Can This Breakthrough At-Home Blood Test Make You Live Longer? (SiPhox)

Fundamentally, if you could cut the cost of blood testing, make it very small, make it usable in the home, what impact could that have? Rather than saving time for a doctor, which is important, can we increase health span for everybody?

Most people that have the traditional insurance, Western medicine paradigm, the lens is so fixed, if you need blood tests, you go to the doctor.

Let's put a device in every home in America. Rather than making blood testing reactive, where, okay, I have terrible symptoms now, I'm going to get a bunch of blood work and hopefully they'll figure something out. It's making it proactive where people are getting much more blood tests and that's the cornerstone of their whole health journey. It helps to do the blood test because then you know what to work on. Medicine is getting better, but it's too expensive for most people. Having more data makes it easier. If you give a doctor lots of data, here's five years worth of blood tests. Why am I feeling bad? The chances that they're going to give you a good answer quickly are very high.

What gets measured gets managed.

Life expectancy is not increasing while cost is increasing in the standard medical system. And that is not true in Europe. America is just, it's obviously broken. I don't think anybody can argue it's not. Yeah, we don't have a very strong opinion of how to fix it. Besides that, you need more data and you need more control over the situation. There are lots of doctors writing books and so on. They're kind of dropping out of the standard approach and saying, okay, we need preventative medicine. Foreign.

Mike, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to Austin, Texas. You haven't been here in five years, six years. Welcome back.

Yeah, thanks, Josh.

Yeah, it's a really cool experience being in Austin because I feel like it's the freaking technological, wellness, health epicenter of the entire world, man. People think of New York and LA as like the big ones. But this place I've been feeling for a long time, especially with what we do here on Wellness and Wisdom. It is the perfect time for people to empower themselves in their own home. So many people, which is why you do what you do, are just kind of lost in the sea of Western medicine. They want clarity, they want to understand, like, what do I do with my blood test? What does it even mean? This is a really exciting conversation. I remember back in the day, 2014, I went to Fisherman's Wharf in San Diego for like one of the first quantified self meetup groups. This is back when, like, Kevin Kelly was going strong and Tim Ferriss was talking about it and I found all these different tools. But at the end of the conference I was like, what do we do with all this stuff? Like, how do we make meaning of this? Even my aura ring that I wear. So for people that don't know you, man, give us like the 30,000 foot view of Mike and of Sy Fox. They heard a little bit about you in the intro already, but just share with us, like, what are you all about and how'd you get into this world, by the way? The medical world is not exactly an open door. You have to work your way in there in a certain way.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. So originally my background is in chemistry, so I originally studied chemistry and biology. I didn't work in it, so I did several startups. First one was an electric vehicle, charging actually, which was acquired. And then I worked in manufacturing. So I lived in China for a while doing manufacturing. I then set up a factory in Grand Rapids. So I've kind of lived around different places because of this. Originally from New York, basically the way I got into this, it's actually really a bit of an accident. But my family actually has a history in medicine. So both my grandparents, three out of four of my grandparents were doctors and so on. But I never had any plan to be involved in medicine. I always was kind of. If you're entrepreneurial, the last thing you want to do is deal with bureaucracy. Right. So basically medicine is incredibly bureaucratic in America. And to be honest, if you're young, you don't even have to deal with it. Right. You can kind of try to avoid it. Yeah, yeah, most of the time. And so that's how I treated it. And then when we founded Cyphox, it just turned out that Syphox was started around the chip technology. So a silicon chip technology. So basically it's kind of interesting. So 20 years ago, the Internet was built on fiber optics. And at the end of the fiber, when you get into the data center, there was a large box which would convert the light into electricity, which could then go into computers. But then people started actually taking that box and miniaturizing those boxes onto chips. So now you could control light on the chip in silicon structures, the same type that are used like in the chips in your phone and so on. You could make it very cheap, very scalable. And that's how the Internet scaled up. So if you think about everybody moving to Zoom during COVID the Internet didn't break right. So it's very easy. They just printed more Chips built more data center, like it all works, right? And so that technology is really incredible. And it just turns out that a lot of the tools used in biotech, like if you, especially in blood tests, like if you walk into a LabCorp or Quest Lab and you take apart the instruments, they're full of optics. And so we realized shortly after starting the company that the best thing we could do with the technology was to actually miniaturize a blood testing tool. So that's how we got into this. My co founder is a really well known engineer in the chip optical chip space. So he design one of the chips that's basically most successful one in the world. That's a silicon photonic transceiver. So it's for sending data through fibers. But like when you send the email, there's a very good chance it's going through one of the chips that he designed by hand. Well, not by hand, but you know.

Sure by mine by hand. Yeah, yeah.

Chips are very scalable. So like if you make a good chip, it gets distributed all over the world, right? It's a little bit like software. You know, there's one search, right? So there are a couple of search engines, there's not a thousand. So anyway, so we realized that kind of the next frontier for this technology is miniaturizing these types of tools. So there are other people doing this for like DNA sequencing, trying to miniaturize DNA sequencing and so on. Actually we have several of the founding engineers at our company from a company called QuantumSCI, which use the same technology to miniaturize a DNA sequencer over the last decade. And after we got into blood testing, I realized that you can't work fully within the system of blood testing because the way it's done now and the way the whole medical industry treats it, it's just super uninnovative. So there's not a lot of incentive in the system to make it better. I'm not the person to be kind of like talking about this from a pedestal, right. So I'm just like anybody else who kind of uses the medical system, but obviously everybody knows is broken and it's very hard. Like a lot of medical devices, what they do is they'll go to 100 doctors and say, okay, what do you want? And so the doctors tell them they work on it for five years or 10 years, they release it. And then it turns out, you know, we didn't really. Or like the insurance company doesn't like this. And you know, there's this kind of Stuff and things. There's really not a lot of innovation. So we decided to take a different route and just look at fundamentally, if you could cut the cost of blood testing, make it very small, make it usable in the home, what impact could that have? So rather than, let's say, saving time for a doctor, which is important, it's like, can we, for example, increase health span, right, for everybody? What would this look like, really, at scale? Is it possible to do something interesting? And what we found is that the science on blood testing and biomarker tracking is way ahead of what's being done, right? So if you have money and you're using a functional medicine doctor, you're paying a concierge medicine service $100,000 a year getting blood tests much more frequently, they're getting analyzed much more seriously. You're being tested for many more markers than the average person, Right? And so that's something that, you know, the semiconductor technology is really good at democratizing things, right? So the reason everybody has this magical device that talks to the Internet, camera, everything, is because it's full of chips. So we were able to take all these really expensive technologies and make them small and cheap. And so really, where there's an impact is if you're serving millions and millions of people. And that's why we went after, specifically at home, blood testing. So instead of just improving what's going on now, making it a little bit cheaper or faster for the existing incumbents, we really wanted to go after. Let's put a device in every home in America and make it possible for people to. Rather than making blood testing reactive where, okay, I have terrible symptoms now I'm going to get a bunch of blood work, and hopefully they'll figure something out. It's making it proactive, where people are getting much more blood tests, and that's the cornerstone of their whole medical journey or their health journey, right? They're getting all this data and they're able to see things early, they're able to optimize and so on. So that's kind of how we got into this. It was really kind of step by step. So we didn't set out to fix health care or something like that, like a lot of companies do. And there are some. Some companies doing that in different ways that are doing a really good job. But we really started out from, like a technological perspective of here's what's possible, and then how do. How do we make an impact with this?

It's exciting because I think about the different panels that I've used in the past and I used Wellness FX and a couple other ones and they great. But they didn't really like have the gravitas that I feel from Cyphox. Like when I used the product and I sent it in, it was super easy. I dropped it in the mail. Part of me was like, how does this even work? It's a dried sample like this gets processed in a lab. How could this possibly be accurate? But this sensor chip, this is really what it's about. This silicone, photonic biosensor. This tech you said has been around for how long? The biosensor tech.

So let me. I'll explain the whole thing. So basically we. So the target of the company is really to make it possible to this in the home, right? So that's not what we sell now. We sell kind of an intermediate product, but it's a much longer path to be able to market something and sell something that you use directly in the home. Because there are two ways that blood tests get regulated. One way is if you have a central lab where there's a lab director that's kind of overseeing everything that's happening. And another way is if you're literally using it in the home. So our goal in the relatively medium term, short term is to do a home device that goes through FDA and everything. And this is what the cartridges look like. So there's a small reader that goes.

With it and it's on the screen for Y' all on YouTube. So we have a close up of this on the screen right now.

There's a chip in here that basically has a bunch of very small sensors at the chip scale. So it's that black square and that's where the magic happens. So that's a miniaturized version of something that you would see inside large lab instruments. So it does very similar type of chemistry. It uses all the same type of reagents. It's really just making the readout small. We actually chose an FDA cleared instrument and miniaturized that. So we kind of tried to stick to what's already working. It's not really like a new technology. That instrument already uses chips like this, but it has a very big readout. So we really miniaturize the reader and some other parts. So that's the crux of what the company's doing. But because it takes so long to get that through the fda, fully developed, scaled up, we decided to go to market with an intermediate solution, which is like the best thing you can do with like slightly less innovative technology. But it's, it's, it's actually better than anything we could find out there. And if you've tried things like Wellness Effects or Inside Tracker or whatever, you still have to go in and get the Venus draw.

Yeah. And it's a pain in the ass.

Yeah. And you're, it's not something you're going to do every month and it's very costly. So what we ended up doing is we built something around this card so we don't produce this, but it's actually a very innovative technology. So what this does is when you put blood on these squares, so you put a small amount of blood from the finger on these squares, it separates the blood cells from the serum. And so then as the blood runs across, and so you've done essentially what like a centrifuge does in the lab. So they'll usually spin your blood and get the blood cells to come out. And that allows it to be. Once it's dried, it can be stored for two weeks, so it can be mailed via usps. It's very convenient. And then it gets rehydrated and processed at the lab. So this technology already exists out there. You can, for example, get an everly well test that'll do like one or a couple of biomarkers with this. But what we did is we really worked to stretch the amount of markers you can do from this card. And we're always actually innovating on that. So our goal is over the next year to half the amount of blood for the same amount of markers. And we don't exclusively. It's not exclusively our technology. We're even using FDA clear tools and things like that. It's just, let's get something to market that does a best in class test that people can do. Really low cost. So we sell it basically at cost. Just trying to get the volume of blood tests up overall in the world.

Yeah, right.

And learn a lot from that. Learn together with our customers. Like, what does it mean when you start tracking, you know, on a frequent basis, how do we improve people's health? Stuff like that.

It's really, really amazing. I think this is cool. And the reason why I think this is amazing is because I've actually done the test where you just do the Lancet, you drip the blood on there and you send it in. I actually did it when I was on vacation and this is like in the middle of Tennessee. We were out there in the middle of nowhere and I was able to just take it to a PO box, a Dropbox and so I'm thinking about the people that need to know. Maybe on a quarterly basis we can talk about in our podcast, you know, the actual schedule of how often one should be testing their biomarkers. But I think about most people that have the traditional insurance Western medicine paradigm. The lens is so fixed, Mike, in that world of if you need blood tests, you go to the doctor, if you need care, you go to the doctor. How do you even start to bridge the gap between the current, I guess you could say consciousness around Western medicine and the paradigm of if you want to get well, you have to see a doctor versus this is true health. Because you're an empowered citizen scientist. You're the true N equals one that actually is taking control of their health. And you can do it for like a freaking fraction of the cost. Some of my labs that I've run are thousands of dollars. You can get 17 biomarkers from dripping your blood on a piece of paper. I mean, I know I'm being reductionistic, but it's freaking incredible where we are in the technological world. So how do you begin that conversation with, you know, this global audience and just, you know, at this table, man, of like, real empowered health between the old model versus the new model? Because the new model is where it's at.

