035 - Can You Reverse Heart Disease? Early Detection, AI Scans & The Future of Cardiology
In this interview, preventative cardiologist Dr. John Osborne (founder of Clear Cardio) discusses the overwhelming impact of atherosclerotic plaque as the leading cause of death, the shortcomings of traditional reactive cardiology, and the promise of early detection using high‑resolution 640‑slice cardiac CT combined with artificial‑intelligence analysis. Osborne explains how AI can spot plaque as small as a tenth of a period, enabling a "cardiac colonoscopy" that identifies disease before symptoms appear. He outlines the "pyramid of prevention"—lifestyle, diet, and exercise at the base, with invasive surgery at the top—and argues that most heart attacks stem from plaque rupture rather than severe blockages. The conversation covers Clear Cardio’s clinical workflow (full‑body CT, AI‑driven plaque quantification, and a comprehensive treatment toolbox that includes diet, exercise, lipid‑lowering drugs, and other proven interventions), the low radiation dose of modern scans (≈0.2 mSv, comparable to a chest X‑ray), and the business model of scaling the service across major U.S. cities and internationally. Osborne emphasizes patient empowerment, the need for self‑pay or concierge pathways when insurance lags, and his ultimate goal of eliminating heart disease so that preventive cardiologists become obsolete. The host, Brad, reinforces the relevance for an over‑40 audience focused on longevity and highlights the practical steps listeners can take to access Clear Cardio’s services.
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this is the pyramid of prevention, right? At the very top of the pyramid, people get like to the points where your dad is, and we need surgeries and we cut off toes and right. That's where we want to— that's where we should not focus. It should be the base of that pyramid, right? And the base of that pyramid, Plan A, as I like to say, is always diet, exercise, non-pharmacologic stuff. How do we prevent diabetes? How do we prevent high blood pressure?
Never heard of this. My stress test was normal. But then I had a heart attack. What if I told you that's not rare, and that most people are walking around with plaque and have no idea? Well, in this episode, I'm sitting with Dr. John Osborne, a preventative cardiologist and founder of Clear Cardio, to talk about the real longevity game, catching heart disease before it catches you. Now, Dr. John mentions that heart disease and plaque-related heart deaths are the number one killer in the world by far. than the following next 3 or 4. So this is something that you might want to pay attention to, and some of the new technology that just came out 2 years ago, and that Dr. John and his team with Clear Cardio are implementing across the nation. If you're over 40 and you care about living longer and living better, then this episode might be for you. So I keep talking about my school community that I'm on, and I've grown into about 100 members, and I'm really trying to help out the over-40 crowd, putting a platform out there that's better than Facebook groups. I really love this school setup. Having any type of discussion. And if you can look at the tabs here, from general discussion to focusing on diet, movement, inflammation, this is just where I'm spending my time. Once again, check out the show notes for the link, or if you just Google Over 40 Fitness Hacks School, S-K-O-O-L, I will be the first thing that pops up on Google with the school emblem right there. And you can sign up that way. Check us out. Hope to see you there.
Dr. John, I'd just like to thank you for coming on my show. The over 40 crowd, I think, really knows how important heart health is. Everyone's scared of heart attacks. It's one of the leading causes of death out there. And just, you know, as we age, just naturally a concern. And for my show, we've kind of got more into the, you know, just standard weight loss and aesthetics, more into like, we're kind of more focused on longevity and what are these new things coming out that we can test for? Because we know we don't have tests for everything. So we'll use your knowledge today to kind of get us on track. But before we get into some of the cool stuff, my audience always wants to know, How you got into what you're doing, and I'll let you take it away.
Absolutely. So, Brad, thank you again for sharing your time and having me on your show. I'm so excited to be here. And I think interestingly, your evolution from sort of aesthetics and weight, which is phenomenal and great, and frankly is also great for the heart too, particularly the weight stuff, to really going, wait a minute, I'm having another birthday. And as you know, big discussion out there is longevity these days. That's one of the biggest hot topics in healthcare. And, and part of longevity is that whole issue of the difference perhaps between lifespan and healthspan. And I obviously would want those to be the same or as close to the same as possible. I will point out something that is, is, is obvious that if you do not have lifespan, then your healthspan doesn't matter. So, if you're doing everything in your 40s and everything's perfect and your weight's perfect and you're exercising and you're doing high intensity, training and whatever else and not smoking and you've lost weight and all of that stuff, but you die of a heart attack at 50. You had a great healthspan, but it shouldn't stop at 50 or 55 or whatever. And the reason I say that is still roughly in 2026 with current statistics, about 45% of us, if you think of this as a pie chart, 45% of us, what's our biggest threat to our longevity? Frankly, lifespan is cardiovascular disease. That's strokes and heart attacks. Roughly kills about 40 to 45% of us.
