350 Ops, 200 Bites, and the Future of Healing | Bill Clark & Dr. Bob Harmon | Ep. 442

But yeah, a lot of it when the early days was just OJT learning while you're out there as a dog guy trying to figure it out. But it took a while, I would say, a couple years for them to truly understand the assets that they had in those dogs and how many lives they could save. And they really did save a lot of lives. And then they started using them so heavily to where there's actual times where you'd have to say, I can't send my dog. He's crushed. He's exhausted. He's fought. I'll give you an example. My dog, Black Rifle Coffee, actually did a story on him, a coffee or dye. He was shot in the head 2007. It was an assault in Kandahar. It was supposed to be a low level target. We took fire right off the ramp coming out RPGs, PKM. And then they were like, hey, as soon as we got off, got in our firing line and my team leader at the time has passed away now as well. He said, Billy, I need that dog in that door. So the door is about 300 yards away. Okay, I got the red smoke. Gun runs north and south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, Captain, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. I'm all winded, man. It's giving it to me. I made it. Get clear hot. Captain, clear hot. We'll say the elevator intro, but this elevator is going to like the 90th floor. So you have a little bit longer than like five or six floors. Fire away. Introduce yourself to the world. Yeah, so start whenever. Oh, we're already going. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. It's not live. It's not live. Yeah, you're going to edit it. So yeah, I don't edit anything. Everything we were just talking about is going to go in there. Sweet. Maybe possibly. Yeah, so. So yeah, Bill Clark. I'm a spent grew up kind of all over the place. My dad was in the military, did six years in the Marine Corps three those years in Vietnam as a door gunner in Huey's. It was shot three times every deployment. So very military family. My mother was one of the first women to static line jump in the army. This is actually where she met my father. Yeah. How did she enjoy that experience? She did not. That's why she did about three years and jumped out. Yeah, jumped out pretty quick and said I'm not doing that anymore and got out of the army. So, so yeah, we lived kind of all over the place. I used to live in Germany when the wall was still up there. My little brother was born in West Germany. Have a twin brother who was a Marine and older brother who was in the Navy. And my little brother has Smith McGinnis syndrome. It's a very rare form of Down syndrome to where he doesn't really feel pain. So he used to put steak knives through his arms and run into walls as a child. And we just couldn't figure out like, Hey, what's going on? Why is he doing this stuff? We knew he had Down syndrome, but no one knew exactly what it was. Whoa. Yeah. I've never heard of that. Yeah. So they've seen that on TV. More than likely probably. Yeah. But I didn't know that actually I didn't know those two things were interconnected as well. Yeah. So they one exist without the other. You know what? I don't know. I could possibly, but when he was diagnosed, I think it was in the early 90s, he was diagnosed and he was diagnosed. He was the only one in the U.S. that had it. So they would send him to Texas A&M and do actual studies on him when he was a child to figure out what's going on with this type of Down syndrome. What's chromosome? Like what's going on right there? Right. So. So yeah, that's my my brothers and my family and my parents were my parents divorced when I was about five. And then my mom was married five times. My dad was married five times. So lots of step or half brothers and half sisters as well. Not the best to confirm. Yeah. You said five each. Yes, sir. So four step brothers. I think so. I think it was a little competition number for both people to land at. Totally aside from what we're going to talk about, how was that experience for you growing up with that level of and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like that that would be some level of a little bit of stability than instability. Stability. How was that? Yeah. So for me, it was it was not good, right? So I didn't I wasn't allowed to speak to my father. My mom wouldn't allow us to speak to our biological father because he was extremely abusive towards my mother and my other brothers, but not so much of me and my twin brother. So I never really spoke to him. My mom wouldn't let us speak to him on the phone until we were 18 years old and then we can make the choice on our own. Right. So we did that. So I only knew my mom's four other husbands and they were all extremely, extremely abusive, drug addicts, alcoholics, so grew up in your normal, you know, I wouldn't say normal. Pretty abusive. How did she have addiction issues herself? I think she just she did. So I think my mother just chose the wrong place to look for specific partners and that was bars and things like that. She never found anybody who was successful or meaningful in any aspect or or format whatsoever. And my last stepdad was put in prison for molesting my niece and a family reunion. And then my twin brother quickly beat him up pretty bad to the point of their police were going to arrest him as well for assault. But it was his daughter. I would have done the same if not probably killed him. I was going to say I'm shocked he stopped where he did. I don't actually think I would be able to stop in that moment. Yeah, I think the only reason that he stopped is because the police pulled their weapons and told him to get away. So then they arrested him and then he only did less than a year in prison because it was his first offense in Washington State. I was going to ask which state they let them out, of course. Very interesting how many states handle crime. Exactly. So a molestation of a 13 year old will only get you about six months in Washington State. Do you know what his sentence was? I don't. I couldn't tell you offhand because I didn't really give a crap really to be honest with you after I heard about it. I said the same thing. I said he's lucky he's alive. If I would have been there, he probably would not have been unfortunately. I'm just fascinated by some of the criminal justice systems. You'll get 20 years, but you're out in three. It's like why did you bother to give a guy 20 years if the system is going to let him out in three. Exactly. 20 doesn't mean 20. If it means three, just say three. Yeah. That is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Spring is a reset. Longer days, more visibility, no more hiding behind winter habits. Out with the excuses, in with discipline. Black Rifle Coffee didn't adopt grit when it became marketable. They were founded on it by veterans who understand that courage is consistency. It's showing up early. 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Not that 20 years is going to make the crime right, but if you're going to like, you know what? Okay, that's a I feel better about that punishment. And then how are you going to feel three years into that? The guy's back on the street. 100%. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I agree. Hold this thing. I think the justice system as a whole is is needs to be relooked at revamped and completely redone as well as our political system. But that's another conversation. But so then yeah, I graduated high school was always told I'd never played Division One football, but ended up playing Division One football at Eastern Washington University, not far from here in the Big Sky Conference in Cheney Washington, right? As I spoke, but prior to that, after I graduated high school, I joined the Marine Corps and was in the reserves for them while I was playing college football. And then September 11th happened. And then I knew I was going to get activated right away. So I went to the Marine Corps and I said, Hey, I like I get into recon special operations and I was an RTO at the time and in the Marine Corps. And they were like, absolutely not. We're under man, you're going to an infantry union, you're going to Fallujah. I was like, check. So luckily I walked outside and there's a Navy recruiter standing right there. And he had to remind me that the Marine Corps is the Department of the Navy. And he said, it is, it is. And he said, we'll give you eight grand and let you pick your job if you come over here. And as a college student who was on scholarship and didn't have any money, I took what I could. Yeah. Join the Navy as a military police officer was in the military police space for about a year before I was recruited to go to Dev Group as a dog handler. That's when they first started the program right around 2002. Were you handling dogs at that time? I was. So when I went to military police school, my place top of my class and they said, what do you want? And I said, I want to go to dog school, which is right across the street there, Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. So I was the first E3 in the Navy to go through dog school. It used to have to be a E5 or above and done your time on the street like a normal police department before you can pick a specialty. But with the war kicking off, they needed bodies pretty quick because dog handler's were getting tasked to go to Marine units, Army units, Air Force units across the spectrum. Everybody was basically sharing working dogs. So I went to end up going to dog school right away. Graduating went straight to SIG and Nellis Cisley was my first duty station and really enjoyed it there. But within the first year there, we went through a security inspection. Every security department, every kennel has to go through. They used to call LEPS. You might be familiar with it, law enforcement, physical security inspection. So they inspect the whole security department. They inspect the kennels making sure that all officers and tools and everything are in place and everything's in working order. So for dogs, they'll do explosive programs, narcotic programs and bite type programs. And then they rank you based on your area of theater. I was in Europe and I happened to be six months on leash. I was the number one Navy bomb handler in Europe based off my test scores. So right away there, I came with your Marine Corps background. You'd be a good fit for this program that's just kicking off. And they asked me what, you know, do you know what dev group is? And I'm like, no. And then they asked me if I knew what the SEAL teams were and I'm like, yeah. So they're like, okay, you're going to get a call from a master chief. I was like, okay. So a week later, I get a call up in the skiff and the one skiff that they have in security. And it's the master chief that started the dog program at the command. And then he asked me to come over there. They come over there. They screen me, select me the same basic screen process back then was the same that you guys go through. They liked me a lot. They picked me up and they deployed me. So that was 02 early 02 or late 02 excuse me into 03. And that's where I met some of the some of the guys you know real well as well. I started out with with that squadron was deployed. Your old squadron was deployed at the time. And then I followed up with blue and then and did quite a bit up there. I did the Karzai stuff for a little bit as well. Myself and Nick Estrada would go and swap dogs out there. And then you guys would swap bodies or whatnot. So did that for a little bit and then did some some stuff with the guys on the battlefield as well. And then that was the beginning infancy of that program. And then they built it out to where we had one squad or one dog per squadron. And then once the dog started proving their worth pretty quickly, we started going to about four dogs per squadron. And then we were pretty top heavy to where we were doing bites a lot. Like we are finding a lot of bad guys and barricaded shooters, caves as you're very well aware of and spider holes and deep bush and all that other stuff. That's hard to find a human being in the ISR can't find. But nothing's going to take away from that dogs capability because their sense are 10 million times that of ours. And they've saved a lot of lives on the battlefield. We've lost a few dogs over there as well. I did a total of on and off. If you count my augment deployment close close to 13 years there and 13 deployments, probably 350 plus operations and well over 200 bites in those operations. Just sending the dog any possible way that I could to take some alleviation off the guys and to cause some kind of a distraction so that we could get shots on target and things like that. But the dogs have done tremendous things on the battlefield and always have all the way back to the Greeks and Corinthians and everybody's used dogs and war since even on the offensive side, not just in the defense but on the offensive side all the way back thousands of thousands like 400 years before Christ they have dogs in combat. I don't know why it took the US military to 1942 to figure out that hey that's probably a good asset to put on the battlefield but it did take them a very long time even though our counterparts in Europe had been using them for thousands of years. And then the way they introduced them into the United States military is really weird. It was World War II and they had the coastlines right so you had the on the east coast you had the Nazi subs that were pretty close and over there on the west coast you had Japanese subs and they couldn't figure out an early warning detection device on all the coastlines and they were trying to figure it out and they didn't have enough human people to line 50,000 miles of coastline right so they would put a dog like every 100 yards and just stake them out at centuries with handlers and the dogs would give early warning because they can sense the subs pulling in and they can sense actual people coming into the water which I was not aware of that actual Germans have came on to American soil and were blowing up ammunition depots in World War II until the dogs figured out to put alarm systems out their early warning systems but I was not aware of that. That's a lot of dogs. Yeah a lot. Tell me if I'm wrong the command dogs are multi-purpose right? Yes sir yes. Ours are always bomb and bite so drugs is not something that we need there. Our primary mission actually was bite containment and then explosive secondary so typically we would come in off the bird, dog handlers up front with Recky and EOD we push the dog out two to three hundred yards some guys are not comfortable with three hundred yards depends on what kind of control you have on that animal. And you're saying away from you? Yes. Handler and the snipers yep so dog would lead basically patrol in look for enemy personnel that are hidden or explosive IEDs or whatever it may be on the patrol in and then typically once we get to ORP I would bounce in with primary assault or I would have control of squirters and then the other handler we would flip flop every every op one would go to breaching primary breach and one would go to squirter control. And for the listener ORP men's operational ready point we go Google it you can look it up. How much of Green Team did they put you through? What was their expectation for you guys? So at first when we first got there they were like we're going to send you guys to Ranger School as your part of your selection process. Oh that doesn't sound pleasurable. No not at all. But that quickly went away and then the first couple of us did some of the CQB portion with them with the squadrons we were attached to and then the CQB portion of Green Team and then the freefall stuff and that's other than that that's typically it. So and after that they stopped doing it because they created the direct support course the very first one I went through that one as well. That was there in 2006 but it was run by the Green Team cadre the very first class in 2006 and that was 13 weeks and I think it's down to 9 weeks now and they teach you a little bit to the basics of everything you guys need to do land navigation, OTPs all those you know a little bit of rope ropeing with elevators and all that stuff but that's really all that they didn't fully put us into integrated into Green Team or anything just portions that they thought would benefit us and a lot of it was OJT. Some of my troop chiefs like Tommy Valentine took a lot of time off of his time to help me with learn some stuff and so did quite a few guys I won't say their name because some of them are still active most of them are retired now but yeah a lot of it when the early days was just OJT learning while you're out there as a dog guy trying to figure it out but it took a while I would say a couple years for them to truly understand the assets that they had in those dogs and how many lives they could save and they really did save a lot of lives and then they started using them so heavily to where there's actual times where you'd have to say I can't send my dog he's crushed he's exhausted he's fought I'll give you an example my dog Black Rifle Coffee actually did a story on him a coffee or a die he was shot in the head 2007 it was an assault in Kandahar was supposed to be a low level target we took fire right off the ramp coming out RPGs PKM and then they were like hey as soon as we got off got in our firing line and my team leader at the time has passed away now as well he said Billy I need that dog in that door so the door is about 300 yards away so we use a visible laser to direct the dogs it's common knowledge now most people know that so I laced the door the dog goes in and as we're moving up to the door everything stops the firing stops PKM's RPGs and then we move up to the door and I can see that from the door about 100 yards out I can see the IR light off the back of my dog but it's not moving so you'll see the shadows in the room if it's moving right so it's easy to know if the dog's on a fire or whatever he's doing so I knew in number one he was either down or he's laying down so as we got up closer he was laying down next to two rugs and he was just focused on it so now I know it's explosives so I recall the dog we step back a little bit search area before we go internally then we go internal and it was too fully loaded PKM's inside of the rugs so ISR is telling us you got movers all over the place it's turning into a basically a village sweep they're sparkling we got another guy we had in a garden area so we move over to that location they're sparkling and giving us a location so for me as a handler you really have to be very cautious and understand the wind direction temperatures outside all that comes into effect when you have an animal because you have to set the animal up for success as best as you can right so and a lot of that's just going back to the basics throwing some grass up and seeing which direction the wind's going and then presenting yourself downwind so the dog can pick up the odor and you know that if it's cold the odor is going to sit low and when it's hot outside the odor flies up and it dissipates in the air very quickly so all of those things have to go through your head as well as the other things that you're dealing with with the dog camera and everything else the light systems on them and utilizing them in that whatever operation so going back to the guy in the garden you know in the garden they have those like two foot walls that separate all of the different lanes of trees or whatever so I checked the wind I put my dog downwind from the actual where they were sparkling and the odor and then I just lays the end of the wall where ISR was sparkling so that he could pick it up quicker and that's exactly what he did he jumped over the wall he gets over there and he almost was cheating a little bit he was using his ears not really cheating but he was using his ears and not his nose which I prefer him to use but he heard a sound and he just took off and then you know how it slowly start hearing the guy start making noise and so I recall the dog we give the guy instructions stand up he's refusing sent the dog again dog bit him again called him back told him to stand up he stood up that time and then had a weapon and was eliminated and then so then they're like hey Billy we need you to move to another area there's a guy two guys ran into another compound so we need to go check that out so then we move over to that compound and one of the guys is trying to get in the dog door so I pull off his lock cutters and we cut it send the dog in and the dog right away goes into this into this small outhouse and myself and then and then X the Sulta roll up to that door and there's two dudes in there with a case and the dog is going back and forth we don't teach him that like biting them back and forth that is a party so we were not we never taught them to do that but he was smart enough to understand I guess that these guys both have weapons I need to keep them occupied how are they responding to this back and forth screaming and all they're doing is screaming and mass confusion because it's dark it's dark for them they're being attacked by a velociraptor a ninja velociraptor yes sir wow yeah he's just biting them back and forth and myself and that a Sulta take those two guys out and then he turns and tucks tail or not tucks tail turns and takes off for the next door something inside said hey grab him so I just grabbed him by the back of his harness because I didn't know what was internal in there pulled him back and it just happened to me like 30 women and kids in that room so luckily he didn't go in there because they don't discriminate they don't know women and kids they know scent that's what we teach them so what do you estimate he would have done he what do you start destroy them yeah good call yep yeah he would have 100% destroyed him because we don't again we don't teach our dogs to determine the sex of whatever animal they're going