Well, I think, you know, one thing we really thought about a lot when we were designing this product is basically, okay, we're going to give people a very broad panel, like the broadest we can for the amount of blood, the amount of money, that kind of thing. And that's going to cover, you know, inflammation, metabolic health, cardiovascular risk, hormonal. And we actually have some expansions where you can do more hormones. And the reason we did that is because there's this already, this existing, very powerful movement of people taking control of their health. And it's happening through all these different channels. So it's everything from podcasts to doctors coming out and saying, you know, there are lots of doctors writing books and so on. They're kind of dropping out of the standard approach and saying, okay, we need preventative medicine. If you look at actually the graph, this is incredible. This graph alone kind of says it all. If you look at life expectancy versus dollars spent. So the US Is now plateaued. So life expectancy is not increasing, and we're not even talking about health span. This is like being alive at all. Just surviving, just surviving. Forget, even health is like a different story. But life expectancy is not increasing while cost is increasing in the standard medical system. And that is not true in Europe. So if you look at all the European countries, I think if you can include like Israel and a few other countries, the graph has a bunch of, you know, basically your typical western country. Everybody's life expectancy is increasing and the cost is not increasing that much. And so America is just, it's, it's obviously broken. Like. No, I don't think anybody can argue it's not. Yeah, we don't have a very strong opinion of how to fix it. Besides that you need more data and you need more control over the situation. So essentially I think a good example is like diets, right? So the USDA food pyramid diet obviously failed everybody, right? That was a disaster. The question is like, what's a good diet, right? I think that's very hard. I mean people, there are camps, right? There are all these like tribal camps of diets. But the reality is what you really need is to figure out what's working for you. Because people are just very different and they've had a different history in their body. Like you may have a really high insulin resistance, you might not, right? So, and this is something we see all the time, we're testing thousands and thousands of people, right? So we see a lot of variability for how people respond to diets in general. Like what their body, how their body can process food metabolism and so on. And really our belief, I mean as engineers is just that you would never really try to fix anything without having sensors on it, collecting data. And if you can't afford to have a physician that's incredibly highly trained looking at you like a prized racehorse, which some people do, and that works. We have an 80 plus year old president, so that's not something that was feasible 100 years ago. So medicine is getting better, but it's too expensive for most people to get that kind of scrutiny. Having more data makes it easier. So if you give a doctor lots of data, here's five years worth of blood tests. Why am I feeling bad? The chances that they're going to give you a good answer quickly are very high relative to you coming in. They don't know any. You know, there's, you've had one blood test a year, they haven't even tested you for most of the interesting things because you haven't had symptoms now you're not feeling that great. So that starts like a debugging process. If you have a baseline and you're, that you've been optimizing against and you see something change that's much easier to deal with. And it's even something that people can take into their own hands so they can say, okay, you know, I'm going to try the keto diet. Right. Let's see what effect this actually has on me. Like some. Does this have an effect on my testosterone? Does it have an effect on my sleep? Like, is my cortisol. Sure. Actually.

Or the big one. Cholesterol.

Yeah, lots of people. Exactly. Lots of people are worried about their apob and cholesterol when they go on a keto diet and tracking that and seeing whether, you know, they can optimize it even while staying on that diet and so on. And so all of these things are just made easier and more quantitative if you're doing blood tests. And I think that's a big missing part in general, like, there are a lot of people proposing solutions like how to fix the fact that Americans are generally very sick. You know, six out of ten Americans have chronic disease. So there are a lot of solutions, both from the medical system and also from kind of alternative and holistic medicine. Everything else, diet, you know, from all angles, like exercise. So our position is just trying to look at what, you know, we do make recommendations based on the blood test, but we kind of stick to the ones that are so well known that they're not really controversial. Everything else, we basically leave it to people to take control of it themselves. I mean, we're just giving you the data, showing you the context. Like, what does it mean? Yeah. And then you can go out and essentially find what works for your, like, for your unique system. Right. Because human body is incredibly complicated and like all these one size fits all systems usually don't work for people.

It blows my mind because you and I, Mike, have unique thumbprints. Right. So we are biochemically individualistic, yet we have so many blanket fucking approaches in the traditional system. That's like, if you're sick, take this pill. There's almost like a flowchart which essentially leads to pharmacological intervention. That's just kind of how it goes. And so that system is broken because if you go 30,000ft above it, you can obviously see that there's really no customization, there's really no data driven decisions. And to be honest, I'm curious how you feel about this. Most physicians, it seems like, don't even want to do full blood panels because then they'd have to spend time interpreting that panel. Did you find that when you were going through the creation of this company?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of pushback I can give you an interesting example. So we talked to somebody that's worked for a long time in standardization of insulin testing, not too successfully. So there's not a lot of, like, if you get an insulin test from different labs, you'll get pretty varying values, like depending on which tool is used at that lab. So she's working on that for a long time. And we told her we're building a home insulin test, and so we're curious about, like, which tool should we try to standardize ourselves to and things. Again, she's like, why would somebody want a home insulin test? So basically, despite doing insulin, working in the insulin testing field as an academic for a very long time, she actually didn't really believe in the fact that people even need this number, when in reality, insulin resistance is probably one of the biggest health problems in America. It's far larger than your. I mean, it's. One third of Americans are going to be diabetic at the pace that they're going.

Right.

So it's just very funny. And today, fasting insulin isn't even measured typically. Right. Until you get to a very, you know, once you're diabetic, they might measure it, but it's not something that's screened.

At all unless you're part of our community. I mean, that's definitely something we care about because fasting insulin dictates a lot of other ancillary things, of course.

Yeah, yeah. And it's stuff. It's totally uncontroversial science. Right. So there's no. This isn't like. There's one guy who's the fasting insulin guy who's been publishing papers about this is like piles and piles of literature. Everything's been studied. Right. But it's just. Yeah. The system's really not set up to deal with it. The whole philosophy of it, the way that money is spent in the healthcare system doesn't support this kind of preventative approach. There's a lot of issues. I think it's not, you know, doctors are kind of working within this bureaucratic system. And I think it's especially the ones that are kind of in a standard path. It's not really their fault. It's just how it is. It's just how the system works around them and kind of channels them into this way of doing things. I will say that American medicine, incredibly effective at some things. Right. And if you look at what it's effective at, it's where the feedback loop is very quick. So essentially, like, if you're doing a Surgery, the feedback loop is right then and there, almost.

Yeah.

And they're amazing at that. When the feedback loop is like years, that's when they start losing, you know, there's just not enough. And there's a great book, I think this is a Daniel Kahneman book where he talks about, like, when they study experts, the ones that are much better are the ones that get a lot of feedback. So if, like fast feedback.

Imagine that.

Yeah. And then they can, they can basically train themselves. You know, it's kind of like ChatGPT. Right. There's just a lot of data. Right. So they get trained on like, what works, what doesn't, even if they don't fully understand it. Right. So if you're seeing the intervention work in your patients quickly, then it's much easier to train yourself, like, where what works, what doesn't? How do I do this? And that might be one reason why drugs are used so much, because they work quickly. Right. So it's just something that the doctor can give you. The result is like, you know, two weeks later, bam. Right. And it's much harder with other interventions because sometimes you have to do them far in advance. And the feedback loops are not that great. And it's. And that's just how it ends up going. And it works much better if the person's themselves invested in it and tracking themselves. Right. Because you just can't. There are not enough doctors for everybody to have three doctors looking at them all the time.

Sure.

It's just not realistic.

Yeah. A big point of contention that I have is that I struggle with chronic sinus issues for the majority of my life. And I took probably every antibiotic out there. So much so that I developed Marcons, multiple antibiotic resistant staph. And so the way that I'm healing that is through natural care and working with functional med doc. But I'm really fortunate. Like, let's not sugarcoat this. I'm fortunate. I'm in a place of resources where I can do that. The average person, they just don't have that much coin to throw. And let's be real, those metrics that you mentioned where, you know, a third of Americans are marching their way to diabetes or more, those are the people that live in economically depressed areas that they need a break, you know, they need a financial break for this. I'm curious, do you know who Peter Diamandis is? Have you heard of him in his work? All right, so he said something, I think it was last year. It takes 17 to 20 years for new technology. To reach the GP's office, to reach a medical director's office. And I think that that's just not fast enough now for your own life.

Right? Yeah.

I mean, what, am I going to wait 20 years to be healthy and be empowered? So I wonder how you'd answer this. So if you look at Moore's Law, where the doubling of circuitry and the lessening of cost, we hit the hockey stick, I don't know, seven, ten years ago, where technological inspiration and innovation went skyrocketed, human evolution still on its path. I mean, we're only 2% different than our Neanderthals. So with technology, there comes some trepidation from people, and then there's the other camp, where it's like they just want it, they can't get enough of it. They're transhumanists. There's these little weird camps that form. And how do we speak from the middle Mike? Like, how do we get the best of both worlds of natural health and following the body's natural signals? And then how do we also use the good side of tech, where we can save money and actually use Moore's Law for what it was studied and designed for?

Yeah, I mean, I think. I guess. So your question, just to summarize your question, it's, you know, there. There's the camp of, like, the crunchy hippie world where you're just trying to get back to nature because we know that worked.

Which I'm in that camp sometimes, or at least that's.

And, yeah, myself as well. And then there's the technology always works camp. And I think. And, you know, we've seen a lot of examples of technology working as well. So I think. I think it's like both. Both are true in a way. I mean, I've spent most of my career in entrepreneurship, but I've spent maybe a total of like five years in academia or something at Technion and then at mit. And if you actually see how the sausage is made, and of course, also at companies. So technology is, I think, a lot of the transhumanists and futurists, they're not that close to the actual interior of the technology world. I mean, some of them are, and they're just like believers, right? So. But Ray Kurzweil or whatever. But a lot of them don't. They, you know, they kind of see the polished outside. So, for example, like a paper comes out in nature, like, oh, taurine extends lifespan of whatever. Right?

Yes.

And then that's like, as though that's true. You know, but in reality, like the people that wrote the paper themselves, if you ask them, do you take taurine? Half of them are going to say, yeah, I'm not really. I'm not sure, you know, because it's, it's, you know, because it's very hard to find, like a real. I mean, unless you're doing math, right? It's very hard, especially in, like, biology and all these things. It's very hard to find, like, a really deep truth. And it takes time for it to be really figured out. Like, you know, when plastics first came out, people were in love with them, right? They were like, you could. It was like you could get expensive plastic furniture and stuff like that eventually. I mean, you know, people realize, okay, actually wood is. I mean, we're sitting at this wood table, right? It's just much nicer than a plastic table, right? So I think people fall in love with technology, but it's, you know, over time, it kind of, you know, it falls out. So some technology turns out to be amazing. Some of it turns out to be actually really harmful. So it just depends, I think, in many ways, I mean, at least when it comes to health, we didn't evolve with a lot of this stuff. So the assumption should be typically that it's dangerous, I think, because it's, you know, human body is a very complex system. It's resilient, but it's super complex. And, you know, if you're throwing really big changes at it, it's. I think if you, if you want to be conservative, like, I would feel much safer living in a tent on a farm than I would be in like a complete pod, like, built fully out of some technological, like, perfect world, transhumanist thing that's supposed to make me happy, right? I just think the chance of that working from the first try are very low. Like, I want to live in the Generation 10 pod, right? Like, once they've had 10 generations of people living in them and they've really tweaked like, the right pheromones to.

