Building Health Communities that last w/ Jeff T.

Welcome to the Silicon Fox Podcast, where we explore the habits and stories of high performers. I'm your host, Mitchell Eschner. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for hopping on the Silicon Fox Podcast.

It's great to be here.

I am— you've got a fun, a pretty fun background, and so I was excited to learn from that. I think it's pretty unorthodox to some of the other folks we've had on the show. So I do always like to start these by just giving you the chance to So, give us your quick background and what brought you to the world that you're operating in today.

Yeah, so, let's see. I really have been in the health space since I started a meal prep company called Eat Blueprint. We were making meals inspired by Bryan Johnson's Blueprint Protocol in San Francisco, and after running that For about six months, it was kind of it was kind of booming pretty fast. This is before Brian had launched any of his own products. Yeah, he reached out to me. We did an event together, and then he acquired the business, and I worked at Blueprint for about a year, where I launched Blue Blueprint meals nationwide, and also. Blueprint Biomarkers, which is the lab and diagnostics vertical, which was like MRIs with Ezra, blood tests, like a, you know, 300 biomarker blood panel, the world's first microplastics test, and a DNA methylation epigenetic age test. I also worked on the mobile app, integrating, bringing all those biomarkers into the app. I ran a lot of the events. We had these Don't Die summits in all these different cities. And yeah, about a year ago I left. In that time, I have really been looking closely into the space of peptides and compounding pharmacies. It was just very clear to me that that was the future of medicine, which is preventative and personalized. And yeah, now I'm running events. I call them peptide parties. One's in San Fran— I've done 2 in San Francisco, have one in LA in 2 weeks. I think I'm gonna do one in New York.

What do you guys do at these parties? Is it just a big peptide, you know, everyone's injecting or what's going on?

We haven't done any injections at the events yet. It might be too much. But we definitely have some peptides that people try. Specifically, we've got the copper peptide for skin cream, and then we've had other kind of Peptides like BPC for gut health, but no injectables. That might be too much for a party.

Yeah, up the stakes. Was the meal prep company, was that with Julius Ritter?

No. So Julius started it a little bit after me. He started a separate company.

Okay.

And so we were more so competing.

Got it.

Yeah, I'll, I'll, that's all I'll say there.

Got it. Yeah, I, uh, I know, I just, we, I've met the Superpower folks a few times. We actually had Max on the show. Um, and, uh, yeah, I saw there was like some involvement with, with Bryan Johnson stuff and a lot of these meal prep companies and so forth. Um, but super cool. And so now, now Full Peptides. I mean, you've like seemed to bounce around some pretty crazy events. There was like testosterone part. I, we, we had like this kind of research thing that I ran through and it was like testosterone parties, penis Botox meetup, all of this above. Yeah. I mean, how, like the, these IRL like health events that are alt, I can imagine that they attract quite an audience. Like what's the north star for you when you think about like the world of health and balancing the science versus the wellness versus like the for fun and, Kind of more playful version of it.

Yeah. So, I mean, we definitely have to explain the penis Botox party as well as the testosterone parties. So, the tea parties I did before I started Blueprint Meals, and that was when I was looking into male fertility and men's health. There's a— I learned the— I read the statistic that guys' testosterone levels are down like 40% in the last 40 years and their male fertility biomarkers like sperm count are down 60% in the last 40 years. And so, I started hosting these T-parties, which were testosterone testing parties. Again, just testing, we weren't shooting up T. And, you know, I did those in a few different cities too. It was kind of like the precursor to peptide parties. Yeah. But then I started the Blueprint Meal Prep Company. That kind of just happened. And that was just growing a lot faster.

And this was all a precursor to sperm racing, which you're also somehow involved with.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, it did come full circle where I— when I left Blueprint, the sperm racing team reached out to me. I don't know if people know about sperm racing, but it's another kind of like IRL event around health, and in this case, men's health, where they raised $10 million to race sperm, like Eric Zhu and some of his co-founders. And they just went mega viral, like close to a billion impressions, I think, on the first race. And then they reached out to me, just had— they had seen my work at Blueprint and said, hey, do you want to help us launch a brand? And so I started a separate company. It's like a sister company to Sperm Racing where we're the official gummy vitamin of Sperm Racing. And I called it Sperm Worms. So you can go to spermworms.com. You can go to SpermWorms Instagram, Twitter, it's still there. It's there, it's like running, it's growing. It's growing the fastest it's ever grown right now, actually.

