What “Efficacy” Actually Means in Skincare with Jack Jia of Musely

Hey guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. This is Ektah and today's episode is going to be talking about what it means to have efficacious skin care routines. And I think this is an incredibly important conversation because with all of the products out there, all of the noise, I think consumers get lost in this world and trying to figure out what's actually going to help my skin versus what's going to maybe enhance the effects that I'm looking for rather than true treatment and the protocols we should be following. So without further ado, please welcome Jack Gia, who is the founder of Muesli. Welcome Jack, I'm so honored to host you. Yeah, thank you, I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, I'm so happy to have you on because this is such an important conversation and I think Muesli, what you've established with Muesli and the accessibility you've established is incredible. And I can't wait to dive into that. I really want to talk to you about, there are so many aspects, but this idea of like medical access and using technology to like bring this forward, I mean, I would love to kind of walk down memory lane if you could tell us what led to this idea and what made you want to create a platform like this. Yeah, I think the whole journey was fairly accidental. I think the skincare need for something applications certainly has been always there, but we Muesli actually was a marketplace. We thought finding best skincare products was a curation problem and there are good products out there and just, you know, we have to try hard to find it. And this is back in probably eight, nine years ago now, around 2017 to 2018. So we built a marketplace, we use our corporate resource, built a marketplace with 900 best of breed skincare products, brands that are, and we were pushing it and also had a little private agenda because my wife developed this condition since our son was born and at the time, there was already over 20 years. And she had this condition called melasma, typically induced by pregnancy and childbirth and then typically stays on with women for life. There are about 6 million women in the US with melasma. And she tried everything. She tried everything on the planet for hundreds of different creams. And then, you know, for 20 years and then last few years, she was trying laser, right, from the less expensive IPL laser to more expensive Fraxel and nothing worked. Nothing actually worked and her melasma got worse. So part of the building this marketplace is that there were several dozen dark spot correctors in our marketplace. We spent a lot of effort study their ingredients and, you know, we thought this would work. And my wife tried those also and it was no different than from the past. So nothing really worked. So that was kind of the, oh my God, what's wrong? And that's how we start to look deeper into the industry, right? From outside, we just know that people keep trying different skincare products. People, you know, my wife always bringing new things from some friends recommendation over the years. But so what was the problem? That was kind of, you know, we were stuck in 2018, we're stuck with this 900 skincare brands on our marketplace and they were no different. And so we got some expert to help us. And ironically, now our chief medical officer, Dr. Marie Jean was brought in as a advisor, maybe, you know, she's a dermatologist. So she would know this. And she didn't even bother to look at any of the products. She just says, well, none of these 900 skincare product work. And I said, well, Dr. Jean, you got to look at it a little bit and look at their ingredients, which we did. And she said, well, I've been practicing cosmetic dermatology for 25 years. I've done this research. I've seen it all right. I have literally have dozens of women bringing whole bags of skincare products to my office every week for the last 25 years. And then asking the same question. Right. And the initial first few years, I actually try to study them and just know they don't work. And then I asked, you know, so is there no solution for these conditions then? And she said, no, you have to go prescription. That was the first time I heard prescription cosmetics medication, right? We all know prescription for treating illness. But for these cosmetics conditions, they're actually treatment. The other two women actually shed even more insights. One is Laurie Bush, who is the founding CEO of Rodin and Fields. Another lady, Kimber Mazurazzo, she was the EVP for proactive at the time. And they both actually came out of those industry and with, you know, 40 years of skincare product development, you know, working for Neutrogena's and Johnson and Johnson and a bunch of other companies in the past. So I thought, hey, you guys are from in the industries. And so you would know why can, you know, these big giants do something about advocacy. It turned out that was actually even more insightful. And so the doctor knows they don't work, but they don't know why. Right. And the industry folks says, we are not allowed to work. It's not like we don't have chemists that understand what would work. Right. But the problem is, if you put something topical on your skin, if that topical cream can interact with your skin cells, right, do something good or bad, you know, for goodness, you know, treating wrinkles, dark spots or for badness, causing illness or cancer. Either way is that that's the very legal definition of a drug. Yeah. So the skincare products on the market are simply not allowed to make anything that would do something. Right. So the bottom line is that these creams out there, whether it's a $10 cream or $600 cream, they're just moisturizers. Yeah. Because you can't make structural and functional claims if you're not a drug. You cannot make that claim. Right. So and the bigger the brand, the less likely they will be able to add ingredients that is remotely applications. Right. The small brands may get away with, you know, adding stuff that nobody knows that that's, you know, but that's just generally as an industry. That's the very barrier. So that's why, you know, people try different things. There's, you know, every, there are thousands of brands out there. Right. Every celebrity has their own skincare brands because it's just a marketing story. It's just, you know, scented water, we call them. Yeah. I mean, this is really, really interesting what you shared because you brought up your wife's journey with melasma. I think that's such an incredible example because melasma is an actual skin condition. And so when we're talking about skincare, I mean, this also is something that's always on my radar. It's like, it's one thing like, I think brands can tiptoe around that drug claim thing. But then when you're somehow indirectly claiming something works for something like melasma, you're still in that weird territory of like, what are