they're depressed now they're on antidepressants and now it's this cascade and then you can rapidly see how did they get on four or more prescription drugs right because we've now built a system that has cut off the lifeline for these women and it was a tragedy and it happened and it was real and it It was the same thing with testosterone. It became dogma. That dogma was manipulated and utilized, and it wasn't until the 90s when Big Pharma decided it was going to sell testosterone. When you were asking about that earlier, Pfizer launched a testosterone cream into the market that changed everything, and that's when all of a sudden they started looking and going, wait a second. This study is kind of bullshit. What are we doing here? And it took 30 years for that. I mean, even longer than that. That was in 1997, I think. So we're literally talking almost 30 years before the FDA changed its stance on testosterone to match the data. Explain to me what you've been doing because you've been working with Bobby Kennedy, right, as far as like pushing these peptides, trying to get these – fighting for the peptides. Yeah. And you've kind of like been helping him and educating him because he can't pay attention to all this stuff. There's too much stuff going on. I know there was a lot of skepticism about Bobby Kennedy before the election happened even leading up to when he was trying to get confirmed there was people like the Cali Means and his sister Casey who were going on Tucker Carlson going on Rogan talking about the hyper processed foods Bobby has historically been known for the guy who wrote the books about the vaccines, called out Fauci. He was like the vaccine guy. A lot of people labeled him as this conspiracy theorist. And, you know, right before he was getting confirmed, he kind of like wasn't talking about vaccines. Now it's all about hyper-processed foods. So like people were like, I had a, I did a debate on this podcast with, I don't know if you saw, it was Callie Means and Jack Cruz. and he was like, what's going on? He's like, what is this pushback? People were thinking that the vaccine companies had gotten to Bobby. Yeah. Right, and that's the only reason Bobby was going to get through. I think that was political strategy. I think it was, too. The vaccine schedule did get changed. Right, because now we're saying that. In a moment like that, you don't want to pick the biggest bully in the courtyard and punch him in the face when you're in the middle of going through what he was going to go through. Getting initiated. Yeah, and so I think it was a strategic move that made great political sense. Stay silent on a topic that could be polarizing, give yourself time, live to fight another day, and the plan worked. Because now Secretary Kennedy has been able to fix the vaccine schedule and bring it back to the right to choose. That's what's crazy about all that. To me, if you want to vaccinate your child, vaccinate your child. Right. If you want to smoke a cigarette, smoke a cigarette, but you know what the fuck it is. Yes. And all Secretary Kennedy has done is provide a pathway for people to have what option they think is best for them in their personal situation. That's it. And get rid of the mandate. If you're trying to get – I completely understand. I think any rational thinker could understand, any reasonable person could see. If you want to get through, get into, initiate into this system, this political system where you're surrounded by people whose pockets are lined by pharmaceutical companies, you're not going to get through the door saying vaccines need to be abolished. Correct. And made illegal. Because you also got to think you've got to get through all these other politicians and these politicians have been lobbied and these politicians have been indoctrinated into a system that they believe in. Right. And all the things we talk about, like I said, so many people go, it's not FDA approved bad. It is FDA approved. Good. Right. It's not that black and white. It is not that binary. It's not zero or one. It's both in every instance. Right. What is the tool in the tool belt? What is the patient? What is this? What is unique to this individual? It should be a choice. I am a huge proponent of freedom of choice. It is your choice. It is your job to take care of your body and your family. And I've listened to Cali take bullets over focusing on food. and they say he ignored Big Pharma and he did this and he did that. And it's just not true. I think Callie is trying to shoot the alligator that's closest to the boat. And my experience with Callie Means and Casey Means is they are stewards of the American people and that they're fighting for truth. And Callie and I have collaborated on a lot of different things and worked together. And his focus and his history is in the food beverage industry, right? And so he's intimately familiar with the tactics of that. She was a lobbyist for that stuff, right? Correct, for Coca-Cola. And so he knows where the bodies are buried. He knows the secret to the game, and he knows how corrupt it is. Right. And I'm sure he broke down for you how most of the big food companies are now nothing more than shills that were acquired by the big tobacco industry. Right. And they implemented that same lobbying and that same strategy in that sector. But if you look at what's actually happening at this point in time, whatever Callie and Bobby did was right. Because not only have they freed up the freedom of choice on vaccines, we've already begun to overhaul the food system. There was an announcement made, again, with the food pyramid. And they flipped it upside down and everyone's like, well, that's not that big of a deal. And it's like, no, but what you don't understand is this isn't just a guideline. This guideline and framework is literally what influences school food programs, our welfare food programs, our governmental payer programs, our military food programs, and it establishes precedent. And that precedent will cascade throughout the rest of the United States. And what we feed our children in schools will lead to the diet, lifestyle, and behaviors they carry into adulthood. And when we were feeding children ultra processed foods and Cokes and most of the food stamps were being spent on soft drinks, which is nothing more than diabetes in liquid form. They're still doing that at my kid's school. Are they really? Yeah. It's so crazy. I testified in Texas against for the for the food bill, the Maha food bill. And literally in my testimony, the lady opens a Coke and goes, right into the mic and takes her drink. And I was trying to explain to them, do you know what, like, let's just put all your ego aside. Put this as like, this is a battle between me and you. Let's just look at it pragmatically. The difference between a chronically ill, dying human being of diabetes and a healthy human being is less than a teaspoon of sugar in the blood at a time. Do you know how much sugar is in one soft drink? Eight teaspoons. Teaspoons or tablespoons? It may even be tablespoons. Eight. And now you're giving it to a child who is not a full man, not a full-grown woman, a small human, consuming eight times what would be considered catastrophic in their bloodstream at one time. And that's assuming that child only drinks one of those a day. And you wonder why we're chronically ill, chronically obese, and chronically dealing with diabetes and metabolic disease. It's insane. They go 8 to 10 teaspoons. 8 to 10 teaspoons of sugar in a 12-ounce soda. It's crazy. It's equivalent to drinking. Yeah, the podcast was a little unfortunate the way it went because Callie, he came in with an open mind, I think, willing to learn. And there was two diametrically opposed points of view there. I can also understand Jack's perspective. He deals with patients. His career has been dealing with life and death situations with one person. Callie's more of a big systems guy. And here's what's challenging too, though. people try to label those folks like Bobby as anti-vex. He's not anti-vex. He's pro-science, pro-data, pro-checks and balances, pro-not-give-the-keys-to-the-fucking-castle-away-to-an-industry-that-has-sold-chronic-disease-and-perpetuated-chronic-disease. It comes down to a very simple fact. If what we were doing for the last 20 years worked, then why are we more sick than ever? More diabetic than ever? More riddled with cancer than ever? More depressed than ever? More suicides than ever? More death of despair than ever. Your system is not working. And at some point, we have to say the emperor wears no clothes. Somebody's got to call a spade a spade. But in politics, unfortunately, you've got to play the political game and, I think, be savvy about it. That's the beauty for me. I'm not a politician. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm just in health care trying to help people find the right way to optimize their health and drive their health span. Right. And so I don't have to hold back. But I think in politics, sometimes you have to horse trade. Yes, definitely. Now, explain what was going – what were you doing in regards to – there was something you were talking about in regards to the combination of the IGF-1 drugs and – or IGF and the GLPs together. Yeah, one of the things that we've seen in a cash pay practice is there are other peptides and there's synergistic effects, right? And so the GLP-1s, when micro-dosed, can be extremely beneficial in reducing body fat without impacting lean muscle mass or bone mineral density, right? And one of the reasons that people begin to lose lean muscle mass is they have a hard time eating enough protein because their appetite is crashed. And a lot of the times that's because the commercially available dosage of a GLP-1 is just too much for them. And so in our practice, at the WasteWell practice, the vision is more you can always go up. You should start slow, methodically work that patient up to a dosage that begins to slightly suppress their appetite. But then there's a synergistic effect of adding something like an IGF LR3, which is going to be on board to help improve lean muscle mass, help boost metabolism. Boost your appetite too. It does. Yeah. And it causes an increase in your hunger. And so it gives us this hybrid. And what we've seen is a micro dose of a GLP-1 combined with an IGF or even in male patients with testosterone. Like