And is that still number 1 on the list?
By far.
Yeah.
Even— and it's been number 1 for the last 120 years. It was number 1 throughout COVID. It is strokes and heart attacks. It is cardiovascular disease. It is plaque-dependent diseases, basically. That has been by far the leading cause in the US for about 120 years. Even COVID did not eclipse cardiovascular death. And worldwide, also the global largest global killer, 20 million people a year will die of cardiovascular disease year in, year out. So I started my training, got an MD. I also got a PhD in cardiovascular physiology, learned early on I wanted to do cardiology, went to the best place in the country to study cardiology, which is a place called Brigham and Women's Hospital, one of the Harvard hospitals in Boston after doing my MD and my PhD. And interestingly, so this is the '90s. And the big focus back then, of course, was blockages, stents, balloon surgery, right? Fixing blockages and all that's good and fine. But during my experience there, I realized, but wait a minute, this is not communicable disease. This is not COVID. We don't go from, I am perfectly healthy. I have no plaque. So in my training in the '90s, we're very focused on blockages, narrowings, finding them, stress testing to find them, ballooning people, cathing people, stents, balloon surgery, all that stuff. But I thought about, wait a minute, you know, this is not communicable disease. It's not like you go from a perfectly normal vessel to a blockage. Something happened in the meantime. And so I thought, well, wait a minute, we need to find, if you want to think of it, and I, it's really a pretty great analogy, is I really began to think about, we're finding all this cancer of the coronaries, the blockages. What about finding the polyps? What about the early stuff? And how do we do that? Well, in the '90s, we didn't have that technology. However, in the early 2000s, we began to develop technology called cardiac CT, which was very much in its infancy. And I realized that is going to be the solution that allows us to identify the early baby plaques when they're very treatable and stoppable and reversible, in which case then people never get to the daddy plaques, the blockages, and stents and balloons and surgery and heart attacks and strokes are eliminated.
Yeah.
That was my genesis. There was no such thing as preventative cardiology back in the '90s. So I basically had to develop my own training program along the way over the last— I've now been in practice 29 years. It took me 7 different boards, lipids, hypertension, echocardiography, nuclear cardiology, cardiac CT, internal medicine cardiology, to basically put together my own self-training in preventative cardiology. Not that I cared about having lots of expensive pieces of paper on the wall. But there really was no program going, oh, preventive cardiology, take this door and they'll train you for a few years and you'll come out as a newly minted preventive cardiologist.
I'd rather see that doctor first, by the way, the preventative cardiologist.
Exactly. And what's amazing is now with the tools we have, so this is not pie in the sky, this is what we have right now with using the appropriate technology, cardiac CT, so very high resolution, 3-dimensional imaging of the heart and the blood vessels. Now combining that with like everything else, AI, but the AI added to the cardiac CT images is unbelievably sensitive. We can pick up plaque that is a 10th of the size of a period at the end of a sentence. Wow. That is how sensitive this is. Okay. And in fact, now using AI, and we've now done hundreds of thousands of these, by the way, over the last about 4 years, 1% of us using the, I call the microscope of AI, Will be normal. Okay. It's like having the perfect SAT score.
Yeah.
1% of us, 99% of us using cardiac CT, which is a simple non-invasive test. We use this Donut of Destiny, we call it. It's a CT machine. We put an IV in your arm, very fancy machine. Literally the scan to get the information takes an 8th of a second. We then process that with AI, which literally will show us plaque that we cannot see with our eyes. We can also then quantify it, track it, measure it over time. And that has been the real revolution in the imaging aspect of preventive cardiology over the last few years. And that's what we do at Clear Cardio. 99% of us will have plaque. 1% of us will be normal. The vast majority of these people have no idea, no symptoms, no chest pain. I feel fine. I like to say normal stress test last week. So our goal is really to now do essentially cardiac colonoscopy, right?