after they're going after a scent and they all have a a specific possible to teach them to do different you could yeah 100% you could I mean women have a specific scent obviously what their cycles or whatnot that you could teach the animal to avoid yeah and children have specific odors as well that you can teach them to avoid that as well right and you can teach a dog to do anything really it's all about repetition and you can teach about a flight plane no probably not well maybe you could with stem cells put him in his brain but I don't think that's possible you're either thumbs yeah yeah exactly true so yeah so then we took those two guys out and then pull around backside we had to split the force because the village was basically like I said turned into a village sweep so half the troop went to one side and then my the two teams that I was attached to were on this side so we're working our way around the backside of the compound to try to get to the other half of the troop who's now persecuting like another 10 or 15 movers that squirted out to a tree line and as we're moving in an open field that back room erupts one of the back doors to a back compound that we did not clear because it was a village erupted with AKPK fire again so all of us are basically laying down taking cover fire different fields of fire doing what we need to do but then I seen a I seen a guy hiding behind a tree in a wall so I lays the base of the tree my dog goes and bites the guy and the guy starts running towards that door and as he's running towards that door bullets are flying everywhere it's nonstop and I seen that he was hit physically I could see it by his movement in his body that he was hit so then once he was hit I'm recalling him the gigs up I don't have to be quiet now so I'm screaming for him to come to me and he's stumbling he's coming to me but he's stumbling and then he finally just kind of falls a little bit so one of the snipers was next to me I asked him to give me some cover fire and I ran out there picked him up grabbed him put him behind a short wall was trying to find where the entry wound was I couldn't find it and it looked like in real time it looked like it hit him in the body so I'm putting my hands under his vast taking his vast off feeling anywhere I can again it's winter time so it's probably like four degrees and kind of hard but I don't feel anything wet I don't feel any heat and I'm super like I said I know he's hit I just don't know where it's at and troop chiefs yelling hey Billy I need the dog he's on comms I need the dog I need the dog I need the dog in the tree line and I'm still looking for this wound and finally I close my night vision in and I for some reason I put my hand on top of his head and I think it was to calm him but when I did it I felt I always cut the ends of my gloves my fingers right from my trigger fingers I felt bone and a hot fragmentation stuff on my hand so I look at my hand and it's blood so now I know he's hitting the head I just didn't know where I just know where the exit was at so I have to tell my troop chief hey you know the dog's out a commission gunshot wound to the head I need to pj my location so pj comes no this time the dog is still fighting he wants to get back out to go to work he's pulling and pulling and fighting me with every ounce of energy has to get back into that battlefield and I'm trying to wrap him up using my blowout kit his blowout kit trying to take care of him but he's too he's just too animated he wants to go back to work so finally the pj shows up and he's like hey let me give him some morphine it'll calm him down so he gives him like a half dose of morphine and sure enough he finally calms down but then we wrap up his head and do all that stuff and then looking for a medevac but we couldn't the hlz was too hot so we had to wait for everything to calm down and then ex filled out went to kandahar the vet and the ambulance waited for us off the ramp got to the vet and it was a reserve veterinarian who was a horse doctor so we get inside the tent there on the kandahar flight line why would they even send some I mean yeah occasionally horses were used but why would they even send somebody with that specialty no idea so they just think because she's a veterinarian and she's an army reserve officer that they can deploy her so they deployed her we get in there so they start working on the dog we had the tf brown guys with us they were doing their stuff they're the ones that really saved him once I got on the bird they took him from me worked on him on the bird as I think we still had like an hour to go to the base they worked on him for about an hour and then once we got in there the doc took over and everything and our medics went back to the to our compound right and then I'm sitting there and the doctor looks at me and she's like he's not going to make it I'm like what do you mean she's like well he's breathing too fast if he continues breathing like this all of his organs are going to shut down I'm like interesting I said so what do we do she goes I don't know that literally was her answer to me so I'm like check so one of the guys was there with me I said hey can you stay here for me now I gotta run back so I went back and I got the tf brown medics and they came back and the primary medic was a major there he's a good man I forget his name but he he walks over there and he takes I think it's climp uter all that you use for asthma right and oxygen and he mixes them into a mask and he puts it over the dog's face instantaneously his breathing goes back to normal so then he looks at her and he goes treat them no different than you would treat a human it's not difficult so sure enough yeah they he ended up living 24 hours later he was good he took the round it went underneath the eye hit the orbital bone came up behind it severed the nerve and then exit out the top of his head so we million dollar wound should have killed him instantaneously but we after he healed we put him through another work up cycle just to see how he would operate because he wanted to work you could see it but he kept running into things on his left side so damage yeah so we adopted him out and my vet tech there at the command adopted him and he lived seven years after that on the couch and the only time he had any issues was around fourth of July he had to put him outside because the fireworks he thought we're breaching and fire fire you know fire fights what now so he would sprint through the whole back door and he would have to go back to the back yard bouncing off the fence the entire night right so but they were the only issues he had majority of the dogs that we have had at the command and in combat have died of bone cancer of age when they it's typically bone cancer that's just the natural life cycle a dog essentially so you know what I don't know if it's that doc or the exposures so no exposures to toxins and yeah the high stress their immune system that kind of gets out of whack for sure do dogs get purple hearts yes so my dog acts was given a bronze star and a purple heart that night for his actions found he was yeah they he found eight hidden in me personnel and into fully loaded weapons before taking that around so yeah he was given a bronze star and purple heart and then that's pretty bad ass it is yes so no in the big military they won't do that the command does that just because we ask so much of our dogs and our dogs as you know or like teammate they're no different than teammates right so we ask a lot more of our dogs in the regular military does with jumping with roping with you know heavy machine gun fires the type of train that we put them through is is ten times that of a normal military working dog so we ask a lot of them and we don't we try not to do that voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice voice They take care of the animals, they live like kings, they're very well taken care of. They have full time vet care on station. They eat the high quality foods and they're very, very well taken care of. PT'd every day and then they're training every day and then they live very, very comfortable lives in work and retirement. So we take care of them pretty heavily. So they've actually, I think they cloned, my last dog I had, they cloned it. Unbeknownst to me, I was actually telling Doc about it. My dog's name at the time, his name's Ibrahimco. He's passed away now, bone cancer. One of the guys in my old school, I actually adopted him out and lived around the corner from me there in Christopher Farmer. So I got to go see him whenever I wanted. That's awesome. But he ended up dying bone cancer, probably like two years ago. But when I first picked him up, our trainer's like, hey, we had to take this dog back to the vendor because he's got to get his stomach stapled. So we staple all of our dog's stomach, meaning so the biggest casualty and the biggest killer of most working dogs is bloat. Bloat is where they're starting. I've started this in horses. And it happens frequently in dogs. Horses, cows, dogs, their stomach actually kind of twists and then they'll bloat. And so you have to, if you tack it ahead of time down to the side of the wall, then it can't twist. What's the cause of the twist generally, unknown? So from what they tell I? Up and down, high stress, travels, things like that can cause it just like it does in same thing in horses that you might have. So you're basically taking a premeditated step to prevent the number one cause. Yeah, why would you, dealing with that overseas would be an absolute nightmare? If it happens on the battlefield, the dog's gonna die. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, it's typically, yeah, they'll take it, they'll staple it to the side wall like Dr. Harmon was saying here. And then that way, because what we found is that typically if your dog eats and you PT them right away, very high susceptible for bloat, right? Because that stomach is heavy and it's gonna twist and it's gonna float and flip on that bone and then start swelling with gas. And then the only way to save them right is to decompress and put a needle inside, that you decompress the stomach and then go in afterwards and surgery and clean up the dead tissue that comes with it, right? So most dogs don't survive bloat, depending on the severity of the bloat and how far along it is. Cause some people don't catch it until later and by that time the tissue and everything is already dying internally. Are all dogs susceptible to bloat? Big dogs, mostly. It's almost all big dogs. Big chest cavity dogs, Doberman, Pinscher's, German Shepherd, Great Lady. Great days, get it frequently, sometimes labs. That's why I have a miniature Doxin. A mini Doxy, we'll talk about Doxies later. Yeah, Doxin's a great dog. Let me just tell you, he's an asshole. He shit upstairs today, in the house. How old is he? Two. Or he's a baby still. He's alerted. Yeah. He's a baby asshole. We had the baby. He's a mini? Yeah. But they have shorter backs, which will be good for the later conversation. He's a long dog. Is he old? Yeah, they said, what is it? IDF or whatever it is, they're susceptible to the back injury. He's been shitting upstairs. We just moved and so we put a baby gate up and my wife was like, I'll just let him up real quick. Instantly went to another room and shit. I'm like, shouldn't have done that. Yeah. First off, I'm not a dog trainer at all. And I actually wasn't home when it happened. So I was regaled with this tail the second I crossed the threshold of the door. That is awesome. He is a spiteful little shit. But he is so adorable. I can't say, all right. Yeah, you can't. Just put the baby gate up. So there's something, and there's an interesting statement about dogs. It relates to everything we're talking about, but in particular to stem cells and understanding how it works, dogs don't lie. If you have a cat, cats lie. They will fool you, they hide things, but dogs are pretty honest, right? So when you're on the field with those dogs, they tell you if they're in pain and when they're not in pain, then they'll tell you they're happy, they're not in pain. They get back in pain again, they tell you. So when you're trying to assess is something working in a dog, a treatment, stem cell, anything, they are very honest. There's not a placebo effect. They don't play games in a clinical study to try to fool you. So using animal data like that is really useful for us to understand what's gonna work for a battlefield dog that has pain and an orthopedic problem. It's a very interesting, they don't lie. One thing that we always tell handlers too is you learn to trust your dog. Your dog's not gonna like you. It's gonna tell you where explosives is. It's gonna tell you where the bad guy is. If you know how to read them and you do your training and you do your repetitions with that animal, the animal becomes an extension of you. You typically can look at, I could look at any of my dogs from a hundred yards away and tell you if they're sniffing animal pee or if they're sniffing human. It's pretty simple once you understand the concept of it. But, so yeah. You're up. Intro time. I'm just, That's the standard. That's the story you know how to meter exceed. I'm just a cow doctor. How does one, did you grow up wanting to be a cow doctor? Did you stumble your way into this trade? So I'm a Telso born boy but my folks moved to Southern California. Not my fault, but they moved to Southern California when I was three. And I grew up in La Jolla when it was a little sleepy town in the 60s. Man, it is not a sleepy town anymore. Not anymore. But it was like Santa Cruz, the same place where you grew up. They were small, sleepy coastal towns. And I grew up and for some reason, my relatives back in Oklahoma thought that my younger sister needed a horse. They didn't bring like a horse you could ride. They brought a little foal and they loaded it in the trailer and brought it to La Jolla. And of course, none of us knew anything about horses. And so the, we found a place in a little area called Sereno Valley. It's now Biotech Alley. It was just grass out there. Put the foal out there. My sister then went out to the stables. Now I'm 12 and I'm a La Jolla boy and then you go to the beach and you, and so I went to the stables one day. And I looked around and I said, there's two guys and 50 girls here. This is a really good deal. I think I'm giving up the beach. And so I became really interested in horses. The guy with the horses. Were you really interested in horses? They always come with a rider. Yeah. And so, but I got excited about large animals and that guy had cattle. So I got to learn about the cattle business. And then so I was gonna be an architect. Then I got, no, I'm gonna go to UC Davis and I'm gonna become a veterinarian. What is the path to becoming a veterinarian? So same as a medical doctor. So you have undergraduate, four year full undergraduates. You have to get a bachelor's degree. And then you apply to your medical school, to the veterinary school. And there's only 20 veterinary schools in the US. So it's like 10 times harder to get in than a medical school, because there's just aren't very many. And then you apply to veterinary school. So you get in veterinary school. Your first year or two are sort of general biochemistry, all the standard stuff that you would take. And then you specialize and you pick are you going food animal track, being cattle and pigs and those horses or small animal. And you get to pick that? You get to pick. You can also pick, I wanna be a mixed track. I don't know what I wanna do. Just a generalist perhaps. I wanna stay more general. After you finish your four years and you get your DVM, so you've got a doctor of veterinary medicine, probably a third of people will go on to an advanced residency or internship in surgery or some specialty. But you can go out and practice. And so I took a master's in epidemiology and statistics, which turns out to be important on how I ended up where I'm sitting now and I'm not doing cow doctor work anymore. Yeah, for sure. I got very interested in computers and data and collecting data relative to production medicine. So livestock, cattle, sheep, goats, even horses, collecting data. And so when I went out into practice, I was gonna be a dairy practitioner and you work in large dairies, big businesses, agribusinesses, you're doing nutrition. Things that Billy and I talk about in human longevity and biohacking, we did all that as veterinarians 30 years ago, because if you don't have the animals in prime condition, they don't produce. And so we learned very early on all the things that would help. So the big pharma companies all found me and said, here's this really strange veterinarian. He knows computers, he knows data, and he knows livestock and he's in the livestock business. So I started doing clinical trials for big pharma. How much involvement does big pharma have in the world that you were talking about in the animal world? Most people associate it directly with just humans. Yeah, so it's very interesting. Almost every big pharma company, Eli Lilly, they have a veterinary subsidiary called Elanco. Pfizer, veterinary subsidiary now called Zoetas. So the big ones have a little division that is specifically focused on veterinary medicine. Is that so they can, I don't know how to ask this question without sounding like a conspiracy theory. No, no, please ask. Experiment in the animal world in the hopes they find something that might work in the human world. But is there really a conspiracy? That actually would be easy. I didn't know the right word for it. As I was thinking of that quite like, how does one ask this? No, it's a great question. And it turns out they missed the opportunity to see things work in the animal world. It's the opposite. When they have a drug they're developing for bone cancer. Doesn't work, they have side effects. They then flip it down to the veterinary group and say, see if you can deploy this and use it and make some money. Oh, interesting. It's very strange. So they don't take advantage of that. Oh, it's almost a way for them to reduce their losses if you wanted to be super macabre about it, but yeah. No, not really because drugs, most regular drugs, pharmaceuticals are specific to different species. So if it doesn't work in human or has a side effect in human, it might work in dogs or it might work in cats or some production animal. So there's an opportunity for them to look and see, is there another way to deploy this thing that they spent millions on already? But they don't talk. It's the strangest thing. You've got this huge division doing all this human stuff and you've got a veterinary division and all this data that they could be looking at, we call it now translational medicine. I am probably the epitome of a translational medicine doctor because they take all of this veterinary data and all of our learning and we'll get into stem cells, particularly if we're just learning about how things work in animals and then you can translate that over. When we cure cancer in rats, it very rarely translates to humans. Rats and mice are not people at all. Or if you're doing it in a little Petri dish, it doesn't translate. And so that translational medicine, large animals are pretty much the same. So I would guess if I looked at the diseases that Billy had and his dogs had, a lot of them very similar, especially orthopedics, especially cardiovascular. So we have an opportunity to learn from that and it's a huge missed opportunity, I think. Are they correcting for it yet? Or are they still kind of independently siloed? They're independently siloed. It's very strange. Not only independently siloed, for money purposes, sometimes like Pfizer sold off their animal health company to get money. You know, like they do, they bring in divisions, they sell them off. It's not profitable, they don't like it, doesn't seem to fit their business plan today. I mean, I can see splitting a P&L, right? Like get whatever, run a business. They were always split P&L. Why would you give up that opportunity? Makes no sense. Well, why would you not collaborate? I mean, I would have, you have to, I know nothing about this world, but I would have to assume that in both of those tranches, human medicine and animal medicine, there are people who are interested in innovation, pushing the needle, advancement. Why would there be no cross collaboration? That doesn't make any sense. I'd be like saying, well, yeah, you're in the SEAL community, but don't talk to the Green Braes. Definitely don't talk to those guys. Don't talk to the Air Force, what do they know? I don't know, maybe they have a way better view of the battle space because I'm like this and they're like this. No, it's crazy. But it is the case that they're very siloed. And outside of, within the same company, individual biocomponies, biopharma companies, very proprietary, mostly very closed, don't talk to each other, everybody's worried about getting their stuff stolen. And so there's a real lack of collaboration, which is a huge shame because the answers are there. How did you two meet? So yeah, myself and- Wasn't in the battlefield, although it could have been. It very much could have been. You didn't miss out on much, to be honest. So the place we could have crossed, I am the veterinarian that developed stem cell therapy for the Navy Marine Mammal Program. The dolphins and the sea lion war fighters. First off, many people don't believe me when I tell them that the dolphin program is real. I've seen it firsthand, one of them may or may not have had a sexual interest in one of my buds classmates at the end of a drag or dive. So I hear that's the case, it can be. They can be, shall we say, aggressive. Yes. In nature, yes, in nature. So here's how the dolphin program came to me. It's like fear. So I'm at a big veterinary conference in Orlando. If you've ever been to the Gaylord Hotel, it's the big inside, like a terrarium in there. And I'm sitting in the Jimmy Buffett boat