And it's fertility gummies or what is it?

Yeah, it's fertility gummies. So we've got vitamins like zinc, CoQ10, folate, vitamin D, vitamin E, and all it does is help guys with their fertility health. So, increasing their sperm count, sperm load. It's pineapple flavored, so it should improve the taste as well. And yeah, this was just seeing where there was this big problem. And so, when Eric reached out to me, and I was like, wow, this was kind of initially what I was looking at before I started the longevity, more Blueprint-related stuff. And I had to do it. But it's going super well. I don't market it a ton. I don't really like put it on my socials, but I am also running that just like on the side. We've got a really great team that is kind of running the operations. But yeah, it's still live and doing well.

So what's this like desire or like crazy involvement in male fertility testosterone? I saw that statistic too, which I think it's like an interesting statistic 'cause it's hard to measure. It's the same thing as the people that throw out the statistic of divorce rates in the country, which is like 50% divorce rates in the US. When you really go below the COVID it's kind of hard. It's like net marriages this year versus net divorces this year, and that's not applicable because you're not tracking people over time. Fertility, I think, is potentially a little bit easier, but even then it's kind of hard. It's all self-reported, or people come to clinics, or you know, a lot of that kind of stuff. But I'm sure it is like a pretty big issue. I mean, I talk about it a lot. I'm relatively young and have a kid. So I'm curious like what the push and motivation was for you and where you think that space— because one thing I do find fascinating, like sperm racing, people will joke and it's kind of this meme, but there's actually something pretty interesting that it's getting a lot of younger folks or like this new generation that also has pretty bad fertility interested, involved, like meeting them where they're at to get them into this. Like, obviously, if their next, you know, if the next product lines are gummies or capabilities or therapies or lifestyle change, like, there's probably a lot of value in attracting people in the medium where they're used to. But I'm curious, like, what your internal motivation that got you into that space.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question, and it kind of I mean, for me, it was, I just want to solve, you know, problems. And particularly, I want to help people with their health, right? I myself had lymphoma, actually, when I was 14 years old. And I'm all good now, like knock on wood. But to me, that's kind of— maybe that was a starting point for when I realized, one, personally, how important health is. It's really the only thing thing that matters at the end of the day. And that kind of has just led me around my own experiments in biohacking since high school. But then, you know, further down the line of, you know, I want to help people, I want to make good use of my skills, I want to— and so I would rather like build companies in the health space. And I had done tech stuff before too. You know, that's— I first moved out to SF when I was 19. I was a software engineer, eventually did Y Combinator in 2021 with a software company, not even health-related. But when I wasn't enjoying that, and when we were honestly, like, in a bad market, I thought about what I really cared about, and it was health. But as far as, like, the crazy events go, and we should probably talk about, you know, the penis Botox party, 'cause you can't just, like, not explain that. Yeah, let's hear it. That was when I did invent, But that's when I did an event before I joined the Blueprint team with Brian. That Brian was at that point talking a lot about penis health, penile health. And I think he had talked about doing a penis Botox injection.

What is that? But like, what is it?

It's when It's exactly what it sounds like. It's when you get Botox injected into your penis.

And what's the purpose of— we might get striked down from YouTube for this, but now I'm very curious.