Yeah.
Find the polyps, take care of the polyps. We can stop and reverse them, We have incredibly effective and proven tools to stop and reverse plaque. The problem is, and the major limitation in cardiology, is we've never focused on the early detection, on the, as I like to call it, the cardiac colonoscopy, which is now here. It is now available.
Yeah. You know, my knowledge of the heart and everything is very such limited. I've only seen my dad going through all this testing. He's now 82 and he's had some issues. Of the statistics of all like the cardiac-related deaths, how much of the percentage of that is related to like blockages? Because I know there's literally like 50 other things that could go wrong with your heart. Because I'm watching my dad go through this right now. There's valves that are malfunctioning.
Valves, electric.
Yeah.
Yeah. In fact, I like to say, you know, when people ask what I do, sometimes I'll be snarky and I'll say, well, in reality, I'm just a general contractor. I do some plumbing, I do some electrical, right? So yeah, there's a lot of things that I hate to say can go wrong with your heart. There's a lot of parts, but by far the single biggest thing is plaque, is atherosclerosis.
It is.
Okay. Are those blockages, right? That's the biggest thing. So here's the stats. Roughly 40, 45% of us right now, as of today with current stats, will die of a stroke or heart attack, which is about 40 to 45% too high, right? I would argue heart disease, particularly plaque heart disease, the stuff that causes those strokes and heart attacks, with early imaging, with early detection, with appropriate personalized treatment, can be completely, almost completely eliminated. The problem is we wait until we have symptoms.
Yeah.
And by the time we have symptoms, we don't have a little bit of disease, we have really extensive disease. So, Basically, it's like using a test that can only detect stage 4 end-stage metastatic cancer. Anything less than that, I have no idea.
Yeah.
So, a great question. 85% of the people who have a heart attack, if you did a heart cath or an angiogram a week beforehand, 85% did not have severe blockages. It is what we call plaque rupture. So, over decades, years, decades, we form plaques in these blood vessels. By the way, they grow outward, not inward. So that plaque is really being warehoused in the blood vessel wall, in the donut, not the donut hole.
Yeah.
So if you look at if there's any severe blockages, there's not. All the activity is occurring in the blood vessel wall and that blood, that plaque being stored in the blood vessel wall, that fatty, buttery, nasty cholesterol plaque is literally separated from the blood flow by a single layer of cells called the endothelium. If that plaque ruptures, rips open, breaks open, flakes off within seconds to minutes as it encounters that cholesterol, which is very thrombogenic, that is, it likes to form a blood clot within seconds to minutes. If that blood vessel ruptures, as we call it, it'll then fill the remaining lumen, the channel, that blood vessel with a clot. That is the pathway that people have heart attacks. That's why in half of men and two-thirds of women, the first symptom of heart disease, first time you know you have it, kills you.
Yeah.
Right. The lucky guy—
it shouldn't go through. It could end up becoming a stroke, right? Isn't that how it works?
Exactly. Right. Or, if that same process occurs in the neck and the blood vessels of the carotid arteries going to the brain, we call that a stroke. But, the process and the plaque behind it and the process is exactly the same.
Yeah. So, here's another problem because I'm watching my dad go through this. He had atherosclerosis. I don't know how closely related that is to heart.
By the way, so we don't confuse everything, plaque, I like plaque because Yeah. You know, I'm a 2-neuron cardiologist, right? We're not very bright, right? So, I call it plaque. But, if you want to be specific and accurate, the best medical term is atherosclerosis.
Yeah. Plaque is easier to say. I still have problems saying it.
Exactly.
So, you know, I don't want to say what insurance he has, but the typical corporate, you know, healthcare out there, they do only to your age a scan right here on the neck because that's where it normally would— and it was 100% clear. Years later, he was having leg issues. And because of his pain, they went in and it was 86% blocked. And in my mind, I'm like, so it was a whole ordeal to clean that out. I can't believe that this is all they check. And then literally 2 years later, he started to have foot problems. And I had told him, I was like, okay, cool. They checked that leg. How come they're not checking your whole body or at least the other leg? And they're like, because I have no pain. And 2 years later, he gets a turf toe from playing golf and it just would not heal. It got worse and worse. They ended up amputating the toe. And finally discovering that even that side was like 93% blocked.