having dinner in a maririta with my fellow veterinarians. And I get a tap on the shoulder, turn around and look. And here's this probably 30 year old young female Navy in full dress whites. And she says, excuse me, Dr. Harmon, could I just have a minute? Of course, I'll be glad to give you a minute. I'm with the Navy Marine Mammal Program in San Diego, which is where your company is. Would you be willing to come down and give us a lecture on regenerative medicine? Because we're very interested in trying to help out our warfighter animals. And that led to a huge collaboration on Office of Naval Research grant for us to study how to collect stem cells from dolphins and sea lions, how to create banks of cells so that they could be treated in theater or afterwards for chronic diseases, wounds, all the things that cells might work for. What year was this? This was 10 years, no, 12 years ago. Okay, so they were already looking at stem cells back then. Yeah. We started our company in 2002. Which company we talk about. We're talking about the veterinary company. And there's a matching human company. I'm integrating them. I'm not missing that opportunity to do the crossover. And so we started it in 2002. I had been in doing all these projects for these biotech companies. I had an opportunity to sell that off, move to a different business plan for myself. And I'm out horseback riding one day in my phone rings. And it's the CEO of a stem cell company in La Jolla. He says, hey, Bob, you're a vet, right? We've got these great, these stem cells that are in fat tissue. They go, fat tissue? No stem cells in fat. And he goes, no, no, you don't understand. You need to come look at this. Maybe you want to license this for the veterinary world. That pure chance opportunity to go look and take a look at this technology. And I went to my first stem cell conference. And I'm sitting in the back of the room. And I'm kind of a cowboy guy. I had my boots on. I'm sure I'm the only veterinarian within 100 miles of this little conference. And I'm in the back of the room. And the guy from NIH is showing a picture growing stem cells in a little Petri dish. And he says, if you give these cells the right signaling, including their nutrients, what you put in their dish, what they eat, you can convince them to be different kinds of tissues. And then he clicks on the clicker and the cells start beating in the dish. And he says, there's no electrical stimulation. We told these cells you need to be heart tissue. How do you tell a cell it needs to be heart tissue? The right kind of nutrients tell it the kind of environment it's in and what to be. And they aggregate together, form their little connections and electrically beat in sync. It was the oh shit moment for me. And I go, I think maybe everything I learned at veterinary school about healing, maybe I don't understand this very well. It was my true aha moment that if we could harness that, could we then use that to repair broken tissues, old tissues, rejuvenation. And that was the beginning of my veterinarian. I said, we can do this in veterinary medicine. We went to the FDA, the veterinary FDA, by the way, is very enlightened. And is it the VFDA? It's the FDA. It's called the Center for Veterinary Medicine. It's one of the four branches of the FDA. People don't realize that we're regulated by the FDA as well, but it's a different group, mostly veterinarians, very open-minded and they allowed us to proceed ahead and start doing this. And now we're 25 years later almost 25,000 patients we've treated. We're talking animals at this point. They're still patients. No, for sure. Well, I want people to understand when we cross the... Absolutely. The lexicon you have. This is across 60, six zero different species. I think I'm the only veterinarian on the planet that's ever done liposuction on a Northern white rhino to collect stem cells. I mean, I'm gonna be honest, I don't know if a whole lot of people that would want to do that. It's not a good business model either, generally. What part of the body do you do liposuction on the rhino? The ass? What are we talking here? How did you know that? I don't know. Lucky guess. Lucky guess. It was a lucky guess. Most of their places, it doesn't work well, but we all have just like we sit on, there's a little fat pad there. And so it's an easy place to collect fat. Unpack for me for a second, your initial response when they were talking about stem cells and fat. You said initially that you didn't believe that. What was the traditional understanding or your traditional understanding up until that point? All of us in medicine, traditionally you think about the bone marrow is where stem cells are. I've heard, or umbilical cord, right? Or umbilical cord, so storing cord blood, or in the bone marrow. Okay. And you go, okay, so that sort of makes sense. It turns out it is not true at all. And in fact, once you reach about the age of 50 in the human years, your bone marrow has almost no stem cells after the kind we're gonna talk about that are for healing and fixing things. You almost have none. Was this a matter of them not looking in other places? Or did they not have the technology to see it? Okay. They weren't looking, but the technology to isolate cells and look at their surface markers and see what they are, it's like having night vision goggles. What was life before night vision goggles? You know, and so we had the- I can tell you that because I was serving during that time. Yeah. You trip a lot. Yeah. Well, and so- Lots of rocks. Scientifically, we tripped a lot because we didn't know when you're looking at, because if you look at a stem cell, actually in a microscope, if I pull one out and we all look at it, you'd go, just looks like a little round cell. So it looks like. But if you look at the markers on it, it tells you it's this special ops cell that has characteristics that are different than the rest of the body cells. I mean, what kind of tech are we using to actually see those markers? Is this just a crazy microscope? Is this a merging of like- Is AI playing a role in this too, helping people figure this stuff out? It is now. Okay. It certainly wasn't back then, 20 years ago, when we were first looking. The first time we saw these kinds of cells with markers was 1982. It's not a long time ago, but it's a- From a technology perspective? Yeah. I mean, just let's just pull up a phone from 1982. And we've come a little bit, we're a little bit of distance. So now we have these laser optics devices that you can put a marker on the cell that sticks to the things we're looking for. With the laser. No, you put that on and then you run it through this laser optics reader and it goes, oh, you have this marker, this marker, this one and this one, you're this kind of cell. You're a lymphocyte, you're a stem cell, you're this. So now we can see them and now we can separate them and now we can study them. I feel like we're living in an episode of Star Trek. It's gonna get worse, right? And we're weirder now. So you asked a question earlier, how did we meet? So when I retired, I retired as a, I did two command tours as command mash chief. One at an F-18 squadron, which is a massive wake up call for me after spending as much time as I did at the command. And then- What was the biggest wake up moment? Just much younger. Are you saying there's slightly different people? Just different, yeah, quite a big difference. Much younger kids getting into drive-by shootings, drugs, cocaine, you're as a command mash chief. Ah, kids. You're exactly, I think that you become a legal expert in the command mash chief role. You're pretty much attached to your legal owe and you handle a lot of those cases. So yeah, I went to an F-18 squadron for my first tour, then I retired out at Socom. I ran the care coalition program, which is the only government owned nonprofit. And I was the senior listed for the Northeast. So I covered Bragg all the way up to Maine and then Medevac's over from Germany, back to Bethesda and things like that. So what does the care coalition do? So care coalition takes care of all special operation veterans and support personnel across the spectrum. So once you're getting ready to retire, they help you go through your medical records and they make sure that it's supposed to say the things that it's supposed to say based off your injuries and your service. It's just preventative stuff to make sure that on the way out, you're knocking things out in the correct manner. And they go through, they'll send you to specific rehabs for combat injuries like VHP, Virginia High Performance, and they go over neck and toe all your injuries and put you through workouts and supplements and nutrition and help you get back on, set you up best for success in the civilian sector. What you just described is a better off ramp than 99.99999% of people in the military are gonna get. I agree. It's sad that we only hold that within SOCOM because there's so many people that could benefit from those types of programs. Have come to the conclusion that I think the military should give up on the off ramping and outsource that role to NGOs. It sounds like it would be a good way to do it. I mean, it takes them eight weeks to onboard people in the Navy, right? And then the Navy, I mean, that's the shortest I believe. You know, you got Marine Corps Army, all that. And that's just to integrate them into the ecosystem that they're gonna go into. There is enough money and people out there who wanna do good for those that have served. I think you should just totally tranche that out to NGOs. They're responsible to somebody, obviously, but then they can specialize in it. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I think that's the best way to go because they're in there. Well, the military sucks at it. They do, yeah. So it's like, stop trying, guys. You're smashing your head against the wall. Let's find a better tool, because you're using a Phillips head to try to put together an airplane and it's just not working. Yeah, I agree. 100% just do it. Stop doing it. It's almost like they don't care anyways. It's just set up like this TAPS program. It's a click, click and watch videos. Like that's third grade stuff. I think it just meets the liability threshold of what they're responsible for. And I don't think there's some dude up there twisting his mustache. I just don't think they know how to handle it. Yeah, I agree. And you know, it's interesting, Billy, this morning, even sitting talking, the NFL and other big sports is analogous, right? So it's the same thing. They're great, they onboard them really well. You're really cared for, your healthcare is really cared for, and then the day you're cut, thank you very much, and out the door, and no off ramp, and then they don't know what to do. And so in this world of looking at how do we help out people, the very similar kinds of needs. Yeah, and it's similar with the, like he goes back into the NFL athletes, or I would say you're any professional athlete at the top 1%, you know, they kind of go through the same things that we go through and we transition out. You're taught and you're trained to do a specific task for the majority of your young adult life. And then if you make it to the level where you did it, and myself, that top 1%, that's all you know. And when that's taken from you, that's why you deal with so much, even in the NFL, and Major League Baseball and NBA, you deal with very high suicidal ideations and people, you know, offing themselves because they just don't know how to really comprehend life without that being there, because that's all they've known. And unfortunately for the NFL, it's an average of a three year career. So you have a lot of young guys that play three years, get out and then they have everything taken from them and they have nothing else to go. So I try to do a lot of speaking engagement with professional teams and try to get out there and share the word. There's a very large comparison between tier one operators and professional athletes when they transition from whatever sport or service they're doing to the civilian sector. It's almost night and day. So one of the biggest things that helped me, and I didn't recognize this at the time, was laying in a hospital bed in Iraq, asking myself whether or not I was gonna be able to continue doing the job. It was the first time that I can remember where I thought outside of the world as I saw it inside. But it helped me because I never forgot that this, I'm like, okay, I might be able to figure this out, but it's probably beneficial to remember that at some point in time with enough revolutions around the sun, we are going to have to find a new job in something else. And I never forgot that. So I wouldn't say I had one eye on the next and one eye on my job. I just never, I never forgot that. And it helped me transition from one to the other because I preferred to think of it as opposed to it being taken from me. I found the opportunity to put it down. And then moved on from that. Yeah, and I think a lot of the- Simple, not easy, right? It didn't mean that I had the easiest transition. But I know a lot of guys, and I bet you do too, they're at 19 and a half years in, they're like, oh yeah, I just started my bachelor's program, like fuck man. Yeah, yeah. You know? I also don't want people at the 10 year mark to only focus on their retirement and neglect their military job. But hearing from people who have gotten out, talking to people at the 15 year mark, like listen, just give it a thought, do a little bit of journaling, write down, maybe just explore in yourself some things you may want to do. It can help because I also think it is dangerous for people to think this was taken from me. There are chances and opportunities and things that happen in life where that's true. But we all also know that we have an expiration date. So even if you just reframe it in your mind, like I'm gonna put this down versus it's taken, I think that that can help with orientation of trajectory a little bit. Oh, I agree 100%. And I had a life altering event, not like yours, similar but not like yours, that made me think that same way. So in 2017, prior to my retirement in 21, I was diagnosed with a late stage cancer, colon cancer. I had done a 100 mile run. I was an ultramarathon runner. I've done a lot of hundreds, 150s. I think that's how you get colon cancer. Probably, that's probably the number one way to get it. Yeah, so. That's what I've been told. The study that I completely made up to talk people out of doing those things sounds about right. That's why I don't do them anymore. But I, so no, I did a 100 mile race down in Florida and I had some bleeding on the bottom side. And that had happened to me in Afghanistan. No indication prior to that? No, no indication. So other than that, 37 at the time, I was, but four years prior in Afghanistan, I had the same thing happen. And the medics looked at me there on deployment. Said it was just polyps. I wasn't smart enough at the time to do my research. I don't want polyps for it. They're just the beginning cells of cancer. And I just didn't care. I wanted to get back out to work and do my job, right? And super broadly, I mean, cancer is a cell that's growing out of control. It is, yes. So that's the polyps. Fast moving cells, yep. So then, yeah, so four years later, I told, it was a, so I went into medical, I had a young lieutenant. And I say, hey, sir, you know, I think something's going on, you need to get checked. I have some bleeding. So he did the same thing, finger check, polyps. And he's like, okay, that's just polyps, don't worry about it. I was like, I don't think that's accurate. And I say, because this happened four years ago and you guys told me the same thing. And I said, I would like to have a colonoscopy if I can. I'm 37. I'd like to have a colonoscopy. He's like, we don't give 37 year old master chiefs that are in your shape, colonoscopies. And I'm like, listen, dude, nobody tells me what I like. Yeah, yeah. Nobody tells me how to party. No loo, please. But I, I'm getting one every six months now. I'll show you, sir. Yes, sir. So the young lieutenant was sitting there and he just didn't want to work with me. I said, can you go get your captain, please? Well, you know what's wild about that? And again, I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure for men, prostate cancer is going to kill us all. Like if we could live forever, it'd probably be prostate cancer. What is the, and this is military healthcare. So it's not like you're writing a check for this. What is the downside of a guy wants to start screening earlier of doing that? I'm not, this is ridiculous. I don't know how, to be honest with you, I don't know how the military or Navy medicine looks at that. I don't know what they're looking at cost. I don't know, really. Check box. Yeah, but so then, yeah, I told lieutenant, I said, hey, I'd like to speak to your captain. So the captain comes in and he's like, hey, Master Chief, how can I help you? And I said, I want a colonoscopy because this happened four years ago. And he said, if you want me to shove a camera up your ass, I'll do that for you. Like finally, somebody who speaks my language, what are you doing Friday? Yeah, somebody who knows what I like, right? So yeah, so sure enough, like next week, the following week I go into my colonoscopy and I'm in my recovery room and the doctor comes in and he's ghost-wise in the face. Like I've seen like piece of paper white. That is never a good sign. Never a good sign, right? So that's all I said was, let me guess, I have cancer and he said yes, and it is a large tumor. And I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, oh, we don't know. We have to send it off for a biopsy to get what stage it is. Like, okay, so break the stages down to me because I don't know what you're talking about. They can take a piece when they're doing the colonoscopy. Okay. So they did that and they send it off. And then I didn't know, he didn't know what stage it was. At the time I was still... How much time in between them sending it off and you getting the results? About a week. Sleeping really well? Yes, that was awesome. Yeah, no idea. God. So I get a phone call about a week later and he's like, hey, it's late stage three, be early stage four. You have about a 14% chance of survival. I'm like, check. Did he deliver it just like that too? Pretty similar. I mean, he was trying to be respectful as he could. I think that's the way to be honest. I would have preferred it no other way. Correct. So he said you got about 14% chance of survival. He's like, I would say that it might be higher just because you take care of yourself. You're not obese, you eat a lot, you run, you do the things that you're supposed to do. So I said, so what's next? He goes, well, we're gonna ship you up to Portsmouth. You're gonna go into surgery on Valentine's Day on February 14th, 2017. I go into surgery and then they cut me from the navel all the way to the top of my pelvis, opened me up, pulled everything out, took six inches of my colon and took the tumor and then stapled me back up and then said, you'll do chemo for the next six months. So after about a week of healing in the hospital, I went into chemo and chemo, if people who have never been exposed is probably the one of the worst possible things you can put into your body. It put me into a depression mode that I had never been into because the only way that I knew to deal with whatever is going on in my head, which most people can't guess anymore what's going on in my head, but the only thing to do that was, for me, was to workout. It gave me some sort of stability and running, lifting weights, whatever it was. It took that edge off to where I could think straight and do the things that I needed to do. But with chemo, I could only keep up with the workouts for about the first three months and then after that, I was bedridden. I couldn't move. And then after six months, they gave me the clean bill of health. They say, hey, there's no signs of it left. Congratulations. Now you'll get a test every year for five years. And then if it's clean in five years, then we'll do a test every three years. So now since it's 2017, I do a test every three years. Still comes back clean. But they did a hereditary test and it was not in my family. No one in my family's ever had colon cancer. So they said it was from exposure. So something that we were exposed to overseas because in the squadron I was originally in at the command, there was a whole bunch of guys that got colon cancer. And then Socom did a large study on cancers and colon cancer and brain tumors because in the special operations community, they were running rampant. And they- None of that surprises. No. Even without an overseas deployment, the exposure to explosives in their natural form, then when they go off the smokes or the residual associated with that, lead. Exactly. I mean, come on. I look back, just countless hours jamming mags straight to the chow line, not that it can't leach through your skin, but just every, all the vast amount of non FDA approved chemicals that we were likely exposed to. Yeah. And if you look even Iraq or what's going on in Iran right now, the consistent bombing, remember? That's what we did in Baghdad. And then once that stuff settles and we're coming in on Helos in a brown out, spins it all up and we're breathing it in as soon as we're off that bird. And we don't know what we're breathing in. Could be human feces, could be whatever, you know what I mean? And lead and all those things that come with explosives. But so they said it was definitely something I was exposed to. And then, but I've had a clean bill of health, but getting back to how we communicated, I got off on a tangent there for a bit, but when I got out- This is the buttholder. Yeah, just the buttholder. I got my tube, I was good. Yeah. When I got out, I started doing executive protection. And I'm working and I'm still working for a crypto