Nope. That. I want to live on the farm, too. I want to live on a ranch.

But I think it's. Obviously there are lots of technologies that work amazing, and if you really need to solve a problem, you frequently have to use technology, right? Because sometimes those problems are created by technology and you can't fix them naturally because they're really serious. And in fact, obviously in nature, things go wrong all the time also. So it's just, I think it's just about being data driven. And conservative is really the way to go and just open it. But also open minded, right? So it's not like having a religion that one thing works or not. But I mean, I'll tell you just an anecdote. So a friend that I went to school with, I recently went to his wedding and he's become a farmer. So he's, I think they call it biodynamic farming. So he's a bio. That's, that's like a new kind of word in the farming. And he has a master's degree in this and everything. So he's very serious and he's just incredibly healthy. Like I don't think I really have a healthier friend than this guy. And you know, his biohack is basically farming. So he's just farming. He makes his own food, you know, like he's drinking like milk straight from his own cows and everything like that. So I think it's, you can definitely find really good examples of this. And you can find people that are super like, you know, they're taking lots of supplements, they're incredibly data driven, they're doing tons of blood tests. And those people can be very healthy too. So I think it's really just about. Actually there are many things that work you should just be trying to optimize for actually, you know, getting the benefit from it.

It's amazing. We live in an amazing time, man. 2023, 2024. Like we are so blessed. Yet also, like you said, sometimes tech can be the source of the problem itself. Like people that spend 12, 14 hours on screens all day, we are guinea pigs for that. I mean that's only been around for a handful of decades. So we're kind of figuring it out as we go along. I look at all the deleterious things that happen because of tech and then I look at a company and a man like you, where it's like you're answering the call from some heart based position. Maybe you've never been asked a question like this and I'm cool with that. What is the heart behind what you're doing? What is the spirituality behind what you're doing? Because it's one thing to be a successful entrepreneur and solve a problem by, you know, people go on Google and they search problems and then that gets fed into a business engine. And then, you know, somebody in Silicon Valley is like, oh, there's a white space. Let's create a product for that. Let's make a bunch of money. That's great. But that doesn't really solve the underpinnings of why the problem exists in the first place. So what's the heart, what's the soul for you behind Cyphox?

Well, I think there are different kinds of ambitious people, but I think probably the right. All entrepreneurs are very ambitious. So it's like why are they doing what they're doing? People that I like better are the ones that really want to see something happen in the world. So it's not about really accumulating something or whatever or power, but you want to see like make a change in the world that you're excited about. Right. So just see things improve. Yeah. And for a lot of people that are, you know, at heart like scientists and engineers, it's really hard to find a situation like that. Like you can find a place where you have all the resources, right. So you can get into like Google X. Right. So you can work at some research lab but nothing you make gets commercialized. It's very typical. I mean sometimes they do, but it's very typical to work on something for a long time and then they kind of say eh. And it's, it's, that's. And maybe you don't even make anything that great because the environment is not sufficiently constrained where you're really focused, Right. You're incredibly focused on solving a problem. And there have been incredible successes from, you know, big companies and labs like that. But in general, as an engineer or scientist, it's a big struggle to find a situation where you're actually connected to the wheels. Like if you think about a car, right, where the clutch is actually connected to the, to the drive shaft and you can move the, you can move the car forward. Yeah. A lot of times you're just running the engine. You're doing lots of work and it's kind of impressive or whatever. People are publishing papers, they're, you know, getting promoted at Google or wherever it is, but then nothing happens in the world. Right. So I think a lot of the motivation, and it's not just me, but I think a lot of the people we hire at Syfox, one of the things that they're excited about is that we're really focused on, okay, we're actually going to make this, we're going to benefit real people. We're going to take whatever trade offs we have to, to get to market and actually have this used. Right. And there are lots of companies you can look at. Like there was a company that made this headset. I'm trying to think of what it's called. It was really really? They raised like $1 billion. Magic Leap. Right. So where's the Magic Leap? You know, I mean, so they probably tried to make something amazing, right? So very technologically advanced, but they never just made anything. Right. So there's no. I mean, now maybe they're going to launch something. I don't remember. I think they're still around.

Why did they fail? Why do you think companies with that kind of inclination fail?

I mean, I think what happens a lot is people that are really good at raising money are not good at getting focused and actually delivering. So you'll see very often the scrappy companies that are not that great at raising money, they struggle then YC actually, so we did Y Combinator with Syfox. They talk about this all the time. The companies in the batch that raise the most money frequently are not the ones that end up doing the best. I mean, of course a lot of them do well, but it's because if you're too good at raising money. So like, Magic Leap raised a ton of money and sometimes you're not that great at executing or you're not even passionate about it. Right. You're just passionate about, like blowing the. Blowing the blue.

Raising money.

Right, Exactly. So it's very hard to, like, have all those, you know, be an A player at that and an A player at actually delivering and so on. So I think, you know, in our case, we're just good enough at that to survive. You know, we're doing okay, but we really. Where I think the company is special and it's not just myself, but really everybody, pretty much everybody that we've hired is that it's people that really want to see what they make, like get out in the world and benefit a lot of people, get used, you know, all that kind of thing. So I think that's what drives me and everybody else at the company pretty much.

It's powerful because if people knew, like, let's say these top 17, and I want to learn from you why you guys chose the 17, because they're very specific. Out of so many for. There's hundreds and hundreds of biomarkers. Why the 17? There's so many people that just literally don't understand. Like, when I was spending time on family vacation in Tennessee, I was just. Just noticing how people interact with each other and just what they were eating and how they were spending their time. And it really. It didn't shock me, but it did make me sad because really, if they knew what they didn't know, in other words, if they could Start to move through the ladder of awareness from unconscious incompetence to at least knowing that they're incompetent, conscious incompetence, then maybe they would understand it's not a diss on people. We're all that way in some way. I'm that way in certain categories. For sure. We all have blind spots. But. But I wonder for, for if you could wave a magic wand with Cy Fox and if you could put this in every single home and if it could be something where you would then educate people. Hey, these are the most important things that'll make you spend time longer with your kids, that'll make you feel better in your body, and that'll give you a higher quality of life. Like, that's the juice, that's the magic. That's why we're here. Otherwise what are we doing? We're kind of wasting time. What do you feel about that? That picture I painted from Tennessee and just the state of our union when it comes to education around what biomarkers even are.

So there are different ways to design a product, right? So then there are, There are. Many of them are valid, right? So many valid ways to make like a amazing product. I don't have any background in product development. You know, I've done a couple startups, so just some like personal experience, but I never studied it, nothing like that. So when we worked on, myself and my co founder really, you know, gave birth to this and figured out like, what will the first iteration look like? And a few other people on the team. But we spent a lot of time just pricking our fingers and taking blood tests. So that's the first thing. So we basically went through and many other things. So we tried all like, all kinds of subscriptions, everything for a long time. Because we were, for the first two years of the company we were just developing hardware. We really launched this in the third year of the company. So those two years I spent, you know, 10% of my time just trying different things, talking to tons of doctors, researchers, whatever, right. And kind of what I found is that there is different crowds in the health space, like the direct to consumer health space. And I would split them up like this. There is like the, the 23andMe crowd. So it's basically, I'm going to test you for something, you know, maybe it's not that serious. It's kind of a joke. Like you get to see if you're like, you know, 10% German, like whatever, right? So nobody's taken. Very few people have taken a 23andMe test and then become, you know, increase their lifespan by 10 years, by whatever, right?

It's kind of just novel.

It's novel. And genetics, it's just very hard to use only genetic. Because most, most, I mean, genetics affect you. But really most of the things happen later, right? So that's why blood tests are, are more valuable. And then there are other, like, because 23andMe was so successful, there are other companies that do stuff like that. I think one really good example is probably the most successful at home test. You know, we studied all of this, right? And the most successful test is actually the food sensitivity test, which was basically a woman from Harvard Business School. And look, maybe I don't have this story correct. This is just my opinion, okay? So you have to take it with a grain of salt. But essentially a woman from Harvard Business School, I think she's actually from Texas, and she realized that people were searching. I don't feel great after eating, right. So this started with a Google search, kind of like what you're saying. This is more of a Silicon Valley approach. And so they developed this test where they test for what are called IGG antibodies, which was. This test was around. They just repackaged it and kind of started selling it direct to consumer. IGG antibodies against food. The problem is that there are four types of IgG antibodies and it's very expensive to test all four or whatever. The reason is that they didn't end up doing that. So they test total IgG, which is like a very general number, and it can be caught. You know, there's a lot of things that affect it. And so basically they could never really get. Doctors buy in that. Like if you have a high IGG level for eggs or something, your body responds to eggs and that means you can't eat eggs. So what really happens is there's some chance that that is actually related to a food sensitivity and it's very poorly understood. Like, we actually were working on allergy testing for a while. So I know very well that at Johns Hopkins there's a professor who's really an expert in this. And I kind of went through this and understood that it's basically an entertainment test. So you take this test and let's say it tells you like you have a high level for eggs, so then you stop eating eggs. But what's interesting is it does benefit people. And the reason is that for some percentage of people, when they stop eating eggs, they actually feel better. So they've discovered something. So it's like because elimination Diets just work. Right. You don't even need this test to do that. Right. So it's kind of funny. But. So that's probably the most successful test. And the reason is probably that in America, food is so bad that if you just have any excuse to stop eating a certain food, you might seriously. Yeah. You might benefit from it.

Right.

So you find out, oh, I have a wheat sensitivity. And then you, you stop eating. And it turns out whatever the iron that they're putting into wheat, the enriched iron or whatever, is like you have really high iron in reality. And that's why you feel bad when you eat wheat or whatever it is. Right. So anyway, this is just not medical advice, but this is basically. So that's what was out there. This is a very long answer to how did we come up with the markers? So what we did in the end is we said, okay, what's the biggest risk that you really want to avoid that the medical system is terrible at is chronic disease. Right. So, I mean, there are other things you might want to optimize and so on. And there are many companies like pharma focusing on different areas. Right. So we, we really wanted to start with chronic disease and things, because also chronic disease is something you really want to make a lot of measurements over time, like, where are you trending? And if you look at the, you know, 60% of Americans have a chronic disease. If you look at which markers or like which systems in your body are associated with that, it's inflammatory system, which is also really associated overall with longevity. So a lot of longevity people will talk about inflammation because it's thought of as like a big cause of aging in general.

This is like the C reactive protein or do you use something else?

Yeah, so there, there are a lot of inflamma markers. What's interesting is that they're all interconnected. So for example, you can measure what are called cytokines, which is like a more real time inflammation measure and deeper. And sometimes they do that for people with like IBD and rheumatoid arthritis and stuff like that. But those will cause your body to produce crp, creactive protein. So that C reactive protein is like the gold standard measure.

Yeah.

And then there are a bunch of other things you can measure. And we measure more than one thing, but C reactive protein is a major one, and that one is correlated directly with lifespan. So there are big studies where the higher your CRP is, you know, it just decreases your lifespan. And there are many reasons it can be high. Right. So it's not like a single one shot thing, so it can be due to various inflammatory processes. But we measure several inflammation markers to get the person started on the journey of getting that down.

Is the CRP downstream or upstream? When you look at cytokines, it's down, it's downstream.