Right.
This is insane to me. My doctor, I go to a concierge doctor. He's like, I can get you a full scan of your whole body tomorrow. But I have the freedom to pick and choose because of my concierge. The corporate only waits for the, like you said, the—
Yeah. Oh, you're alive. Oh, this is great. Well, let's do this test now.
So that's the thing. You have to take healthcare into your own hands and push or just go pay cash and do it yourself.
No, I agree. I mean, a whole separate discussion on how pretty terrible healthcare is right now, and particularly for early detection, right? We do colonoscopies, women do mammograms, they do pap smears, right? We guys get our PSA tests, right? So we even now do low-dose CT scans for lung cancer in former smokers or people who smoke.
Yeah.
So we have a really great concept and idea of early detection of cancer, which is great, except plaque atherosclerosis, Kills more people than the next 7 causes of death, including cancer. I know. And what do we do?
All anyone's worried about is cancer these days.
And what are we doing to detect it early? Nothing. Right. We wait until we start losing toes. And the other thing, and your dad unfortunately illustrates this, is plaque can be very spotty. You could have completely normal vessels in the neck, which they easily look at with ultrasound, which is great. And yet have significant blockages in the heart or the legs or any other artery of your blood vessel. And good news, bad news. Our vessels are bigger than they need to be. We have tremendous reserve, right?
Yeah.
We can tolerate a blockage without any symptoms, any awareness, or even on screening for it called an ABI to look at blockage in the legs, up to a 70% blockage and have absolutely no symptoms and feel fine and have a normal test like an ABI because vessels are much bigger than they need to be. The bad news is by the time we blow through the first 70%, which takes decades, That last 30%, it doesn't take long for that 70% to go to 80%. And then we start losing toes or having heart attacks or strokes or whatever. So, by the time we start having symptoms, it's never too late, right? If you're breathing and have a pulse, we got you covered. We have incredibly effective tools to treat plaque. However, let's just never get there in the first place.
Yes. I don't want to get there.
No. Early detection.
Well, Dr. John, tell us more about Cleer Cardio. Is that a scan or a program of systematic checks? What's the whole— Concept.
Yes, it is. You know, 30 years of interest and passion in preventive cardiology. It's really what I've been doing for years. I started doing cardiac CT 25 years ago. You know, people would pretty much laugh at you, go, what are you doing? Right? But I knew it's okay. We'll show you. So we're now beginning to really hit the stride. Literally hundreds of papers and in the medical literature and all that to back this up. We're doing a really poor job translating that into Access to people. Okay. Great data, great science. It's amazing using cardiac CT, which I'll tell you about in a moment, and then AI. So it's out there. We're doing it. It's our standard of care, but really poor, as you mentioned before, translation into access to, you know, you go to your cardiologist, should they get this? Absolutely. Do they get this?
No. Yeah. And Dallas, Texas, how do I get it here?
Well, so, so we started in Dallas. We now have an office in Chicago. We'll be opening up an office in Manhattan here in January. We're working on an office in Miami. So we are working, and I apologize for the joke, but we are working to really get Clear Cardio out to as many people as we can. We hope in the next year to 2 to be in all the NFL cities, you know, high population, density population cities. But we do have lots of people that fly to Dallas and we're 20 minutes from DFW, 20 minutes from Love Field. 20 minutes from Addison if you fly your own jet. So, so it is pretty accessible, middle of the country. But we are really working on getting our technology out, which is several things. It's one, this incredible scan, which is this incredible high-resolution, 3-dimensional scan using a CT scanner, but a very, very specialized CT scanner. In fact, our scanner in Dallas was the first installation of this 640-slice CT machine in North America. That was 3 years ago. There are now 8 in the US. So it's an amazing piece of hardware, but now coupled with this incredible AI, I call it the microscope that literally can analyze the images and see plaque that we cannot see with our eyes. Okay. As humbling as that is, I've been doing it for 25 years, 25,000 scans later. In fact, I just finished up with a patient that we scanned him 4 years ago before we had the AI. Yeah, just a little over 4 years ago. And I said, it's normal. Yahoo. That's great. Well, we rescanned him and then we also took the old scan and sent it up to the cloud and did the AI on the old scan. Guess what? 4 years ago, he had something that I couldn't see.