billionaire who's involved in just about everything you can imagine. But with that being said, he's one of the most kindest. And I don't say this, you know, half ass at all. In today's world, he's one of a kind. He's very extremely young, 38 years old. He was the co-founder of Ethereum. Okay. So, what wealth has tied up in crypto? Crypto and other, he's all over the place, right? So he owns medicine too. Okay. I've never understood, I understand that, whatever, I don't invest in crypto because it scares the living shit out of me. I also don't understand, because there are people who are on paper worth billions in that world, but how do you actually materialize something like that in a non-digital space? So it's no different than the stock market. It's exactly the same as the stock market. It's just with digital money. Like even with the bank system. Everybody takes digital money though, you know what I mean? Like, so you have, it's like, how do you translate? Like, I got a billion dollars over here, but how do I buy something over here? We have to cross into some level of fiat currency. Yep. That's what I've never really understood is. And to be honest with you, I don't fully understand it. It even is, I started out as his bodyguard. I'm in a different position now. But I tried to learn as much as I came from, but he's on another planet with, he's the smartest human being I've ever been. I'm sure those people figure it out, but to a, we'll just say very unsophisticated investor. Like, great, you got this huge net worth. I can't even buy a goddamn pizza with this if I wanted to. Cause I don't know how to make it into real money in air quotes. Well, now the banking systems, JPMorgan Chase, and those guys are buying off on us. So that tells you that they're all moving in that direction. It tells you that they want control. They 100% they want control, right? And that was the primary purpose of crypto was to keep the government out of controlling it. But now that they see the value of it, they're very heavily, this administration as well. With the crypto czar that they put in place who is not a crypto guy makes zero sense, but it's just that that's the direction I think everybody's going. Asia is the biggest component of cryptocurrency right now. So, so yeah, I started working for Mr. Hoskinson is his name Charles Hoskinson. He's the one of the co-founders of Ethereum. He started Cardano and he has a new one coming out this month. It's called midnight, but it's the very first of its kind. It's a dual layer security system. It's the only kind out there. The only one is capable of doing that. And what I mean by that, you're looking at me like I'm understanding what you're saying. I'm going to break it down. I contact my right now. I'm like, what? I'm going to break it down. Are you following any of this? No, Michael's the generation that would be following this. I'm like, yeah, I understood midnight. Yeah, as long as we're talking about time. You know, yeah, sleep is important. I'd say again, I'm not in crypto expert and the best way to explain it is crypto has the security within crypto and I could be way off, but I'm pretty sure this is the way it goes. That's what blockchain is. Blockchain is the security. I heard this one too, but I don't know what it means. So blockchain is, they should say, like it's an invisible box inside of a cryptocurrency that holds all of your private information inside that box. So everybody can see your information in that box. It's not hidden. The thing with... They may not know who it's associated with. Exactly, but they know how much is... I only know this who watch in documentaries. But they know how much is in there and they know how some of people can get into it. So midnight has dual layers. So you have two different blockchains. One, no one can even see it. And you can turn it to whichever security system you want. So if you don't want people seeing it, you can block them out. They can't see. They can say, okay, like you can buy a car with your crypto balance and your balance and your cryptocurrency is enough for that vehicle, but it doesn't give any of your private information in a way like your routing number, your account number, your bank account number. What else is in that bank? It blocks all that information so they can't see it. They can just say, oh, you're approved to buy the car because you have those funds. So with that being said, it's probably gonna tie heavy into the government, right? So, because now you can hide it and you can see it depending on what you wanna do. So he's got a lot of big businesses. The government's not gonna like that. Yeah, so they probably, I'm assuming they're probably gonna try to control it. It's some aspect. I hope not. Mr. Charles is like I said, he's a one of a kind human being. This is assuming it's not being built for the government. Or it could be. He could be doing it behind my back. Sometimes that way, three piece 10-12 suit. Yeah, it could be 100%. But he, so yeah, that's kind of where, so Mr. Hoskinson owns Hoskinson Health Clinic. They call it the, what do they call it? The Mayo Clinic of the West. It's located in Gillette, Wyoming. And in Wyoming, they just signed on Friday, the SF-48, which is the, they just signed the SF-48, which is the Stimself Freedom Act. So currently right now, Wyoming is the only state in the entire US that you can practice stem cells on humans with their own stem cells. But it has to be from their own body. Has to be from their own, right? Which ties into this, what you were saying, their own. Very important question as to why would we use that instead of something else? Yeah. It's hugely important. Yeah, so that is how I got tied in with Dr. Harmon being on Mr. Charles' Hoskinson's Protection Team. He's very big on having, him and his family are huge supporters of veterans. All the EP guys on his team are soft guys. And all of the EP guys on his wife team are all former Marines. And they have a green beret over there as well, that they're all good, good human beings. And they truly want to take care of veterans. So that's how he kind of got into the stem cell space. He's like, I want to take care of my guys. I want my guys to be healed from their injuries of the combat deployments that they've done. So then he started conducting business with Dr. Harmon and they're working on some stuff together here in the near future to where Wyoming will be the number one hub in all of America for stem cells. Most of the time you hear the stem cell conversation is so there's south of the border, north of the border, specifically what I'm talking about. The southern border of the US, you can go to Tijuana and start getting some interesting things. And it seems like, again, this is my non-educated understanding of this. North of the border, it seems like you can still use a certain amount of, we'll call them, umbilical stem cells, but you can't replicate. It seems like you go south of the border, the rules change a little bit and you can build from that building block that you have and build it into something that is massive. Correct, incorrect, ish? Close, that's ish, that's good. I'm gonna actually accept close because how little I know about it. No, that's the same way. That's good, that's good. If we were playing hand grenades, you would've got hit. Of course, using hand grenades is so excited. Yeah, and so it's a very interesting, so in the US, except for one small exception, there are no legal stem cells commercially. Why? FDA has made it very difficult to get through for the purpose of safety of the patient. And it's a, you know, FDA is a bureaucratic arm of the federal government. They have all the problems, all the rest of the departments that the government had. They're slow, they don't change really quickly. Even if somebody wants to, it's hard to get things to happen, so it's slow. It was designed to protect against charlatans. They're selling snake oil. And there are a bunch of them in the US right now. And people that are selling anything. You see it in the peptide space. Currently you're seeing it in the peptide space. Very much. 99% of all the peptides being sold are research grade only. Somebody's buying them from the internet and it says for research, use only. That's the only way they can sell them currently. Right, and so they're not legal as a drug, as a use in human. And the same thing is true in stem cells. Except for a few really isolated cases, that they really aren't available yet. So the only option you have to get treated north of the border is through a clinical trial, which we run in our personalized stem cells company. We run clinical trials by a special exemption from the FDA, which is kind of hard to get called expanded access, or under the 2018 Federal Right to Try Act. Federal Right to Try. Do you have any family members that have ever had cancer? Yes, my mom died from it. Okay, so those people who are dying of a disease and the treatment that they're trying is not working. The Federal Right to Try Act says you can go ask Pfizer or a company that has a drug in development, not yet approved, you can ask for access. Yeah, I support that completely. Yeah, if your life's gonna be in. And it's informed consent. So like your mom could have had, here, this is what the side effects are, here's the possibility. We're pretty sure it's not gonna work, but it might, and here, we'll provide access. What year did that get signed in? 2018. She died in 2010. So prior to that. And prior to that, FDA had this exemption where you could go petition them, and they even had a 24-hour emergency deal where you could do, in Texas, there was that Charlie's Law that came about, it was that same thing. So it's always about somebody who's dying. So there were two congressional members who had that in their family, and the states were starting to open up and say, wait a minute, we are a right to try state, state by state. Feds always win if they get in a battle, but just like with marijuana, the feds have sort of said, okay, the states have decided. So in 2018, Trump signed, and Trump won, signed the Federal Right to Try Act that federalized the whole thing and allowed it. But it's only for people that have serious or debilitating diseases who have tried standard of care and it didn't work. We've treated at PSC, we've already done our FDA clinical trials or safety studies, and we've now provided treatments to about a hundred, a little over a hundred patients that had serious problems, like probably both of you have enough orthopedic problems so you can fill a boat. Are we talking 100 patients, human? Are we back in the veteran? We're in human now. So let me tell you how we bridged that. It was a very interesting bridge. And we'll get you involved in it too so you can heal. My body is perfect. Obviously. I don't have any issues, zero. Boy, that's cool. No concussions either. Yeah, nah, nah. Sharp as a tack. Don't forget things. Every day. What day's the weekend? I can't even get, because I have retained metal in my body, I can't get a lot of different types of imaging that they'll use to look at the spots in your brain. So they had to make an estimate based off my operational career, which you might as well roll six dice with a different number and add them up. They could be close to accurate or completely wrong. Right, but a lot. That's what they said, yeah. It was triple digits. So we'll talk about Lex, the Marine Bomb sniffing dog who had all kinds of shrapnel on the X-rays. It's a very interesting dog. One of the first ones I saw that came out of a military working dog background. But so we've been doing all of these animals. I mean, like thousands of them. Super elite athletes. Like we do horses, the Kentucky Derby winners, the Dubai Classic winners. Some of these are top elite athletes, 1000 pound muscle tears, tendon ligaments, all those kinds of injuries. So we knew that it worked. Then we started doing dogs, same thing. Then we started seeing arthritis and old age issues, which are more in older dogs. And so you see those. And so 2018, we sat around the table and said, you know, it's time to test this. This is coming towards human. There are companies working on all this. We have a database nobody in the world has. We've got tens of thousands of animals with this real data, including clinical trials, real clinical trials, really good data. But FDA wants you to do mice and rats and Petri dishes and that and submit this 15 years worth of work before you can treat your first human patient. That's the pathway. Why do they make such a jump? Why is a Petri dish and mice, you do that for 15 years, why is that the light switch where it's okay then to jump to humans? And again, I'm not based in science. Mike, is there any other animal that you could use? Closely approximate? Yeah, and FDA pushes you, you need to have at least a larger animal model, even a dog. So they want you to do that before you go. I mean, at least that's, I buy it. Like okay, from a lay person, that makes some sense. It does, but stupider, if you already have the dog data, they will make you go back and start over with the dish. That's okay, now we're talking more, well no, this, now we're talking more about the government. Yeah, it is stupid. So, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give. How we're talking about our government that I know and love. Efficient, yeah. I'm gonna give the FDA some credit on this one. So, I think we're the first company in history. So we're a veterinary company, I'm a veterinarian, I'm not treating humans. And we formed the human company and we packaged all this data up nicely, and we go to the FDA, we submit all our data. And they looked at it, and it took them a couple months to figure out what this was. And I remember the day I got the call from our lead reviewer, and he said, so this isn't experimental dog data, is it? This is like real dogs with real diseases. You didn't like create the stuff in the lab, you know, in a vivarium. I said, yes sir, this is real data in real animals with chronic diseases. I don't think I said, and sir, dogs don't lie. I don't think I had to tell them that. But you go, so this is real data, including some blinded controlled studies, and we submitted all the data. They gave us an approval to do first in man with our methodology of treating a patient with their own stem cells. Derived from fat tissues. Derived from fat tissues. Why that's a drug is a different question. They call it a drug. But they gave us permission to do a hundred patient human study. This is the first time in the history of biopharma somebody's taken only veterinary data and gone to the FDA and said here. But it's because we're using a patient's own cell so it was perfectly analogous. All the methods, the liposuction, everything was the same. And so, and the more species you do, the more power the argument has. So we go, by the way, we gave them dog, horse, and cat data and said, if you want more, we've got 40 other species that we can show you. And it's the same across all of these species. So it's a common way all of us heal, including marine mammals, birds, reptiles. We all heal the same way, but the same little round stem cell. And whoever designed this beautiful system called the body and the fat that's in there, they put these cells in the fat, in and around the blood vessels, and they're there your whole life. So now, and when you're 90, your stem cells in your fat, as long as you don't have something like a whole body cancer or leukemia, are a young cell. We treated a 94-year-old guy in our clinical study, our first clinical study, 94 years old, 92 when we treated him, 94 at the end of the study. His cells were like a 20-year-old. What were you treating him for other than just... The airwaters. It's like, you're just gonna die soon because you're super old. So we're just... You're being treated for life. Actually, no. Let's make you younger. This is an example of exactly the kind of people... So this guy's 92, and our orthopedic surgeon says, so we want to have Marty come meet with you, and he wants to talk to you about getting stem cells. And I said, man, our study design is really not like, alter old people. But what's the same as a fridge case? So I said, fine, you haven't come over to the lab, you can see the lab, we can talk about this. So I'm expecting, you know, like the medical ambulance pulls up and he goes out in his wheelchair so he can see me. He drives up in his Bentley, himself. He gets out and he walks in, a little bit of a limp, and he goes, I run on the beach in Del Mar, and I can't run anymore. If I sit on the couch, I'm gonna die. I gotta get in your study. Can I please, please get in your study? And we figured an exemption for him to get treated, and we were able to take a little bit of his fat. We then grow up a batch of stem cells for him. Now he's got him for the rest of his life. At 92, he said, I want enough cells because I'm planning at least to be 100. So I need enough for the next seven, eight years if I need them, okay, make me enough. So we build a bank of cells, they're his cells, nice young cells, even though he's 92. And then when his doc is ready to inject his two knees, they just call us, we pull him out of the freezer, they sit in deep freeze. This, you know, like, remember Walt Disney, he was gonna freeze his whole body, that doesn't actually work. I thought it was gonna be just his head. Just his head, you're right. In a story I told like. It was just his head. Which I'm doubly certain that doesn't work at all. No, it doesn't. Doesn't work whole body yet either. That's what I'm saying, but I think if you separate the body pieces, your odds are just even diving worse. When he freezes at this minus 180 degrees, that's even colder than Montana and Wyoming. The cells are in suspended animation. They sit there for 50 years. See, your lifetime, they'll be there. And then when you take them out, they thaw and they're reanimated and ready to go to work. Ready to be deployed to use for what you wanna use them for. So we were able to treat this guy. And that's kinda how I got into it is I'm one of the veterans, the first veterans that's gonna go through treatment with him. I've already had my cells removed and they've built my cells and I get them injected into my pain points in April. What if you have more, I've had stem cells one time at Ways to Wells down in Austin, Texas. And they were Ways to Well. Ways to Well. Bringham Bueller is the founder of them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe they were based off of, it's a limited amount. They're based off of umbilical stem cells. I got them just IV because I didn't have an acute injury at the time. Do you guys treat in that same way or is this all a targeted approach towards like whatever? A rotator cuff, okay. It's a great question. So yeah, those kinda things in the US are not legal. People are doing it and they hide and FDA doesn't find them or FTC if they make claims they find them. Bringham's not hiding, right? Bringham's not hiding. I know, I'm surprised at the places. But again, FDA can't regulate it very well. And part of the reason is, and we discussed this earlier, Doc, I'll hit up on this, if you're putting someone else's stem cells, let's say you want, you know, you shame Bolt's stem cells. You're also taking whatever disease is he's prone to. Does that even work? Yeah. So you can take umbilical cord or somebody else's stem cells, but they're not yours. So your body knows they're foreign. You may not have a reaction, you know, like a bee sting, allergic reaction, but your body clears them faster and so they don't work as well. Also, so if you're into computers, so if you're a Mac guy, you don't want to put a PC operating system on your Mac or the other way around. That does not work. Now imagine your operating system is your DNA, right? That's your instructions for how you live and how your body fixes itself. Now you stick somebody else's operating system in, or a young kid over their lifetime, multiple different operating systems, it's confusing. But also, you don't want somebody else's diseases. We're all pretty careful anymore, right? But before AIDS, we didn't know AIDS was there. All of a sudden we found that virus it's in blood banks and tens of thousands of people contaminated. Before COVID hit, we didn't know COVID was around and all of a sudden it's there. Wilha knew it was around. Fauci knew what AIDS was too. Happened to be working on that one too. Go figure. Who do you think that guy's doing with his days now? Living life happy as can be on a private island somewhere. Probably. With the rest of the weirdos on islands. But you know, if you have the choice, would be great to use your own as long as they're potent and young and functional. As long as that matter stuff was true, yeah, for sure. Yeah, now if you today had a car accident and you didn't have your cells stored and there were donor cells, you would use it just like you'd use blood, right? But if you're going for a surgery that's elective, you might store your own blood just because you don't want to take that risk. And so because these cells are still young and they're very potent and productive cells, why not bank your own and you've got them for your life? We don't need to ask FDA about banking. Just like cord blood, you can bank cord blood. Today's episode is brought to you by David, the industry leader in protein bars. There's two different type of bars I'm going to talk about today. First there is the gold, which is actually in this gold wrapping. I have these in the studio. 