a lot of men, you're going to increase protein synthesis. And so now you're absorbing more of the protein even if you're not eating as much of the protein. So testosterone has a direct correlation to protein synthesis. So you have to eat more. Well, you don't even – yes, the goal is to maintain protein while cutting out all the stuff like the Cokes and the sugars and all that. And where I do see a huge benefit with these GLP-1s is it does reduce dopamine response. And so a patient who was getting that dopamine signal from drinking a Coke is going to drink that Coke and not really get that. But the problem with that is, too, those patients that are on too high of a dose of a GLP-1 lose so much appetite, they have a hard time eating that steak or eating that chicken or eating that protein source. And it's crucial to preserve lean muscle mass. because body composition, I don't know if you know who Gabrielle Lyons is. Yeah. Yeah, she's brilliant. One of the things Gabrielle Lyons talks about is we're not only overweight, we're under-muscled. And so part of our issue as Americans is we're not consuming enough protein per day to maintain lean muscle mass. And so think of it like a furnace. If I add muscle, every pound of muscle I add to your frame is me throwing another log on the fire. It's another log on the metabolic fire that raises your state of thermogenesis and raises your metabolic rate, which means you can eat more calories. And so so many women especially are focused on just losing fat that they forget there's just as much benefit, if not more benefit in gaining muscle. And so you and I talked before this about my friend Jelly Roll. Yeah. So many people think that Jelly Roll is on a GLP-1. and Jake... Because people have just become used to it now. I know. Like so many people are on GLP-1s. Like I was telling you, I was like anyone I see who like loses a lot of fat quick, my bullshit detectors go out like, is that motherfucker on GLP-1s? I can tell you 100%. And I even said this to Men's Health Magazine in the interview they did about his weight transformation. I said, if there's one fucking person in the world that has a lot to gain about saying GLP-1s and he did a GLP-1, we compound GLP-1s. I own a pharmacy that makes GLP-1s. I own a clinic that utilizes and prescribes GLP-1s when appropriate. Even with all that, I tell people you don't need a GLP-1. It's a tool in the tool belt. It doesn't mean that it's the only tool in the tool belt. And oftentimes there are other things we can do to optimize your health, like putting on lean muscle mass, increasing metabolic rate, helping you feel energized and ready, reducing estrogen levels, reducing inflammation, reducing water retention, upping your energy level. And all of that comes back to you can't do that if you don't look under the hood. If you don't do comprehensive blood work and you go into a primary care and they don't run your blood work or ask you if you're willing to do a DEXA, don't do a GLP-1. If they don't talk to you about diet, lifestyle, nutrition, do not take a GLP-1 from that doctor. I'm just telling you. Like taking a GLP-1 without talking about diet, lifestyle, nutrition is like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos. It makes no fucking sense, man. You're going to have to refine your diet. Even on a GLP-1, if you don't, you're just, you're literally chemically anorexic. You're just creating chemical anorexia. It's a chemical straitjacket where you're not hungry. It doesn't mean that the molecule is bad. It means that the person advising you on the molecule is incompetent. And there are, unfortunately, a lot of doctors in this country that are reaching for a GLP-1 before they've ever asked the question, before they've ever got to know you as a patient, before they've ever uncovered the root cause, before they ever dove into you at the biological level. There is no value in that. And so when Jay came into us, the first thing we did was let's do a DEXA. Let's look at where you're at. Let's look at your body fat. Jelly roll. Okay, okay. So let's get through all of these diagnostic tools. Let's do a full blood work. Let's look at you. And he broke this down on Joe, so I'm not sharing anything HIPAA. And he's also given me permission to talk about it in the public setting. But the first thing my clinician told him is, we've got to get your testosterone up. We've got to get your estrogen down. And we've got to reduce your inflammation. And we've got to get your insulin under control. If we do those things, we never have to reach for a GLP-1. we can do all of those things and we can help you with diet lifestyle nutrition we can get strategic and you need to exercise and you need to be in motion and he was already doing the exercise in the diet and all we did was try and optimize the hormones optimize the overall biomarkers and put him in a position of homeostasis where the weight would fall off and jelly did the rest the guy worked his ass off he got up every day he started walking i told this i think i told you the story before he he said he had lied to himself and his family time and time again and said tomorrow I'm going to start tomorrow I'm going to start tomorrow I'm going to start and after he came in he gets back home to Nashville and he says tomorrow I'm going to start and he wakes up and it's pouring fucking rain and he told the story he said I I sat there and I thought I don't give a shit I'm going to do it today and he walked I think he said three miles in the fucking pouring rain and when he gets back up the steps and he comes up this long hill to get back into his house his wife and his daughter were there cheering him on and he just got in there and started crying because he finally stopped lying to himself and lying to them and he became a man of his word again and he never looked back and it's like a drug is not going to do that man everything starts with you everything and i don't want to sell somebody a medicine or a drug i want to sell you long-term solutions that help you drive your health span and that's going to come from diet lifestyle nutrition and from you having honesty and integrity with yourself on where you are and how you get there. And it's not at the bottom of a pill bottle. Right. It's not. Like that's just one tool in the tool belt. Yeah, man, that's powerful hearing stories like that. That's awesome. Yeah, that is really awesome. And, you know, also some people that I've seen that do the start with the GLP ones, that can also be like a catalyst for them to get motivated about everything else. You know, like once they start to see some sort of physical change happen in the mirror or like the needles moving in the right direction. Now that can like be a catalyst to push them off the cliff to like go get in the gym to change their diet. 100%. And to, you know, that can be the cascading effect. And I've said this. I am not anti-GLP1. Like I have seen it change people's lives. I had another, I had another, a friend's wife who said, bring him for the first time. I work at a hospital for the first time when everyone's in the lounge eating cookies or a cake or at somebody's birthday I have enough self-control to walk by it and go yeah I don't I don't want that and that little win leads to other little wins and then you wake up one day I lived it I fucking lived that I was 25% body fat on the cusp of diabetes and when I finally got my hormones right, weight started coming off. And I was like, oh my God, dude, I may actually be able to be in shape. Like I never thought I didn't think that was even possible. And I tell so many people this, my goal and our goal at Ways to Well is not to be a dictator and dictate to you, take this, do this, do that. No, it's to give you the pros and the cons and to give you the right information to guide you and allow you to take sovereignty and autonomy over your health. And how you do that is you educate a patient, you empower a patient, and you get the fuck out of their way. You don't dictate to a patient, you're not taking this or you're not, no. When somebody comes in and says, I want a GLP-1, I'm not here to tell you no. I'm here to give you the answers as to the pros and cons. If you're a 90, 105-pound girl trying to lose weight for spring break, that is not the molecule you should be reaching for. Right? But if you're a 500-pound guy who's been overweight your whole life, you shouldn't be scared of a GLP-1. I'm not saying it's your only solution. I'm not saying it's the only way out of where you're at. But it's a viable tool, and you shouldn't be scared of it if utilized appropriately. But understand, you're still going to have to do the diet, the lifestyle, and the nutrition. You just got to show them the light. Just give them a little glimmer of light, and they're going to want to go get more sunshine. Yeah. And once you see how you feel when you can actually get there, it can be astonishing, the difference. If you see all the comedians at Rogan's Club and the transformations of all these comedians, like all these comedians. Because he gets them all the ways to well, right? Well, they've all dialed in their nutrition. They all work out now. And these guys that used to be drinking and partying and putting on weight are now in their 40s and 50s and 60s. And they're waking up and training. Turning around. Their mental acuity is better. their data, their recall, their ability to communicate, their ability to hit that punchline, they're sharper, they're clearer. It's a cascade effect. Wins create wins and momentum creates momentum. And our goal is to create a fucking avalanche. Yeah. Like create an avalanche of wins. And it's possible for anyone. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop fucking digging. Right. And then let's dig you out of there and let's put wins on the board. Yeah. And it can be hard. It can be hard to do because it's like, I mean, it can be like swimming upstream because we live in this world where we're surrounded by convenience. Yeah. You know, fast food, packaged, processed foods everywhere. I mean, I am constantly trying to fight the urge to eat my kids' leftovers. You know, leftover peanut butter and jelly laying on the plate. My kids' ravioli and, like, scarfing down the rest of his ravioli or whatever it is. Like, it's just nonsense. I'm surrounded by it. And my wife doesn't give a shit about any of the crazy stuff that I do when it comes to health or diet. My wife's just like, do whatever you want to do. Leave me out of it. You know, she doesn't give a shit. She's going to eat all the pasta she wants. That's so funny. And, you know, she's not into any of it. But it's like me living around four people and trying to maintain everything I want to do with my health and like the podcast. It takes an extreme amount of discipline. but the only reason I'm able to do it is because I've literally felt the difference and it's a game changer. For me, I have been in the pit of despair. Like that's what I call it. I'm like you wake up one day and you go, how did I get here? And like the hill's so high, the mountain's so tall. I don't think I can get out of this. And you just go, God, man, it's going to take me years to get this weight off. And it feels hopeless. and like in that instance you just got to take one step don't look at the whole journey just take that step the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step right and you take that first step and then you wake up the next day and you take the next step and it's not about being perfect it's about being better and wins will lead to wins and momentum will lead to momentum but i can say if you're optimized if your hormones are optimized if your health is optimized if you have the tools and resources to understand, you know, because even for me growing up, now the world's changed a lot, and I think there's so much data and resources and knowledge. But my parents thought that eating, like, wheat bread with bologna was healthier and Miracle Whip was healthy, right? Because we're not eating white bread, and we're eating Miracle Whip. That's how crazy it is. They were drinking Diet Cokes instead of Cokes, right? And they were eating Sun Chips instead of regular chips. It's all still ultra processed foods with no nutritional value, no macros. So you come out two hours later and you're hungry again. Well, it's because you didn't feed your body anything of value or sustenance. And like it's amazing. And I'm not saying the world's that naive today. But growing up in Texas in the 80s, this is how naive we were to health. And the world's evolving and the tools are evolving and the ability and accessibility to healthy food is evolving. And I think that's part of what this new administration is doing. is they're trying to educate the masses and to change the food programs in schools and throughout our existence to make these things more accessible and more affordable and more approachable and to give people the tools to prevent metabolic chronic disease. Hold that thought. I've got to take a pee real quick. We'll be right back. Explain what you've been doing as far as going everywhere and testifying and doing meetings with the FDA and with RFK and all that stuff. What's that all been like? Man, it's a surreal like domino effect. You know, Tulsi Gabbard, I don't know if you know who that is. She's awesome. And she's a client. She's become a friend. And one day I was just telling her about all the crazy things going on around peptides. This was like two years ago. And she looks at me and she goes, Brigham, you're going to have to get political. And I was just thinking, I don't ever want to get political. I don't even know how to get political. And this is where I go back to how we started that Steve Jobs quote. But when you look back at your life and you connect the dots, you'll realize you were always exactly where you were supposed to be. A week later, I get a phone call from Bobby Kennedy's team. And they said, hey, Secretary Kennedy heard your podcast with Rogan. We want you to fly out or come out. We're going to be in Dallas. do you have time to come out and talk to him about some of the corruption that you saw as a med device rep and a drug rep and the pbms and the insurance companies and some of the stuff you broke down on joe so i'm like how ironic is this like you just told me this and then a week later this happened so i get in my truck i drive to dallas there's all this secret service shit and they text him that i'm there and they wave me back this is when he was the presidential candidate and I sit down with him and the guy rolls up his sleeves it's funny because I'm in like I'm always in like jeans and cowboy boots and like a fucking t-shirt and he's in a suit and he just takes his jacket off and throws it up and rolls his sleeves up and it's super casual and he's like okay so break down for me the pbms we go over all this for like 30 minutes and I just explain to him what's going on with peptides and compounding pharmacies and fda lobby and then a week later they message and go hey secretary kennedy wants well he wasn't the secretary didn't yeah bobby Kennedy wants you to do his podcast. So then I did his podcast where we deep, deep dove into it. And then he asked me to come up and meet with him and go elaborate again. And while I'm meeting with him, I get a text from Callie Means saying, hey, do you want to testify in front of the Senate about all the stuff you talked about on Rogan? We're doing this new Senate testimony thing where we're going to educate the Senate on the issues with health care. You could be like an industry insider. We're going to have doctors. We're going to have this. We're going to have that. But as I'm on the hike with Secretary, who's now Secretary Kennedy, I mention it. And he's like, well, can I come? And so this is so surreal. We end up, and then Jillian Michaels was on the hike with us. I don't know if you know who that is. Oh, yeah. A fitness influencer. And a health care advocate. We're all like, can we all three come? And Kelly's like, yeah, I'd love to have you three. So we all go and testify in front of the Senate. And then it became, that was like this moment that became known as like the Maha movement. It was Bonnie Hari, the food babe. It was Alex Clark, a podcaster who was focused on women's health and a lot of things going on in women's health. It was Courtney Swan, who was focused on glyphosate and the broken food system. And we all just put together our little sliver of knowledge of why the system's broke and why chronic disease is skyrocketing. And then some other names you may recognize, like Marty Macari, who's now the head of the FDA. It was Casey Means, Callie Means, now Secretary Kennedy. And at the time we left that and it went viral and literally got picked up as the woo-woo movement. They called it woo-woo non-doctors up here trying to – and I'm like, non-doctors? We had a Harvard-educated doctor. We had a Stanford-educated doctor. We had two Stanford doctors, Casey Means and Marty McCurry, brilliant people. who have been in that ecosystem for decades, who are breaking down where the trials and tribulations and pitfalls are. So it didn't jump forward. Secretary Kennedy ends up becoming the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And at that point, it was more just reaching out to him and saying, hey, can I bend your ear? Like, here's what's going on. And to that guy's credit, I thought when he got in that position, he would do what most politicians would do, and I'd never hear from him again. And I can say, I have not met a person with that level of honesty and integrity and fearlessness, like fearless courageousness. I have no dog in this fight. I'm not like, you know, like if I thought he was full of shit, I'd be under the first one. That guy's full of shit. He literally is doing what he thinks is right. And he is fighting for truth. And he has helped fight battles that no other politician in the right mind would fight. Who is going to help small little mom and pop compounding pharmacies and go against the giant machine that is big pharma? The answer is not a single freaking person other than Bob Secretary Kennedy and, you know, now Callie Means and Marty McCurry and some folks that have been given an opportunity to usher in a new world of health for Americans. And they've put their money where their mouth is. Like if you look at what they've done with vaccines, if you look at what they've done with the food pyramid, if you look at what they've done with hormone optimization, if you look at time and time again when given the choice to do the right thing or the thing that benefits industry, they've chose the right thing. And so I'm very optimistic that the future for health care could be bright. We are hopefully going to open the pathway to provide affordability and accessibility for peptides to the American people again, a regulatory pathway that will provide checks and balances and allow patients accessibility to peptides again, which will allow us tools and options to help drive health span, items that were stripped away from us during the Biden administration. Those 17 FOIA requests that I've talked about. Right? There's a reason that the legacy FDA hasn't responded to those FOIA requests. And that reason is they either don't like the data they have because it's damning for them and positive for us, or there is no data. Right. It's one of those two things, which either one of those means they made a decision based on industry and not on patient outcomes. and this administration is the first administration in my lifetime that I have ever seen be willing. Again, I'm not a politician. I'm just the guy trying to figure out solutions to problems. What has the reception been or what is the – how open have the people at the FDA, like those legacy folks, been when you're having meetings with them? Have they been open-minded? Have they been – what's it been like? You know, it's interesting. It is really hit or miss, you know. And, again, it's the same thing I said with pediatricians. It's not, I don't think, I look for the best in people, and I really do believe most people are doing what they think is right. But if you're given bad information, you're going to make bad decisions. And if you've been indoctrinated into a system that has told you since its inception that you're right, and that you just follow the science, but the science is handed to you by one party, and that one party controls the narrative, and that one party is the giant corporations that have the most to benefit by skewing your lens on a subject matter, then you shouldn't be surprised when you wake up one day and you find yourself way out in left field and you have to question