So CRP is actually supposed to go out what it's made for. I mean it has maybe multiple uses, but one of the uses is to fight bacterial infections. So sometimes if you have like autoimmune or other issues, or sometimes people actually have a persistent bacterial infection they're not aware of. So if you measure your CRP and it's just persistently high, sometimes it's like, I mean this is funny, but I've actually talked to people, I've had this. They fix some issue with like a tooth and it just drops. So they have this permanent like tooth infection for years and years and years. And they only find out because they start measuring crp. But basically. So wild. Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting. But basically CRP, the average American has a CRP of 2.5. Healthy CRP is like 0.5. So they're way out. And doctors will only talk to you about your CRP above 3 or like maybe approaching 10. So they're kind of like, look, until you're 10, I don't even, you know, whatever, it's not medical, you're just fat or whatever. Like we don't care. Right. You're just a typical unhealthy American. But it's something that really correlates with diet. It correlates with getting exposed. So for. Sometimes it's allergens. I mean it's very, it's a broad thing so it can't tell you exactly like this is what you need to do, do. But there are basic things you can do to try to fix it. And we give like the typical recommendations. But then also like people just have to, it's their health journey. Like they have to figure out, try different things and figure it out. And there are more tests you can take to try to.

It's a, it's a huge magnifying glass though, like CRP. From all the different, I mean, 600 interviews, this conversation of CRP has come up probably over a hundred times.

Yeah, it's a big one. That's a big one.

It's like the biggest magnifying glass that you said in the portion of the stream where we can then take a look at why it's getting fed like that in the first place. Like Is it toxicity? Is it mold here in Austin? Mold is fucking everywhere. And I don't know how it is in Boston or in just the entire state of Massachusetts, these wet climates. And just what mold can do to people's bodies and raise their inflammation. It's wild that you said that you knew someone or you had heard of someone that had a. I know more.

Than 1, 2 people that had this.

And so if they can catch that early, like think about this. If somebody can catch their crp and we'll go over the other biomarkers that are in the Cy Fox test, but this is why this is so freaking empowering is because somebody can actually check in on how they're doing every three to six months instead of waiting 20 years to go to a doctor when they are above a 10 CRP. And by that time they're going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to fix what could have been fixed two decades ago.

Yeah, and it's, if you look at the studies, like it's really forget the studies just in our own data, you know, we have thousands and thousands of people worth of data. If we take this broad test. So we see how's the person's hormonal system, how are they doing metabolically, whatever. People with high CRP typically are not doing well in other areas because inflammation just affects everything. And maybe the root cause is affecting multiple things. It's like. So that, that's one, that's a very big one. That was actually the first one that we started with. We considered launching a CRP only test and then we said, no, we'll do a very broad panel because it's better to make it slightly more expensive, but just give people as much information as possible. And I think it turned out we were completely right because we actually found a lot of things that we weren't even aware of when we launched the product. So like a very good example is we started getting occasionally people with a ferritin. Ferritin is the protein that carries iron in your blood. Actually you're not supposed to have that much of it in your blood. It's mostly in your cells. So if it's very high, like if it's elevated, it's usually inflammatory because your cells are breaking up and releasing this ferritin into your blood. But we've started seeing people with super high ferritin, like 10 times normal. And it turns out that there is a semi genetic condition. I always mispronounce it, but it's like hemochromatosis. I Think, which basically takes like 10 or 15 years off your life that people don't catch until they're really sick. And you can catch it just by measuring this, this one protein, which is a relatively common. Again, these are not like magic in the corner biomarkers studied in some lab, like some. These are. Ferritin is like gold standard normal. Typically it's low for in anemia. So they'll measure it like in pregnant women. Because sometimes pregnant women get anemia. But yeah, you have these kind of unicorns that have super high ferritin. And for them, you know, they take this test, it's whatever. I mean, it's not very cheap, it's whatever, $100, right? So it's not free. But I mean, they take this test and they've now gotten their ferritin down, so they go. And it's actually pretty easy to treat. I think mostly what they do is just have them give blood.

I've heard that too, a couple times a year, just give blood and everything gets recycled.

Yeah, there's one guy who actually wrote this whole long post on LinkedIn about how we basically helped him get a decade of extra healthy life, right? So he was feeling terrible. He had gone through a bunch of. He had had a couple of surgeries from like dirt biking or something, and nobody had ever like getting hurt dirt biking. Nobody just ever measured his ferritin. Like, even when he had, he was complaining of like different symptoms that are associated with this. He just never got it measured. And then of course, he didn't buy our test looking for that. He just bought it like, I don't feel that great. Right. And we weren't even, to be honest, just completely honest. We're technologists, right? We do blood tests. We covered a lot of the major chronic diseases. We weren't even aware of this one, you know, like when in all of our interviews with, you know, advisors, doctors, whatever, nobody even brought this up and it turns out to be a relative. I mean, it's somewhat rare, but it's, it's common enough that we're finding people like this. And then you have a bunch of other things of that flavor, right? So all these, like relatively rare conditions, they add up, right? And that's why it's nice to do a broad panel because you can, I mean, another simple one that people don't look at that much is trig hdl. And so, and you can get, you get trig HDL from your doctor as well. So if you do like a yearly, they just don't I don't think they usually actually show you the ratio. So you can take trig out and you know, divided by hdl.

But and by trig you mean Triglycerides.

Triglycerides, yeah, triglycerides hdl, very predictive of metabolic health. And we see that, you know, if you look at the whole data set, we really see that trig HDL is very predictive even when we just look at the person's bmi. Right. Like, are they, are they in normal shape? People with poor BMI are going to have that Trig HDL out of range. And that's something that lots of studies support it. You know, if you just look at your LDL or whatever, it's really trig HDL and even HBA1C, which is like the standard sugar marker. So it's the average of your last 90 days of sugar. That's how it works. So it's a protein that kind of sugar attaches to it has a 90 day lifetime. So the amount of this protein that has a sugar on it correlates to how much sugar is in your blood over the last 90 days.

Wow.

And that, that's a really good one. That's a standard one. It gets measured every year. So if you look at your, if you look at your yearly but blood test, if you're getting one, it's on there. Typically they won't really talk to you about it until you're very close to diabetic. Right. So it's like going up, going up, going up. Nobody says anything. And it's like, oh, actually you're getting diabetes. Right. But anyway, that's a later marker. So you can still have like pretty good glucose control, but already be very metabolically, you know, out of whack. And trig HDL as well as fasting insulin are going to be much earlier and sometimes more accurate also. So it's having this kind of like broad panel allows you to look at these things and sometimes one of them is fine, but another one's not because again, people are all different. It also depends on other things in your diet and lifestyle and even the day you take the test. Right. So there's variability. Sure. If you're taking 10 tests in a decade, that variability of like for example, testosterone and cortisol, those rise, if you have the normal circadian rhythm, those are going to rise every morning. So when you go into the doctor and you get your test, even just the variability, like if you're not able to take the test at a precise time every time or if you didn't.

Get sleep or if your kid was keeping you up. I've been in that world.

Exactly. So if you have, if you can control when you take the test, if you say, okay, I'm always going to take the test one hour after waking, I'm going to take it. On days where I've had like a normal day, normal sleep, that data is going to be much more accurate. Because otherwise you're just measuring noise, right? You're measuring like, how long did it take the phlebotomist to get to you? Right? So like an hour later or whatever it is, you know, you wait in line and then the number's different. And what do you do with that information? Right.

That's a big one. It's a big one. Because if we can do a check in for ourselves three times a year, maybe four times a year, that truly, and I really mean this, like from my own life experience. I'm 43. So like I've been in this world since 2002, was my first year as a fitness trainer. So it's been well over 20, almost 25 years. And when I look at the whole gamut of clients I used to work with my own self, people I coached online, people that have sat in this studio, what comes up every single time is what gets measured, gets managed. If you measure something, I don't care if it's like your business, even your relationships, your physical health, if you have some kind of a window. Every successful business owner in the world, this is why I don't understand, this is why I'm so stoked on our podcast. I cannot understand why this conversation has not exploded across the entire nation. Because every single business, I don't care if you're like a mom and pop shop or a multi billion dollar company, everybody takes inventory. Everybody has a P and L, everybody has some kind of tracking system. If you don't, you're screwed. If you don't have a tracking system, you're screwed. So, like, this conversation's really near and dear to me because I think about my father, struggle with health. My Grandpa died at 80 of chronic heart failure. On both my parental and maternal side, there have been all these conditions that honestly, if they were to just take a look throughout their life, maybe they'd still be with us or definitely they'd be with us for longer. Like there's a heartstring here for me and there should be a heartstring here for all of us that if we're actually taking an honest look at how we're showing up in our biomarkers, then our lives can be extended by 10, 20, even 30 years. You mentioned the Ferritin. Is there anything else that you've had come across your desk of like clients or research or things that you just looked at and you're like, holy shit. This person just added so much time on their life because this one biomarker showed us they have to take this easy step to basically treat themselves, heal themselves.

So I think it's a mix. Like we don't, we don't collect as much data as some other companies around about our clients. So we don't always know like what they're doing on the other end, like how significant the results are for them or whatever. We do see people improve and so obviously they're taking, taking control of these things. I mean, one anecdote that I hear all the time is that people discover that they have low testosterone. And this is a big meme, right, that people have low testosterone. In the modern day, it's poorly understood. You know, as a chemist, I'm biased that it's probably the plastics. If I had to guess right, it's probably plastics and other endocrine disruptors like.

The phytochemicals that are inside of plastic.

And yeah, so basically when you make plastic, it's. Plastic is kind of crystalline. So if you take a plastic bottle and you drop it, it'll just crack. So they add something called a plasticizer. It's like small molecules that break up the crystal structure so that the plastic is more like a glass and so it's more tough, so it can stretch and things like that. It can move past itself at like the molecular level. And so those small molecules, they leach out. So if you like put a water ball in the sun, it leeches these molecules into the water. And there are a million of these things going out from all angles. Right? Because the whole world is built up out of.

Tell us more about the plastic. That's a really. Please tell us more about the plastic. Because people read about this and like, eh, it's fine, I can drink this water. That's the temperature of the sun that's been sitting in my car for three days on the dashboard.

You know, oddly, no, you can't. So the thing that surprises me is that these plastic. This is something I don't understand. I don't have enough of a background in this. But why there hasn't been just more research around safe plasticizers? This is like, you know, I studied polymer chemistry. I Don't understand why everybody knows what's going on. So you know bpa, right. So there's like BPA free. But what they replaced BPA with is not really safe as far as I know. So they haven't really done like, you know, they should do the serious studies and make sure that these plasticizers don't actually bind to any receptors in your body. Right. And this hasn't been done. I don't know why, it seems like an obvious opportunity to me. Right. Like somebody should probably have a startup. Just like I make plastic that doesn't, you know, if you put a frog in the water, I mean this is the joke, right? Turning the frog's gay joke. But it's, it's true. Like if you put a frog in the water with some of these chemicals, if it changes the frog's sex and things like they're just mimicking hormones.

Let's talk about that because right now on the screen and in the show notes, there's going to be two reports. One of them was from Jade Tita, a guest on the show. Another one, whether you like him or not, I'm neither for nor against him. It's Alex Jones and he had someone on his show and they broke down the science of how these chemicals leach into the water and turn frogs gay.

I think they, they actually, that's like Alex Jones just being funny. But I think they.

No, there's some real science.

They make the frogs hermaphrodites. They grow like both. But the thing, okay, frogs drink through their skin. So they're especially susceptible to this, like.

Well, so do we. I mean, the epidermis is the largest organ in the body.

It's not quite as bad for people. But the point is, I'm a big believer in, I'm pretty sure, like there are probably other factors. So there's like blue light. Right. So you know, you produce all your testosterone at night. Again, this is things I've heard. I'm not an expert in this.

Yeah.