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The use of them then falls under FDA regulation. Okay, so that's where you cross the guardrail. It is, so let's talk about Wyoming for a moment because this is an important one. There are other states that have had access laws, including Montana, Florida, Utah, they've had some access laws that I think were not really well thought out. They were kind of for a specific reason. They weren't well thought out for how to provide safe access to patients and not have it be a cluster. Wyoming, especially Dr. Senator Eric Barlow, turns out he's a veterinarian as well, he's a cow doctor by background. Help push that down. Push that, brought that to the legislature. And we really helped try to have it be that it's safe for the patient, it's their own cells, has to be made under FDA regulations so they're made safely. And I think it's a well thought out law. It goes into effect, by the time last Friday, it goes into effect July 1. So we'll see this next year, how that goes in terms of that access. So that means that a patient can go to Wyoming and get access if it's manufactured in a legal and appropriate manner. Which that's what we're doing at Hoskinson's Health Clinic in the near future as well. And that's how you guys are again tied together. Because we have a lab in San Diego that is an FDA qualified lab. We do things all by the rules. We file with the FDA at the same time we're providing early access for patients that really need this. So we'll be able to provide those cells to the Hoskinson Clinic to be able to treat patients in Wyoming under the Wyoming law. How long is the flash to bang? Somebody comes down to San Diego. Is that where you guys do the fat removal? Yeah. Till having viable cells that you could use. Great question. Here's the process. So you can actually get the fat taken any place. I'm sure in Calispell, you have at least one plastic surgeon. Maybe more than one. Like mine came. I Google it, but I have to assume so, yeah. Yeah. Mine actually came from the inside of my legs. White fish. Yeah. And so we have people in San Diego that do that, but we have people that get their fat collected in close to Virginia Beach. We have some in Florida. We have some in Texas. How much do you need? What are we talking? We talking one of these cans? Two teaspoons, I think? A couple of tablespoons. Literally a little cluster of grapes is all we need. How invasive is that? It's not at all. It's a 30 minute. It's like going to the dentist. You get a little bit of numbing right there. They put a little solution in to loosen up the fat, and then 30 minutes later they're done. At the dentist, they don't stick a tube inside of my body. I get the parallel there. So for me, it was a little bit more invasive. Mine were on the inside of my legs, because I didn't have it. His problem was he's too lean. I didn't have it anywhere. So you could imagine in a great world, every special operator goes off season for them when they're not on deployment, gets their fat collected, gets these stored. So that fat then goes to the lab and send you. It can go overnight. By FedEx, we've got it there. Takes us about 60 days, three weeks to grow the cells. So when we get the first little two tablespoons of fat, it has about a million stem cells, maybe. Sounds like a lot, right? It's not a dose. When you go to treat a joint, you need 20 million approximately to go into a joint to help fix a joint. Even more when you get an intravenous for something like COVID, a disease you're trying to treat that's a whole body disease. So you need more. So the first three weeks, we're growing the cells. And they multiply, if you're a business guy now, so imagine if your money multiplied by these cells, they double every day. I will let you know. At the end of the first one. When I find a business model that works for me. Currently, I have not encountered that. Stem cells might be in the near future. And so they double every day, so that million goes to 2 million to four to eight. Compounds real fast. And now all of a sudden, at the end of three weeks, we have two or 300 million, we could make a billion. And remember, a dose is about 20, so a vial we put about 20 million cells. So we'll have five to 10 vials at the end of that three weeks. Then we take three weeks to do the quality testing. We want to assure there's no bacteria in there. There's no endotoxin, which can be a reactive thing. It's really the cells. We have one thing called a flow cytometer. We measure and make sure it's the right cells in there. And then we freeze them in little vials of 20 million each, and then they're ready. Now when you need them, you take them out of the freezer, takes 20 minutes to thaw, inject. When you need it. It's like a bowl of warm water. When you need that, it's at room temp. No, I mean to defrost it. No, no, they defrost at room temp. You just send it out there? I send them on the shelf and they thaw in 20 minutes. Just thinking about how I get the chicken breast out of the freezer. I'm not gonna take them out of the freezer. I remember. So this is less than one cc. It's a little small volume, 20 million cells in there. Does it look clear, see through? Just slightly cloudy, because there's cells in there. I was gonna say it was a clear. All right, okay, that's utterly fascinating. But he's on the cutting edge as well. Dr. Harmon likes to play Koi here, but he has the ability to drive free stem cells as a combat medics can carry them on the battlefield. Because the thing with stem cells and injuries is the sooner you can get stem cells into the injury, the faster it will heal, which will cause less damage. So he already has the ability in freeze dried stem cells that PJs can carry with them. And when a guy like yourself gets shot, they can put stem cells into that wound while they're packing it and it will help it heal faster. Would they have to have like stem cells from everybody there? Or is this a case where a generalized stem cell in that moment? A generalized stem cell could work in those emergence. Okay, yeah. I mean, that's obviously an extremist. So it's like, yeah. Yeah, and so we will get there. And so for those is for sure gonna work. What would you think be the difference in that instance? So let's go to like a, let's go away from the battlefield because that is statistically anomalous for most people. Let's say car accident. Let's go first responder. Somebody is ejected out. Well, no, that's pretty tough. So they're in the vehicle. Let's start a little. Let's start a little. Chroma victim at a car wreck. What impact would it have by getting those types of stem cells in early? Great question. So what is it you call the first hour after? Golden hour. So why is the golden hour so important? Because somebody told me that it was. Yeah, what the problem is cells are dying. And cells aren't dead immediately. They're dying. Even that guy that got shot and they die right on. All your cells in your body don't die immediately. So they're dying, not dead. These stem cells, one of the really core things they do in emergency medicine is they rescue dying cells from dying. And they give you a visual. So artificial respiration. Somebody stops breathing and hey, cell yet are artificial respiration. Dying cell. Let's say you just hit too many margaritas and you get some dying liver cells. If you put them next to a stem cell, the stem cell knows they're dying. Like a good medic would know they're dying. They put these little tubes out that go between their cell to the dying cell and they push through growth factors and mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy that rescues the dying cell. It's much easier to rescue dying cells than to try to regrow new ones. So if you can get cells in quickly in a trauma situation, I'm gonna predict you're gonna see in probably less than five years, we will have a way to take these cells, put them freeze dried, they're in a medics backpack and you rehydrate them in 30 seconds or a minute. You know, you see I tend to battlefield and you're hanging in a bag trying to just, you know, get the blood pressure back up. You're gonna have cells in there. What would that look like? So, I mean, a golden hour and again too, is to try to get to that higher level of care. Somebody gets the stem cells on the battlefield or a traumatic accident, say we have two patients, patient A is going straight to the hospital without that, patient B is showing up to the hospital with that, what would that look like differently to the physician receiving them? So, I'll give you the actual real data. We'll pick stroke now. Stroke is an emergency, it's the same as in a car accident, it's just now all of a sudden you don't have blood going to that part of the brain. The data is very clear, published data. The patient that got IV stem cells within 30 minutes or an hour of a stroke versus the one that didn't, half the cell death, half, reduction in half. So, imagine you got a spot like. I'm not sure if I'm wrong, a lot of that cell death is between the ears. All right. Brain tissue. All right, it's brain tissue. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, okay, yeah. Same thing is true with a heart attack. You know, the problem in the heart attack, the reason you need to get the spot unblocked and that stent put in there so you get blood flow is because the cells are dying, not dead, dying. And if you can get those cells in, so there's a huge amount of work going on in multiple companies to deliver these kinds of cells for those things. But let's go away from acute for a minute because what's the big problem? You're guessing from looking at your physique, you're a health guy. You take care of yourself, try to eat right, you exercise, you run, you do things. So deeply appreciate that compliment. None of it is true. It's just natural ability. My main gym recently is Jiu Jitsu. I mean, that's probably my main physical activity, but I also live an active life. I hunt, I hike. I don't really like recreational hiking. I've hiked enough professionally. Yes, except I've done enough. Like, hey guys, we're gonna start over here. I'm like, what? Again, did you say 11 clicks? Like a little closer. Also, what's this topography like? Son of a bitch. No, I live an active life for sure. And honestly now I'm paying way more attention to my health than I was previously. I don't know why I didn't necessarily, I don't think anybody young really thinks about their life through these. You think you're immortal. Yeah. We truly think that. So what's the epidemic in the US? It's chronic diseases. Obesity. So there's a fact you're not gonna believe. You're gonna say I made this up. So if you look at two people, both 50 years old, one has really bad osteoarthritis, one doesn't have osteoarthritis at all. The one that has really bad osteoarthritis, knees, hips, 50% higher death rate due to all causes than the person that doesn't have arthritis. Yeah, that's true. People don't die from arthritis. Yeah, they do. They sit on the couch, they get fat, they eat a whole bunch, they get diabetes, they get heart disease and they die. So it's mobility. It's why these chronic diseases are so insidious. You don't think about it. But when you have a chronic disease that's keeping you from moving, the poor people that now have long COVID, you'll say there isn't such a thing. It's an absolute thing. It's not well-defined. Now they just argue about whether it came from the vaccine or COVID itself, which is like, I don't have enough time in my life to go down this rabbit hole. Yeah, so all we need to do is figure out how we, but so treating patients that have these kinds of diseases is hugely important. And being able to take these cells and use them to address chronic disease. We're focused on orthopedics because it's, we know a ton about that from the horses and the dogs. But it works in, for sure, autoimmune diseases, other things. But you just, you never know. And so if you have yourself stored, that's great. And so we're sitting around in December of 2019, January, 2020. We're watching the news, everybody's watching the news. And this is like the bad joke of the priest and the Irishman that walk into the bar. And so this is the veterinarian and the orthopedist walk into the bar and who's there, COVID. And so literally, I'm a veterinarian, but I've studied all this human medicine stuff for 35 years and I know these cells really well. And my orthopedist is sitting across the table and he says, Bob, every time I ask about a disease, you tell me, here, I've here's some data from vet. You must have data from vet on viral diseases and lung diseases. Sure enough, we do. We actually have some published data in horses and dogs. Turns out dogs get lung fibrosis and horses get bleeders that cause fibrosis in the lungs and bacterial infections. And we have data from stem cell treatment. So we packaged up our data, we wrote a rationale paper, we rushed and submitted it to the FDA and they gave us approval to treat patients in the ICU that were dying from COVID. Everybody was rushing trying to find something, right? Nobody knew what to do. And so, okay, so these are patients in the ICU, part of them on ventilators and half of them are gonna die. Anyway, they've already tried other things and they're getting worse. It's the only reason we get to treat them as part of a FDA clinical trial. Wow, this is not a very fun clinical trial for a veterinarian who doesn't do acute trauma. And my patients are gonna die, even if my drug just doesn't do anything. So we treated 10 patients, they all consented, they go, okay, we're getting worse, we gotta try this. We gave them three doses IV, like you got that stem cells. He's were, and these weren't their cells, they were donor cells. That's why I'm gonna talk about donor cells a bit. These were donor cells, cause they didn't have 60 days to wait. I was gonna say they didn't have the flash of back in time to wait. At all, at all. And so, this doctor at University of California, San Francisco, the big hospital in Fresno where all the farm workers were dying because they were getting exposed, heavy exposures. And he says, okay, we're gonna treat these, but let's treat them with three doses pretty fast, like a day apart, because we don't have very much time. And if it's gonna work, it's gonna work. And if it's not, we'll, no. Yeah. You wanna guess the punchline? No. I'm not good at guessing. Neither. You can't make this stuff up. I now have the final report from the study. We partnered with another biotech company cause they didn't want the, I really didn't wanna be in the acute ICU treating business. So we worked with another group, but this was our protocol, our cells that we had already manufactured from donors for another purpose, for cancer actually, for another purpose. We treated those 10 patients. Within two weeks of treatment, all 10 patients went home off oxygen. Why isn't that national news? Cause COVID went away. And everybody moved on with life. And everybody doesn't want them to know. Yeah, but COVID went away but things like COVID didn't go away. It didn't, which is why we're now moving away from orthopedics and what we're doing into treating diseases that you give whole body systemic treatment. But think about what the problem with COVID was. You probably heard everybody talk about cytokine storm. Just means the body has massive inflammation cause it's responding to the virus. So let me tell you the things that these kinds of stem cells, not magic, these what the stem cells do for a living. Number one, they turn off inflammation so they're like an anti-inflammatory drug. They show up and they're backpack full of all these drugs. If there's inflammation, they make anti-inflammatory drugs. They make a morphine like pain drug. If you have pain, when you don't need it anymore, it goes away, no side effects. So it does those two things. It makes antibacterial and antiviral peptides naturally to fight those. It fixes the inside of blood vessels to get damaged. You just know the same dose. This isn't like a different product. This is all in one of these vials you're talking about. Yeah, and so you go, ah, it does all these things. This is snake oil. No, no, it's how we heal ourself every day. You cut your hand, you're in the kitchen, you cut your hand, what happens? It bleeds for a little bit, the plate lets clot it and then you watch it and it's been over a couple of weeks it heals. It's your own stem cells. If you were six years old, you could almost watch it heal. Little kids heal, cause they have more stem cells in their tissue than we do as older. Somebody really old, they get a fracture, they don't have as many stem cells. All we're trying to do is to harvest these from the patient, multiply them, give them a whole basket full of troops that they can do a troop surge if they want, and then freeze them so they can use them. This is not actually really more complicated than that. It's not a rocket science. People make it sound like this is some brand new complicated, newfangled kind of technology. All we're doing is harnessing natural healing. I wanna go back a second to the COVID time period cause I still can't wrap my head around. Yeah, why didn't it become big news? Yes, I've remarked in what stem cells would have been. Well, the key first off, I've remarked in is just a horse dewormer. I don't know if you know that, it didn't win the Nobel Prize for anything. Exactly. And honestly, I have heard highly intelligent people arguing to the death on both sides of that. And I don't think, and they always, you know, they pointed Joe, like Joe is trying to tell people to take horse dewormers. Like I think it does that too, but also some, and again, I'm not a doctor, so I didn't invest myself in that deeply. But percentages like zero or 100 always freak me out a little bit. But what you're talking about is 100% success rates. At a time period though, where nothing else was producing that. How was that not national news? Right. Well, there's a reason why we didn't have it as national news, because it belonged to another company. We sold them the rights to that so we could come back and do our other stuff. And they ended up going bankrupt, not because of this project, because they were doing a bunch of other things. And so we were sort of prevented from that. I just got the report finally, and so it's usable data for us to go back and start thinking about, because think about the same cell that we used to treat these kinds of patients that were seriously debilitated with acute lung disease. Now they have chronic lung disease. And I'm not gonna argue which ones were, vaccine which ones were. It exists now so. It actually doesn't matter to the poor patient. They go, well, for whatever. I still have this problem, can it be treated? So I'm very interested to see how we treat that. But the most interesting one, relative to your world, is traumatic brain injury. I was gonna ask you, another question before we get into that. How do the stem cells know to only regenerate or grow? What they're supposed to. How does it not, how does, you encounter cancer, right? How does it know to not grow that or even attack it? Because I do hear people talk, well, I don't wanna get a generalized one or even necessarily a local because what else may it be impacting? And I'm like, that's a good question for somebody who has a much larger IQ than myself. Yeah, I mean, I don't want cancer. It's not IQ, it's just studying that part of what cells do. And so it goes back to, you know the story about the thermos? So, you know. I don't think I've ever heard a story about a thermos but tell me more. When you put hot water in there, you close it, it keeps it hot. When you put cold water in there and close it, keeps it cold. How does it know how to do that? I don't think the thermos is doing much. It's just an insulated vessel. Yeah, true. That's. So here's the key to stem cells. They are a cell that's full of biosensors. And it's an adult cell, not a fetal cell. So it's an adult cell. So it's all it knows how to do. They are regulated and they know when to start, when to stop, what to produce and what not. Because they've got the DNA, your DNA that tells it for this body, I can sense what's going on around me. And when they're growing and they're repairing something, the DNA instructions in there, their standard operating procedures, they only go to here and then they stop. Adult stem cells never ever, ever, ever, ever have been shown to turn into cancers. What do they do when they encounter cancer? It's an even more interesting question that's not a solution yet, not a full solution. So these cells make blood vessels. So if you have a heart attack and I inject some in, or I inject them in, cells will come racing there because they make blood vessels in response to lack of oxygen. Hold your nose long enough, your cells go, oh crap. And I need to make this little compound called VEGF that makes new blood vessels. So now if you have a place that you need more blood cells, it'll know that. So when it encounters a cancer that's going on, it'll be attracted there because it's all inflammatory. And it goes there. There was an original argument, hey, it might make the cancer worse, would it? Not turn into cancer, but make it worse. Turns out with the latest data, that's not even true, that these cells are trying to be a body healing cell and block that. They're not a treatment for cancer for sure. Yeah. Yeah. We don't know how to instruct them to do that. So now it kind of, it recognizes it, but it doesn't really, almost discards it because it doesn't know what to do. Okay. There is some talk about using electrical impulses to direct them because electricity runs through us already. I don't know how far they are with that. No, it'll be interesting to see. You had, I think, on a prior podcast, did you have the good Dr. Reardon come visit with you? Dr. Reardon. From Panama. Maybe he was on another podcast. I think that was Joe. He might have been on Joe's podcast. So that's the Panama, one of the Panama clinics. And Dr. Reardon, if you read his book, he would tell you that he learned about these kinds of stem cells from a veterinarian in California. And we met, became good friends, and the whole story of that. So what is his Panama clinic using? Are they still going with BloodSpun or Merrow? They did everything exactly like we do now. They were doing stem cells from fat. And he made a switchover, and you'll have to ask him the why, but he made a switchover to using cells from placentas that you could grow. Same thing, grown-up cells, not from cord blood, but grown cells, and their donor cells. OK. But the proof's been in the pudding for over a decade now. You see these NFL players get injured. Some of them, 10 years ago, career-ending injuries. And what do they do? They go down across the south border to get injuries, and these like, or get stem cells, like Aaron Rodgers and Kurt Cousins with these Achilles tendons, and they're healed in record time and back on the field. Yeah, it's their own stem cells. It's even longer than that, Billy. It's been back away. So I was giving a lecture. Yeah, it's their own stem cells. I was giving a lecture to a group of veterinarians at the LA Fitness Center, at the big center that's right now, like where everybody goes to, including the big guy. NFL players. The big guy. The big guy. Oh, yeah. Shaquille. Yeah. I'm giving this lecture to a bunch of veterinarians that does knock on the door, and my vice president says, Shaquille, and you want us to talk to you about getting stem cells. And I said, sure. Yeah. And I said, I'm going to lecture. And I came out, and sure enough, he's sitting there. And we talked for two hours. He was very interested in getting cell therapy. He had really bad knees. And he said, Bob, I want you to treat me. And I go, you know I'm a veterinarian. No, we're not in this yet. This was 15 years ago. But there's some places you could go, and I introduced him to Panama, and I introduced him to Spain and other places. I said, there are a few places that are legit. Be careful. And he ended up going to, I think, the Dominican or something and got stem cells. And that rejuvenated his career in Miami. Interesting. There's a bunch of these athletes that have gone. And there's nothing wrong in the cells aren't like bad cells. They won't work. But the risk, people say that there's no risk. There was a very famous surfer in California, went down to south of Tijuana, got his stem cells. Two nights later, died. There were real stories of that. There were a group in literally in San Diego County. And this was a company that was illegal. And they were taking placentas from hospitals, separating out cells, growing them up, and giving them to people to get infused for longevity. 