Yeah. Now that's, that's the crazy thing about AI and, you know, some scary stuff about it, but also great stuff. But people think that, you know, the normal person using AI to try to be a doctor and all that. I've come to the conclusion that AI is really great. Going to the professional that's in that industry, even for myself, like doing personal training and low-level biohacking. When I'm using AI, I'll catch it on stuff and be like, "No, that's wrong." Da da da da da. And it'll be like, "Oh yeah, thank you for catching me on that mistake." Are you serious? So AI can mess up, but without a cardiologist using that info, I would put my eggs in the basket on you versus me on my heart health using AI.
And no. Used as a tool, it's a tool, right? It's not an end. I am a live person, by the way, but used as a tool, it can be unbelievably effective. So part of this is the scan. Part of it is now coupling with the AI. And then part of it is the 30 years of experience in preventative cardiology, right? Along the way, got board certified in lipidology, cholesterol, which by the way, only 100, which is really disappointing out there right now. There are about 100 cardiologists that are also board certified in lipids or cholesterol. That's it. So 2 per state, including Wyoming and Alaska, right? So very rare. And if you look at people that have decades worth of experience in cardiac imaging and lipids and cardiology, that list becomes extremely, extremely small.
Yeah.
So it's really the imaging, the AI, decades worth of experience in preventative cardiology and understanding plaque and the biology behind it, understanding all the tools that exist. And if you look at the Proven tools we have to treat plaque, to stop plaque, more importantly, to reverse plaque. We have a really robust, very large toolbox. It's incredible. And they're proven. Not only do these tools, diet, exercise, drugs, whatever, not only do they lower numbers, blood pressure, exercise, weight, cholesterol, those things, blood sugar, et cetera, but more importantly, they have been proven by applying these things. We have less deaths, less heart attacks, less strokes, less balloons, less stents, less bypass surgery. Our major problem is that all of those tools have been applied to really sick people that are well and deeply into extensive, what I'll call stage 4 disease like cancer. We've never had the tools to detect the early disease to stop it then before we have symptoms, before we get in trouble, before we lose our toes like your dad or need stents or balloons or surgery. And that's really where the— it goes back to the imaging, right?
Yeah.
Without the imaging, we, we don't have the ability to detect this stuff early. Or as early as we can and should.
Yeah. So say we all know the people who aren't as healthy, they're trying to get healthier. You know, those are the kind of what we think builds plaque over time. Let's put that aside. There's always people that just have genetics or something outside of diet and exercise that is causing this. Obviously you can detect that. Are there still good drugs and methods for even those people if they weren't caused by, you know, the normal unhealthy habits?
Oh, absolutely.
Okay. So, we still have something for everybody, basically.
Yeah. You know, I always think of this as the pyramid of prevention, right? At the very top of the pyramid, people get like to the points where your dad is, and we need surgeries, and we cut off toes, and right? That's where we want to— that's where we should not focus. It should be the base of that pyramid, right? And the base of that pyramid, Plan A, as I like to say, is always diet, exercise, non-pharmacologic stuff. How do we prevent diabetes? How do we prevent high blood pressure? And in fact, we know with good lifestyle, just good old lifestyle. I mean, I think that everybody knows, eat right, exercise, don't start smoking, do all the right stuff. Even if you have a high genetic risk, good lifestyle can lower that genetic risk by 50%.
Okay.
So that's always the first step. Now, if unfortunately you chose the wrong ancestors, as many of my patients have, poor people, their ancestors, lovely people, but they gave them heart disease and their ancestors gave them heart disease too. But if you do have genetic factors, guess what? We have incredibly robust solutions to those as well. Right? So this is kind of like 1922. If you had diabetes, type 1 diabetes in 1922, you died.
Yeah.