But I've read some papers about it. I mean it seems real. So you produce your testosterone at night and if you're getting poor sleep, which is disrupted by blue light, you know, you're not going to produce as much and so on. So I think that's all probably also contributing. So there are a lot of things going on. But I think the plastics is just a low hanging fruit. Like we know that these plasticizers are in the plastics and they're also in things like all types of fragrances. And so I Mean, there are better people to talk about this. I don't know everything.

No, I think you're great. We've all been in a grocery store, we've all walked down a freezer aisle. Every single one of those, like Hungry man dinners, they're all leaching that into the food as it gets cooked in the microwave.

And I think this is very much driven by the market. Like, if people rejected this food and they said, look, I really want to be served in a porcelain, you know, whatever, like, make this safe. Right. If people were only willing to buy safe food, like on average or more or only, you know, actually preferring it in the grocery store, you would certainly see companies are. It's capitalism. Like, they're responsive, right? So right now nobody cares. And that's why it's like this.

They don't care because they don't know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. A lot, a lot of it is. A lot of it is just a lack of this being discussed. But I think, I mean, many things are just banned in Europe. I mean, this is an interesting, just again, this has been discussed a million times by other people, but Europe has banned many, many chemicals that are used routinely in America. Maybe some of them they're banning incorrectly. Like, some of them might be fine, but many of them are really well studied. It's clear that they're not good for you. I think in some ways America is a, you know, the quality of life in America suffers from all this stuff. The nice thing about America is that it's like a freedom storage battery. Right? People are really free here. You know, they're free to drink out of plastic, they're free to start SpaceX. You know, it's. It's like a range, right? You're kind of like free to both hurt yourself and do something exciting. But certainly we could probably fix the drink, you know, fix the plasticizers thing. I don't see why it has to be that way. So I don't think it's like a political issue. Probably everybody should just agree that we need to ban these things or at least consumers just need to reject them. Right? Yeah, but of course, it's a lot of overhead. Right. You have to start looking, oh, how do I avoid this? You know, and everything. But it's just, that's how it is. And it's something that, you know, my parents, so my parents are from the Soviet Union, and when they came to America, they were super paranoid about this stuff because they hadn't been using all the single use stuff. They hadn't seen all these, like, weird colors in the food, you know, like, what is this red food? You know, like, how are they even doing this? Right? So my parents were both scientists. Like, my mother, especially as a biologist, was including, incredibly paranoid about all this stuff. And I'm very thankful for that because I must have avoided at least some of it, at least in the home, right. Because of that. And I think a lot of people, if they don't have that background, they're just like, yeah, this is normal, right? Let's, you know, I microwave the plastic and then I eat out of it.

Right?

This is great. It's super convenient. Whatever. So I think it's. Anyway, how does this tie into the blood test? A lot of people we see have hormonal issues, right? So either they have low testosterone or it's other things. I mean, there's a range of things that we measure. So there's also, for example, we measure tsh, which is. It's called thyroid stimulating hormone. And that's. Your brain is producing a hormone that stimulates your thyroid to make thyroxin, which is the thyroid hormone, regulates your metabolism. And if you have very high TSH or elevated tsh, it means that your thyroid's not really working well. And so your brain's producing more of that saying, like, come on, you know, we need to. It's a control system.

So it's saying it's kind of like kicking it in the butt.

Yeah, exactly. It's saying, we need more that. Of this. It's the same thing with insulin. Like, your body can't handle sugar because the cells are not insulin sensitive, so you start making more insulin to try to compensate for that. So it's these control systems going out of whack. And we measure tsh and we find people with elevated tsh. And really the way you discover that normally is you have a bunch of issues. And then finally the doctor says, like, okay, let's measure your thyroid levels, because we can't. You know, we're finally at the. At the end of the rope. Like, I believe you. You don't feel well. And then. And then you find out, okay, my thyroid's not functioning. And then there are a bunch of reasons it might be and so on, but at least having that knowledge, whether it's okay, everything's fine. So I don't need to worry about this. You know, I don't need to buy supplements for the thyroid or whatever it is, it's working, right. Versus just having no idea. Right? So that's. That's another one that we see frequently elevated. But I think with the low testosterone thing, the interesting thing is that that one's very entertaining. So people love that because it's, you know, it's like something. It's not quite. It's not super dangerous. You know, it is bad for you to have to be out of range on it. But it's not as, like, serious. It's not cancer or something. Right. It's not. It's not as serious as, like, inflammation or whatever. So it's more entertaining. People like to talk to each other about it. They like to joke about it with their wife or whatever. So I think that that one is a very popular one. And I think there are a lot of companies now that are really focused on, like, giving people drugs to treat this. And I actually think that's probably okay, but you really should try all the hacks first. If that's my take.

Yeah. If you're doing hormone therapy, it doesn't matter if you're not sleeping, if you're eating total crap, if you're not drinking water, if you're not doing cardio, if you're not lifting weights.

Exactly.

If you have friends that tear you down, if you drink every weekend, if you spend time with Negative Nancy's that just try to tear down all your dreams, none of this shit's gonna work. You could do hormone therapy till the cows come home. It's not gonna matter.

Yeah, I think it's. If you really can't afford to make changes in your life, maybe it makes sense to. So there's. There's the, like actual testosterone therapy. And the companies that do, they'll increase lh, which is the hormone that stimulates testosterone production. So that's probably a little bit safer. Again, not my expertise, but that's what I would do if I was going to do it. And that works. But I think most people can start by just try the standard stuff. Watch the Huberman episode about testosterone or whatever. Your preferred guru is about this stuff. It works if you do squats. I've done this. I've measured this on myself because I'm taking blood tests all the time. Because you have to. It's called dog fooding. Right. There's like a famous guy who.

Yes. You gotta eat your own dog food.

Yeah, exactly. Your own dog food. There's actually. I don't know if. I don't know if you know this, but there was a guy who sold dog food who was known for, like, eating it on. In a TV commercial or something. Oh, that's Totally. It's actually, yeah, it's based on an actual person.

Oh my God.

Anyway, so I'm dog fooding all the time. I take tests all the time. And my co founder as well, and a few other people in the company.

Me too, man. My whole studio is full of dog food, all these supplements and tests and machines.

So basically, in my own data, I can definitely see that the hacks that people talk about actually work. Right. So do you want to implement them? Whatever. But I mean, yes, if you do full body exercise, like squats, you're going to see your testosterone go up. If everything is working, like, if that's not working, then you need to go and debug it. So there are people with real medical conditions and everything else, but I think for the majority of people, especially if you're like under 50, you know, it's just, you're just, maybe you could like, if you were in Europe, you could just live the way you're living and you'd have higher testosterone or whatever, but you're in America. Right. So you have to deal with this environment and that might mean like putting extra work into being healthy. Right. So that's. And I think it's probably more sustainable just to get serious about it and exercise more, sleep more. I think most people are not going to be, you know, extremely fit, but just doing like the basic stuff that works, it also makes you happier, right?

Yes.

So it's the way I see it is it helps to do the blood test for me, certainly. Because then you know what to work on. Right. So you can see. Ah, okay. This is actually fine. Like my cortisol is correct. Like it's going up in the morning, it's going down at night. So this is not an issue. Right. I don't need to worry about this. But okay, I, you know, my testosterone is lower than where it should be. So let's do squats. Right. And that improves it. And so that's because you can't do everything right. So that it really helps you hone in on what you want to work on. Right. Because you have finite time and resources.

Yes.

So I think from that perspective, it's been helpful for me even. And for a lot of our users, that's why people come to us is frequently. I mean, I'd say the two big things is people come to us because they're just not feeling that great or they're just worried. They want to know. Right. So that's one reason. And the other reason is because they have a certain amount of Time they want to spend on their health, and they want to know, where is the big impact going to be. So those are probably the two kind of Personas that are most common.

You know, it's crazy, Mike. I did a nlp. I've never told this story in a podcast, so this is why I love what we do. It's the, like, real conversation. It sparks a lot of memories that I don't think people have remembered for a long time. When you start having real dialog with somebody and people hear that, it kind of sticks to their soul in a way. It's like, how do we know we can trust someone? It's not just the micro muscles in their face. It's. It's the pitch in their voice. It's the way that they tell stories. Like, for. For me, I was in this NLP training and we did this thing called the values ladder. And the number one value for me was abundance. And they were like, okay, abundance in what? And we went down the line and I realized it was abundance in health because I used to be 280 pounds. I've struggled a lot with health in my life. And so they said, great. My coach was working with me and he was like, all right, so how do you know that you're going to have perfect health? And immediately my unconscious mind was like, well, all my biomarkers would be in range. And this is at an emotional intelligence neuro linguistic programming training that I was in. And here I am. My unconscious is feeding me information that as long as my biomarkers are in check and I'm consistently checking my biomarkers over time, then there's literally no way I can't lead a healthy life. This is the whole mission of our company, right? How do we live our life well? How do I deliver on that promise of what does it even mean to live your life? Well, I think unless we have a window into that, Mike, it's impossible to know how we're actually showing up. We can imagine things. We can be anecdotal about how we think our health is, but the numbers don't lie. The numbers do not lie. And so I'm curious, like, with these numbers, how do you yourself use this? Like, what's something that you're working on right now in your own personal health, or maybe your own emotional health or mental health? Being a CEO is not easy, man. There's a lot of people that need a lot of answers all the time. And, you know, you carry a weight on your shoulders, right?

So one of the one of the hacks is that I'm not the CEO, I'm actually the chief product officer. I was the CEO of my last company and I found this experience that you're talking about, and I am definitely in this go around. I have to thank my co founder that he's taken that on because that is definitely the worst job.

What's his name?

It's the worst job in the company. Diedrich.

Diederik. Shout out to Diedrich.

He's a strong back. Diedrich is now American, but he grew up in Belgium, so he's been here for about 10 years. And we have him to thank for the speed of the Internet.

Amazing.

Yeah. Most people, Belgium has a very high quality of life. Like, you know, it's one of these small European countries, you know, all your neighbors, this kind of thing. Great beer. It's all it's known for, amazing beer. So most people will not live in America. Like you don't find a lot of Belgians here because they always end up going back. But Diedrich is so, you know, he's like Elon Musk type personality, where he's really just. He'll eat glass to do what he wants, you know, to make something happen. And so he's one of the only Belgians I've met who has not returned to Belgium in the time that I've known them, you know, because he's just a. America is the place, right? Because this is where you can really do something, do something effective, right? Like, it's very hard to build something like really significant in Europe. Right. In terms of the blood testing, what's most important for me, I mean, it just depends on your. I think for each American probably there's some way in which living here has ruined your health. And so you have to find that way and focus on it. So for me, it's definitely metabolic health. And like my big goal is just to get to a trig HDL of 1. So my trig HDL is probably 2 something or whatever it is. And I think that'll probably be the health, you know, if I get to that point, that'll be the peak of health for my entire life. Right. Like, I probably have never been that healthy. And I, you know, played football in high school and everything. So I've had like periods where I was more fit. But I think in terms of like real longevity and health, that's. That's really. That's really the issue I need to work on. And I've had some luck with it over the time. So we launched this product about a year ago, for six months before that, we were testing it in house. So we had, you know, 40, 50 people doing blood tests all the time. And just through all of that, that's been very helpful for me. I mean, I'm, you know, I like to experiment and everything. So I'm probably not even the best example. I wouldn't follow what I'm doing. But I've tried a million different weird diets to see how it affects, you know, how it affects me. I've tried carnivore potatoes. So I've tried all potato. Have you ever done the all potato potato diet? Yes, that's.

Kresser talks about this, the resistant starch, where when you heat up the potato and you cool it down.

Yeah.