you really saying? And what are you really promising to your consumers at the end of the day? I want to ask you, like, why do you think the beauty industry avoids talking about this reality and like diving deeper into these like really technical issues that are very much there? You know, because I've heard this a lot. For example, I've heard a lot, oh, there's no regulation in the United States for cosmetics. And I disagree. I think there is. I just think there's so many loopholes, you know, at this point that I'm just curious, like, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, there are definitely sort of regulations around this, right? So that's why the general skincare, cosmetic skincare product cannot make any kind of those claims, right? It can only, even for simple things like wrinkle fine lines, you can only say something, it can remove the appearance of wrinkles and fine line, but not really actually treating those underlying conditions, right? Those are great example, right? Melasma may be quasi kind of medical, but insurance doesn't cover it because it's still considered to be cosmetics, right? Just makes your face, you know, these random dark spots, what's the big deal? That was kind of insurance companies, at least superficial justification. But that's, there's a fundamental business model issue that we can get into that separately. Why insurance doesn't cover these cosmetic conditions. But the reason industry cannot address it, and but they, it is because this is a giant industry, right? $300 billion worldwide you know, industry for skincare. And they move a lot of stuff, right? The entire business model is based on build on, you know, celebrity endorsement, supermodel, paying, they definitely pay 10 times more to the supermodels than to the scientists who can actually do something about them, right? And then because the very regulation makes their business model not viable, so they're just selling moisturizer, different kind of moisturizer, make a different sense, telling stories around them. That's why this is something that influencers can get into, celebrities can get into it because they have a story to tell. Yeah, if you just need moisturizer, yeah, you, you can certainly buy any of those, right? But that's why if you ask, you know, dermatologists, the best moisturizer actually are the simplest one, right? The CeraVease, the, the Vaseline, you know, those, those are better moisturizer than the Fancy, you know, I won't name names, but you know, the $300, $400, $500 ones. Yeah, exactly. So that's the reality. There is the industry that can, they build around storytelling, around supermodel, around branding by itself, right? To almost like a fashion business where you wear these things to almost get achieved a fashion impact. But a lot of people do have real issues. That's where all these skincare products don't really do anything. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, this is really interesting because you've also talked about something called the giant burden of big pharma. Why do you think the pharmaceutical infrastructure struggles to innovate in areas like cosmetic dermatology or longevity? Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is the big pharma was created, right? Maybe a hundred years ago, right? To solve the problem of medication costs being very high. Yeah. Right. So before that is actually all drugs are made through compounding, right? In every country, every culture for thousands of years, right? Small mom and pop shops creating a mix of chemicals and then treating illness. That's kind of the how, you know, the drugs were made, right? Then, you know, the countries got together and basically says, well, we need to regulate this. We need to make the drug cheaper so we can manufacture large quantity of medications. And so that's how it was built, right? And in order to protect consumer, we want the safety so that that's why you have the modern way of drug discovery, which is a $2 billion journey, right? 10 years clinical trial, you know, from phase one to phase three. And then you get one drug, one formula, and you file a patent and you protect for the next 25 years. Right. So even you are successful in that journey, you basically have one formula, spend a $2 billion and no change for 35 years, right? So, so A, that's not a good way to innovate, right? Innovation is supposed to be an iterative process, improving constant improvement. So there is no improvement in that model. And the cost is also very high, the $2 billion. So it's not like, you know, a lot of people say big pharma just, you know, super greedy, right? They are actually, in some sense, to their defense, they have a $2 billion hole for that one drug that discovered, right? And oftentimes, you know, not every drug will be super successful. So the one successful drug have to cover the loss of maybe two other drugs. So you're talking about five, six billion dollars before they can make a dollar. So therefore, the drugs become really expensive. That's why drugs are so expensive. And so therefore, the drug must be covered by insurance. This is kind of the related problem, right? The current healthcare is really designed not for health, is really designed for sickness. So, so you might well call it sick care system. Our sick care system is designed to treat life threatening conditions, right? It's really, you know, like 300 million Americans pour our money together to pay the healthcare. And then whoever got really sick can use that healthcare to cover the drug, right? So there, therefore, the, these big pharma, the $2 billion investment can be recovered, right? They really require $100,000 per month treatment, a million dollar per month treatment, ideally, in order to recover that $2 billion investment, right? So that's why the drug is so expensive. It's not like the drug, the actual chemical itself is expensive. It's all the process, the regulation, all the costs incurred over a long time. And so therefore, the current drugs business model, the healthcare model is really for life threatening condition. It's really for the sickness, right? And, and therefore, you know, these cancer patients can, you know, the insurance have to pay a million dollars. Now, if you look at the industry in skin care, or even in other wellness kind of conditions, it's just not designed by this current healthcare business model, right? You know, like, like skin care is a condition, you know, almost for everybody, right? Hair loss, menopause, longevity, you, all these conditions are really everybody's condition. Cosmetic condition is also everybody's. Rinko's fine lines, everyone's condition. And insurance by definition cannot cover it, because if insurance covers everyone, they will go broke, right? So, you know, it's just, you know, by nature is small and narrow, you know, we pull our money together to cover minority conditions. That's why the insurance business model is all about. And the healthcare