That was it. Right? 1922, January of '22, the first person gets the first injection of crude insulin. The blood sugar came down, was never ever seen before. Major tipping point in diabetes. Diabetes is a disease that no one wants. You don't want to have it. It's not great. However, these people now with appropriate tools, drugs, whatever, will lead a normal lifespan as long as they play by the rules and do the right stuff. So we're really at that tipping point 100 years later with heart disease. Wow.
And then once again, the million things that could go wrong with the heart, we're just talking about plaque. When we're going through your program, your CT, everything, is that, that's the only thing you're checking for, or can you pick up other things like—
Oh yeah. So, so we do the scan, right? You know, I I like to say, being cardiologist, I'm going to try to keep it below the neck and above the diaphragm. However, we look at carotid arteries too, but really vascular focused. However, when we do the scan, and in fact, every time I go over the scan, so we have about a 90-minute appointment to go over all of that data, right? We'll obviously focus on the heart. We'll use all the cool AI. We'll talk about what all that means. I'll show everybody the pictures. But before we do that, I literally show them all the other stuff that we pick up for free. 'Cause we're gonna see your lungs, your stomach, your liver, your esophagus, your spine. Look at your bone density, see if you have fatty liver. So we can see and detect lots and lots of other stuff. I call it the free stuff. And we get that every time we do the scan. Then we end up looking at the heart.
Yeah.
And it's interesting. So we do have a radiologist that looks at all the non-cardiac stuff, 'cause that's, I'm not a radiologist. My responsibility is the blood vessels. But again, 25 years later, 25,000 scans later, I always look at all the non-cardiac stuff to see, okay, that's interesting. You know, what do the radiologists see? And, and I do have a gentle rivalry with my radiologist colleague to see if I see stuff that they missed. And sometimes you do. Just been doing it for a long time.
Well, that part too, look at all the value you're getting. You're not just getting your heart. Oh yeah, absolutely. It's just a, if you're doing the scan, that's why I've always said, why can't we just get a full body scan just to—
Right. I don't think we're getting there. I think one of the biggest limitations, to be honest, using CAT scanners, which do use radiation. People get worried and scared about radiation. I think we should be aware of and responsible with radiation, but we should not worry about it or be afraid of it. With the machine we have, and now we had this amazing upgrade of our software a couple months ago, the amount of radiation that we're using to do these incredible high-resolution scans is—
Zero.
Zero. But boy, it is really low. It's about the same. You get all this data on the heart, All those other things I talked about as well for the dose of irradiation of about a chest X-ray. So it's, it's really incredible. And I will say older technologies like nuclear stress tests, which we do about 10 million a year, right? Which is a 20th century technology. I stopped doing them 20 years ago. The radiation exposure, if you just think of what we get as, as background, right? Everybody living on the face of the earth is going to get about 3 millisieverts of radiation year in, year out. Gamma rays, isotopes around us. You're going to get 3 millisieverts. of radiation a year. So that's a useful kind of way to think of it. When we do nuclear stress tests, that one test is 30 to 40 millisieverts of radiation. That's about over 10 years of background radiation with one test. With cardiac CT, with our scanner, with our multiple layers of AI, we can now do cardiac CT for 0.2 millisieverts. It's about 75% less than a mammogram.
Wow.
So the radiation is there, it's present. You want to be responsible with it. But it's really pretty trivial. Yeah.
That's just telling you technology's getting better and we'll start fixing some of these issues. That's beautiful.
Yes.
Well, cool. Well, Dr. John, besides, you know, I've had podcast guests on my show who live in other states and haven't yet got up to all 50 states, but that's, you mentioned and others mentioned that, hey, it's just another reason to schedule a cool staycation somewhere in a, you know, other place you haven't tried and now you have a reason to go.
Exactly. This time of year, you know, Dallas is maybe a little bit warmer than if you're up north. Plus we got great shopping, great restaurants, and it's, it's a place. So time to come down and see it and maybe catch a Cowboys game.
Yeah. I think it just enhances the experience of going somewhere. Like, where do you want to go? Well, here's the reason. Let's, let's build around this. So I think that's awesome.