You get less of a glucose spike. Did you try that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wore a GLUC continuous glucose monitor while doing it. So I have, I have all that data. It's very interesting. Probably, I mean, the best I've ever, I felt is probably on the carnivore diet. But the potato diet is very solid. You feel great. You know, it's, it's kind of interesting. It's very surprising that, you know, you would imagine you feel pretty bad just eating potatoes, but it turns out no. But. So I've done a bunch of experiments on myself, but it's a journey. Right. Because I have so many other priorities. Yeah. So I think if I could do nothing else right. And just focus on getting these markers right and getting fit, I think I see the path to doing that. Right. So now it's just a matter of time management, like how much can I optimize to spend time on this and energy and thought. But that's the main one that I think is important for me at this stage in my life.

Yeah.

A big thing is that I'm. That's much more long term, is that. So I got my genome sequence, so I did like a full genome sequence. And one thing they found is. So there's this gene that in women increases their chance of breast cancer. It's called brca. So I have one of those genes which doesn't really matter for men as much, but it increases your chances of prostate cancer. So one thing I'm doing now is I've started measuring this kit doesn't do this out of the box, but there's a expansion that we do called the hormone plus, which has more hormones than it also has psa. So this is a prostate specific antigen which goes up if you get prostate cancer. So I have a 4x risk of prostate cancer versus a normal person, your average person, and most men get prostate cancer eventually. So it means, you know, I have only this much time left with my prostate, you know, unless they're conscious of it. Yeah, whatever it is, 30 years or however much. I don't know how long it'll be. But. But anyway, if you track PSA and there's actually somebody in our company who was like, he developed a cancer screening blood test at his previous job. And so he's very passionate about PSA specifically because he knows all the data on it and he studied a lot. If you track PSA over time, each person's level is individual. So from a single measurement, it's very hard to know what's going on unless it's really high. But if it starts trending up, that's when you know something's going wrong. So you really need to track it over time if you want to have that baseline so that you can do an early detection. So that's one that I've started cycling in. And you probably only need to measure it, let's say once every six months or whatever. But having that trend, that trend line is really important if you want to detect early.

And you can get that, you can add that on to the Cy Fox test.

Yeah. So the way we view it is like this panel is the base panel. You should be getting it frequently. And then we have add ons which basically allow you to look deeper at certain things. So there's a thyroid add on that we're launching soon. We already have the hormone plus add on. So the hormone plus. I have a funny anecdote about the hormone plus that I can go into. We have continuous glucose monitor so that you can check in on your, like, how do you actually respond to glucose? So let's say you see in your blood work, my metabolism is off. I have a bad, basically bad score for metabolic health. Or one of these markers you can actually see, is it my glucose response that's doing this? How to which food is it, whatever. So we do offer that as well as like a tool to figure out deeper. The same with the hormone plus panel. Like, okay, my testosterone is low. Is it my lh, is it something else? So we have some more hormones you can measure to figure out, like, is there an obvious reason? And that's something that's in general a goal of the company is to increase the depth. So you're always taking this test, but then there are more things you can do if you want to Go deeper and like actually learn about what's going on. And that's how, you know, most engineers will debug a system, right? You do something broad and simple and you kind of see what's going on here. And these are all biomarkers that are really well studied. Very commonly, if there's a problem, they're out of range. And then we go deeper down, you know, particular rabbit hole, like hormonal, thyroid, whatever it is.

I think of what happened with Theranos and that was big. They were even like a huge write up in Time magazine back in the day when people used to read physical magazines. Remember those days where you like hold a magazine in your hands?

Oh, yeah, I used to read. I used to read science.

Some people still do that. And I think about what went wrong with Theranos. What do you think went wrong with Theranos specifically? And then also what do you think goes wrong with standard blood testing now that you guys are here to solve?

That's a good question. So we always get the Theranos question, of course. So, you know, so every deep tech industry, so anything that's very complicated and it's hard to really look inside, right? You can do five years or so of BSing everybody, right? Especially if you don't launch. So if you never launch anything, you just say, oh, we're going to make a headset that does this, you know, super virtual whatever, right? You can always make a nice demo. There's an interesting example. You know, there are examples of this. I don't want to, you know, shit talk things, but there are examples of this in every difficult industry. So, like LiDAR, anything that requires like really serious technology, you'll see these companies that are super hot. And then later it turns out it didn't really work out. And nobody really usually. The thing that with Theranos is different is that people's health was at risk. And so they got investigated much deeper. The story, you know, was much more popular. But this happens in technology in general. So you'll have somebody that's amazing at selling. You know, they have an amazing vision. They know what people want. Right. And they're not afraid to just say, we have what you want. Right?

So even if they don't have it.

Yeah. So what Theranos did is they went to doctors and they said, what do you want? And then doctors said, I want a full blood panel from a single drop. Right? Or whatever, right? Give me a full blood panel. And that's the problem, by the way, with developing blood tests for Doctors, they can always. Once you're at the doctor, they can always draw your blood. They can always send it to the standard lab. And so they want everything. They want your blood count, they want chemistry, they want it. So that's one of the reasons we're not looking at the doctor's office, because we can only do immunoassays. We really focus on proteins and hormones. So that's the area where we play. And then if you want your blood count or whatever, you know, that's your annual blood test that you're getting. Anyway, so Theranos asked, not people, but doctors, like, what do you guys want? And so the doctor said, okay, we want these hundred things that you normally get when you take many tubes of blood. Right? And Theranos basically said, we're going to make it happen. But of course, they had no plan. And so it's just one of these cases where somebody's really good at raising money, but they weren't able to. Sometimes they make it work, sometimes not. But it's just a hard problem, especially trying to do. It takes three different machines normally to do these tests. So the blood count is a machine. The chemistry is a machine. So chemistry is like your ions, magnesium chloride, whatever, albumin is done on that. Some proteins are done on that as well, and then your immunoassay, which is hormones, hscrp, whatever. And those are three big machines, like the size of this table. Right? So if you're gonna go after this problem, you should pick one to start. So now, since Theranos, there have been companies that have kind of unbundled this. So, for example, there's another YC company that already has gone through the FDA with a blood count, but it's specific. It's like, for white blood cells, for cancer patients, it's like a narrower thing, but they have one. It's actually functional. It's gotten FDA approval. They sell it. So we're focused on immunoassays, which is proteins and hormones. And that's something that this technology is already FDA cleared for in a larger instrument. So it's very conservative relative to what they were trying to do. In the end, I think it's. They had the right instinct that this is important. Right. But it's just very hard to combine being amazing at fundraising and actually delivering. Right. So that's rare. There are people like that, and those are the incredible success stories. Right? But often these things are not mixed in one person, and that's the biggest thing about it. Also, Theranos was very Non transparent. So now everybody that's trying to do blood testing has to be more transparent than a typical company. So we, for example, publish videos of R and D lab like tours, we publish blog posts about how the technology works. We talk in our faq. You can read about it just on our website. Exactly what we're doing for these tests, how this works is on the About Us page, which this isn't launched yet, but actually you can get on like a waiting list for a study where you get to use the home device as part of a. It's investigational, so it's not for diagnostic purposes, but you can get into a study that will happen next year. So we do a lot of intentional transparency, like at conferences, more like industry conferences, we actually do demos of the hardware. We'll like show people that it's actually physically there.

Right.

We're not taking your blood to another room or whatever. And I think that's really important. There are a few companies in the space that are actually trying to do literally what Theranos promised. So, like the small amount of blood, they have increased the amount of blood at this point, it's like more like a tube, but in the doctor's office. And they'll give you the blood count and everything the doctor wants. So there's like vital Genolyte, which shares. There's an overlap in the technology that we do in Genolyte actually, but they've combined it with a lot of other things. It's very large and then Truvian. So there are three, three quite legitimate companies that have been funded with a lot of money now going after this. And, you know, in my opinion, they're probably going to solve it. Like somebody's going to solve that problem of like speeding up the yearly physical blood test. But I don't know what the impact will be on health, on like people's health, because that test is already happening. So we're already doing the yearly physical blood test. What it does is it cuts down the time from when you do the blood test to when the result comes in. So the doctor can like address it maybe a little bit more while you're with them, but you anyway get like four minutes of your doctor's time. So, yes, it's going to have some impact, but I think fundamentally we have to get this into people's homes and we have to target it more seriously at chronic disease versus the standard home blood test that's kind of. Sorry. The standard doctor's office yearly blood test, that's being done now, but that's actually ongoing. So whatever. 10, however long, however many years it's been since Theranos announced, yeah, we're going to do this. There are companies that are legitimately doing this. They have very serious people on the team. They have real investors. So Theranos never raised money from real VCs. It was like senators and generals and stuff like that, who of course can't diligence anything like this. So I think the whole space is moving in a better direction. But it definitely also created a big opportunity for people getting into it in this decade. Because last decade, if you were doing anything with blood testing, you had a very hard time once they blew up because everybody just equated you to that company and that was it. So now that's kind of passed and it's opened the doors for a lot of companies. So there are, like I said, there are other companies doing other components of this.

Why do you call it Cyphox? What is that?

Oh, it's just silicon photonics. So that it's just short for silicon photonics, which is the core technology for miniaturizing the optics in the blood test.

Got it. It made me think of a fox for some reason. I was like, cy fox?

Yeah, yeah. We have little plastic plush foxes that we give, oh, cool. You know, like to interns and, you know, at conferences and stuff like that.

The reason I ask you that is because I've always heard this. And you know, back in the day, if you ever, you know, I'm 43, so I don't know. You're in your 30s still.

Yep.

LL Cool J was one of the most amazing communicators and he was a rapper back in the day. Shout out to LL Cool J and he was like, if I can tell a story and a 10 year old can understand it, then I know I'm doing a good job. And I feel like with your mission where it's by leveraging silicone photonic biosensors, lower the cost of at home health testing by 100x and provide results instantly, you are essentially going into an industry that is a battleship and you are attempting to turn the battleship around and completely revolutionize. Really what we're talking about is you're revolutionizing health span. That's what this conversation is. Do you ever get overwhelmed by this? Because it is an incredibly large thing to go up against the ivory towers that have existed not just in medical, but in testing and in labs. There are multi billions of dollars that are planted in place. These structures that have been for so long and you're literally turning a battleship, ripping it down to its frame and attempting to completely set a new course with maybe a whole new kind of boat. That is a big task. Do you ever feel like you, do you ever feel like you get intimidated by it? I mean, every industry goes through massive change, but this is a big one. Once you start poking your fingers in medicine, do you ever have any fears or any anxieties that come up?

I actually think that the reason that the industry hasn't gone more in the direction of home testing historically is that the technology wasn't very good. So, you know, there's like paper strips and there are the glucose meters that work with like electrochemical sensors. And so those. No, but those are never used in central labs. And they kind of know that it's impossible to get them to the point where they're as accurate as a central lab. And so our main thing that we're kind of hammering on always is what we launch for the home is going to have the same accuracy as a central lab. And that's, you know, given the fact that person's collecting their own sample. So of course, you know, if you put, if you put something, if you put milk in the, in there instead of your blood, we can't do anything about that. But like if the samples collected correctly, you know, giving true lab quality results, I think that's been the biggest impediment. It's not that, you know, people in medicine don't want more information. Sometimes they don't, but there are enough, you know, it's a heterogeneous. Right. Some of them do and some of them talk about it all the time. So, so it's not that. And you know, even health insurance companies and whoever in reality, they would love to have information about what's going on, like predicting, even if they can't fix it, at least predicting what's going to happen to the people that they insure. Right. Which helps them understand, like, are we even in a sustainable business? But everybody wants this. It just has to be done right. It has to be lab quality. So people have tried like, okay, we're going to make something that kind of works and you know, it's in the home so it gets a pass or whatever. Our goal is just lab quality. And you can see that even this, like the technology we sell now, which is not as advanced as the home device, it's all going to a central lab, is being run in FDA cleared instruments, whatever. Nobody went out and just built a product around this that was comprehensive and did as much as this, even though it was more or less possible. Like, we weren't the only company that could have done this. And I think it's just because even this is kind of a new technology for medicine. Right. So 10 years ago, these cards didn't exist. Yeah, this way of preserving blood didn't exist. And if you send the blood in a tube, it has to be shipped on ice and everything. So it's just when the technology is ripe, people change their minds about it. So now when people, let's say, take their Cyphox results to their doctor, we've had multiple people do this. You know, the doctor might retest them on a. They tell them, okay, let's rerun this marker in a central lab. But they take it seriously, you know, and a lot of people have had changes in the way they're being taken care of because they're able to actually show this data. So I'm not that skeptical about the industry turning around on the idea of, like, preventative. And it just needs to be cheap and easy. That's kind of my perspective on it.