and all the big pharma was also designed to charge you a lot of money, right? The chemical itself is dirt cheap. Whatever they, you know, that charges a million dollars for the cancer treatment. The actual margin is $99,999, you know, I don't know how many 9s percent. But everything else, you know, created the cost that they have to recover, you know, that's kind of the fundamental problem, right? So, therefore, there's no one actually use the modern science and medicine to treat non-life-threatening condition up to this point, right? It's, you know, so Musely decided, and maybe with a few other telehealth companies, he said we need to address the other side of the equation, which is wellness conditions, cosmetic conditions for everybody, for everyday person. And the science is there, the medications are there. Just there's no big infrastructure to allow that to serve consumers. It's very fascinating because, I mean, I love how you've explained this. Thank you for doing such a deep dive because when you think about pigmentation, hair loss, aging, all of these things, you're right, they kind of fall into a major gap in the system. But you know what's interesting is that we do have the drugs. And I think that's what, like, that's where I get lost too as a consumer is like, we have the drugs, but like, we stop promoting them and we get so involved with the skincare stuff where it's almost like, guys, we're treating pigment, there's a drug for this, you know, like there's actually a solution here. Why aren't we, like, as consumers shifting that focus? And so, I mean, I think it's a very interesting space that way. Yeah, in fact, the irony continues, the economic irony continues, right? One is that this whole big pharma that I just mentioned, then the moment the drugs is out of pattern, yeah, right, they lose economic owner. So the big big pharma no longer care about them. Right now, Ozenpig is still being protected by patents, right? In a few more years, I think by 2031, in the US patents, things expire. So Ozenpig will become generic. Then all of a sudden, Novo is not going to care about them anymore, right? No one notices going to move on to the next one. So all these other drugs that's old are no longer being promoted by anybody. There's no economic owners anymore. So that's actually 99% of the drugs. And the ironic thing about these drugs are the safest drug, because they've been around, not just through clinical trial, they have been to actual usage for 30 years, 50 years, right? Trend known has been on the market for over 60 years. And it's the safest anti-aging, you know, medication, right? But there's really no one promoting trend known other than the industry generally at least got a hold of this one drug, right? But that's an exception, right? Even that is ironic. Even everybody's talking about trend known, right? The generic drug, you know, non branded generic trend known still lists has a list price of $400. Wow. Right? It's crazy. Yeah. If you go to Costco, the, you know, pharmacy, you can get that drug you know, basically for $100. That's still too expensive because the chemical is absolutely dirt cheap. We're talking about cents. Yeah. For people who have drugs, that's right now Costco sells for $100, right? And that's just not, not right. No, it's not right. And you know what's interesting, this actually gets brought up too is like, you look at some of these serums like retinol, retinol dehyde, bakuchiol, and they're selling them for $100, $200. And I'm like, guys, like, you know, that's conversion steps away from being, you know. And those retinol, right, just recently we're talking about science and chemical, right? Those non prescription retinol, they're actually not the things that can directly help us on anti-aging wrinkles, fine lines, because they're just pure vitamin A. Retinol is just a, aka vitamin A, right? We do not have receptors for vitamin A, right? We have a receptor for in our skin cells, right, for third cousin of, of retinol, right? Which is trying to know an, or retinol asset, right? It requires multiple human enzymes and weeks of conversion in a lab tube, you know, from, to get a very small fraction, right? 5% typically of the retinol you put it out, right? But on our skin, you know, those retinol doesn't stay on for six weeks, for example. And therefore the conversion is very, very, very minimal, right? We're talking about 0.1%, 0.01% of what you would get from a trend known. And therefore it doesn't really do much other than irritating your, your skin and making you red and dry. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. I love that you said that. And I thank you for saying that because I have been, I've made that point once on social media. And I had some people come after me. I'm like, you guys, this is just math, you know, like you're relying on your skin to convert a molecule into its active form, which there are three isoforms of receptors that will bind it. I mean, just think about that, you know, like this is biology. It doesn't stay on. We're, we're not allowed to, you know, you can actually stay there for weeks before the conversion actually happens. Yeah. And it's different based on everybody. Everybody's skin is different. So if you're like, maybe you have a deficiency in certain enzymes that will convert it. So like, we don't even know that. Well, it still doesn't happen that fast, right? Because the, the, the team can stay on for hours, maybe a day and you watch it off. Right. Then it's gone, right? So then that, that part, the next day you put a new one, the cycle goes on, but it's just too short, right? That's kind of the problem. Yeah. And then efficacy, that's, that's, I think that's what gets me is that there are like, now I'm watching the industry shift, right? Now people are saying, we have to prove our efficacy. We have to prove our marketing. Okay. Take, let's start with retinol. It's one of the most made products in skincare. Every single brand. That's why, that's why even that is still marketing, largely marketing. There's the tiny little, you know, truth to it, right? But that tiny little truth is too small to really make an impact, right? That, that 0.1% conversion that maybe happened on your skin. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of studies on this. It's proven that's the case, right? It just takes a gazillion time and longer and, you know, for, for it to be working at some level, right? It just, you know, you need to go prescription if you want the impact, right? That's the bottom line. I agree. I couldn't agree more. And I think that's what honestly, when I first discovered Muesli, I think that's what really made me fall in love with the brand immediately was because one, it's accessible. I mean, you have mastered accessibility with, with the brand, which truly hats off to you. But also you weren't, you guys don't sugarcoat it, you know, you just say like, this is what this does. Like for example, if you want to get the trepinoin prescription, that's the anti-aging cream. That's the literal job of trepinoin. That's what it does, anti-aging. And I've been pointing this out because when we're making marketing claims about certain things, you have to have the data to make those claims. So really, technically, if you're talking about anti-aging, trepinoin is the molecule that's the most studied for anti-aging. So everything else doesn't make sense, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the good thing is when you start to compound, we have to compound because, and then we end up making cocktails, right? Then you can add other ingredients to make trepinoin more, you know, tolerable, for example, or like, less side effect, right? Side effect is known, right? More than 50. If you use pure form of trepinoin, you know, 50% of people have severe side effect, right? And so we can create this cocktail. So we may use the standard, whatever vodka, you know, making the cocktail, but we add a bunch of other things to make it much more tolerable, even more efficacious, often time, right? We have active and inactive, both are working together. And then we evolve our formula. So our cocktails are not fixed. So we've been doing this for almost seven years now, right? The day one formula is changing. So our doctors, our practitioners are working with our chemists and pharmacists together, right? In a forever iterative loop to improve these formulas, we have 130 some formulas in our product portfolios. But these has been evolving, changing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. And then we introduce new formulas or new treatments, you know, typically four to six per year. So that's why we now we have 28 different major treatments, started with just the dark spots, you know, really for my wife, my wife was the first patient, we call her patient zero. And then literally, she could not believe she did not believe this would work, because she tried everything on the planet, right? So for 20, at the time, 23 years, and just nothing worked. So why would this be any different? And then after, I think one month, you know, four to six weeks, her mouse was completely gone. I mean, that was shocking, right? And she became kind of the first model in some sense. And then I thought her experience was unique. But turned out that at least 90, 95% of our patients in my last month have exactly the same experience. I tried everything, everything else, and the kitchen sink start to blend things on their own, right? Little start to put coffee with green teas with cucumbers on the face and hopefully to get rid of these dark spots, right? You know, in and I have a lot of these recipes, and nothing worked, right? Nothing, nothing, nothing worked until musely. And that's kind of the recurring stories and over and over, just because I mean, it's not like we are so secretive, we figured out something unique. Our doctor knew this formula, our chief medical officer, no, but they couldn't even make it, right? Even as a board certified dermatologist, could not compound, right? And compound cheaply, right? They, some of the offices used to compound with the little compounding machine and to make these, because there's no big pharma helping them, right? Again, as I said, there's no tools, they even know what to use, but no one makes the tool for them to use. That's kind of the irony of the industry. Well, that's why I find your background to be really, really interesting, Jack, because you're coming from the technology infrastructure and, you know, that kind of technical background. And I find that to be wonderful for something like this, because you were essentially able to solve a problem, I think, from the lens of just, I mean, we've talked about the accessibility, but this is the technical components that go into making a system like this work, you know? And I want you to talk about that in terms like your experience and how that shaped the way you built musely from the ground up. Like what were some of those, like, maybe tell us some of your war stories, you know, in the early days? Like what were some of the things you had to kind of figure it out, figure out and like walk through and, you know, really put your brain power behind to see how this would come together? Yeah, yeah. Well, the first problem we tried to solve, we thought the first water problem was definitely seeing a dermatologist in order to get the prescription, right? So our chief medical officer is a board certified, you know, she's actually local in the Bay Area. And well, my wife actually wanted to see her in order to prescribe the first, you know, she was the patient zero before our compounded formula was even made, you know, with the branded bottle, right? But that was sort of too expensive, right? Too hard, takes a lot of time. And the average wait time for boards, you know, for dermatologists is six weeks, even if you have them in the neighborhood, a lot of the neighborhood don't even have dermatologists. Yeah. So that was too difficult. So building telehealth is something we didn't know. So the worst story for us is that we have to, you know, none of our engineers, we were building this marketplace app, right? But we have no idea what the telehealth looked like. And then God, it was brand new. So everyone can learn from the ground up, right? Literally, we have to, you know, spend probably three, four months to learn how to build it. We initially thought that we can license something, but we quickly realized there's nothing really truly available. There's a couple of other folks maybe have pieces of the equation, but they really don't have the full system because it's so new. So we end up, you know, to our, we have a culture at Musely, it's, it's called DIY is do it yourself. And that culture turned out to help us quite a bit because it's such a new market, nascent sort of a space. We end up have the time and, and the space to learn and build it. And so we end up building the best telehealth system, our patient records, we have to be hip, a compliant, even we don't take insurance, we took the high standard of, you know, security and then compliance and all that has to be learned. So that was kind of the first battle. The second battle was really making the drug inexpensively, right? So the compounding was, and there were some compounding shops, but mostly our mom and pop shops, there are a lot of them actually in the US, like over at the time, it was over 10,000 compounding pharmacies. But they're just doing compounding drugs for neighborhoods. And so the model we use is called 503A, which is you write, doctor write a prescription first, based on the prescription, the pharmacist will compound the medication for you, right? It's not like going to CVS, there's manufactured drugs available. So, so it's very manual, very custom made, personalized. That's, you would think that's very expensive. It is very expensive when we first start out, but it's still