everything you've ever been shown. Because I feel like most of the folks I've met at the FDA are pretty open, honest, and receptive. They are trying their best to get it right. But it's also a legal landmine. I mean, it is a field full of landmines. And if you make one wrong move as a political appointee or decision maker, your whole career is over. And you're navigating people who, congressmen, congresswomen, senators, who have vested interests in protecting their parties that are backing their campaigns, right? And when big pharmaceutical companies are banging on the desk of a senator and saying, oh, my God, you're going to allow these guys to put dangerous peptides into the hands of Americans. And what is going to happen? And then those politicians are out there going, if Secretary Kennedy does this or Marty does this, he's going to make it the Wild West. You guys are going to be viewed as the Wild West, the guys who deregulated peptides. And my rebuttal to that is that is absolute bullshit. bullshit. Like, and I can tell you why. What we're asking for is for you to take it from being the Wild West. You right now, what the FDA has done is the same catastrophic series of events that happened with the opioid crisis. They put something on the market, they allowed it to be in the market, and then they pulled it from the market. And then they forced everyone to black and gray market. So everyone in the opioid crisis turned to buying drugs from Mexico and heroin from black market dealers and it created catastrophic deaths and chaos. The same thing, as crazy as it sounds, occurred with peptides. As soon as the FDA banned legitimate compounders and clinicians from prescribing and utilizing doctor-supervised, doctor-monitored, doctor-prescribed, FDA-inspected, legitimate compounding pharmacies that are under the guidelines and rules and regulations of the FDA and the state and the federal rules that are ISO certified with chemists and pharmacists providing efficacious products that are validation tested, sterility tested under the most stringent of guidelines. You took that, you threw it out the fucking window, and everyone just started buying shit online. Right now, today in America, four out of five peptides filled are filled through gray and black market sources that have never been inspected by the FDA, that have no human safety studies, that have no validation testing, that have no contamination testing. We actually brought my buddy Ryan Humiston. He's a YouTuber. He went out and we ordered peptides from all of these different companies. 90% of these peptides either have contaminants or are not the dosages they say they are. You tested them. Yes. And some of them are more than they are. Some of them are less than they are. Some of them are underdosed. Some of them are overdosed. That's irrelevant. My point is, you can be the administration that provides affordable, accessible, preventative care to the masses. that doesn't turn America into the Wild West, but turns America into one of the leading nations in the world for preventative care. And you can do this through a regulatory pathway that allows patients to make decisions alongside board-certified clinicians, and you can put a prescription and a system in place that protects the American consumer. Because right now, it's a fucking train wreck, man. It is a train wreck. And I own Compounding Pharmacy, and I own a telemedicine company, and I employ clinicians, and I employ pharmacists. Most of what we – almost everything we prescribe, the only peptides we prescribe are the ones that the FDA allows us to make today. But there are over 19 peptides that were banned that are now gray and black market, like BPC. They let you, but they're not officially approved. Correct. There's a difference between being an FDA-approved drug and an FDA-exempt modality. Right. Right. And so the difference is we haven't put it through a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. The question is, is it safe? And the answer is they are safe. We were utilizing these other 19 peptides for almost a decade. Like it's not like this was new stuff. We had been using them for a decade, and that's why everyone was like, what? Overnight the FDA banned all these things? Why? And then the FDA's statement at the time, and again, this is the previous administration. This is not this current administration. Their answer was we're worried about safety. Well, where's your safety data? And now 17 FOIA requests later, I'm still asking them, where's your safety data? See, this is one of my biggest concerns, is all of the progress that's happening right now under the new administration. What's going to happen when the next administration comes along, the next regime comes along, and they decide to clean house? That's my biggest fear, not just with the health care stuff, with everything, with the censorship stuff, the Internet, the Internet censorship. What happens with YouTube? You know, all of that crap. I agree. I'm worried too, and that's why I'm attempting to try and establish permanent regulatory pathways, right? For my niche, for my area of expertise, which is health care, my big hot buttons and what I hope and I pray that we can get done under the new leadership of Marty and Secretary Kennedy is can we open a regulatory pathway to allow Americans to have accessible care, accessibility to care like stem cells and peptides and hormone optimization and large language models and artificial intelligence and all of these various modalities and tools that have historically been denied obstructed or put out of a marketplace right this is not conspiratorial and i'm not trying to be hyperbolic it comes down to when you dig and you peel back the layers to the onion Nine out of ten times the reason it's being obstructed is because of industry. It is because the insurance companies or the big pharmaceutical cartels have a vested interest in suppressing and preventing these modalities from making it to market. Because if they were just allowed to be in the market free and clear, if it was a free, open, competitive market, they would be – and people get to learn about this stuff through podcasts and open media, open communication and dialogue. you guys would provide extreme competition to them. And that's what you saw. And that's what you've seen over the last year. Why did GLP-1s go from $1,300 a month to now they just made an announcement that you'll be able to buy them for $165 through TrumpRx? It was not because Big Pharma is just good guys. It's because the pressure became so deafening because patients got used to affordability and accessibility. and they realized they could buy them through compounders and it went viral and it was everywhere. And then that opened everyone's mind to peptides. I mean, you can't turn on social media without hearing an athlete or a famous actor or a famous podcaster talking about peptides, talking about hormone optimization, talking about stem cells. The cat's out of the bag. Like we know, we know. And like even with the stem cell space, if we really dig into safety on stem cells And I'm going to testify on this next week in the state of Arizona. Every single adverse event that's ever been reported on stem cells has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the chain of custody or the chain of command. So what I mean by that is bad distributors, bad actors, bad storage, improper aseptic technique, bad administration from a clinician. And where does that happen? That happens when you take the guardrails off. That happens when you allow peptides to be bought online. That happens when patients are forced to go to a shady alley to go get a cellular treatment because they think that this guy's got something that they can't get anywhere else. Or they go to Mexico or they go outside the country. And I'm not saying all those places are bad. There's legitimately great clinics in Mexico and outside the United States. That care should be readily accessible here within the United States. under the jurisdiction and the safety nets that the FDA provides when the FDA is willing to engage and allow these accessible pathways. Right? And so even today, lobbying the FDA, I'm trying to educate the FDA on the differences of the nuance because you have to understand whether we're talking an academic from, you know, Stanford or Harvard or a doctor who's built into an ecosystem or the FDA, they've got blinders. and the world they know is what does insurance cover. So I have to bring it all back to that. Why do you get FDA approval? You don't just get FDA approval for safety. You've got to go through FDA trials because you need an indication. Why do you need an indication? Because we wanted a regulatory body that was supposed to be unbiased that will look at the data objectively and say, yes, this works for diabetes. Why? Because once you have an indication for diabetes, you're now going to make the insurance companies pay for that drug. And so if I'm going to make insurance companies pay for a drug, if I'm going to make Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE pay for a drug, I better damn well prove that it's safe and that it works. That is not the market that I live in. The market I live in is cash pay. I don't bill insurance. I don't bill Medicare. I don't bill Medicaid. I'm not asking taxpayers to pay for this drug. I am not asking anybody to pay for a peptide other than the person who wants to use the peptide. So you get how this is a different nuance? It's like, oh, yeah, it is. It comes down to does the doctor think this is going to help you? Yes. Does the patient want to try this? Yes. Does the patient want to pay cash their hundred dollar hard earned money to try this? Yes. Then why in the hell are you stopping them? Right. It's different. I'm not asking. You're not asking me to pay for your meds. That's the fundamental difference in what big pharma is doing. Big pharma is trying to push a drug on the market no matter what so they can get an indication so they can build billions of dollars and create a market that allows them to continue to daisy chain more product into that market and capture an ecosystem And this is a fundamental paradigm shift for even legislators and for even regulators They like wait a second you not asking me for an insurance code No no this isn't because as soon as you give it to the insurance companies, they're