11 of them got intravenous E. coli infection and ended up in the hospital. Not, you know. Just some heavy antibiotics. Probably not great. In my mind, it's just like a breaking bad garage like set up with this queen. You want some? You can just eat. So it needs to be done right. It needs to be done legitimate. But the cells work. And the dogs and the horses and the rhinos don't lie. Yeah, it's just best to use your own cells, vices. If you can't, anybody else. And there will be a place for both of those for sure. But for people, particularly with chronic diseases, arthritis and those problems, just get your cells banked and get through one of these programs. And if I don't die in the next three to four years, I think we're going to get an FDA approval. Once we have an FDA approval for one thing, these we're working on now, and now we're going to work on, we'll talk about TB item. We'll get one of those approved. Your doctor can then prescribe, again, this sounds silly, he's going to prescribe your own stem cells through a situation like this where you can get them multiplied and turned into a pharmaceutical grade product for anything that the doctor believes is legit. If you go to your medicine cabinet, you're a healthy young guy, you probably don't have a lot of stuff in there. Not that young. But if you look at it on the label and actually read it, it's not at all for what you're being treated for with that. Most of this stuff is off-label. It's off-label. To include a lot of the peptides, use a hot one right now like redotrutide, right? They're treating people with addiction. My sister is gone, she went from being a hospice nurse to now deeply working with women on hormonal, at pre-menopause, paramanopause, menopause, all the things that not a single one of us is talking about. Yeah, and some of the stuff she's talking about, the research and what people are using these things for, what they were originally designed for, and then the down-screen off-label mass. I mean, she's talking about redotrutide being, having immense impact for addiction control. And they don't even necessarily understand the mechanism, but it's working spectacularly. Yeah, and the important thing is that those things get the right kind of safety testing. So the patient's getting told, hey, this might work for you. It would be interesting to see if it worked. Since you bring up addiction, there's this list of things these cells do for a living. And when you look at them, you go, wow, they do all this. And then when you think about it, of course your body needs those things in order to function. So we talked about that they make a morphine-like drug. It's a peptide that actually works in pain. So when you get these cells in a joint, before the inflammation even goes away, you get some pain effect and reduction in pain. So it turns out that if somebody's addicted to a drug. Cocaine. Let's just go hard. Yeah, particularly the pain drugs. Yeah, opiates, yeah, for sure. The opioids are the worst. And a lot of that comes from them trying to do their best, going through traditional medicine, becoming addicted, and then that's how they end up morphine on the street. Yep, nope, it's exactly the case. And so when you give these stem cells IV, they make what's called an opioid agonist, means it acts like an opioid, and it blocks the receptors so that the opioids don't stick, and you don't get an addiction problem, you can get people off the addiction. Big group in Australia studying at Monash University on using that for an anti-addiction or getting people off. But also if you give them, at the same time, you give an opioid, it blocks the addiction portion of that. So now picture, so you're laying on the battlefield, your medic's gonna stick you with some. Fettin' a lollipop. Something in there. Tempting your hand to leave you out of town. Yeah, and at the same time, hangs your bag of cells. So then when you're done and you don't need that anymore, the addiction, you've at least partially prevented that. So it's another thing we're gonna use. In addition to all the things you're talking about, preventing the cells from dying. Yeah, and the other injury. Okay. That's gonna be huge. So it's almost like it's our own, it goes back to everything, like it's been said about a lot of medicine in the past, is that our own body heals itself. So it's the same thing with our own cells. If we can take those cells and make them superhuman cells, but they're still our cells and put them back into us, it can make us be younger, technically, right? But so the question you should ask is, I'm young, I'm rural, I have all these stem cells, they're in my fat tissue, they're here, maybe I'll eat another Big Mac and get a little more, I'll grow some more there. Just to make the procedure easier. Yeah, just to make it easier. But you go so painful. Why aren't my stem cells fixing everything? Why do I have any problems? Why do I have arthritis? Why did that trauma, why didn't it get fixed? There's a couple of really interesting answers to that. One is, so the body tries to fix itself, but only for a certain period of time. And after that period of time, it says, and it's gonna put a patch on here. So this is, whether you believe in evolution or not in evolution, in the old days, you're gonna get eaten if you can't get up and move. So the body for about, in each organ's different, you got maybe one to two weeks. So like if you tear a hamstring and you're hiking, you're going hunting, you tear a hamstring, you got about two weeks. At the end of two weeks, the body goes, that's enough, I'm gonna make scar tissue. Patches it, but it's not your friend, that's where it's gonna rip and tear next time and it impedes you from your performance, being optimal performance. And so the body, this sense says, that's enough. The other way you can look at this, so when there's a battle, you send in normal troops and they're trying to clean up, sometimes it becomes a mess, sometimes it's a cluster and it gets sort of static. You're not making any progress. You hear all the discussion of the troop surge and why that worked. Think of this as kind of like, when you take these cells out and you multiply them, you're making some special ops cells. You really are. They can do a lot of things and now you're gonna parachute them in to your elbow that has this injury or to a liver or a place where you've got a problem and it's gonna be able to overwhelm the system and get it back into a healing mode. It turns a joint back into being, if you're into using various kinds of peptides, anabolic, meaning it's re-growing versus catabolic, it's breaking down. It turns your joint back anabolic and it starts to fix itself. It's true patient heal thyself, but all we're trying to do is to provide a way to jumpstart that. It's nothing more complicated than that. We have the ability to heal. And the old deal in the ancient times where the physicians just needed to keep the patient occupied for long enough for the body to heal itself. And don't do something wrong. Don't do harm. That was the old saying. Above all else, don't do harm. Don't do harm while you're trying to fix it, but this is now a tool and it's not gonna replace common medicine. It's gonna replace some medicines for sure. It's not gonna replace all surgeries. Works really well with other surgeries. The one I really wanna see that we haven't done yet is Tommy John surgery. If you're a baseball fan, those take a year to heal. So I'm gonna give you a Green Beret story. I don't wanna insult you guys, right? I love Green Berets. Okay, great. We'll talk about Green Berets. So one of my veterinary clients was Ranger Green Beret, got out, went back to veterinary school, became a veterinarian, and then he came to visit me and he said, so I've got, you have to have really good diagnostics and I need stem cells and I need rehab, PT, good PT. If I had those three, I can fix any horse and he's a horse guy. And the top horse is Olympic level horses. And he did a series of 87 that he published where he controlled the diagnostics. He had horse MRI, literally big enough you can get a horse leg in there. You can look at, so you can diagnose it properly. You can't diagnose it, you can't treat it. Then he harvested a little fat off the butt of a horse. It's the same way we do it in men people. You get it off your front usually, but for your plank. Made the cells, treated, and then his wife was a rehabber. So she had a rehab stable and they went back so we could control and have good rehab. They don't always follow directions, right, as patients. And so he controlled all of that. Nearly 90% recovery and recovery and success for him was they had to be back at their level they were at before. Operational level. For a year. This is huge ask. Yeah, that year is a huge ask. I can see like, like instance. Yeah, these are jumpers and steeple tracers and race horses. Those level of kinds of horses. And so he proved if you could do that, you know, and you can diagnose it properly, you get the treatment in there and then you follow the instructions and do good rehab. It's not magic. If you just sit on the couch, if you have a bad knee and you sit on the couch, it'll make your knee feel better. But if you don't get up and move and you don't stop eating too many big Macs and you know, all the sugar and the body inflammation, it doesn't work as well. So if we learn that, so we learn that from the animals. All right, TBI, how does this tie into TBI? So one thing's traumatic brain injury is an acute event and then it's sort of over. Same thing if you really badly injure your knee and then you kind of take the pain meds and your rehab and then you think it's kind of over. It's not over. It's smoldering in there. So you hear about CTE, you know, the effects of long-term after traumatic brain injury. It's because you've had multiple acute injuries that have now caused the brain to be on fire. So if you just picture my brain in the flames and smoke coming out and smoldering, you know, and you don't feel it, because it's not pain in the brain like it is in the knee. In the knee, you feel it and it's getting worse and you either put up with it or you go see somebody. You're taking anti-inflammatories. But in the brain, it's more insidious. So you don't know. You notice things, right? You either if you don't have it yourself, you've got colleagues that have that and you can tell in them those effects. And if you have more and more injuries, you have more and more of that inflammation in the brain. It's just brain on fire. So you go, okay, do I have to then, if these cells make anti-inflammatories, right? Help cells from dying. Yep, good checkbox, good versus well. So you go, okay, so how do I get them in there? I'm not sure I want to drill a hole in my skull and you know, put inject cells in there. And through the eyeball. No, it's like cocaine. It turns out you can sniff them, which is actually could be true. It could be, we'll talk about that, but it might really be true and rodents, it is true. I was just gonna guess you did IV and it passes through the blood-brain barrier. So, you know, a lot of things in science, we're trying to answer a question, but if we don't have the right question, then the answer doesn't actually really tell us what's going on. So if the question is, how do we get cells into the brain? We're trying to solve a problem that maybe doesn't need to be solved. Do they need to get into the brain, actually into the brain tissue? And some of them do from IV, especially if you have an acute injury. So, you know, you're a skier. Snowboard. Snowboard, oh God. And so the snowboarder, you smack the tree, right? For the next- I mean, I try not to, but yeah. I swear, they try to bully us. For the next week, your brain barrier is disrupted and you're gonna have actually a little brain swelling. A little. Yeah, so it's real. So it's disrupted that. And so cells can get in there faster and some of them do go there. But here's the interesting, there's another piece of science, you can probably, you can win a bourbon at the bar. You know, on the inside of bud vessels in organs that are inflamed, doesn't matter whether it's your knee, your liver, or your brain, there's little receptors in there. It's like Velcro. And when there's inflammation, those little receptors pop up. It's the reason they pop up. Because as the stem cells come floating by on the freeway, they have a matching receptor and they will stick. When they stick, you remember, these are drug factories. They carry their little backpack of all the pharma drugs and they make them as needed. So they do not like to have them all packaged already. They make them as needed. So they stick and they go, wow, there's inflammation here. They make these drugs, which pass right through the blood brain barrier into the brain. And the anti-inflammatory drugs that go into the brain turn off the cells that are inflamed, turn off the inflammation. You can measure that with a brain scan. Already been shown. Already a couple of very interesting studies that have been done in the US. Small studies at universities showing, yes, in fact, you can just give these cells IV for a brain injury. And they get there. Yeah, it's a little like Star Trek. So how does that work, Doc? If there is no inflammation, let's say, because TBI's, I have eight lesions, they said, right? Which is, it shows where the brain was damaged and now there is just a scar or a scratch, right? That's a lesion. How do the stem cells fix that if there's no inflammation? So I would there bet two bourbons to a bottle of Coke that you have inflammation that's quiet inflammation going on that if you actually, you can't see it on an MRI. It's on a special scan called a PET scan. So you can see that inflammation in there. And that's the problem. These football players and they're done playing, but they've got some residual effects and they think this is an old injury. It's not, it's like your cancer. It continues to smolder and grow and the cells will die. It's why you keep getting worse and worse over time. It's not because you're getting older. It's because you've got that ongoing. So really it's not just a scar. There's ongoing inflammation in the brain. Gotcha, yeah. For sure. And if it's just a truly a scar, it was a one time deal and it's gone, it's just scar tissue, that's much harder to fix. You probably have to put the cells there because they don't know to go there. They have a GPS. They're probably as good as your dogs. If you look at how these cells know where to go, it's amazing. They follow the scent and they go in the bloodstream. So as an example, so if you take and tie off a blood vessel in the lower leg or you have a clot, so it blocks that. And then you put stem cells in and you put a little like a piece of iron in there that you could measure on MRI and just put a my V. That lack of blood down there is signaling. It's a screaming signal for them to go there like your laser pointer for your dog. Yeah. And they know to go there and they will go there and then they make their drugs and it makes new blood vessels. So they really are smart. So I think we're gonna be able to do this with just IV treatments. And we have a study that I'm submitting to FDA in the next couple of weeks that is a pilot study for retired military traumatic brain injury patients that are gonna be monitored by a neuropsychologist from Pendleton that has seen all of your friends come back from the war. And it's being funded by Valor for Life. Do you know that nonprofit group? I have heard that, but I couldn't tell you. They're in Southern California. They've provided money for spine and orthopedic surgeries. It was founded by Dr. Robert Bray, who is a spine surgeon, 20 year veteran doctor from the Air Force. Super sharp guy, very well known and he just has this soft spot for that and he made this foundation. He gets money donated to that and he is gonna select the patients for this pilot study, treat them in his clinic, and we will have real controlled data. We can then show to the VA, to SOCOM, to the FDA on how these cells work. And again, why people haven't really gone after that. Everybody's going for cancer treatments, heart attacks, Alzheimer's, but to me, traumatic brain injury has a grand total of how many approved treatments? Zero. It's a very underserved and it's not just military, it's sport. First responders in the Pella High School. These kids in high school that are playing soccer are getting TBI's. I mean, it's anything that has a ballistic activity to it. I don't mean firearm, I mean just that collision. Force on force. Yeah, and the problem is, when the brain has that concussive deal, it rebounds off the back of the skull and then it damages itself and then you have that inflammation. So once you have that inflammation, can we fix that? I think we can change healthcare. And you know, these cells again, they're a magic. We have to learn how to use them for different things. They don't just work for everything. I could give you a list of all the things that probably will work for, we'll figure it out. We have to know the dose, the delivery. That's what we do as a company, trying to figure that out. What's the risk associated with them? So, I think as you already said earlier, I was a toxicologist for biotech and pharma companies. You know, I've studied that a lot. I've seen lots and lots and lots of drugs go through. A lot of them die that never made it because they have side effects. In my 40 year career, I have never seen anything as safe as somebody's own cells. Now, you got E. Coli that you mix up into the cells. You don't do them right, you're putting dead cells in, you're putting something that's gonna react to the patient in, you put too many in the wrong place. There's ways you can muck it up. But I've never seen anything that is safe as this, which is why everything in the world is risk balance, right? No matter what you do. We were talking about jumping out of a plane or getting court-martialed. You're talking about jumping out of a grenade or not. Everything is risk-reward. When we look at the potential reward from these, sometimes it is, we don't know if this is gonna work for this yet, but then you look at the risk side and you go, what's the downside? It's very low, not zero, it's never zero, but it's really low. And having seen 25,000 patients and probably 50,000 treatments, maybe more than that by now, we do repeat treatments, these dogs come back every year or two. We didn't cure their completely wracked joint. You got bullet into your hip, yes? Some of that stuff you don't fix, or you fix it with surgery. So we don't magically cure osteoarthritis, we manage it. They can come back every year, every two years, and get a booster. Yeah, I mean, I like everything that you're saying. What are the realistic hurdles that stand in place from things like ambulances having access to this? Are people legitimately being able to hear this? Because I think a lot of people are gonna hear this and they're gonna really love it. Accessing the care is a totally different thing. What legitimately stands in the way between you being able to provide this care and mass? FDA approval, number one. So getting through the FDA, and there's only, after 24 years of companies trying to get stuff through the FDA and the US in the South Arabian, exactly what we do, we've got one. And it's for kids with a leukemia graph versus host deal. It's the only one approved here. And so it's been really hard to get through. Current leadership at the FDA, Dr. Makari, he's very sharp and he's trying to push forward ways to get things more advanced and get them through faster. But that's the big, like if tomorrow they said, we looked at all your data on