relatively inexpensive compared with the big pharma drugs. But then once we start to scale, we realize that entire industry was just too old. We have to use technology to reinvent it. Give me an example, right? The standard, this 10,000 compounding pharmacy, the standard dispensing software they use for compounding is written in Microsoft DOS. So in order to have our machine running there, we had to find even DOS to run and then we put the software on it. That's crazy, right? So that means we have to reinvent that. So our engineering team had to learn how the dispensing model works and re-roll that software in modern stack, right, of software. And so we initially written in Java, then we first further modernize it. And then in that entire process, right, because every single drug has to be compounded, started with pharmacists telling the technician how to do it, and then all the drugs made has to be checked. Every single bottle has to be physically checked by a pharmacist with their names on it, on the label, right? So it's very, very personal down to, so that's a very manual process. So we, in order to increase efficiency and scale, we have to make software helping that process. So we introduced, for example, QR code scan so that the technicians and the doctors and the package ship people can work in a very similar way. We have to introduce many, many lines of production, right? Because these are not factory kind of thing, but we can still, when we fill the pills, right? We have some hair pills, we have the longevity pill called the Age Well Pill, and they are individually made. And those pill machines are very miniaturized for technician to work on, you know, this small line, right? So because they were literally prescription already written. So today we have, let's say 100 bottles of the Age Well Pill for 100 different patients, right? They can still automate this with technology, but at a very customized, you know, personalized fashion, right? So this whole notion of, then all of these are freshly made. So therefore, the medications are more potent when they're fresh. So we'll have this notion of from farm to table, you know, from farm, farm to individual homes. So even in that farm to table model, we can make it so much cheaper, so much more affordable than the big farm, you know, massively produced with billions of pills produced at the same time, right? You know, we're still probably a thousand times, 100 times, 10 times depends on what drugs cheaper than those kind of No, that's what I think that's what blows me away is that everything's so affordable on newslet. Like it's, it's really, really amazing. Pretty much everything we try to keep it a dollar a day, right? A dollar a day is sort of the mantra. And we used to compare with the, you know, it's a cup of coffee, but now you can't get a cup of coffee or four dollars. The coffee is now three, four bucks of coffee. I don't think they're selling coffee anywhere for a dollar anymore. No, I know that was kind of what changed in the last seven years. Yeah. No, this is, I mean, it's really fascinating to me, I think for so many reasons, right? Because the price point thing really matters at the end of the day. And I think this is where, you know, when I look at Mewsley, I don't just see, okay, you know, these are like skin health solutions. I also, from my perspective, I'm looking at it from like, like, if a physician is looking at this model, this makes the job of a physician, I think a lot more simplified, you know, if you're a new dermatologist, for example, you want to give your patients the most access that they can get. And it's a hard conversation to have. I've had that conversation, you know, both on the patient side as well as other side, where it's like, when you know a prescription costs $500, like I know the classic example of this was Osempic, right? When Osempic first came out, people were being quoted like $500, $600, you know, for one pen, like, you know, or more than that, I think it was like, yeah, like $1,200 or something crazy. And then to have that conversation for any, I think, practitioner is very disheartening, because you don't go into medicine trying to sell people ridiculously high prescriptions. Nobody wants that. There's not a single medical professional that's like happy about that scenario, you know? I mean, Osempic is a great example of the traditional big pharma across the line to a consumer wellness business, almost, right? That's by accident, right? It was definitely a diabetes drug, right? It's almost out of pattern. It's been there for long time, right? It's been there for 20 some years. And for some country like China, Osempic patterns already expired. All right, so it's been that long, right? And just was recently in the last few years, all of a sudden, oh my God, this is for weight loss is great. And they're really adjusting, if you look at the stock price for Novo Nordisk in the last few years, even with this massive adoption, acceptance, consumer wellness usage, their stock didn't go up that much, because this is not their business model. Selling it cheap, right? It's not that cheap right now. Even the pills are still $200 a month, right? The shots, the needles are still $400, $500. And still, they're having a hard time making a lot of money. Even they're making a lot of money, but they're relatively to their business model, it's not the best business cases, but this is one of those crossover happened, right? It's kind of like, you know, that's why this fundamental business model for wellness is not really generally speaking, they don't exist. And that's why we have to learn how to vertically integrate, in our case, with dermatologists and OBGYN doctors, since we got into the HRT, menopausal conditions, and even longevity, functional medicine, that kind of a discipline medical. And then with the pharmacists who can compound chemists, who can formulate, then we have to also understand chemical industry. That's also a very old, very inefficient business. Tommy, you're talking about traditional wholesaler, reseller, I remember in the 90s, to get carfix, you have to buy some parts, direct to consumer business, since you have to go through these layers of complexity. Same thing happened still in the chemical industry. So we have to break through all of that layers to get the chemical dirt cheap ourselves. And then by vertically integrating these, and you can create the best cocktail, and you can improve the best cocktail, and never done, right? That's kind of the, and that we now, you know, certainly start to, especially for the menopausal conditions, given our woman, you know, naturally gets into that age, or, you know, the aging condition happens to the middle age anyway. So that was already squarely in that demo, where just most women didn't know HRT should be considered, right? It was a taboo topic until 20 years ago. And so thank God, that change, you know, in realization of this 40 study from, you know, 25 