And again, we are working on really bringing this out to the rest of the country. We're also working on other countries as well. So my ultimate goal as a cardiologist Is to eliminate heart disease. Okay. So that's all I want to know. And if you follow that logic even further down, as I love to tell my patients at the end of my talk, when we're chatting and I'm going over all the data, I love to say, hey, my first goal is to eliminate heart disease. I can't do it without you. So please help me to eliminate heart disease. And ultimately, if you follow that logic further, far enough, in reality, I'm asking my patients and you, Brad. So thank you again for having me on, is to put me out of business. Okay.
Yeah.
So I want docs who say, I want to not just save lives, prevent stuff, people having toes amputated and all that stuff. But in reality, I want to— I want the disease, right? I want to cure the disease. So that's always been my ultimate goal. Or as I love to kid people, I'm going to lean into you, Brad, you and your audience. Please work to put me out of business.
Yeah. You know, it's funny. That's what I tell my dentist every yearly visit. I'm just working to put her out of business.
She's like, good.
Absolutely. That's what I want.
It's interesting because I think of dentists a lot, right? In my era, right, I'll be 62 here shortly, right? The big deal was cavities. Bless our dentists. They largely got out of the cavity business. They said, we're going to fix cavities, teach people to brush their teeth and sealants and all that stuff. And they put themselves out of the cavity business, which is great. Now, needless to say, none of them are on the corner begging for food. They evolved into cosmetics and—
Well, yeah, aesthetics is still huge.
So they're great. But I think that should be a real guiding light for us in cardiology, Right. You know, let's work on trying to fix the underlying disease. We'll be fine. We're smart people. We'll figure out something to do with our time. But in the meantime, let's try to eliminate the leading cause of death. I'm a big fan.
Yeah, me too. I think all this preventative stuff, I've just seen like this, the shift over the last 5 to 8 years, and it looks like it's going in that direction, which is why I love podcasting and finding out more, you know, about health and wellness and all these different modalities. So it's great.
The preventative is meeting the road.
That's it. Well, Dr. John, where can my audience find out more about you? Find more about your program? Is it just website? Are you on any other social media?
Yeah, so it's www.clearcardio.com or also catch us on YouTube. We have our Clear Cardio channel and our Power Prevention podcast. We've got a lot of great informational stuff. If you want to learn about the heart, atherosclerosis, plaque prevention, lipids, hypertension, All of those things, lots and lots of great data on our YouTube site. So Clear Cardio on YouTube is great. And check out our Power of Prevention and lots of great, interesting testimonials of patients who have gone through all this stuff that I think is really interesting on a patient level too.
So my audience knows, I'll put all those links in the show notes. They don't have to remember that. And then as far as your expansion, what do you see in the next 5, 10, 15 of—
Yeah, we're hoping we've really got a plan and obviously there's a lot of scaling up. You know, but we, we've already all the parts in places we should be in. As I said, we're already in Chicago. We, we started cardio in June of '24.
So we're— Okay. So 3 years.
This is happening very quickly. We're already in Chicago. We'll be in Manhattan here in January. We'll be in Miami after that. And we're working on some opportunities on the West Coast in San Francisco, et cetera. So kind of, I hate to say this, but I'm, I have a terrible sense of humor. We're kind of like cancer. We're locally invasive and widely metastatic. So if you're not in a Clear Cardio city, Clear Cardio is coming for you. Okay. But in the meantime, just check us out on our website if you're interested in more information.
Absolutely. Well, Dr. John, I'd like to thank you for coming on my show and educating us. You know, like I mentioned, we started out in the, the little fitness and just muscle building, but as we're aging here, I know my audience, just talking to them, they care about longevity, they care about their heart, other organs, you know. And like you said, being number one, that's the easiest one to nip off the bucket, cardiovascular health. Then we can worry about cancer and heart disease. Yeah.
Free radicals, plaque, right? You know, can't make you immortal. I love to point out, it can't make you immortal. However, no stupid, predictable, preventable deaths or mortality or morbidity, like having your toe taken off like your poor dad, right? That's got to stop, right? All the tools are out there.
You just know it. And that's why I love what I do is getting this message out there. People got to start taking health into their own hands.
And we appreciate it. We really do. So, thank you, Brad, for helping me to eliminate heart disease and also helping to put me out of business. So absolutely keep up the good work.
Well, thanks for coming on, Dr. John.
Our pleasure. Thanks so much, Brad. Really appreciate your time.