I mean, this is for health purposes only, but it's, it supposedly helps with the blood flow and maybe the overall structure. Uh, probably is mainly used for like size enlargement. But I don't know how I was doing the event with Brian. He was coming to SF for his first event, and he reached out to me because it's like I was—we were—we were cooking. Like we were cooking in SF. Like we were blowing up, and so he reached out to me, and he was like, "We should do an event together and just see if we get along." And I was like, "Sure, let's do it." I don't know what happened. Like maybe I just searched penis. Botox. And I found a doctor in the Bay Area that does penis Botox injections. And it was completely separate from Brian and just turns out to be a thing. And so when Brian came, I brought him and the doctor and we stood on a picnic table outside and we just like talked about it for like 10 minutes. People just had a Q&A on like, what is this? What does it do? Exactly like you asked. But yeah, that's the history of it. And for me, I've done all these kind of crazy events, being part of a blueprint of sperm racing and my own tea parties, now my own peptide parties. I think for me, community is just something that I love. It's something I care about a lot. I think a lot of people get a lot of information. There's a ton of information online already. On health, and maybe not all of it's good. So, you know, kudos to you for doing this podcast. But for me, it's about bringing people together to do things around health, right? It's like, it's not like an app is gonna solve your health problems or get you excited or information will, right? It's like, this is not just a software tool, right? Our events, I've typically had ice baths, right? And like red light therapy masks. And we get to try, you know, a bunch of interesting supplements or maybe peptides now, right? At my tea parties, I brought a nurse who literally drew people's blood, right? It's a very physical, you know, health is very physical, right? We're in our own bodies. And I bet it's probably my part of my larger thesis. of where we are right now, which is that, you know, we're in this like post-AGI world. Claude and Grok and Chat, they're already smarter than me and most humans and most things, right? And so what do you do when your intelligence is obsolete? I mean, you have just your body, right? That's what makes you human.

No, you implant a Neuralink, which will tell you to go work out and then you'll do it willingly. And you'll eat and you'll do all the right things because Neuralink will tell you to. AI will come through for your body too. It's not a—

Yeah, it will. It will. It's gonna program us, right? And it already is in the sense of, you know, Google Maps tells us where to go and how to navigate. We've already kind of lost our own spatial tactile awareness that we had for many, many centuries and thousands of years. But yeah, I mean, that's part of Bryan's thesis too, right? if you could outsource all of your decisions to an algorithm, then would you, right? Would you outsource it? And for him, that's the Blueprint Protocol. But I generally agree. I don't subscribe to Blueprint. Like, I don't literally do it every day. I definitely did back in the day. But for me, it's more just like, what do we have left? It's our body, it's our own biology, and our own agency over our own biology. That's really all we have now in this, like, AI era.

You know, one thing that I'd love to learn from you and get out of, you know, this conversation is really thinking a lot about consumer growth and community, because you've just talked about it. But I think people undervalue, you know, we spent some time, and I've gone to one of these events at the HPLT, the High Performance Lifetime. folks and Brian Mazza. And Lifetime Fitness acquired his group, which just did events. It was like 30 people, and it's like this highly curated 2 or 3 day event. And there's a lot of these now. You know, a lot of the fitness influencers have like their big home, you know, 2 or 3 day getaways. You do fitness, you talk, you bond, you go to the sauna, and it builds great meaningful relationships. It's its own version of like, why do in fraternities, you know, people get hazed? Or why in the military do you do half the things that you don't need to do? It's 'cause it all trauma bonds, and that's really the way to get people together. Or like, why do companies do offsites? And so bonding people over health creates an experience where it's like you're both accountable, you're actually doing net positive things. Maybe instead of people going out to drink, they're gonna go out to work out. I think that's a new trend we're seeing in this generation. I very much don't drink. My ideal business meeting would be like, hey, let's go grab a really early morning lift, and that would just like, I would really align with this person if they can do that. But it's difficult. I think there's very few folks that pull off these events at scale and are able to hack the current medium of consumer growth. In the software world, if you're in the San Francisco startup scene, you probably know Cluley and those folks. That type of community marketing has cracked the medium to some extent in socials and consumer software. But in health, I think there's been few folks that have like really been able to build strong communities and platforms outside of, again, the huge podcasters or Bryan Johnson or people like that. What do you think it takes? Like, what are the hacks? What are the secrets here for folks to build like really strong consumer brands, communities in like the current medium of whether it's social media or in person or just all the above? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not— I don't think I'm an expert. I'm like probably solid at it. I've done it a lot, but I don't think I'm like S-tier, S-tier. I'm still getting there. I'm still a baby in the space probably. But first, I mean, I would separate IRL versus URL. Like online is quite different from offline. Obviously recurring rituals is the most important thing for online, or sorry, offline, offline. So in person, the most successful example there is, is, is HYROX, right? Because they have— And like CrossFit, generally speaking. CrossFit has a very, very strong culture as a sport, much more than almost any other sport that I can think of. And certainly the most dominant recent new sport that people engage with. People watch MMA and that's blowing up and they have a very strong community too. And CrossFit had that even before HYROX, but CrossFit turning into this kind of format of of HYROX's competition, it just completely takes over. It's taken over so many gyms in cities.