years ago, this Women's Health Initiative that was just wrong, right, misguided the entire society and the women, and who are not seeking treatment for these conditions, that's massive, massive conditions, right? The menopausal condition that 25, 28 symptoms that we've been tracking, right? Most of them are actually doing it. Yeah, it's a huge, it's a huge, it's a whole area of study just figuring this out. Like, I know, I know. And the top view actually turned out to be dermatological related, right? It's a skin, it's a hair, it's nail change, of course, the mental health and half-flush, and you name it, right? And now we know why. I mean, actually our medical director for this field, HRT, and is an OBGYN doctor from Stanford, she's been wanting to help their patients, her patients for 20 some years also, even when this WHO study came out, she knew it was wrong, but she couldn't say anything because that's, you know, NIH study. So therefore, you know, we have to follow. And so now for the last few years, she's just on a mission, right? So let's thank God we got a platform, she now can formulate the best HRT treatment and most affordable treatment, and for women to really treat these conditions, you know, these conditions shouldn't be there, really shouldn't, women shouldn't be suffering in their 40s and 50s, and that's really the, that's a shame. Well, that's also why I think a platform like Musely and this level of accessibility is so profound on multiple levels. So even, let's move past just the fact that we're getting access to prescriptions, let's move past that, right? And talk about how we're getting access to information that's indirectly coming out through interventions like this that are now accessible. I mean, women didn't even know for the longest time that this could help me, you know? Like that information wasn't even out there. Like now when I see the social media conversation around hormone replacement, anything, right, skin changes that you go through in menopause, perimenopause, it's a brand new conversation because it's like almost like discovering a new field of medicine. That's what it feels like. And when you look at it from that lens, it's like, oh my God, like these things were right in front of our face and we never even considered them as options for women. And so, I mean, also, I want to say this about, like you had brought this up, like the compounding part of it, like tretinoin, for example, right? Tretinoin, when you, I use Musely's tretinoin, that's my choice, and I love it, absolutely love it. Mine is compounded with niacinamide and hyaluronic acid. It's amazing. The problem that that solved for me as a consumer was, it gave me the ability to stick to it, the consistency part. And I think that's a huge conversation as well, right? Because most people, when you talk about another tretinoin, their biggest complain is it spreads very thick. I can't get it on my face, and then they don't stick to it. So they believe that pharma is failing them, drugs are failing them because these aren't old or dated in whatever. But that's not true. It's that we have to rethink that. And so, I'm kind of superimposing the examples, but it's the same thing with women's health, where it's like, I feel like for the longest time, we felt like these are inaccessible treatments, but they're not inaccessible. They just need to be framed in a way that you feel comfortable approaching a doctor wanting to get them. So, I want to get your opinion on that, because I think that requires a cultural shift to happen in the consumer space. What are your thoughts on that? What do you think is blocking that cultural shift from really taking place in a very robust way, where we are all doing our thing? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great, great question, and it's something we talk a lot about also internally, because traditionally, medication has been considered, again, as I said, the traditional model has educated the consumer is for illness. I don't take meds unless I'm sick. Yeah. Right. That is right for certain kind of conditions, but it's not right with the modern science understanding. So this is what we do. The science behind this is, I would say, it's to be fair to a lot of people, a lot of the science really behind this thing is matured in the recent 10, 20 years. So, a lot of the stuff was not available. We didn't understand DNA. We didn't understand the cellular structure. We didn't understand a lot of the interactions. There were not a lot of studies. You know, musically, we have done a lot of meta studies. We don't do original study that takes too long, but we've done a lot of meta studies on really what has truly worked, what doesn't work. So the fundamental shift is that we need to treat medicine like the true supplement for our health, not just to treat illness. If you draw this square, half of them is for life-threatening conditions. That's fine. You have cancer treatment. The other half is wellness. And this is the science. The fundamental sign is we peak produce every chemical we need as a healthy person in our 20s, late 20s. Every chemicals we need to keep us healthy is produced 100% at that age. From there on, we're on a very slow downhill decline of producing these chemicals. So, for example, the musically medications out of these 130-some formulas, most of the medications are either 100% bioidenticals or very close to bioidentical chemicals. And therefore, these are the things we, as we age, we start to lose a lot of them. Then we would talk about HRT was a great example. The estrogen loss for women starts at late 30s, early 40s, around 40 years or plus, minus, depending on individual. That estrogen loss will go through a 10-year cycle from 100% down to 1% left, right? 99% loss in 10 years. Imagine the change of the human, within, with that chemical gone, right? Completely, right? That's why there's so many conditions side effect produced. And it's not necessarily a healthy thing. Why we would lose estrogen? Why women would lose estrogen? I mean, there's a biological reason, evolutionary reason why that happens, but it's not healthy, right? And the same thing with hair loss, right? Yes. For hair thinning, women don't lose hair completely, right? Like men, because the hair follicles are largely killed by testosterone, right? And women have smaller amounts. So therefore, about 10% of the men's testosterone, right? So therefore, it's not potent enough to kill all the hair follicles. But why would testosterone kill hair follicles? What's the reason? Nobody knows why that happens, but it's just one of those things. It's a mystery of life. But to prevent that from happening, you need protections. You need the DHT kind of chemicals to really help to protect the hair follicle being killed. So there are chemicals. We naturally produce them when we're really young. We start to lose them. Both men and women start to lose them. And so therefore, we can add them, whether it's