I have some bad news...

Hey friends, so I've got some bad news. I got diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and my stomach is eating itself. We just found out about this diagnosis last month when I did a bidirectional endoscopy, which means it's a colonoscopy and also you go down the throat as well. So looking at my entire intestinal tract. And so this is actually something that I was diagnosed with when I was 21 years old. I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. And so I started taking hormones to modulate my thyroid, but the thyroid and the stomach actually pair really well together in immunology. So when you have a problem with the thyroid, you sometimes have a problem with the stomach. There's actually a clinical name for it. And so I didn't know this thing was happening inside my stomach, but what happens is, so think of your immune system like you have trillions of soldiers. Each one is an immune cell. And they have a specific key, and this key is designed to destroy a specific target, like a virus or bacteria. Some of my immune cells, some of these warriors, uh, went rogue, and instead of attacking a foreign threat, they started attacking my own stomach. And that's why this process is eating my stomach. And so what this does is it changes my stomach acidity, so I can't actually process, uh, certain things. Like, for example, I can't process iron. So if I were to eat foods with iron or take supplements, I can't absorb it into my body. And so it leads to nutritional deficiencies, anemia, and even it can create risk of cancer. And so what happened is, you know, a lot of people, they look at my, my protocol and they'll say, this is insane. You've been measuring yourself so much over the past couple of years. Like, how is it possible you missed this? It's actually a really hard one. And I'll give you some context because I think it's relevant for each one of you. So looking back, I can now piece together the, the puzzle. So I've had low iron, low ferritin for 11 years. And it's very common in medicine for doctors to see this and they see other markers like your hemoglobin and your hematocrit and say, those are normal. Therefore you're not anemic. So you must be okay. But low iron is something you really want to look into. And so I just revamped my medical care team earlier this year. And when they came on board, we said, we're going to take a fresh look at all things. And they looked at my low iron and they said, what's going on? And I said, yeah, like I've been battling this for a long time. I ate meat, I took supplementation, I tried all forms of iron. I tried different times a day, different sequencing of iron with various supplements. None of it worked. It didn't make the, the iron, my ferritin go up. And so one of my doctors said, okay, like alarm bells are going off in my mind because when that happens, it typically points to a potential of you having a polyp inside your colon, which is like bleeding. So you're losing blood from a polyp or you have some kind of cancer. And so they said, we got to get you in for a colonoscopy immediately. So we scheduled that and we did the colonoscopy and the doctor came back. Oh, so, um, okay, I'll come back to this in a second. So the doctor did my colonoscopy and he came back and said, visually, your colon looks great. And so as you'd expect, I said, okay, doctor, but I need a percentile. So what percentile would you put me in all men of a colon? He said, yeah, 95th percentile. He said, it's clean, it's great. So that was great. But then this is the thing, this is where this disease hides. So you can do a colonoscopy, the doctor can go there and inspect and not identify that you have this autoimmune condition. So what my doctors had done with foresight is they said, we're going to biopsy various samples inside your stomach so that if there's a problem that can't be detected visually, we'll find it in the biopsy. And so we did the biopsy, we had— we had it came back and there it was. Uh, so it's a hard— so first you have the gate of low iron is not taken as seriously as it should, um, even though you should point at this colonoscopy. But the second layer is even a colonoscopy didn't detect it. It was only from a biopsy which we found it. But now it kind of completes a puzzle where hypothyroidism was diagnosed at 21. It pairs with the stomach. So I've had this autoimmune condition for potentially 20+ years where it slowly eats away my stomach. So I guess the, the good news is a lot of people think of getting a diagnosis is bad, which certainly like none of us want a diagnosis, but I kind of feel energized by this. I feel excited by the diagnosis because I would so much rather know now than I would find out down the road when it's like, now it's creating cancer in your stomach. You know, I can do something about it. I— knowing about it allows you to do things earlier. And so I'm very excited. So yes, my stomach is eating itself, and that's also what makes me excited about it, because up until this point, I think people— like, when you get a diagnosis like this, the standard of care is So sorry, you know, let's manage this so that it doesn't, you know, like as best we can, let's manage it. But really it's just, you're conceding to the disease. No matter if it's fatal, you're just like, sorry, we can't do much about it. But now with our new tools of AI and biotech, we don't have to concede anymore. You know, when, like, when, when I got the diagnosis, my first thought was we're gonna solve it. Like we are absolutely gonna solve this. Now it's, it has never been cured. There is no known cure. So it's a, it's a really good challenge for us as a team. But, uh, we did immediately, I had 1 million of my immune cells sequenced. So we went in, we did this massive blood draw. We did 1 million of my immune cells and we look at each individual immune cell. It's actually an amazing technology. We have that ability to do it. And then we look at each of the immune cells' key. And we say, who are you? And by doing this, we'll take that information, then we'll do a second biopsy. So I have to go under again. We'll do a live biopsy of my stomach. We'll take those cells and then match them to the data. And we say, who of you are the rogue immune cells attacking me? And once we have those signatures, we know who they are, we can then design solutions to say, we're gonna stop you from doing those attacks internally. In the meantime, you know, it's, I think the response globally has been a lot of fun. I think there's a lot of people who are really concerned about the diagnostics, my diagnosis, which I appreciate very much. A lot of people are leaping for joy, just like, you know, how ironic and humorous it is that the Don't Die Guy is now getting diagnosed with this, uh, this, incurable disease. And I welcome all of it. You know, like I've, I was the first person to say, I'm most likely going to die of something incredibly ironic. It's just kind of my fate. I'm okay with that. I've reconciled with it. So I think the discussion is positive, but my team and I, we feel really fired up. Like we are ready for this task. We want this task. The past couple of years have been about how do you fine-tune the body through nutrition and exercise? And various protocols. And now it was like, how do you actually take on the diseases that create mortality risk for us and solve them?