It seems like this tech would actually save the traditional labs time and money if they were to implement it.

The funny thing is that in medicine, the lab companies are not the villains, I wouldn't say. And they're not even big companies. So this is something that surprised the hell out of me. So coming from other industries where you have, like, you know, Apple is a $500 billion company, whatever. The biggest lab companies, there's two of them, LabCorp and Quest, they're $15 billion companies, which is. I mean, that's large, but it's relatively small for something that serves every person in the country. Right. So they're not actually doing that great. It's a commoditized business. They don't make that much money. A lot of the cost is just, you know, the fact that you have to go into an office, the phlebotomist, the moving the blood. It's a tough business. And it's forgotten by venture capitalists, typically, and investors in biotech and medicine because it's not very profitable. So people focus on drugs because drugs are very profitable once you have. I mean, look at the Ozempic, right? So that's doing incredible. Right. So there's never been a blood test that has made as much money as Ozempic, I guarantee you. So basically, a lot of the focus and innovation is on drugs. It's just a forgotten part of the. Part of the industry. And It's. I don't think there's a lot of, like, resistance to changing it. If there was actually a solution. What there is, is a resistance to going out of their way to change it. Right. So. And that's something that, you know, the way we see it is we'll make it easy. Right? And, and I think there's usually, we don't. We don't get that much negativity. The skepticism is more around, you know, can you make this low cost? Can this. Can this be done conveniently? And whatever. But if, but doctors generally understand that this could be. Or, for example, can you do this in a way that's going to be manageable for the doctor? Right. Because if they just have all this data coming in, they already have four minutes to see you. Right. So how are they supposed to deal with this? Right. So there's a whole software infrastructure that has to be built around it for it to be realistic and a lot of, like, autonomy for the user. But, but I think if you're practical, all of these things are solvable. I don't think there are any, like, entrenched interests that don't want people getting blood tests or anything like that. It's more just like a hard problem. It doesn't make much money compared to drugs. So people don't, you know, you can't put as many resources into solving it. If it was as profitable as Ozempic, I guarantee you, you would have. And there's proof of this. You would have, you know, some tiny blood test at home already. And the proof is the continuous glucose monitor. That thing is magical. And the reason they were able to build, for anyone who doesn't know the continuous. I'm wearing one here. So the continuous glucose monitors from. There's two companies, Abbott and Dexcom, but there were about, you know, 100 companies that tried to build this. It's. It's actually a filament that goes into your skin, it's implanted in your skin, and it measures. There's like a couple of electrodes there, and it measures your glucose live in your interstitial fluid. This was a really hard problem. Abbott bought a company that did this 20 years ago. It took them, you know, 15 years to commercialize it. The reason that they could do it is that diabetes is just such a big problem and it's such a big market that it justified all this effort. Right? So it's. That's the main. There's no, like, fundamental reason you don't have a blood test at home now. It's really because it's been too difficult, it's too expensive, all this stuff. And as chip technology has gotten better, it's just become more realistic to fix this. Like if we tried to do this 10 years ago, the technology wasn't there. I mean, it might have been possible, but the amount of investment, the amount of effort, everything would have been 10x. And so I think for that reason there's no, it's not like, don't have any fears about the industry or anything like that. I think we're only going to improve things and generally get a, you know, you get generally a very positive reception when you talk about this. People are just really concerned about accuracy. That's the main thing. So as long as you're very serious about accuracy, I, I don't really see it as a. See it as an issue.

Well, making things easy is actually the most elegant thing you can do for any type of behavior change. One of the last questions I have for you. This has been great. I've really enjoyed the emotional component to this because you're, look, you're a scientist, right? And so as a scientist, you tend to see, I'm sure, things in a certain way, zeros and ones, linear and logical. But what I've really liked, and this happened when you came in as you were talking about your time in China and the Chinese tea tables and how you make tea t tables. And so the human element of this could not be more palpable for me because at the end of the day, it's written on the box right here. Measure more, get results. If you want true results, you have to address all of the being, not just the physical. There's an emotional component to this. If you look at behavior change. And I remember that I interviewed one of BJ Fogg's students. And also I've studied some of Charles Duhigg's work and his reward model. And even thinking about the variable reward from Nir Eyal and all these people that have done tremendous research and behavior change, it's about the exterior locus of control that can actually over time shift your internal locus of control. So with that said, like, we're both wearing the Oura ring. I see. And data is a part of my life, but it doesn't run my life. How does using wearables actually help people change their behavior? Especially when you pair it with something like every three month, a quarterly blood test. How does that actually work? What have you seen from data on that? And just anecdotally, it makes sense to me. But from a data perspective, does wearables and biomarkers combined move people towards different behaviors?

So when we were designing the product, we tried a lot of things, right? And we found this was strange to me. So I tried all the different wearables, of course. And it was weird to me that there was no, as far as I know, that still doesn't exist. There was no one dashboard where you could see your blood results and, you know, a digest of your wearable data over the period before the blood test. So it makes sense. I want to know, like, how did I sleep for two weeks or a month before I took this blood test to see, like, is it actually having an effect? Another thing is, you know, studies show, let's say, that sleep and inflammation are linked, but that means they're linked on average, not for you necessarily. Right. So if you want to improve your inflammation, sleeping more might have no impact at all. Right. And that's also something we see in our data. Sleep and inflammation are correlated in 50% of people. So for some people they're just not correlated. Right. So you're just, you know.

So some people can sleep like shit and be okay.

Some, at least from an inflammation perspective. Yeah. So it might be other thing, right? We don't know. But it's just, I'm just saying if you just follow studies on paper, you're following the average human, which is, where is that person? Right? So it's certainly not you. So I think it was kind of obvious to us that this technology is getting better and better. Like wearables have gotten much better over the last five years. And it's also chips, right? That's why they're getting better, because chips are getting better. It was just an obvious thing, like, why wouldn't you want to see all of this information in one place? And that's our philosophy in general. We focus on being the best blood test in the industry. And then we add other things, kind of, I would say, like we do a mediocre job with everything else, right? So we do, we're the best blood test in the industry. But then we have wearable integration. We'll summarize your wearable data and we're not going to go into it as deep as Aura. So if you want to know, like super deep, what's going on with your sleep, whatever, just open the Aura app. We'll give you your average sleep. Like, how was your sleep? You know, we have three different things, like rem, whatever it is, right? We'll give you those numbers next to Your blood data, we'll give you a score. But we're not going to say we're the experts in sleep. Right. So we just kind of stick to being the experts in blood tests and then. But we build around it, all the tools that allow you to, like, low effort. And this is because, honestly, there are different product philosophies. So some are. I think I was going to go into this earlier and I didn't make it. So it's basically sometimes, you know, you interview a lot of users, you ask them what they want, whatever it is, and other products. Like this is how Gmail was built, for example. They just built it for a couple of people. So the guy who built Gmail happens to actually be an investor in Syfox. So he was very involved with Y Combinator and so on afterwards. But when he. There's a podcast where he talks about this, which struck me, like, it's very interesting. When he built Gmail, he just built it for a few people at Google. His goal was to get them to switch from their regular email client to Gmail, which is tough, right? Like, if I come to you and say, change the way you do email. It's difficult because you're constantly doing email. You're very used, very used to it. So this product, in many ways was just built for a few people, but we built it so we actually would use it. Right. So it's like super low effort, like this kind of stuff. And that's, that's our philosophy. Like, we do a lot of things mediocre, super low effort. So you don't have to be looking at an app for three hours to figure out your sleep or whatever. It's just one number in the dashboard, so it's just done. Okay. But it's in the same place as your blood results, which are really the anchor of how we view tracking somebody's health. Right. That's really the most important thing. And everything else is ancillary, but it's a tool to get it all, just improve it and see what's going on. So is your sleep actually affecting this marker? That kind of thing? So that's how we view wearables. It's something that we're always tracking. We integrate with like 200 different wearables. And I'm always really excited to see, like, what's coming next in that space. But I think it's. It's somewhat done, so I'm not sure what will be. Can they come up with anything more? Yeah, but we'll see. But I really like the aura, I think it's one of the best ones, and a lot of our users will use that one. But it's. That's kind of how I see it. We're not experts in it, but we make it possible to have it all in one place. And that's what makes it really low effort.

Have you ever seen that movie Gattaca? Do you know about it? Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So in Gattaca, they had, like, all these biometrics that they were testing and biomarkers, and they had, like, thumb. I think he even faked his thumbprint. Like, he got someone else's skin and he got in there. And I think that movie really set a tone for people. How powerful introspection from a biological level can actually be when you know your numbers. They. They had class warfare in that movie where if you had certain biomarkers and your genetics came out in a certain way, you literally had more life opportunities. I would actually say that Gattaca is here in some way on planet Earth. If you have an epigenetic expression because of your environment, like you're in a more economically diverse climate, you're not economically depressed, you probably are going to have more opportunities, just like they had in Gattaca. And I think if people can actually use this and you make this so affordable that people can. So thank you for that, by the way. It's on the screen right now. It's JoshTrent.com blood test. And that'll take you right to the website. You just enter the code, Josh, 10. It's 10% off. It's already very cheap, by the way, the test. So I don't know how y' all did that. Took these huge machines and boiled it down so that you can actually put it in a lab and test from the paper. It's freaking amazing. But the roundabout question I'm getting to is, like, if we tune in to how our body actually is from a data perspective, from. From a true physiology, and we just. Over the course of time, we just almost like the bumpers in the bowling lane, we just get ourselves to bowl more strikes, and we just slowly adapt in better behaviors. We actually can create more wealth for ourselves. We can have better relationships. We can live longer. That's the whole point of why we sit at this table, Mike, is how do I live my life? Well, what are your thoughts on that? How do you see that on a macro and a micro economic behavior change? All the things. Wellness perspective.

I'm from an immigrant family. I think in, you know, in other Countries that have a longer history, it's harder to do new things, but they do have a lot of things that work. So, for example, like, the diets are more. You know, there's kind of a progression for the last 3,000 years of what people are eating in America. You show up and it's like deep fried Oreos, you know, whatever, right? So it's like, it's super extreme for people that are not from here, right? So, you know, for the first half of my life or whatever, you know, until. Until I became an adult, I really wasn't exposed much to that at all, because I was living in New York and mostly eating at home with, like, you know, just Soviet food, you know, whatever, like buckwheat or something, and it getting exposed, you know, because New York is also not America. Right. Like, once I left New York and actually went out into the wide world, I was, like, amazed at what's going on. But it's. There are also all these benefits of not having the kind of like the cage of culture, right? So America is like, you know, you can do be very different, and it's much more difficult to be different and novel in other countries. But I think what comes with that is that you just have to be more careful because you're doing. I mean, we discussed this. You're just trying things that nobody's ever tried before, you know, Nobody's ever tried. There's no history of like 100 generations living on TV dinners. You know, like, Koreans have been eating kimchi. They don't remember when they started doing this. Right? And obviously there's just this history of this working, right? Like, if it was really bad for you, most things like that, they kind of get evolutionarily removed, right?