topical hair solutions or eat pills, and they will protect from hair thinning or hair loss in women's case. And the same thing goes into longevity, right? Longevity, we start to lose, I mean, I'm in that age now, right? You know, that you massively lose almost all the chemicals that to keep you healthy. That's why the last 20 years of Americans or anybody, right? But at least American, you can quantify the age, right? So 80 years old is kind of the lifespan. From 60 and onward, that last 20 years, 80% of the Americans are not healthy anymore, right? They are no longer, why they're not healthy? Because the lack of these basic chemicals to keep them healthy. These chemicals are not your supplements. You can't just take vitamins and to get them back, right? These are by law medications. These are bioidentical chemicals that we need to keep us healthy. Right? And so we recently introduced the longevity pill. One of the first ones is called the Core Foundation. It's really about energy production. It's called the Age Well Pill. I have had this back pain, right? Just like typical older people since I was 50 years old, right? For over 10 years. You know, if I sit on the chair for half an hour, an hour, if I stand up, I would just can't stand straight, right? I'm bent. Right? And then you see a lot of old people, they walk kind of bent it. I start to feel I'm going to become that if I don't do something, but I couldn't. I run, I exercise, I do all the healthy things. I still cannot reproduce some of the chemicals that I have and so until this pill, right? The pill basically have chemicals to help you to increase your mitochondria cellular energy production. So it's at the core, at the furnace level, right? You end up having more energy and therefore everything else becomes better. It has anti-inflammatory chemicals. It has, you know, helping your metabolism. And so all of that makes your core better, right? So this is, you know, our doctors, our scientists basically said, first we need to cure the core. If you have a good foundation, good bones, then your health will improve. Then we can individually target other parts of the body, right? And I don't know, I don't know why this podcast is going to air, but we will have a skin pill, an oral pill for skin health from within, right? Lulie repairing your cellular damage from UV, right? Yeah. It's unlike like a, you know, sunscreen, you protect UV from damaging, but what we'll still get UV in, right? There will be damaged cells, and this pill can repair that and make your skin better within, right? So that's kind of the one area, right? Certainly we'll have pills for heart, for brain, for guts. I mean, those are all chemicals we need, especially we need as we age, as we become older. We just don't have them anymore, and therefore these cells start to become malfunctioning, right? Yeah. No, it's a very, very compelling argument that you've made here, and I think that's so, so well rooted in the science and the physiology of it, because no one really wants to talk about this. I personally love longevity, you know, and I've been very up to date on reading all the papers that come out. And one thing that I keep seeing that we're missing the point on is kind of what you alluded to just now, which is there are certain chemicals, molecules that are naturally depleting, but then also we are also failing to replete them in the standard ways. So like, for example, I'll tell you, vitamin D is a big one. You know, I don't know what the stats are right now, but I do remember a few years back, there was some data about like the percentage of people in the United States that have a deficiency in vitamin D. And then that led to all sorts of theories, and people were blaming sunscreen, and you know, all sorts of crap, and you know, so it's like, but that is a prime example, right? Because vitamin D is at the center of so many cellular functions, but we don't get to focus on that. We focus more on, well, you know, what's what could have caused this? No, it's just your body's natural way. Like that's what happens. Yeah, yeah. As we age, we start to lose our ability to, you know, produce vitamin D. To synthesize it. You can argue, yeah, you should go into some more, but the problem is the sun can cause a lot of damages at the same time, while maybe producing a little more vitamin D, but still not enough. That's the problem, right? That's the problem. Still not being enough. And a lot of these other chemicals are very difficult to reproduce, because just the clock is ticking, right? And you know, a lot of the mechanism of action is very interesting, very unique. And you know, there have been a recent study on this. I mean, this study is pretty well known now, right? Even as we get into the old age, 60, 70, 80, our DNA itself, right, is still fully intact. Yeah. Right. It's really the epigeno that controls the DNA on and off that goes haywire as we age, right? And how to make the epigeno function, you know, healthy, again, reset it, reboot it, right? It's really part of the trick, right? We're doing a lot of the biohacking is all about that, right? But really figure out what's working, what's not working. So our, you know, when we introduced the H12 pale, there's only five ingredients in it, right? And we started with probably 150 chemicals that people claim that has worked, right? But when you chase it down to the actual study, right? Is this a placebo controlled study? Is there a sample large enough of the impact truly are noticeable, right? When you put all those filter and colon into it, there's less and less chemicals. That's why we ultimately, we only need these five. And for me, my pains are, I mean, after, you know, suffering for 10 years, it was gone after really just a few weeks of taking it. And my had a food pain. I used to play a lot of soccer and I just couldn't do it anymore. And I said, I then that only playing golf, I even walking start become painful. I don't want to write a card. I was like, when I'm going to, how long can I hold on to this? My food pain, right? It was like, all of a sudden, that was completely gone, right? Completely gone. Which is like, oh my God, this is like, for me, this is the miracle pill. I'm, I may be less caring about the skin care, my wife, but this, this is for me. It was like, okay, I'm kind of young again, feels like. No, but it's amazing because that's the definition of preventative care is what you're describing. I mean, this is really the, this is in my opinion, the future of preventative care. It doesn't have to be complex. It just needs to be efficacious. And we have to understand the molecules that are at play and what they do and how they reset your body. You know, I had this, Jack, I had this conversation. I don't remember it. It's been a while, but the idea came up of physiological feedback loops, you know, and that was an important conversation because when you look at physiology and the way it functions, we lose the capacity