But there has been like a lot of races and like, why HYROX? If you were to really dissect these brands and like think about what makes people love community and brand, and maybe you're not an expert, but I think you're doing a killer job of getting people in rooms and communities and like being in the room with a lot of these folks. Like pre-Hirox, there was a lot. There was like Tough Mudder, and there's you know Spartan. Spartan, and I mean Spartan was pretty big, but just like there were a lot of interesting things, local things, cross-country things, cross-world things that were communities and races. But like few of them break through. And like if you look at those markets alone, like I recently learned that there's like huge private equity funds that just like target only like events groups of fitness. It's not a small market. There's a lot of these kinds of things going on. But if you look at people that really hit penetration, like Hyrox is an incredible story of fast growth. But it's kind of interesting to know, like, why was that the case? Was it just the right timing that CrossFit kind of blundered the brand and had this huge turnover?

In comes Hyrox, you know, post-COVID, everyone's back in fitness. It's accessible, it's easy. There's elite. There's also just like the lower, lower end where it's easier to do. These are all smaller things, but I feel like there's a lot of cases of that. So there has to be something that they did that was incredibly strong with consumer brand, community, IRL, and this whole like health movement from a community perspective. Are you a health coach or running a health course and looking to level up your clients' experience? With Cyfox Health's at-home blood test, you can deliver lab-quality blood work right to your client's door, seamlessly ship samples back for fast and actionable results, personalize every consult with the data that matters. Clients who complete a Cyfox test are 60% more likely to enroll in a paid program, After their consult compared to those who only join a sales call. If you're ready to give your clients the edge, go to psyfoxhealth.com/partner. And as a Silicon Fox Podcast listener, enjoy 10% off your first bulk order.

Well, I mean, I think one difference there is that I didn't— I don't know the history of CrossFit actually that well, but I do know CrossFit through that channel has created a lot of successful brands. And I'm not talking fitness brands, I'm talking about actually Chomps and RX Bar. You know, if you study consumer packaged goods businesses, both got really strong liftoff in CrossFit as like paleo-first consumer, you know, consumable brands. And when I think of Hyrox, a lot of what they did right was go to gyms. If I understand correctly, they went to a lot of gyms, and you'll see like people at a CrossFit gym. And you'll see who won the high rocks, or you'll see times there. Tough Mudder and Spartan are kind of just like these big events that you go to once a year, and they don't— they feel kind of divorced from when you're training back home, right? Like, I don't see Spartan or Tough Mudder— I never saw those hung up at the CrossFit gym, right? And so when you just have these like once-a-year events, it's kind of like conferences that just happen once a year. A lot of them, the momentum dies because at the end of the day, the gym is where you practice and that's the 2, 3, 4, 5 time per week ritual that happens. And so, you know, shifting out of CrossFit, then you have ice baths and sauna culture. And there's also obviously very strong, you know, brick-and-mortar startups blowing up right now. You know, Bathhouse raised like $40 million or something like pretty crazy recently with like 2 locations. Right, Othership, I think they raised their Series A, they've got multiple locations now. And those are physical locations. But then I'm in LA right now. I'm good friends with Coffee and Chill, my friends Blake and George. And they are crushing it too. And they don't even have a physical brick-and-mortar sauna house. They just go to different locations in Venice, like different backyards, different houses, different parking lots at bars. Every two weeks, and now they've expanded to five or six different cities. They had an event in Miami with like thousands of people. They had one in LA, I think just last week with a thousand people just taking over all of the Venice Boardwalk. And it's because they have this ritual that happens every two weeks.