your knee arthritis and we looked at your first TBI data, here, you're approved. And so now doctors can use this, it would be in mass. Insurance companies. It's a scaling problem, but yeah. It's a scaling problem, the one at a time scaling problem, which we're good at, because I've done, 50,000 veterinary patients, so I know how to scale that. But the other is insurance. So to make GMP, which is FDA quality cells, pharmacy grade cells, it's not cheap to do. And so the insurance companies, they're not currently covering it because it's not FDA approved. They could. We've had our first insurance coverage for a patient. And it was a Christian Ministry Health Sharing Cost Group that looked at that and said, that's cheaper than surgery, we'll cover that. All the veterinary insurance companies cover it. Your wiener dog, if you had insurance and you had a back disc blowout we needed to treat, would be covered. Just never gonna do that, because his feet never touched the ground. It's camera, camera, camera. These two love to be forced to run on the ground. Walk the dirty ground here. I'm not gonna put you down there with the peasants. No. You ride here. Daddy's hands. I'll have to show you a picture of floppy. But come July, Doc, right? Yeah, you'll be able to treat. So now we'll be able to treat in Wyoming, legally by Wyoming law. So people could technically travel there, regardless of where they live. Is it anybody or is it veterans only like still or is it across the spectrum? No, it's across the spectrum. Anybody can go there. But it has to be patient only cells. Has to be already an FDA safety study done. So the crazy people that are doing this that don't have any studies or anything haven't done it, they can't do it legally in Wyoming. You have to have completed that first safety study. You have to be ongoing engaged with the FDA, which is still doing stuff. So you're one of the good guys. And patient consent. So the patient knows this is still going through FDA. And so they can go there. So they could get their fat collected in Miami or in Portland and ship it and have the cells manufactured. That's all legal to do. And then they go, okay, well, I'm gonna fly into to the metropolis of Gillette. Gillette, yeah. But go to the Oskarsson Clinic and get treated. So with that being said though, how does that, what was the question I was getting? How does that, oh, so what I was gonna say, I'm sorry, I need to get back to it. With the SF-48, one of the major problems that they've had in the stem cell space is that doctors are afraid to inject it because they can lose their licenses if done incorrectly. With the SF-48 legislation to win in Puerto Wyoming, that removes that liability from the doctors. They cannot lose their licenses for injecting the vaccines. The medical board can't go after them for doing, using stem cells, which is not yet FDA approved. But it has to have all these safety boundaries on that so that we do it right. But that's kind of been a lot of the holdups. A lot of doctors like, I'm not touching that because I can lose my license. You brought that up, you know, like so it. So what's the other boundary? So if you go to, do you have an orthopedist that you go see ever? I don't think so. What does that word mean? Yeah. Joint specialist. No. So if you had one and you were seeing it. I'm relatively injury free for us, you know? I mean, trust me. Not the shiniest penny that I once was, but you mean haven't had to go see an orthopedist yet. If you did, and you went and asked the average orthopedic surgeon and said, hey, I was talking to these guys. Actually they keep on my podcast and they were saying that you like to stem cells and he'd go, yeah, stem cells don't work. That's all, that's all, who we, it's not legal. You can't do that. They don't work. I have heard quite a few doctors express very similar things. They may not have been orthopedist, but I'm not gonna say all doctors are like that. I would say some are just more open to forward thinking ideas. But it's understandable because doctors get their license, they go into practice, they have kids, they have family, they have business and life happens. It's really hard to keep up. And so because there's a lot of unethical people selling all kinds of stuff, placental extracts and all these kinds of things that they say are all legal, oh, it's illegal, it's legal, don't worry about it. And then doctors get in trouble. They just go, no, until I see FDA approved on the bottle, I know. So they don't even have time to see whether there is good data that suggests that it really works. So I understand why they're like that, but it's a shame that their attitudes are hardened and they don't even wanna listen. So a patient comes and says, hey, I'm going to see this. Now, again, if it's a doc, an NFL doc for an NFL quarterback and he says, I'm going to Tijuana, the doc's gonna go, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait. You know, this is dangerous. But if they come and say, I wanna do something legal, but you're not helping me. You know, this isn't helping me. The patient should be able to drive their healthcare and doctors should be their partners in that and look at that. And so we spend half our life educating doctors. We've got about now 30 of them in the US that we've trained as to what this means, what it is, they've studied, and so they can offer this under the federal right to try, but it's more limited, but it's still, you know. I mean, it sounds like now, I mean, the ability to do this in Wyoming is at least gonna open up. Insurance will leave that as just a question mark because who knows what's the cost? Like if somebody, like what's the barrier here to accessing treatment from a cost perspective? So from what you've heard and you listen to Joe and you listen to other people talk about, hey, I went here, I went to Cancun, I went to Medellin, I went someplace and got treated. What generally numbers do you hear? Well, it depends on the type of treatment that they're doing and how long they're there, but numbers in the 30 to 50,000 range. And that is sort of across the board. If you go to the Bahamas, you go to someplace and you get treated. Costa Rica area. Each time. That's my understanding, yes. So you go once, it's 40,000 dollars. You go back again, it's another 40,000 dollars. Depending on what you get done for sure, but yeah. And they're using donor cells in almost all those places. Most of them don't, I don't think any of them now do your own cells. So when you do your own cells, the cost now for somebody, if you came and said, I want my cells banked. It's not how about using them yet, but I want 10 doses. I'm gonna take a preparatory step. I just want to get ahead of this. Well, I just want to get them there. It's going to be $20,000 something, 25 to have 10 doses. Now, let's say you did have a bad shoulder and you got your shoulder treated. So you used one dose or maybe it's two doses depending on what the problem is and you get those treated. And so the doctor's going to try you to inject $1,500 or something. Now you come back in a year, now you got the other shoulder because you switched arms and you're hunting and now you switched arms and now you got the other shoulders bad. It's $1,500. So the use over time once you've got your bank, the cost becomes way less for each time you do it. Insurance will, when they figure this out, cover it, I think before FDA approves it. There's no link between those except for they wait because they don't have to cover it. But if they look at it and go, wait a minute. So really, it's going to have is knee replace, that's $50,000 in rehab time and possibility of some adverse. It'd be $50,000 if you'd use insurance, if you'd go to the doctor and offer cash, suddenly it becomes way less than 50 grand. Way less. And it's because all the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, All the, a medical system as it is. Let's say a part of it. Let's say a part of it. Yeah, a part of it. It's causality as a bastard. Yes, yeah. There's quite a few other things. So for somebody who says, you know, I'm 50, this is my next 50 years worth, you know, and you want to have that. You get one collection one time, and then you never get collected again. We keep back what we call those seed lots. And that seed lot, it's like keeping sourdough starter in the refrigerator. So you could do more if needed. I can make more. So I don't have to come back and do in their collection. Yeah. Another one of the most common statements we have when we say, well, we only need two tablespoons. They go, can't you just take more, please? Just play. That's an additional charge. I'm sure they could do that while there. Yes. That is not the service we're offering, however. Yeah. You're going to be at a plastic surgery. Again, I'm not going to tell people about their wife's company. Yeah. Well, they cover that. Right. And so will we start using this eventually for really preventive care? My master's is in preventive veterinary medicine. We don't do a very good job in veterinary or in human with truly preventive stuff. Preventive means vaccine. That's a little part. Preventive is a whole lot of things. But if we start saying, well, I'm breaking down a little bit each year, you know, you look at the amount of muscle you lose, the kind of things that happens when you age. Can we reverse aging? Biohacking is everybody trying to figure anti-aging and how to live to be 120. And that's where it's all headed. Every day, you break down a little bit. It's not a long jump to think if you on some regular basis got intravenous stem cells, would it slow that process by fixing things that are starting to break down? Using it in an athlete, which we have, like in race horses. So after a race, if you look, when you run, I know you run. I don't run at all. That's why I learn how to fight. Why run when you can fight? That's true. So Billy runs, what happens at the end of your run? And you come back and you sit down. And the next morning, you're sore. Why are you sore? Because we broke down some muscle. It's the same thing like a hard jiu-jitsu round or going to the gym. Yeah, harder. It's exactly the same. Why do we heavy lift to break some muscle so that we rebuild? Yeah, so build bigger. If you were getting, and the stem cells are doing the rebuilding, there's lots of stem cells in muscle, and in and around the blood vessels and everything. It's trying to rebuild all the time. When you overdo it and then you have an overuse injury, it couldn't keep up. But if we had a way to do that and routinely treat, I think that will be there. Everybody's looking for the fountain of youth. Yeah. But this is just using your own cells. And you could do them repeatedly with safety. Would that help us with this aging and longevity and slow things down? I think so. And the other big area I'm interested in is in general body inflammation. If you eat right and you don't do a lot of carbs and sugar, you have less inflammation. But everybody's got some. Unfortunately, what is? Michael pulled up the stat for current obesity in the United States. I think it's 60%. So we're losing that. And that's why there's preventative medicine and proactive steps as well. Don't, like, the data is back. If you allow yourself to become obese, there is absolutely no positive health consequence from that. Right. Yeah, what do we got here? 40% to 43%. The recent data indicating that over 100 million US adults are affected. What's real interesting is if you look, if they held it to the standards from the 1980s, they changed that number drastically. If you look at the first rate, it says 70% of the entire population is overweight. Yeah. And if you look at the number of them, if you just look at the inflammatory markers, and it's just your regular lab core test, C-reactive protein tells you how much inflammation you have. People don't even look at that. But everybody's inflamed. Inflammation causes ongoing damage. Stem cells try to turn off inflammation. So we've got a tool now that I think will be our friend. And that's why we thought in COVID, you've got this massive inflammatory reaction to the virus. Can we dampen that a little bit? Yeah. And the cells dampen that, turned it down, and help the patient. So I think it's going to be our tool. I could make all kinds of projections, what it will look like. Yeah. 10 years from now. But there's so much data coming out in all kinds of trials across the diseases. If you look at all the autoimmune diseases, which they're rampant. What about Alzheimer's? Why did all that happen? We've done Alzheimer's work in mice with a group at Washington University. And so is it going to help there turn off that inflammation in the brain? What's that trigger? And chronic inflammation also triggers cancer. Yeah. That chronic bowel inflammation for a long period of time, then eventually turns into cancer. Pull ups in the cancer cells. And then, yeah. I said stem cells don't work directly. People think about stem cells for cancer, because kids that get leukemia get their bone marrow radiated, kills all of their stem cells. Then you repopulate with stem cells. It doesn't really treat. But this is a very interesting use of these. So cells go to inflammation, right? Tumors are inflammatory, right? Stem cells probably will go there. They don't treat cancer. What if we gave a payload to the stem cells? You guys should do that. Yeah. There's a company in San Diego, and we already make cells for them for their human stuff, made cells for them, to, in fact, to do that. There's these little viruses called oncolytic viruses, cancer-killing viruses that causes cells to die. And if you take them and you just inject them into a tumor, it will kill some of the cancer. The body's really good at getting rid of viruses. It doesn't work that well. If you take these viruses and you put them in a little dish with these stem cells, the stem cells suck them up, and they start multiplying. They freeze it. And now we've got to now take them and inject them later into a tumor, or even into the bloodstream. It's going to destroy them. They're like a Trojan horse. They go zipping to the tumor. They stay there. And about that time, the viruses break out of the cell and kill the tumor. There's a phase two study going on at City of Hope in brain tumor right now. Exactly that technology, using exactly the cells that we make for this company. I hope it works. I mean, they've been talking about curing cancer since I can remember being a human being. Do you think it's reasonable that they will? Let's not say maybe cure all cancers, but let's go with a reductionist approach, that we can drastically reduce the impact the cancer has on humans. Yeah, yeah, we have. An example one, there's a drug that works really well in colon cancer now. When you had yours, it wasn't really out. And it's a really interesting drug. My stepmom had stage four colon cancer, eight years old, no chance. They do now, analysis, same thing we look at the markers on the stem cells. They look at the markers on the tumors now, really good. And this particular marker works with this particular drug, 100% cure rate in small number of patients so far, but in the hundreds of patients, you get 100% you go, wow, that doesn't happen very often. So I think we've got the possibility of engineering better and better kinds of cures. Well, in different. The whole stuff you had to take of chemotherapy, that's gonna be in the past, that throw toxins in and wrecks the whole patient. My mom stopped her chemotherapy and chose hospice. She was so far down that road that one of the two, the cancer or the chemotherapy was going to kill her, that was a certainty. And she wanted to have a less painful departure. This biologic treatment of cancers is so different than chemotherapy. It's using a biologic of some kind that has a marker that will anchor to that very specific spot on that tumor and have very little side effect. Radiation, we're getting better and better narrowing down like your laser pointer to try to hit it. That's better than going in and getting your upper body irradiated. Well, and there are also other things, let's see for an example. So my wife, Telly, has what's called retinitis pigmentose. It takes away your peripheral vision and works towards your center vision. So she has five degrees of vision left. She just went through her very first dog handling course and was given a seeing eye dog, Tony, that we just brought home last week. But there's no cure for RP, our retinitis pigmentose, but there are a lot of studies going on that Dr. Harmon is aware of. And he's in communication with my wife's eye doctor with stem cells going back behind the retina to heal some of those damaged cells. And they've had some pretty good success. So there's a lot of different diseases that these could be used to either number one, stop them from getting any worse or two, prevent them and help them heal faster. And again, the animals give us clues for sure. So I have a colleague, his name's Ron O'Fries, a veterinarian in Israel. And I haven't talked to him in a few years, but he had done early studies taking these, he used bone marrow, but the same, extracted them, multiplied them, had these healing MSCs. And put them with a needle behind the retina. That feels awesome. Yeah, and so dogs, you can actually measure seeing ability by using something that's electro-retinogram and you can see, so you don't ask them to read the chart. That would be difficult. What letter is that? We should talk about hearing in C. Lyons. Oh, you've got a good one there too. Let me ask you this. But it really did work. So you go, okay, can we fix those cells that are in the retina that are really hard to regrow that we thought you couldn't? Same thing for hearing. So we now know that those little hair cells they talk about once they go away and you guys with too many bombs, too many shooting ranges, you lose those, oh, they're never gonna regrow. We now have some data that says if you could get the stem cells in there next to where those little hair cells are growing, they can regrow. And you can get hearing back. What do you think countries that are not bounded by the FDA are dealing with this type of stuff? So there's two kind of countries. I'll give examples. Japan and South Korea are doing spectacular work and they're ahead of us. They already have some of this stuff approved and they did really good data. China, on the other hand. That's kind of what I was thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the question. They're not bounded. That's their population, though. And there's some good stuff being done. I mean, trust me, they're gonna break through some new territory for sure. But I just don't know. Yeah, I don't know what laws are species. Yeah, at what cost? Yeah, yeah. So in the middle of COVID, so again, here's the veterinarian in the orthopedic sitting there. What are we gonna do with COVID? I wonder if anybody's doing anything like this. And we're searching the internet. We found two guys in China, two doctors, below the radar, you know, from the politics stuff. And Dr. Rogers and I are on Zoom calls in the middle of the night so that we could talk to them. They were about three months ahead of us in treating patients with stem cells that had COVID. Yeah. And then I found another one in Madrid. And they were a month ahead of us and they already got their first data. So I could see. So there is good things going on around the world. But if they're not bounded by any patient worries and ethics, there's gonna be some bad stuff happen. And there certainly has been. Yeah, which could put a damper on the current processes and winds that we're currently having in the medical field with stem cells because some of the bad stuff that's going on as well. So there's another interesting thing that probably is relevant to the world you guys lived in. Radiation, probably not a good thing, right? In general, whether or not be around that, not so good. Turns out these cells are very radio-resistant. So if you put them, you know, like in a radiation exposure area, the stem cells are the toughest and the ones to last the longest. Interesting. Imagine now you had your stem cells with your foil helmet. No, in a protected frozen doer and you had a radiation event. I know Bart is already looking at this as ability to sort of reconstitute and help the body from dying because the fast dying cells like in your gut, that's the problem, you know? And your bone marrow turns over fast. If you had these cells, you can repopulate and help prevent some of that cell death. So they're gonna be a useful tool for us, I think. Which we did see a lot of guys getting in the special operations community were getting brain tumors as well. When SOCOM did that study, as long as the cancer, when they were finding out that our invaders and the guys that had their invaders with their antennas routed on their back, like I did myself, was probably getting a lot of radio waves and radiation from that as well. And plus the jammers in the trucks that were driving, right? Like sitting above our head, just going off like crazy. I can't think of many things that we were exposed to that are likely to be put into the category of health extension or health positive. I agree 100% on that one, yes sir. Yeah, and you see, the cancer incidence in dogs in the US, highly measured and easily tracked, is almost identical to people. You go, wow, I wonder why that is? They live in the exact same environment as us. Except they're also a little bit dirtier than us. They're living in the dust on the floor and the exposure to stuff. They're going on the grass that we sprayed with, pesticide, maybe even more. And we've learned a lot from dogs, including some of the anticancer vaccines, like the melanoma vaccine, actually works pretty well with developing dogs for melanomas first. I think it seems reasonable for sure. I really, out of all of this, I like the idea of the emergency medicine implementation. Me too, being able to help people or give