of these loops to do what they're supposed to do, which is tell ourselves, hey, you're lacking this, make less, or, you know, or make more, or whatever, right? So the feedback loops themselves get completely hijacked as we age. If we are able to introduce certain molecules and certain things that can replenish that system, you're replenishing the whole machine at the end of the day. Yeah, they're a whole feedback system. That's why I'm not a big fan of the functional health thing, right? But I think there's some, absolutely some truth to it, right? Even just I experienced, I feel like I'm young. When I'm walking now, I want to run because I feel like I've got the energy I want to bounce now all of a sudden, right? That feeling, I haven't had it for, you know, again, 10, 20 years, 10, 15 years. Wow. Well, I love it. And I'm such a fan of what you've created. I honestly can't rave enough about it. I think I've recommended, like I said, before we even decided to do this podcast, I've been recommending music to my friends. I thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, we do. Well, I mean, it's deserved though. It's like people ask the questions, right? Every day, you're getting the most basic questions of where can I go get a prescription for my hyperpigmentation? Where can I go and get solutions? Like, here you go. It's right here. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know this. I was surprised to got a notice three weeks ago from USA Today. We won the most trusted brand in the US. I mean, actually, it's a global brand, voting by the Americans, right? And it was like 20, 30,000 people participated in this completely independent study, right? With no brands being involved, right? We were ranked number seven in the health and beauty space, right? And in our space, so it's really the, all the other brands were very old, you know, your CeraV, your Neutrogena brands, right? Because the way they had the consumer surveyed it, right? You know, 23,000 people being surveyed it. And it's just asking two important questions. Would you buy this yourself again? And would you recommend refer this to people you care, right? Friends and family. And those are the 40, 40% weight on each. And then somehow MuseV got surfaced, right? I don't think we technically were too young to belong to like Oakley is actually one of the beauty brands that listed there. But it, you know, what you said is true. Yeah. When you focus on really what makes, you know, the, the efficacious medications and for wellness, everything else will just follow, right? We have this internally, you have this principle, you know, our drug is not cancer, you know, treating because they, for them, life threatening conditions to even 30% efficacy is fine because if someone is dying from a cancer, 30% chance is better than no chance, right? We have a 80 80 rule. Minimally, you need to be 80% efficacious for 80% of the people. Otherwise, we will not introduce a medication because it's not universal. It's not worth it. Yeah, it's not universally accepted. No, I love that. I think, I think this is the future. I think what you've created and what your, your team is doing, I mean, this is the future. And I see skincare merging more into this understanding that we cannot lie. And we have to stop following the marketing. We have to follow the science. There is no substitute to that, you know, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I would use this. This is not a fashion business. This is not color cosmetics, which is fine. You can, you know, whatever you feel, good, look good, right? This needs have results. Yes. That's the only thing that matters. And that's the thing is like we are having this conversation in the cosmeceutical space where we're talking about things are merging with dermatological science, you know, cosmetics is coming. But at the end of the day, the efficacy has to speak. That's the bottom line. And if we ignore that, we're going to keep spiraling in this, you know, gray zone that we've been in with cosmetics, you know, it's just, it, that needs to stop. I mean, if you ask my opinion, it needs to stop. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the funny thing is that because we created a whole ecosystem through this DIY model, we have our own healthcare system, right, patient record system. We have our eNERS. We have collect, you know, recently, we actually use AI to further harvest the data that we have, right? We have, you know, 10 million data points from from these patients, right? 1.2 million patients gave us data, what works, what doesn't, which formula down to every single formula. If you look at each formula, the number of, I mean, this is not even like a traditional clinical trial study, you survey them, they literally are using the eNERS to help their treatment. So they're using their action to tell us, is this improving, not improving, right? They're not even answering a question for us. They're just helping themselves along the way. Yeah. Even the most least used, actually the least used formula have thousands of people behind it in terms of efficacy impact at what point at day seven, day 30, day 60, day 90, what, what are the impact, how much impact, right? We have all the data, right? This is in some sense, I don't think there is another place with this much data for skincare and now with hair care and, you know, hair care for women mostly, and then, you know, HRT is catching up quickly and longevity is kind of the new frontier. And yeah, we, I think the Stanford, you know, which is the five minutes away from my home, their dermatology department is probably smaller than us in terms of how many board certified dermatologists practicing and they're also participating in the medication development and improvement. Right. So the practitioner is not just using the tool, they're improving the tool. Yes, that's huge. That's really huge. I mean, I could talk to you for hours about this. This is, I mean, it's truly a breakthrough in skin science and I, I have not enough words to praise what you've created. I think, I mean, it's the truth. I really think this will change this industry and, you know, I, for all of our listeners, you just, you guys got to follow the, follow the efficacy, follow the side. That's why I try to tell everybody, you know, follow results oriented result driven skincare. That's when you will be voting with your dollars and you will stop buying marketing, you know, at the end of the day. And so, thank you so much, Jack. This has been an honor to host you and to learn from you. Yeah, thank you, Elka. Really appreciate your program. I always love your program. Thank you. Thank you so much. You guys want to get 28% off your MUSE-LY order? Use the code SKIN, SKIN28, all one word at checkout, but make sure that you have selected the two month refill or the three month refill option and it's your first initial order of the MUSE-LY product. Again, that's SKIN28 at checkout.