So consistency, because like what what about that? I mean, that part fascinates me because there's like so many people that are trying something again. Same thing with podcasting. There's so many people that are trying in the podcasting. health world. And a few break through. Like, for us, it was luck. And, you know, you can pseudo-call us broken through or not, but it was luck. It was like a great episode, and then that just kind of like had residual listeners over time. But like—

That's not luck though, right? Because if you listen to a lot of podcasters of how they blew up, everyone says like the first year it was like just shit, and then eventually just one of them blew up, right? Because content is a volume game. Certainly now. I mean, there's— I mean, you don't have to do volume. You can do super like dense, you know, that's more acquired or like founders. Yeah. But it's a barbell, which is that like, you should either have like an instant classic, or you should have just insane volume. And through volume, you get better quality, like through reps, you improve. And then eventually the algo is, and then it's just gonna pick you up, you're gonna get better guests. Slowly and slowly, and then with the internet, eventually one will blow up, and then you'll you'll kind of be at the next turning point.

And so I'm

just saying it's not luck; it's just like there's

so many

podcasters like you that after year one, like they had nothing, and

then yeah, maybe not luck, but there's got to be you know maybe I don't know if it's podcasting like even IRL things like building brand. Maybe it's just the details, but I mean look if we like sat here and brainstormed how to go build because some of these folks in IRL are like both. Printing so much money, actually connecting people. They're walking out of the rooms, and there's like a bunch of new friendships formed, and it's all experience-based. And I mean, maybe it's just that easy. I don't know. I haven't hosted events, and I don't not really.

I mean, events. What so what what events do make money? Because I feel like a lot do not make money. I don't

know. I mean, most like tech or health events with sponsors that like all the. You know, startup neobanks or all the health sponsors are printing cash, and they're both making money and they're connecting people, and it's like a pretty big incentive win. But just like even getting the right people in the door, filtering, getting the right type of funnel when you have no social media presence, like it's all kind of a huge cold start problem.

Well, I mean, you need a social media— I mean, you need to get over the cold start problem for a community, right? And for me, I always had a a modest following on Twitter. And so, that's how I was able to attract. But even one of my events in, it wasn't even in the US, but it was in Colombia. There was actually, that was my second event. And the first event was in Ecuador, just at a founder retreat. Neither of those were through Twitter, I guess, now that I think about it. But they were in just these communities where people really cared, right? And so, that's why the CrossFit gym has probably been a great starting point for for a lot of different brands outside of CrossFit itself, which is like those communities just like have inherent network effects at that local level, right? Like Coffee and Chill, you don't need to be on Instagram, even though they have a really great Instagram, and that's probably where they get a lot of top of funnel. But you don't need to be on Instagram to know, because if you're in Venice on the west side of LA, you're just gonna know, you know, there's Venice Friend Club, there's Coffee and Chill, you know, there's like Mud Water, there's these places that everyone just knows in an area. that just break through. And SF, super dense, everyone knows everyone. Twitter, it's a very small world actually. But getting over the cold start problem, that's for sure hard. But if you just, if you're a fitness brand, if you're a consumer brand or a health brand, that's like the go-to-market is pretty straightforward. You just like try to go to like run clubs, you know, and just like find people, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's actually, I mean, I feel like, yeah, probably a lot of it's just showing up and consistency and that kind of thing. Kind of shifting to peptides, we talked about them a little bit, but I, you know, I don't know if you saw the recent FDA stuff and they're deliberating and probably has a lot to do with RFK Jr.'s push on this and a lot of the CEOs that are in his ear about peptides and like the component of it. I guess maybe you're coming at this from like a more wellness events kind of frontier health stuff. How do you think about like, just from someone in your perspective, feeling comfortable, you know, testing all these things in your body and trying all these different kinds of peptides when maybe you're like not coming from it with like a very ground-up, let me look at years of research scientific perspective? And like same with these events, like what are you finding across these folks? 'Cause it seems like implementation has hit pretty big scale. I mean, we've, we had a lot of folks in this pod that have done this. Like we had Joy and Blokes and Josh Whalen from there. Yeah. We had a lot of people that have kind of gone into the compound pharmacy space. And again, really, really attractive market. A lot of people are joining. Then, like, always begs the question of, you know, are the haters haters because they're just anti-progress, or are they haters because there are slightly, you know, more like, this is healthcare and more rigorous? Because the folks that are, like, really pro-peptide right now are, like, very tech bro, you know, move fast, break things, and it's like your body. And Silicon Valley meeting healthcare sometimes has worked out, and there's a lot of Great healthcare unicorns, but also, you know, there's Theranos and there's a million other things that have happened. So how have you thought about it in these events and just like interesting stories that you may have heard?