going to obstruct it and create a model that they monetize. And it's going to run up the cost, not down the cost. And if you really want to drive down the cost, you go cash pay and you continue to scale. And through economies of scale, you make it more affordable. And through competition, people are going to make peptides cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And eventually you're going to look back and it's going to be dirt cheap to get a peptide mailed to your house from an FDA approved, FDA inspected and regulated compounding pharmacy under the prescription supervision of a clinician. Right. That's what I'm fighting for. I'm fighting for patient sovereignty and autonomy over their health. Like I'm literally like my message is let a patient work with a clinician to decide what is best for their health and I'm asking the federal government to get the fuck out of the way and to allow that patient to decide what they think is best for their health alongside a clinician that provides checks and balances and insight. Well how much does this health care system different how different is it in other countries like in Europe where they have to socialize medicine? I mean they have their own set of challenges I will say areas that are extremely wealthy like united arab emirates and dubai yeah they're all over this stuff dude they're like meccas for peptides for stem cells um the problem there is like it's the opposite they want it to be more like there's something weird about that world where when you make that kind of money you you want everything to be really expensive and exclusive yeah does that make sense oh yeah like some of the stem cell products that we're doing here for 4 500 they're charging literally over a hundred grand in Dubai. That's ridiculous. And that's crazy. But, too, that's the difference. In a free market, if you're a billionaire and you want to pay $100,000 for a bag of cellular treatment and that's your prerogative. But do they have this whole regulatory system, this proselytized lobbying system to other countries that you don't need to? No, it's different and it varies by state. But the challenge there is everything's paid for by taxpayers, right? And so the same challenge exists. It's like, oh, my God, we don't want to let this into the market because this is going to cost us money. And so if it's a cost to the system, it's a challenge to the system. It's a strain to the system. And so in that system, too, you still have folks that are like, we can't let this into the market, you know, or we need more data. We need years and years of studies and science and all of these things to be able to approve it because it's going to cost taxpayers money. Right, right. But they're grocery stores. They don't have all the kind of like processed garbage. That part's huge, too. Yeah, yeah. They are incentivized to not get people sick. Correct. On this side over here. So here's an example. In Europe, their glyphosate exposure is astronomically. Ours is actually our level of glyphosate that we allow in the United States is almost three times what they allow in Europe. Three times the acceptable level of what they allow in Europe. and there is an argument that that could be one of the reasons our cancer rates are so much higher in the United States and the reason that it's so much lower in Europe isn't this whole lie that is fun about well we have to have a huge agro-industrial complex that produces enough agriculture blah blah blah blah it's because they don't dry spray their crops at the end of the drying process so 90 percent of our glyphosate exposure comes literally during the last few weeks of how we harvest all of our vegetables and crops. And they do what's called like dry spray and they dry it out through glyphosate itself, which increases our chemical exposure. My wife was just talking to me about this this morning. She said there was something she saw, she gets all of her crazy food news through TikTok and she was saying she saw a TikTok about bread. Some new news came out about like all like the top 10 bread manufacturers in the US that you see at any grocery store. They have like an insane amount of glyphosate in them. She's like, we gotta fucking go buy bread from the girl down the street. makes their own bread. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's nuts. And that's why people go to Europe and they go, I can eat pasta and I can eat things. I don't get inflamed and I don't get swollen and I don't get this. And it's because they aren't putting all these extra ingredients in their food. Dude, I can go to Costa Rica and eat pizza every day and I feel like, I feel weightless. I feel amazing. I don't feel like I ate pizza here. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Yeah. In Europe, I want to say, and it's been a minute since I've talked about this, so I don't want to, but it's close. I think there's 300 approved ingredients in the food system, and here there are thousands. There are literally thousands of approved food ingredients in our system. This is one of the things that we testified in front of the Senate. My friend Vonnie, the food babe, she literally held up, and Jason Karp, they held up a bag of Froot Loops from the United States and a bag of Froot Loops from Canada. and our Froot Loops are vibrant, bright colors, great because it's all unnatural food dyes, processed preservatives, extras. Whereas in Canada, they're required to use all natural food dyes. So they're using like fruit-based food dyes to dye the food. Same company though. Same company. And they're literally making it in the same factory and they ship one thing to the American consumer and a different thing to the European and Canadian consumers. Oh, that's the difference? Look at that. Oh my God, dude. And so I'm not going to lie, it does look pretty, but at some point. We have to inject the marketing into the food itself. Yeah. And then, you know, people who want to argue against this go, well, it's still cereal and it's unhealthy. I get it. Right, right, right. You're making the cigarette a little bit more healthy. Yeah, exactly. But at some point, we've got to start creating checks and balances. And that was like what people tried to throw stones at Cali and go, oh, well, they're just doing this. It is a process, man. They haven't even been in power one year. And look at the fundamental change in the food pyramid and the vaccine schedule. Right. And overall with all of our governmental pay programs, your accessibility to soft drinks and Cokes and things that have historically consumed most of the dollars. It's a big shift. You're not going to turn it on a dime like that. It's going to be a slow turn. And I think a lot of these steps are steps in the right direction. Yes, totally. And just like that person trying to lose weight, it starts with the first step. See, pull up that thing real quick about the bread that you just had up about Florida. What date was that? 2026. Did you still have it or did you close it? Oh, there you go. Recent 2026 testing by the Florida Department of Health found detectable levels of glyphosate in several popular U.S. bread brands with levels ranging from non-detectable to over 191 parts per billion. Many bread residues, they generally remain below current federal safety limits. Sure they do. So those are the ones. Yeah, but here's your own. That's the one that we were buying. So the glyphosate... If you look at that, though, too, you know what's crazy is the same issue that we had with the FDA where a lot of the commissioners of the FDA have gone to work for industry. Yeah. Four out of the last six heads of the EPA have gone to work for the chemical industries that they were regulating. And so there's so much spit being swapped. There's so much cross-pollination. Um, there, there's literally, I broke this down on, um, which was it? Was it, uh, there's an email chain that's going back and forth with one of the regulatory bodies where they literally say to industry, uh, if I get this done for you guys, I deserve a medal of fucking honor. And I'm like, dude, this is crazy. Wow. Yeah. And so, and then even to this day, I think it's, uh, the CDC is in a building that was gifted to them by coca-cola yeah a multi-million dollar building that's yeah this is redis like it's like a movie script it just runs so deep man it's so hard to like you just keep trying to break it down but it's it's almost unbelievable and the more you look the worse it gets yeah and then like you know the The whole institutional, easy for you to say, institutionalization of this thing, I mean, it's not even just the regulators and the physicians and the hospitals, but I'm sure this stuff's all baked into the universities and the people that are getting their PhDs and their doctorates and stuff too. Well, yeah, because most of the funding of research is funded by industry. Right. So, like, when you're trying to get a grant or you're trying to get things done, And you're going to have to inevitably eat out of the hand of the industry that is asking you to push that agenda. And so it does skew the data. It does skew the incentives. It does make it difficult to have a truly non-biased study, even if it's coming from one of the academic institutions. Yeah, man. It's insane. And so what – you were talking to me about this crazy stem cell stuff before we did the podcast. Yeah. Can we talk about this on the podcast? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So explain to me these crazy new stem cells that you're getting from Japan. Yeah, so, okay, so there's a lot of different – so first of all, I'll explain. Today, in the United States, most people are using umbilical cord-derived stem cells. That's kind of like the gold standard today in the U.S. So healthy birth, healthy mother, pre-planned C-section. You take the discarded afterbirth, and from the discarded afterbirth, if you can extrapolate out all of these amazing cellular goodies. How legit is that stuff? Oh, it's amazing. Because I did that. I got the umbilical cord blood. Okay. Is that legit? Yeah, it can be legit. I mean, but it's also, where did you get it from? Was it cryopreserved? How did they take care of it? We paid for it, but I was super skeptical about it. Yeah. I was like, we don't know. Some person in a car pulled up in front of the hospital, and we handed it to him in a fucking lunchbox. Oh, you stored yours? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just in case, because allegedly, if you do that, you can take the umbilical cord blood, they store it in a bank for you, whatever. Yeah. And if you get some crazy, like, cancer 10 years down the road, you can use that, and it'll automatically, like, fix you. Basically what I'm saying. I think it's very viable for the future, and I think there's no disadvantage in cryobanking your umbilical cord because there's tremendous potential upside in the future. Okay. And it's better to have it and not use it than to need it and not have it. My skepticism came in to, like, you know, I don't know where this stuff is. I don't know who's doing it. And I don't know, like, if when I need it, I'm going to get the same stuff. Yeah, I mean, I would be skeptical about that, too. That's the only concern is you never know who the actors are and who the players are. And that's where I was going earlier with what happened here in America, like, with stem cells. And people talk about adverse events. And, oh, my God, well, what about an adverse event? And even the FDA is like, oh, my God, what about adverse events? Almost every adverse event in the United States that has ever occurred with stem cells that occurred because of improper utilization or application or improper aseptic technique or bad players. What do I mean by that? About 15 years ago, a bunch of stem cell companies started springing up in the United States and they were selling stem cells and you've got to cryopreserve these stem cells. So they were telling clinics to store them in liquid nitrogen, but they had never validation tested the packaging to see if it could withstand liquid nitrogen. So liquid nitrogen was literally seeping into the container and polluting the cells. So when your doctor was pulling out the cells and then injecting those cells into a knee, a back, a shoulder, a spine, there were instances where they were injecting liquid nitrogen into your spine. Oh, my God. And it killed people. It paralyzed people. Oh, my God. And it created this chaos where it terrified regulators to where they just said, ban them, ban them all. And this was in the Bush administration. And then people were like, they're going to abort babies and they're going to use fetuses and they're going to turn them into da da da. Yeah, like Epstein died stuff. And the truth of the matter is, look, heterochronic parabiosis is real. If you take an old mouse and a young mouse and you suture them together, and they've done this at Harvard, they've done this in hundreds of studies. The young mouse gets older and the old mouse gets younger. What? Yeah, it's called heterochronic parabiosis. so that you're taking all of your old, tired, weary cells, weary blood, all of that, and you're putting it in the young mouse, and it's going to age. When you take all that young, vibrant, healthy cells, healthy peptides, signaling cells, all of these things, you're going to reverse your aging, right? Is this what that one guy Brian Johnson was doing? It's a surgical technique that connects the circulatory systems of a young and old mouse. Results show that young blood can rejuvenate old tissue. And so that's what I was just telling you. I just did at my clinic what's called plasmapheresis. So we hook you up to a giant dialysis machine. We take all of my blood systematically out of my body, batches at a time, and we extrapolate out all of my plasma. So I'm 45 years old. We're taking all my old, tired, weary plasma that's filled with contaminants, microplastics, all the metals and all the things that are in there. But we're also taking out all my inflammatory markers, all my inflammation, all of these bad things that are being stored in my plasma. And then we're replacing that with albumin, which is basically like a clean, fresh version of plasma that's been distilled down. And then at our practice, we're adding back in all of the goodies of life. So all the umbilical cord derived product, we're adding in MSCs, which are mesenchymal stem cells. We're adding in exosomes, cytokines, extracellular vesicles. Think of it as all the goodies of life. And so before I get into Muse, I'll try and make it quick. If we're going to build a building, you've got to have the bricks. You've got to have the mortar. You've got to have the concrete. You've got to have the blueprint. You've got to know how to build the building. As we age, there's a precipitous decline in all of the building blocks. So we begin to lose extracellular vesicles. We begin to lose our peptides and the amount of peptides that are available in our body. We begin to lose MSCs. There's literally a fraction of the amount of MSCs, mesenchymal stem cells, viable in our body compared to where it is at birth. At birth is the most you'll ever see. And so back to heterochronic parabiosis. When a mother's pregnant, she has some of the lowest risk of cancer. That's where a woman's glow comes from, how everyone says their skin looks great. Yeah. Because what people don't realize is it's not only the baby, the mom keeping the baby alive. The baby is actually sending all of these signaling cells and useful cord information through the circulatory system back up to the mother. so when a mom's pregnant that's why her health that's why her she has that womanly glow oftentimes they feel like their skin looks phenomenal all of that is that process so then you take all that afterwards and we can isolate out and utilize all of those cellular goodies that nature or god or whatever you want to say it is gave us and from there we use those building blocks to return your body to where it would have been in a more youthful state, right? And so when we administer an umbilical cord derived treatment, like an MSC or exosomes or whatever, it's in an effort to give you the building block that you're deficient in. So jump forward. That's what we've been doing in the U.S. That's what, you know, the standard of care, that's even what they're doing in Panama and these other places. Now the slight difference is outside the United States, they're allowed to manipulate, and expand upon the cells. Without getting too into the weeds, they can multiply the amount of MSCs. So if you begin to lose some of the MSCs through cryo-freezing and all these different things, you have more of them. Okay, so I flew to Japan in September to go meet with a world-renowned scientist and see the scientists who actually discovered this subset phenotype of stem cells called muse stem cells. Muse stem cells, think of it like the super soldier of stem cells. So stem cells are already, I think, less than 2% of the cells in the body, like a very small amount of the cells in the body are stem cells. And this subset of stem cells is less than 5% of the stem cell population. Whoa. Why are these cells important? Well, in her research, what she uncovered is those were the cells that appeared to be the most prolific and the most present at the time of injury at the site. And so then she started isolating out these cells to try and investigate them and better understand them. And then she, one night she had all these cells in a Petri dish and she got it invited out to a dinner. She goes out to the dinner and ends up drinking sake and realizes, oh my God, I forgot to take the Petri dish and put it in the cryo freeze. when I go to work tomorrow, all the cells are going to be dead. Because stem cells can only stay viable for minutes outside the body, and they die. When she got to the lab the next morning, all those cells were still alive. There were very few that had died. And she said this can't be right. And she realized this subset phenotype of stem cell is ultra resilient. It has the ability to survive outside the body for an extended period of time. It appears to be anywhere from two to three weeks. Whereas other cells will die instantly, minutes. you begin to lose the viability of those cells. So think about it. If I'm going to extrapolate out cells and then I've got to put them in your body as fast as I can, every minute I'm losing cells. I'm losing viability. That's part of the reason that they expand those cultures. But the issue with expanding cultures is you're making copies of copies of copies of copies. And even scientists who are doing this, they have what's called the Goldilocks zone, where they'll do two expansions. When you start going beyond that, you start to degradate the cells, and the cells begin to lose what makes them an MSC, which means they're less valuable to the body. They're not going to have as much impact. So these subset and used stem cells appear to actually be the cells that not only are they resilient, they also appear to be non-tumorgenic, meaning they aren't going to create or exasperate tumors. In studies with mice that had tumors, the pre-existing tumors, they actually appear to shrink the tumor. One of the concerns with pluripotent stem cells is they could enhance the tumor. And so if somebody had an undiagnosed cancer, the fear is would it exasperate that cancer? And there's not a ton of compelling data that shows it will, but that's one of the fears. This subset phenotype of stem cell won't do that. Okay, so those are some of the things around the safety of them. They did organ transplants with mice where they literally sutured in part of a liver, and the mice that were given U-cells accepted that liver 100% of the time, which the mice that didn't have that rejected the liver and died. So it appears to immunomodulate the healing factor, and it speed up the recovery. They did studies in Alzheimer's where they looked at the brain, and 18 months later, these tagged cells were all in the brain. The brain was lit up like a Christmas tree 18 months later, which is game changer because the cells we use today are out of your system in four to six weeks. Like they're literally out of there in days. Sometimes you can get four to six weeks. The healing effect and the benefits are there for four to six weeks, but the cells are gone in days. These mu cells appear to stay in the body for what looks like to be years. And then even I mean, you just name it, whether orthopedic injuries, spine injuries, back injuries, all of the data. is just unbelievable. And the way she explains it is, think of the typical stem cell as a foot soldier. And think of the muse cell as delta operators