them, and maybe you can, whatever, maybe it becomes the golden six hours, right? Or whatever, because a lot of that, especially like up here, I mean, depending on how off the grid you get, the golden hour, I mean, that's not even gonna be enough for somebody to even spin up the life flight to get off the pad to come get you to the next highest level of care. So you're probably gonna need every ounce that you could possibly get to decrease the amount of death in the cells. Yep, yep, yep. My big push is I'm trying to get as many veterans treated as possible in these programs, especially with the TBIs and gunshot wounds and stuff. Guys from our old community and everybody in the veteran community that suffers in the last 22 years of sustained combat. I'm trying to get as many people. Yeah, you think about it. How many people were in the VA system with TBIs? Thousands, thousands, thousands. Probably, to be honest. I mean, it's, you know, when I was going through, I went out to Walter Reed to the, to NICO, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the best care I've ever received in the military, probably because it was run by civilians. You know, and talking with the Sykes and the Shrinks, and you know, what's PTSD symptom versus a TBI symptom? Well, they share like nine out of the 13 symptoms, you know? So there's so much overlap. There's probably a little bit of misdiagnosis. There's probably a bleed over. But at the end of the day, does the symptom matter? Because if the treatment's effective, it's going to reduce symptoms on both sides anyway. You're very insightful, Andy. Very insightful because people go, okay, like traditional pharmaceuticals are for one thing and one site, one, you know. Except for, again, like I gave you the example of the tritide, the off label that's being used. Like this is for weight loss, but like addiction and all these other things. Right, yeah. Now, and when we talk with the Neurosight guys, and we've got some of the best ones that both civilian and military were talking about, they're going, you're running the study. For sure, depression, PTSD, the traumatic brain injury, all those things, there's all this overlap. Measure them all, you're going to see a lot to overlap in terms of the benefits. And so we'll measure that and see. And you know, again, then it's abroad. It's a patient's head carries around their own medicine and they can potentially then deploy it to reduce these symptoms. What can people do now? Again, I love this concept. And I've just been thinking since you talked about the administration in the battlefield and then bringing it back to, you know, just baseline trauma. We're a ways off from that. Sounds like we're a ways off from people writ large being able to access this, but it is possible. But for people who like this concept, how do I mean, what does somebody call the FDA? And that doesn't work, right? So how do people actually mobilize behind something like this that is actually meaningful and appreciable for what it is that you're doing? Is it talking to elected officials? Is it trying to get what was passed in Wyoming, passed in other places, getting behind it? I think starting here is the best bet, right? Now, getting the word out, letting people understand that that kind of treatment is out there, there is a hope. But again, yeah, you're right. Getting the legislation passed in Wyoming was huge. And I think now it's getting in other states and then moving up to the federal level and testifying. So I should be testifying as well in front of the Senate and Congress on this stuff in the near future with some of the Wyoming legislation. So we're gonna try to push it as hard as we possibly can. But you're right, like it's difficult to find where is the source and how do we contact the source if they need that. So. Well, it's gonna move at the speed of bureaucracy. And if you look at the medical marijuana initiative in the US, not saying that this is a parallel, but it starts at one level in one state, which becomes two, which becomes four. I'm shocked, honestly. It's just not federally allowed at this point. I mean, it's like, come on guys. He already moved to schedule three levels. We think that's gonna happen at federal level with maybe one or two more states that go, because that's what happened the first time around. There were five states that did right the tries. And then federal, they said, ah, okay, we're gonna put this under control and make it fun. It'd be crazy that it takes a good idea that long to gain enough momentum in a bureaucracy. Just goes to show you how inefficient bureaucracies can be. 100%. It is. And they need to know that there's support. You know, the good people there don't have support. We're starting to try to gain some support that we could then send in. You know, like if NFL all of a sudden said to the FDA, sorry man, we gotta get this through for concussions. In the cute concussions, we want it on the field. Treatment immediately, we want this to happen. It provides. It provides cover for somebody like Marty McCurry, who's at the FDA as a commissioner level, trying to get stuff done. And yet he's getting sniped by everybody. All of the, everybody's got an axe to grind, right? It just is. It's the way it is. And so, you know, if you can give them cover. Can that help on the field? I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm thinking about this guy. I say he gets knocked out on the field. I mean, is this at the level where when they get him on the little stretcher cart, they throw in 10 or whatever. Yeah, they throw in an American tomb and they can, but at that moment, that's when you always start to administer this stuff. Absolutely. We're already talking to teams right now about pre-season, they should be banking everybody. That way everybody's got their own cells. So they've got this safety deal. Theoretically, so follow my logic. So to qualify under federal right to try, you have to have a disease or an injury that you've tried the existing approved treatments and they didn't work or there's no treatment. I mean, isn't that life? And it's serious. Everything. I mean, I'm pretty sure life is fatal and terminal. We all have experience. I would like a right to try. There's no treatment yet that is. We've tried to get one. We have an expiration. Some of them they come back to imminently. And you know, but so that's true. If you think about it, we should be able to do that, right? So now if they've banked their cells and that's legal, and then they have an acute concussion and the doc at the sideline goes, I don't have a treatment here, go sit in the dark for a couple of hours and see if your eyes stop moving and then back out on the field or you need to take a week off. That doesn't, that's not a treatment. And so now theoretically they could have treatment now. For concussion protocol. For concussion protocol. If I was just resting, they could put stem cells in. Absolutely. And so that's where we're trying to push this exactly now. And if you get now sports teams and professions like that that are now behind this, it pushes it. It pushes the opal a little bit. I just wanna see this. I wanna see this in the ambulance's life. Anybody with one of these problems can, they can ask their doctor to advocate for them and get treated under right to try now. With what we do. I mean, that's the calls we take. And again, that's just a, we're trying to help patients under right to try while we're going through the FDA. So with that being said, can they reach out to you directly? Absolutely. That's where I was gonna go with the next. I mean, we've been out for over two and a half hours. Oh wow. So, yeah. Yeah. What portal would you recommend a people educate themselves on? And then if this is, because the odd thing about the internet, right? We'll upload this. Who knows where it's gonna go and who's life it might land into. Or somebody, I know how this will work. Somebody will hear this and go, you know what? I know somebody, maybe not directly or indirectly, but they're gonna forward it along. And they may have, be it a place where the last option they have is the right to try. How do they get a hold of you? Yeah. Personalizedstemcells.com or PS like PaulSamCells.com. We call that Papa Sierra. Papa Sierra. Oh, sorry. I'm in the wrong, I'm in the wrong. Papa Sierra Cells. Yeah. C-E-L-L-S, not Cells. Charlie Echo Lima Lima Sierra. Let me help you out here. But Charlie Oscar Mike. Now you are back in my wheelhouse. Now everything else you say is directly back in yours. So the way it works for somebody is they call up and they say, hey, I wanna hear about this. I might wanna store my cells or I might have a need. We have then medical director doctors that can talk to them and they talk to a real doc and say, hey, I don't wanna tell some sales guy. He wouldn't really have like, this is still on their way to try. They can talk. We can also send them to medical webinars. We have live ones. I don't have a podcast yet, but I need to learn from you. I should be doing this because the number of doctors and people that I could have come talk about this because it's an education problem. Because everybody, I talked to an NFL player and he goes, oh, well, I knew the wide receiver for the Seahawks. He went to Medellin and it was great. But there's no data and they don't know. So the average person doesn't know who to believe. And most people are a little bit quiet about that as well too. Exactly, yep. They are. And so we can do medical education and then we can talk to their doctor. Then they'll say, I have a doctor and he says, this is just who we. Well, so, well, would you like a different doctor? We know in almost every city, we have physical therapy doctors that understand this. You can go get a new, or you can talk to one of the docs that we already have on our program. And just go get your independent opinion from them. And then they will advocate for you and they'll send in a little ad test and say, hey, I want to treat this patient. And then it just happens. Yeah, we have Dr. Stock over at the Hoskinson Clinic. Already is. She's going to be the director of Virginia of Medicine there. So she's very well versed up on that stuff. Trained by him. Yeah. And it is interesting how resistant to this, some in that field are. And this is definitely not like, I'm not trying to pull anybody into that, or everybody into that umbrella. But I also remind myself that not too far in the recent history of human beings, when you had a headache, they would drill a fucking hole in your head to relieve the pressure or rely upon leeches. And maybe both of those are still viable options. I am just not aware of that being the stable of treatment. I think evolution and innovation, like what you said is true, life happens. You forget that just because somebody's wearing a white lab coat that you would want to assume like they're on the cutting edge of everything, which actually is impossible, especially when life happens and they have their own stuff going on. They can't. I mean, medicine advances just as fast as technology, right? So one has the patient, you would need to stay. I would recommend for everybody, advocate for yourself and keep an active role in your treatment as well too. Just because somebody tells you nowhere, gives you the answer that you don't want, doesn't mean you need to stop. I'm also not saying believe everything you see on the internet. Keep but keep asking. Advocate for yourself. Advocate for yourself. 100%. Yeah, it shouldn't be like this 99% downstream doing what you're told. You should be able to have a dialogue and be as invested in your own care as anybody else is. I mean, shit, you're the one walking around receiving the care. Yeah, you're paying these doctors. And in this case, you're carrying around the drug too. Yeah, I'm talking about you. You're the owner of the drug. You're the take charge of your health. That's the punchline. Take charge of your health. Be your own advocate. And if you need help, we're here to help because it does just happen. And this is a sad story, but this is in the middle of COVID. So we have an FDA approved clinical study. The data is out there. This should work. And it's certainly not harmful. The mother of my lab director making these cells gets COVID. Goes into a hospital that I won't name the name of, but Southern California Hospital, a fairly reputable big hospital. She's in the ICU and she's dying. We offer as the company to provide free as part of this study and not even under the right to try under this study. And not only the doctor, but the hospital director, absolutely not. She died a week later. What was the justification for the hard no? Because they didn't understand it. They were worried about the liability. They don't know whether this works. This is not what we do. The person is dying. The person's dying. Yeah, there's no other. Okay. It's like, so that's part of what right to try. So you can't try something that is experimental because it might harm you. I'm dying. I'm just door. The door's open and I'm staring through and what's the other side? So that was the original right to try. And then as you get further down the line, say, well, I'm not dying, but I will and I'm debilitated and I can't do my profession. I can't work. I should be able to ask for if I have informed consent and be able to have access. And that's, I think Congress did a reasonable job on their right to try. I think they're gonna open it up more broadly nationally, being driven by Wyoming and Montana and Florida and other places that are saying, hey, sorry, Feds, you're lagging behind. We're gonna push this. And in the meantime, my goal as a company and as a CEO and as a doc is to get good data, publish it, legitimize it. Then the bureaucrats have less reason to say no. If I have a study that I can hold up and say here, it's a published study and a referee journal, which we have published in and we publish, then when you go to a doc and you say, hey, the docs that call us now are interested in what we do, you see, here's our publications. You come look at this, but it's gotta go slow. It's great. There's no way the federal bureaucracy with the size, scope and scale it is right now is gonna keep up with the cutting edge. Where the system is beyond being able to be nimble like that. It's overloaded by far, yeah. But if I had the secretary of HHS, Kennedy in a room quietly and he'd sit with me for a few hours, I mean, he's a smart guy. He understands that's why he did the food deal. He said, hey, food's killing people. We need to fix that. And he would listen. And I had the commissioner of the FDA sitting with me and I had my two medical directors with me. In six hours, they would go, oh my God, this changes everything in healthcare. We could cut the federal budget for Medicare in half and 10 years just by using this as a replacement for very expensive things with lots of side effects. I am sure, I'm not just making that up. I might look at it and I go, the kind of things this will do, but it just, it takes time. So if there's somebody- I feel like they're also getting 10 of those pitches a day too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and if somebody listening to this podcast says, I'm good friends with Kennedy or McCurry and I can get you an audience there, that's a fast track because FDA has the power. The prior commissioner of the FDA, Peter Marks, I won't call him a friend, he was a acquaintance. I knew him, I saw him at meetings. I had his cell phone, he would take my call. And he was trying and he was trying to think about how to push things down the road and open this up. And because this is not like any other drug they've ever seen. This personal biologics is not the same. And they're trying to apply the old rules. It would be like taking somebody that you're gonna put in standard marines and saying, oh, well, every one of them's gotta go through buds. And if you don't call, you wouldn't have anybody in the marines, right? You would have less. A lot less. And so we're being put through buds times 10 with the bureaucracy and the difficulty and there are pieces of that that apply. And I actually have a program written that if I got that audience with those guys, I would say here really, and I don't have an ax to grind with this, you know, this is gonna be way beyond what we do, but you could make this be broader and if there's a hundred companies doing what personalized stem cells does, I don't care. This is about getting this to the market and getting patients treated. You know, I gotta be like, I could retire a long time ago and do something else. When I saw this and I first saw the beating, we'll come back to the beating cells in the dish. And I looked at that and I go, this changes everything. It's true, this changes everything, what we think about. It will take decades to get there and it does, but it changes how we think about medicine. This is more profound than penicillin to me. You know, like when people were figuring out, like, hey, you washed hands, you got fewer bad things happening after surgeries, that was pretty novel. You know, idea took a long time. People didn't believe that. Cell therapy will change everything in medicine across all the disciplines, everything from neurology, backs, we treat, we treat backs in wiener dogs all the time. And you can really make a difference. They don't respect heights. They don't. No care for them. And that led us to, we've now done 10 or 12 back injections now in people. Really bad, chronic lifetime back pain. And you will start to hear on some of these podcasts of people that just go, I tried everything. I even had a fusion and clearly that didn't work. I just didn't know what am I gonna do. I think holistically, if the government is gonna, you're gonna continue to see, it's just my opinion. You'll continue to see the bureaucracy until the government finds a way that they can make a lot of money doing so, right? So same with elections. Everybody preaches for these secure elections. Mr. Hoskinson has a 100% secured way to do every election you could possibly imagine, but no one wants to listen on the red side or the blue side. Because in the day, they don't really want a fair election. They want to do what they wanna do. But yeah, it's just the bureaucracy. If it's fair across the board, they don't want nothing to do with it. So it's unfortunate. I think so with the medicine. We get the data, then pharma has to come to the table. And they will. They always buy stuff up when it's now it works. And that's okay. They have really good distribution and they do ramp up. But you have to get there because this impinges on what they sell now on little bottles. And they're waiting to see, hey, does it really work? Do you guys make it work? Do you have the goods? Do you have real data? And I'll keep taking my veterinary data and taking it back to the FDA and say, guys, here's one more showing you it works. Here's one more showing you it works. And it allows us then to move faster. But part of it's just, we're just gonna keep grinding out and showing it really works in patients. And then you get the right patients. You get somebody that's willing to speak up. And it's gotta be legit and you gotta have data. And then the bureaucracy then starts to pay attention. It just does. What do you guys wanna close out with? Whatever you want, I'm good. What do you wanna leave people with? You already gave the website, any other thoughts? Oh, and by the way, obviously we still treat animals. So we treat dogs and cats. That there's no limitation. The veterinary FDA, we can treat patients with their own cells. We do that, we've got treated all these patients. We do that. And like, just sitting in your lobby, watching people get a nice coffee and your beautiful coffee shop. And a third of them are walking around with a furry friend on the leash. And there were two of them that walked in and I go, oh, I wanna walk over and give them a card. Their dog is in pain and they don't even know. It's hard to get the word out there. And vet stem is, we're the only ones really doing this at scale in the US. And where can they find you out again? Is this vet? V-E-T-S-T-E-M, vet stem, just like it sounds. And by the way, do you know when people say you need to vet something out? Yeah. You know where that came from? Nope, veterinary. So in the 1800s in Great Britain, it was taken from veterinary medicine and veterinarians doing that. So it truly is. So I'm not a veteran like you guys, but I am a vet. And we vet things out. So we have figured out some of this and people are remembering, dogs don't lie. They give us answers, whether it's they're walking around with us or sitting on their couch, you're carrying your little buddy with you. They give us the real answers and there's a real opportunity to help them, which helps us in any way we can push the bureaucracy is of big benefit. But people don't, they don't have to live with it. You know, serious chronic pain is now under right to try. They can access. So you don't have to wait. We'll get there and we'll be sitting here hopefully three, four years from now. And now it's not just a state law. Now we have a federal approval and anybody, any veteran that has these issues can go get treated in their local city and it'll be there. But thanks for having us on. Like huge thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. And you're brand and everything you're doing. Super proud to be here. Happy to be here. So thank you. Yeah, I help people hear about this. It's a, yeah, my brain's definitely spinning. Different ways it could be implemented for sure. So yeah, thanks guys for writing the trip out. Absolutely. We're glad to come back and talk after I have my TBI study. You're gonna be done in California. That would be spectacular. Yeah, open the bite. Maybe this guy'll even be in the study, you never know. Maybe. Or get you in. Yeah. I don't have any TBI's. I'm totally good. You stupid. Sharp as a tack. Let's take you on. Anything, really appreciate it.