Yeah, I mean, I think when I first started learning about peptides, I was like, I mean, I bought my first peptide, BPC-157, like 2, 3 years ago, and I was just like too scared to try it. I was like, I don't want to inject myself. needle, like, I don't want to get cancer. I had lymphoma when I was 14, you know, like, I had pretty invasive surgeries. But as just like anything, you know, when you see other people doing it, when they seem to have incredible results, and then the more I surround myself with the scientists, the doctors, the patients who have recovered, the pharmacists, the more I realized that, you know, this is not snake oil. Like, this stuff clearly works. I mean, half of the peptides are produced in your own body, like, already. They're byproducts of your mitochondria, of your gut, right, of your liver, of your kidney. And so that, along with looking into the science, Of like, oh, this definitely works. I think for a lot of people, if you're not that educated on it, for most people it's like they try Ozempic or Mounjaro, tirzepatide, and then they just see incredible results. And that's essentially the gateway drug to being like, okay, if that's a peptide and I also injected it, you know, what else? And it wasn't that bad. Like, it's really not that bad. It's not a needle, like a blood draw or a shot. Yeah. It's a tiny, tiny shot, subcutaneous, that really doesn't hurt. Then they open their eyes and they're like, oh, maybe there's other stuff out there. And there is. And there is. It's like, this is not— obviously there can be some, like, overpromising, just like literally everything in the health space. But, you know, I was at the FDA meeting. Yeah. Wow. I met, yeah, it was like, okay, look at all these doctors that I've been using clinically for years. I met the guy who discovered MOTS-c. He's a professor of gerontology. He's a dean at USC in California. These are very legitimate people. And if you just look at peptides more broadly, it's like, okay, there's over 100 peptides that are FDA approved. Right? There's insulin and Ozempic and all the GLPs, which are literally the 2 best-selling drugs of all time. Those are peptides. And insulin has been around for like 80, 100 years at this point. And so if you just say like, oh, peptides are all good or peptides are all bad, that's obviously incomplete. But like clearly it's just a class of molecule that can be very beneficial. And obviously some do more than others, but, and maybe some are probably just like not great to be used by humans 'cause there's just better alternatives. But there's, it's kind of like, I do just, I would say that they're generally speaking, probably in between traditional drugs and supplements in the sense of some are definitely more supplement-like. You can just take them like an oral capsule. And some are more drug-like where you're gonna have a pretty intense reaction potentially, and you might want a prescription for it, like even tirzepatide, Mounjaro, Zepbound, right? And it's an injectable. So, like, it is necessarily a drug because you're injecting yourself with a substance that could obviously have quite strong reactions in your own body. But really what we're seeing right now is the consumerization of healthcare, which is that for most of all for modern healthcare, which probably traces back to like World War II, when employers started providing insurance, and just like modern medicine, that this was a system where people got prescriptions from their doctor. They just said, they just listened to whatever the doctor said. And particularly since COVID and the emergence of telemedicine, There's just been more and more consumerization of healthcare where people are doing their own research. They're talking to their friends, they're getting information online because the current systems are just not working anymore. They are not trusted by people, by patients. And the current American health system, again, this is why I'm doing this. I think it's probably the most broken part about America. I think we will look on This era of America as the dark ages when it comes to healthcare. And me as a patient, why would I listen to my doctor when I— it takes— when it takes 6 months to get an appointment? I fill out the same paperwork the 100th time. I have a 15-minute conversation. Maybe they kick me off to a specialist. I have to schedule again, fill out the paperwork again. It's another 15 minutes. And then let's say they give me a prescription. Oh, it's like not covered by insurance. Or it's like, oh, it was passed by prior auth, but oh no, they don't have it anymore. It's actually, you have to use a generic version, right? So, and then all the stuff that happened during COVID like whatever side you stand, it doesn't really matter. It was clearly not the best response by America compared to other countries, right? And obviously America's tougher, but like, clearly American healthcare is just not working anymore. We're paying the most out of any country. We're having the worst outcomes despite that. There's hundreds of $200 billion in medical debt, right? And I'm not saying that Hims is really the only solution, like quote unquote pill mill of just like giving cheap things at the best price with zero friction, not talking to a doctor at all. But people are just going to do their own thing because the current system is not working. And I think the most obvious indicator of that is that If the CEO of top insurance company UnitedHealthcare gets shot and the people are celebrating, we should probably introspect for a second and wonder why that is. And it's because everyone fucking hates insurance, most of all the doctors, right? All my doctor friends just hate insurance. They spend 70% of their time doing admin instead of actually working with patients. And it's not their fault. It's because insurance companies and PBMs have— pretty much broken the whole system. And I think we need better alternatives. And a lot of that comes through the consumerization of healthcare where people are paying out of pocket for better choices, to have a choice at the very least, to have price transparency, which doesn't exist in traditional healthcare. But, you know, that's kind of my tangent.