or, you know, the army rangers, navy seals. They're the cells that are doing most of the heavy lifting and they're the real cells that are driving everything. And because these cells are so resilient, you can expand them in a petri dish without losing viability and you can keep them in what's called the Goldilocks zone. And so you're not losing cells through the expansion process. You're gaining cells and you keep them at a two, but basically expand it twice. And now you've got this plethora of these super potent stem cells. And here's the most interesting of all. This is where the rubber hits the road. In the studies, traditional stem cells, MSCs, will find your tired, weary cells and then transfer their mitochondria, temporarily allowing your cells to be younger again. Okay, the way new cells appear to work, and the way the scientist Mari explains it, is think of them like a Pac-Man, and they come and they eat your dying cell and take on the personality of the dead cell and become a young baby version of that cell. So she's doing studies on Alzheimer's, on dementia, on all of these different disease states that have historically been very challenging to treat, even with the stem cell technology. But preliminary data and everything that we've seen is pretty mind-blowing. How long until I can come try it? We'll talk about it. Can I be a test dummy? Can I be a lab rat? I'm working to help, hopefully through the current administration, to open the pathway, the regulatory pathway, to allow people to have accessibility to all these things. We've treated a handful of patients with these modalities, and right now the results are phenomenal. And even with the traditional MSCs, man, I have never in my life seen the results that we have gotten just with what we have now. I mean, with regards to orthopedic injuries, knees, shoulders. What about, like, dementia, stuff like that? We haven't treated a ton of folks with dementia. We've treated, well, you know, I've talked about Jesse's dad, our mutual friend Jesse Michaels. Yeah, oh, yeah. We treated his dad, and it was pretty crazy. We treated him internasally, and it allows it to pierce the blood-brain barrier. and he came in as a mega skeptic and literally i mean you can ask jesse this i'm sure you guys talk jesse's like dude my dad is a mega skeptic and his dad and mom are both like i she said i have my husband back i have my for the first time in years i have my husband back and his dad said i feel like a fog of the last two years has just dissipated and i teleported back into my body I don't know what you guys just gave me and look I want to be clear that's a sample size of one and I'm not saying that but even with traditional MSCs we had kid we had a child a guy's family reach out the kid I think is like 19 muscular dystrophy Deshane's muscular dystrophy it was in a wheelchair they heard me on Rogan they called and said we've been saving up we saved up $30,000 Can we get it done for that? I'm like, we're like $4,500. But if I've never treated this and I don't want to take your life savings, if you just can get to Austin, we'll treat you. And I've told this story. He was in a wheelchair and he can walk 33 feet now. He can walk 33 feet. Hand to God, this is a true story. We had another kid, a 20-something-year-old kid who got in a car accident a year ago. He's been in a wheelchair. They told him, you're paralyzed. You'll never walk again. Came in. I mean, granted, we did peptides, we did red light, we did hyperbaric. He's been going through weeks of treatments. He can stand. He can stand now and he's gaining control of his entire lower body and he's starting to walk. And so I'm not saying that's going to be the case for everybody. And I'm not saying that we can heal these things. But what I am saying is it's worth looking at opening regulatory pathways to allow this to be more affordable and more accessible and to give people the opportunity to heal. I won't say the name, but there is a high, high caliber athlete who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and it's a death sentence. And why would you obstruct this individual's ability to go out and have their last hope? There's no adverse event. There's no risk of this guy dying from these cells. In Florida, in Texas, in Utah, in multiple of the states, we have what's called the right to choose law. that is opening up these pathways that tells the federal government, dude, we don't care. Like this patient is allowed to do this in our state and they're allowed to take a try at this. This is the decision of a patient and a doctor. We don't need the federal government telling us what a patient can do with their cash. We're not asking you to cover it, federal government. We're asking you to allow this human to have a shot at life again. And so I'm trying to get that done at the federal level because if we can build that at the federal level, we can open accessibility for everybody throughout the country. And then this innovation and this evolution of this technology will grow. But nobody's going to invest in a technology that they don't think that they can get approved in their state, you know, or that they can scale at a federal level, a national level. Wow, dude. That is fucking bananas. It just like, you know, it makes me wonder with the advancement of this kind of technology with the stem cell stuff and even like the DNA level stuff, where we're going to be in 50 years and AI all combined. I met with a geneticist in Austin, and he worked for the Department of Defense. Legitimately, he works for a startup that's backed by multiple huge-name billionaires. He said, we are living in the era of X-Men. I can build X-Men today. They have a gene activation shot that can make your bone mineral density eight times stronger. What? Yeah. In defense? He worked for the DOD, and now he's a geneticist for this biotech startup out of Austin, and everything they're doing is offshore. Like, to get the treatments and everything, you have to go outside the United States. They're making super soldiers. They could. They have the ability to make your bone mineral density eight times stronger. They have the ability to turn on a folistatin, which will tell your body to put on more muscle mass. That's what they use in cattle to have cattle put on. Oh, yeah. I've heard about that. I'm not advocating. I'm not, like, here to say clinically it's good or bad. That's not my statement at all. What I'm saying is the future is going to be fucking wild. It is. And there are treatments out there that make peptides look like childbirth. There's like stuff going on. Dude, that's a game changer. Did you see that thing that came out in the emails, the Epstein emails, where he was emailing somebody from the NSA? He was getting in touch with NSA hackers to try to figure out how to hack human DNA to like make him live forever and to clone him and shit. That's crazy. It's wild. No, I haven't seen that. I sent you that article. It was a drop site news article from Ryan Graham. That's the answer to what we did in NSA Code Breakers. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. NSA Code Breakers for a Genome Manhattan Project. The financier pursued cryptographers to hack the genetic code to develop a new super intelligence to understand intercellular communication. I mean, it's here. The science is here, and with large language models and artificial intelligence, we are going to hack the genome more and more and more. So my mentor, and so everything I've told you today is not me speaking alone in a vacuum. Like, my mentor and our chief science officer is Dr. Ian White. 22 years of stem cell research, Harvard and Sare Stem Cell Institute professor, has taught at some of the best and brightest academic schools in America. A guy at the bench doing the research literally wrote a book on stem cells, kept a heart alive in a Petri dish for two months and was nominated for a Nobel Prize using stem cell technology. Dr. White says, if we can begin to understand our genome better, we share a common ancestor with every species on earth. What does that mean? We share a common DNA with Greenland sharks, which live 400 to 600 years and don't have cancer. We share a common ancestor with the Galapagos tortoise that lives over 200 years and has a slow metabolic rate. We share a common ancestor with the eternal jellyfish that lives 5,000 years and reverses backwards. When it reaches a certain age capacity, it rebirths and becomes a baby again and lives another thousands of years. That is within our genome. So all of these traits are within our genetic makeup. The question is, how do we find that marker and how do we turn it on? And it's there. It's within all of us. And so the code to eternity is potentially within us. And this isn't me saying this. This is fucking scientists that are way more brilliant than I'll ever be telling me this. And then you've got, you know, I mean, from all walks of life, then we've got this geneticist who's at the bench building technologies for multi-billion dollar companies that can turn on a gene to put muscle on, that can turn on a gene to make your bones more dense, that can turn on a gene that increases your clotho levels, which includes neurocognitive response. It's almost like the limitless pill, right? If we can enhance your clotho levels to a certain level, it's going to improve all of your cognitive response, your data retention, your data recall, all of these things. Wow. And they're working on all of it. Dude, I had this lady on the podcast who did this whole, she wrote a book on this, it's called The Pentagon's Brain. Have you ever heard of it? No. She interviewed all the people from this organization called DARPA. Oh, yeah, yeah, they're DARPA. And she said that they've been working on Neuralink, like brain implants for super soldiers since like the early 90s. Like all the stuff she says that you see come out into the public and like the consumer market is usually DARPA's 20 years ahead of that. And they're funding all kinds of crazy research. Did you hear Elon where he's talking about you'll be able to see in infrared, you'll be able to see eagle eye. Yeah. And then you've already got chimpanzees controlling computers with their brains. And now we have humans controlling computers with their brains. Like the future is going to get wild, man. It's going to get wild. Yeah. And they're doing it openly with psychedelics already. There's one of the schools, I think it's Chapel Hill, North Carolina Chapel Hill, the head of one of the departments there got like a $20 million grant from DARPA to study psychedelics for soldiers and how to take the psychedelic trip out of psilocybin, I think either psilocybin, yeah, it was psilocybin, to help get soldiers through PTSD and through the trauma and get them right back out on the battlefield. And they're even doing this with the soldiers in Ukraine, I heard. There's a story that came out last year where they were – so all of the war fighters on the Russian side, those guys were all hopped up on like meth. And all of the soldiers on the U.S. side and the Ukrainian side, they were trying to give them Ibogaine. And there was this one crazy dude who was piloting tons of planes full of Ibogaine to Ukraine to get them to those soldiers so they could just get through their psychological trauma and get them right back on the battlefield. And there's even people that speculate that they're using this stuff for optimizing soldiers while they're in battle to increase things like edge detection and moving through 3D space better to make them more optimal killing machines, dude. And the whole psychedelic thing is crazy, too. Yeah. The whole psychedelic thing is how it's been co-opted by so many different groups. Wow. Ukrainian. Yeah. That's so crazy. I think the psychedelic field is a whole other world, too. It is. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens with that. It really is, man. It scares me a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It scares me because, like, you know, like it can absolutely, like certain psychedelics can be used. You know, I think there's been studies to, like, compare, like, the benefits of, like, depression and stuff with psychedelics for veterans and stuff. And, like, the comparison to placebo is pretty extraordinary. But then there's other psychedelics that are, like, a lot more dangerous. You know, like Ibogaine is way more dangerous than psilocybin. Yeah. You know, because, like, it increases your heart rate. A lot of people have had fucking heart attacks and died from Ibogaine. And, you know, there's weird, like, there's weird, like, little, there's this guy I've had in this podcast. He's a hilarious dude. He's a dude. He's from Kentucky. He's a music journalist. He was originally, like, a music journalist writing about, like, country, like, rock bands and, like, blues bands and stuff like that. And he got into this psychedelic study at Johns Hopkins. he signed up for this study in like the early 2000s that Johns Hopkins was doing on um on I think it was on LSD and different kinds of things they're giving him all kinds of psychedelics and studying him and asking him questions and stuff and then he got like super fascinated in this whole world he's been reporting on the psychedelic world and this like new psychedelic renaissance ever since And, like, he finds out all – he, like, he pulls out and, like, brings to light all of the weird little financial entanglements with these billionaires who are funding certain psychedelic movements to do certain things. and one of the things he found was there was this dude named George Sarlo who was like a billionaire. And there's the whole MAPS Institute. Have you heard of MAPS? Yeah, yeah. So they were studying MDMA with Rick Doblin. They were trying to get MDMA, FDA approved or whatever. And these girls from MAPS met this guy. He was like really, really old, billionaire. and they started like hanging out with him, having sex with him and stuff like that and giving him MDMA and he was like, oh my God, he's like, this is making my life so much better. This is like improving the quality of my life so much that he decided to donate a bunch of his money to maps, to this MDMA stuff. And this guy's, I think it was his stepdaughter or his daughter or his stepdaughter found out about this and she's like oh my god my dad is donating my inheritance to this mdma shit so his daughter has basically uh since he's died and she's got all his money now she's taking all her money she started up this like weird little like ambiguous uh company non-profit that's funding opposition to maps and psychedelic stuff and like funding media organizations and websites and and podcasts to talk negatively about psychedelics and it's just like it's it gets so confusing yeah when you when you realize like why certain people are like pushing against things and like even like podcasts yeah i can tell you yeah i know some about this psychedelic space too we're actually funding a study uh called the minds project affiliate at ways to well affiliated with dell medical school uh utilizing psilocybin to see if we can help complex problem solving So rather than focusing on, like, depression or anxiety or any of these things that typically they're focusing on, our question is, can we give psilocybin to a scientist who's working on a very complicated equation or problem that they've been trapped or stooped by and see if they can solve it? And so, yeah, the reason we did that is there was a scientist at NASA that was struggling to solve a complex equation. He had been working on this equation for, like, four years. He went out and took LSD one weekend and came back with the answer. That literally is how this all started. And so they came to us with this idea, and I'm like, I love it. Let's do it. We'll do the trial. So we just started, but we're working through it, and it's in affiliation with Dell Medical School. It's going to be pretty cool. But I know a story of what you're talking about, that that same MDMA trial, there's another billionaire that's backing psilocybin. And, again, I don't know if this is true, but the word in the psychedelic community at these events is this other billionaire intentionally sabotage that trial with the FDA to undermine the MDMA stuff because he wants his stuff. He wants to be the guy who has his name on the first FDA-approved psychedelic. Oh, wow. Right? And he wants it to be his company because there's a huge financial return on that too. Right. Now, I don't know how much truth there is, and I won't say names or anything, but that is the chatter at those psychedelic conferences and some of the events that I've been to. I'm like, man. Yeah, the psychedelic thing is dark. It scares me the most, I think, out of all of this stuff because psychedelics is the one thing that, like, it can be super helpful for people and, like, transformative for people and therapeutic for people. But, like, the one weird thing about psychedelics is people, once they get really into it, they become evangelists. They become psychedelic. They can become, like, fucking door knockers. Yeah. You know, trying to recruit everybody. Or even worse, they become – they want to be prophets is what I've seen. Like almost like beyond an evangelist to like delusions of who they are. They get like a Messiah conference. Yes, yes. Yeah, and there was a study that was – another study that was done I think with Johns Hopkins where it was called the psychedelic study on religious professionals where they took religious leaders from all the different big religions and they brought them in and they gave them psilocybin. and they wanted to figure out what the psilocybin did to their religious belief to see if there was a common core to all religions. And what they found was it just amplified their pre-existing beliefs. They never actually published what they found because I didn't think it went with their hypothesis. But from what I understand, what it's doing is just amplifying what's already there deep within your psyche. It's interesting. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, there's so many different pathways. I don't know what time it is. Yeah, yeah. Shit. 4.50. Yeah, I probably got to remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just kidding. Yeah, we can wrap it up. But, dude, thank you for doing this. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. Tell everybody about where they can learn more about Ways to Well and all the other stuff that you're doing. Yeah, our company is Ways the number two well, W-E-L-L. A lot on the website, a lot on social media. There's a lot of content out there on podcasts where we deep dive into this like we did today. But the vision of what we're doing is getting proactive, predictive, and preventative. At our practice, our goal is to prevent chronic disease, not to treat it. And how do we stop the major killers of humanity? You don't ever let them evolve in the first place. And we do that through an array of different modalities. But it starts with taking a look under the hood, working you through the diagnostic workup, or utilizing maybe a blood work test or DEXA or VO2 max or genetic screening or gut biome test or something that you may have done somewhere else. We're not opposed to taking data from anywhere. The goal is to culminate the data and extrapolate the information and distill it down into a form that you can use to drive your health span. And so we have an app that we're launching with a large language model that will tie into all of this, that'll answer your questions, that'll tie into the pharmacy, that'll help with your prescriptions, that'll help answer why you started them, that'll answer any question you may have that you could think of. And it also covers things like red light and hyperbaric and any of the preventative care modalities that are becoming more and more popular. And so my thing is get proactive, get predictive, take solventry autonomy over your health. Do not put your health in the hands of this broken ass system and be a steward to yourself and your family. And, uh, the future is bright. Like it's, it's bright. We can help guide you if you ever need a resource. Uh, but like we said, the step of a, or the thousand mile journey starts with the first step and we're here for all thousand miles. Dude, it's been epic to meet you. Um, I'm really glad we were able to connect and, uh, I will be booking my trip to Austin as soon as we got this podcast. Let's go, man. Get up, get my, uh, my treatment done. Come on. Hell yeah, man. Thank you for having me, dude. Thank you for coming. I love it. It's been awesome. We'll link everything below for everyone. All right. Thanks, brother. Good night, everybody.