No, it's fair. I mean, it's making markets efficient, especially something as important or foundational as healthcare. I mean, yeah, like insurers having Payers having problems and, you know, flawed incentives. I mean, some of this is getting saved with value-based care. I mean, I think the Luigi shooter is just a horrible person. I don't know what, you know, it's no reaction to have for systems being inefficient, uh, and completely unacceptable. But, um, like, yeah, there's the hope in healthcare that, uh, you know—

It's completely unacceptable, but again, you have to listen to the voice of the people sometimes. And when so many people are cheering it on, you know, like, I don't condone it, I don't condone it, but clearly a lot of people—

It's a very—

I don't support it, I don't support it, I'm not for it, but like, you can look at how many people support it, how many average Americans support it, and you can't deny that.

For sure, no, I look, people being anti-health insurance, for sure, I think the action is incredibly unjustified, but yeah, like, I think in general, I mean, like, you worked in the startup space, or are in the startup space, People should be agentic. You know, their response should be, you're unhappy about it? Like, let's go value-based. Let's push things value-based. Let's go support value-based providers. Let's make things value-based. Let's be preventative. Like, a lot of folks in Medicare have the capability to get screened yearly for preventative, but they don't show up. You know, so if now you're gonna cheer on that somebody was, you know, you're anti-payers, but you're not kind of doing your part as well, there's issues there too. I think there's like, So, the system obviously is very flawed, but I think also, and it's hard to navigate, so folks that don't know what they have at their disposal, but I think like one of the biggest things that I hope, you know, for folks is like there is effort in finding the path of least resistance, even if it's the effort, 'cause I think healthcare is worth it to get to their outcomes that they want and using things that already exist. Again, it's not easy to navigate and know like, hey, I can be covered for preventative tests, or hey, why am I getting billed when I could spend hours on the phone. Not everyone has the luxury of doing that and having the time, but there are these kinds of things and they can push towards value-based, find ways where—

Yeah, but I mean, how much has value-based care actually taken over, right? Like, how— so why does that— Actually a

lot. So in kidney care, it's like, yeah, it depends on specialty. I think it's way less than we think, but in kidney care, it's 53% of kidney care contracts are value-based. Cardiology is pretty weak. It's like less than 20%, I believe. I don't remember. The exact number for cardiology. So it depends on the specialty, but a lot of them are. I mean, like kidney care, I know relatively well, but there are folks with huge patient panels that are value-based where their entire incentive is to like improve outcomes and help. And it's difficult, you know, like I operated in this world and operate and like a lot of patients are against it. And so if you as the value-based entity are trying to help patients, 'cause you're, there's like the bifurcation in patients. There's like the ones that are taking, cash pay health things, and they're very incentivized because they're on their own accord. And then there's the rest of the world that are maybe complaining about payers, but they're also not doing anything for their own health. And so then it's this kind of weird dance where, like with the VBC, if their objective is to prevent a lot of the health outcomes, negative health outcomes, it's difficult if they're having to like, you know, call you 50 times like, hey man, like you said you're gonna check your blood pressure today, why don't you do it? And now it's like this I guess capitalism works 'cause their business is built on doing that and it's for the greater good and everyone's gonna win here. But it's just like people themselves aren't having the agency to look for health. And so, I mean, that kind of actually brings us back to this initial point of communities. How many people would actually show up to work 6 days a week, work out 6 days a week? Almost nobody. Very, very few folks probably in the greater population will actually do that. But when there's friends, when there's social pressure, when there's a gym that you enjoy with people that you like, and again, back to the community aspect, It works. And so, there probably is a lot of value in bringing community-based health to healthcare beyond the wellness kind of world, but bringing it to first principles acute healthcare. The difficulty is just like no one's cracking that nut, and it's not the youthful, high-energy social media crowd. It's probably folks that are harder to build community for and aren't as easy to penetrate, but that would be a very interesting opportunity. Because, again, you're trying to help people, but they're not adhering. So it's very hard to do. And yeah, I mean, value-based has its own problems because of attribution. And it's really difficult to know, did I save you because I saved you, or did I save you because this year you just happened to be healthier? And then no one gets paid, and so no one's incentivized to go build VPC stuff. But yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating space with a lot going on.

Yeah, I mean, you can't— make people care about health if they don't care about it. You know, luckily, I got into sports when I was younger, my parents were super into sports. And at least in places like LA, and SF, New York, you've got all these run clubs, you've got all these young people that are being healthy, and, you know, want to do things socially. But I think you can find communities online as well, right? If you go to like the Reddits, For peptide subreddits and GLP subreddits, it's actually crazy.

Yeah, I can imagine like some of the frontier stuff is always happening on the Reddits and the Discords of the world.

It's not even frontier though. Like the subreddits for GLP communities are crazy where they're talking about all the different telehealth companies. They know all the compounding pharmacies in there. And these are just like, these are much more like Middle America people. And, you know, I think when you have a pain point and people care about it, like people will find them, find each other online. They will if they've got enough of a pain point. And yeah, I do think community is what I'm leaning into right now, but I think— One thing that I still struggle with today, you kind of mentioned it earlier, is like finding that right balance between fun and like entertainment, sort of on one side and then education on the other. I would say like my first event, we had a lot. It was much more like a party. We were just like hanging out, social. There was like no talks, no discussion. It was just a hangout with peptides involved. The second one was a lot more educational where we had 2 speakers come, a doctor and a patient. They both spoke at the FDA meeting in DC on peptides and it was drier. I'm not going to lie, it wasn't as fun, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot more. But yeah, it wasn't as viral. That's for sure.

Yeah, that's fair. What's it called? Well, kind of wrapping up here, I'm curious, what's the new and most exciting thing coming up for you or the world of peptides in the next year that you're pumped about or spending time on?

The most exciting things, I'd say there's 2. One is just seeing what happens with the FDA and what happens with these peptides, right? They, 6 out of 7 had a positive vote, a positive recommendation to join the bulk list so that, you know, patients could get it with a prescription. But it hasn't happened yet. It was just a recommendation. We don't know when that's final. And, you know, there's going to be more peptides for review, like could more peptides become eligible. I think like, and then there's all this news every single day, like you mentioned earlier, of like Red at True Tide, Eli Lilly sending out 6 lawsuits yesterday. There's like something happening every day in this world, good and bad, that it's actually just like an insane time to be alive. Like being at the FDA actually felt like a movie. It was just insane.

Yeah, I can imagine. That's crazy.

And the second thing is just seeing what other peptides are coming out just in general and new frontier drugs. Yesterday I tried seltarexant, which is a phase 3 orexin antagonist, and I got the best sleep I got all day, all week. On this sleep drug. It's not a peptide. But, you know, seeing what the future of, like, biology is, which is like, can we actually solve aging? Can we solve sleep or, like, radically reduce the need for sleep? Can we just extend human capacity in ways that we've never thought before? That's the more exciting thing for me personally. Yeah.

I love it. I love it. Well, I'm gonna have to pick your brain at some point or co-host an event with you to learn how to make this whole thing work. And I'll have to have you be my new peptide dealer. I've been very new to this world, so that'll be fun. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for helping on the Silicon Fox Podcast.

It's great to be here. Thanks.