Yeah.

And we don't have that with a lot of things that Americans are doing, and maybe some of them are amazing, Right? But it's. You definitely just have to put a little bit more effort into being aware of what's going on with you. Right? Because you're not being taken care of by this ancestral thing that kind of got worked out already. You're on your own. You know, you have the chance to be incredible. You have the chance to whatever, you know, watch Fox News and MSNBC and eat TV dinners and like, whatever, you know, like all the. All the fast food is there, right? That you. And it's just what it is. And I think it has its upsides and downsides, but that's why having tools like this is good. And again, we didn't come to this from being, I'm not a fitness influencer, anything like that. There's just an obvious need for this kind of tool. Right. And people can apply it in their lives. We've done it for ourselves and we kind of built something that we know is useful because we use it. And I think honestly that literally every American should be getting a test like this at least once a year. You know, probably four times a year. If they're trying to optimize something even more often as they get more affordable, it's going to be possible to do it more frequently. If you're really working on something, you know, you can just do, let's say a testosterone test many times, I think it's absolutely affordable.

Now for like a couple hundred bucks, you can get an entire window into your health.

Yeah.

And when in history could we ever get something that cheap? That's why I'm saying I don't know how y' all did it, but it's amazing.

If we were in a rational world, this would already be part of your healthcare. Right. Because it's just so such low hanging fruit.

Yeah.

The problems that you might catch or that you can optimize against are super expensive. Not just for you, but for everybody. Right. The whole system, your family. You know, once these things go wrong, they're very hard to fix.

Yeah.

I'm really hopeful that it's going to turn into something like the food sensitivity test where it's just people are at least curious enough to do it at a very large scale. So millions and millions of people and the data that we are able to collect them. So just looking at the metadata. Right. We don't look any personal, individual data. We don't even collect, for example, genomic data. People are often worried about that. So we don't need, there's no sample is actually saved. But just the metadata of seeing so many people on a broader blood test will also help us improve this insights and everything else and help people predict what's going to happen to them, give them better information. And I think that can be like a really good flywheel for actually improving the health overall just of everybody involved. Right. And this is something that I'm sure many other companies will come out with broader blood tests and there already are. Right. So there are more expensive, more concierge solutions out there, but those are, I'm sure will improve as well. And I think it's just something that should be a big part of healthcare, but it isn't. And hopefully we'll make a dent in that.

I think we are right now. I mean, literally, when someone is watching this, they're feeling like, okay, I can be my own, essentially, scientist. I can work with professionals with real data, and I don't have to spend hours sitting at the doctor's office going through all of this insanity. I'll say it. I know you may not be able to say it. The sick care system. It's a sick care system. It has nothing really to do with health. They're good at fixing broken bones or in emergency situations, so they're necessary. There's a box that you brought in the studio, and I want to know what's in this box because I'm guessing that it has something to do with the next evolution of the company. And I'm curious, as we say goodbye, what's in the box? And then what kind of clearance did this have to go through? What are you most excited about? What's in the box? What movie is that? What's in the box?

That's funny. So as we have more and more tools around the blood test, we basically put together, like, a membership, we call a membership toolkit. So it's essentially place where, first of all, you can store everything, but also it kind of organizes the experience. So one thing we do is anybody who buys this is also the lowest cost way to use the product. The way it works is that you have a membership which costs $16 a month, and then every time you take a blood test, you get billed. So you can take them or not. There's no, like, subscription where, you know, they pile up or whatever. So if you don't take them, we don't. We don't charge you. And then you automatically get shipped a new one. And then if you use it, you get billed. It's the lowest cost option for taking a test with us. But we also provide this membership, also provides you access to all the other tools. So out of. We know already that Americans just typically have a terrible circadian rhythm because they're using their phone in bed, no doubt, and all these other things. So we don't even ask. We just ship the. We got like, very nice blue light blockers in bulk, and we just ship them. Because that's like, you know, amazing. If 10% of the users who get this just wear them. We've already done a, you know, we've done a good thing, Right?

Yeah.

So we just shipped them. We don't even ask. And then we include. So it depends on, you know, you have the option to get continuous glucose monitors through this. We're about to launch supplements. So we're working with a company that they do all the supplements for like major sports teams and things like that. So it's very high quality supplements. We're obviously not a, you know, we're not a supplement company, we're not a CGM company, we're not a blue light blocker company. So why are we doing this? Again, it's just, it's a thing of convenience. Like people, people do what's convenient, right? So we just offer all these things. We actually don't try to make a profit on them. We just pass through the cost essentially. So that if you want to do something. So for example, if you get your blood work when we launch supplements, we'll say, okay, these are, this is the package of supplements that you should be getting. Right. And this is, you know, just the basic, like we're not trying to sell you 30 supplements. It's like we, it's very well proven you should be doing these two things right. And then we basically just make it very easy for you to get that. And that's our philosophy. Like we're just trying to make the thing more valuable as a whole. And I think we're able to do that more than other companies because we have this hardware component to the company. So we're able to think much more long term is if you look at like, why is Apple so valuable? It's because of the hardware, so they're able. It's just very sticky. Like once you have the hardware, you're in that system and you can look at longer time horizons. And so for us, we're just trying to grow this as much as possible, get as many people into blood testing now and into optimizing their health so that we have a bigger install base essentially for the hardware in the long run. So it allows us to be a little bit more flexible with how we price things, how we market them and everything. We don't have that short term thing that happens a lot, I would say, like in the wellness industry, unfortunately, because it's just, yeah, you know, it's just you're reselling something or whatever. So we, we're trying to think much more long term. Do this like behavior change where people can learn to do blood testing, health optimization and everything else.

It's so noble, man. It really is. Because there's a lot of things that people waste money on, especially in the biohacking world. There's some in the guest bedroom here in the studio, like they're cool, but they ain't Gonna move the needle. They're, they ain't low hanging fruit. This is, and there's this false dichotomy as we say goodbye on the podcast now that I wish you'd speak to. And the dichotomy is, well, I, I can make a difference, but then I can't make a dollar. No, I actually see this as both. So for you making a difference and making a dollar, maybe not a bunch of dollars now, but down the road, this, this old mentality of like, oh, well, I can't be wealthy and actually have integrity. Integrity. We don't talk about that on the show because I don't believe in that mentality, but I know that somebody watching or listening, they may have had parents that shared with them that mentality. They may have come from a broken financial home or whatever. Can you speak to that? You know, to, to make a difference in people's health and to make revenue for you and your team, like that's a big feat, but that's what makes life so fun, is that we can do both.

Yeah, I think it's, it's getting easier and easier, I would say paradoxically. I mean, I think in many ways, in some ways life is getting harder. Right. Things are getting more expensive and so on, but it's because of the way that technology is accelerating and other things. There are actually more and more people who are, I would say mostly Silicon Valley is responsible for this. However much you might hate some of the things they've done or whatever. There is this really positive mentality there that like you're really trying to take a shot at something big. So you'll give up the short term for that. Yeah, and that's a really good mentality. And usually the thing is, if you really want to be very successful at large scale, it's possible to do it a different way. But it's much easier if you're very long term thinking because then you can recruit more people. Right. So just good people want a long term. They want to see something happen. Right. They don't want a short term result typically. Right. Because that result is usually just for whoever you know, the person in charge. Right. If you're an employee somewhere, you're not making the money anyway. To a large extent. Sure. I mean, there are, there are examples of startups that are really, I mean, I, you know, I don't remember the name of this startup, but there's a company that came out during the pandemic that just prescribes Adderall, so they like made it legal. To prescribe stuff by Zoom because of, of the pandemic and some company like put out like 10 million prescriptions for Adderall, you know, to people who probably didn't need it. And you know, that kind of stuff happens. But I think it's typically, if you want to work with good people, they usually want to be doing something good and like positive in the long run. And I think, you know, in the end, the same is even true for investors. If you have really high quality investors, yes, they want to make money, but they've already made money, right. So they usually want to see something that's going to have a big impact where they have like a legacy from it and things like that. So I think it all fits well together. It's. And the more you expand the scope of what you're doing, the easier it gets. So it's like if you're working on some single small thing and it's like hard to make that profitable or whatever without screwing your customers, just expand what you're doing until you're doing enough that you can have a big impact and you don't have to do small trades. Right. That's kind of how I see it. And that's so far been working out for us.

Well, the long game is the more fun game in my opinion. The short term game might be cool, but it ends really quickly. And so I want to live in this game life as long as I can. And you know, hopefully I really feel like this, this tool set can be a way that we can do that. You know, it can accelerate not just the quality of our life, but it's something freaking actionable. There's so much woo woo and so much insanity in the world of wellness, man. I see a lot of it, Mike, and this is something that's really tactical and really like from the ground up, you can do this. It's affordable. It's on the screen again right now. Joshtrent.com and the code is Josh10. So Mike gave you 10% off. So thank you to Mike, thank you to Cy Fox. We covered a lot of ground, man. What did we miss? When we look at this concept of at home blood testing, you know, the, the regulations of FDA and everything that you're up against and everything that you're for, everything that you're creating. What do we miss? Like, what else do people get to know? What should we know about at home blood testing?

So, so probably there's just two things. We've covered a ton here, which has been really fun. There's probably two things that I just, I haven't mentioned that they're worth mentioning depending on who's watching this. So one is if you like experimenting with stuff and you want to go like the extra mile, you can actually get onto the. I mentioned this briefly, but you can get onto a waiting list. We're going to have a big study where we actually enroll people to use the at home device. So again, this is now being run in a very conventional way. It's the best on the market. But the really exciting thing is going to be this device and we'll do a big study where you're getting mail in tests in parallel to a device at home. So you can, for example, if your testosterone is low, you can then measure your testosterone more frequently as you're making changes. So you do your test every quarter, let's say, and then you have a testosterone test twice a month. So that's awesome. And so that's on the website. And then the second thing is we actually also again we're just trying to get this out there. So we also partner a lot with like coaches or small businesses or really whoever that wants to have blood testing as part of what they're doing. So if they have something else going on, let's say you do coaching and that can be as broad as even. We even do things with people that are doing more like mental health. Right. Because a lot of this stuff is just linked and you want to have a blood testing component in that that allows you to unlock, for example, a better coaching experience or a better nutrition experience, a better supplements experience, whatever it is. We actually have a super easy way to do that. We have very transparent pricing. It's directly on the website also. And you can essentially it's co branding. So you put your logo on our kit, we help you do all the blood testing, we take care of it, we still review everything before it's released to your clients. So you don't have to be an expert in blood testing, but you can add your own insights to the reports and things like that. And that basically just allows us to get out there to more people and in a different context. So for example, we're never going to do mental health counseling. Right. But in reality, depression is frequently linked to, you know, issues like health issues. Right. So having that screened before you start going down the route of whatever it is else. Right. Makes a lot of sense. So that's something where if you're already in the business of trying to help people with their health and you're not Doing blood testing, we make it incredibly easy to add that. And that I think is, I think can be very impactful. So that's just something I wanted to.

Mention that's really huge. So this is going to be probably one of our biggest shownotes ever. We've talked about movies, resources, science. Like we've, we've gone down and into all the weeds on this one and they were really fun weeds too. I love this because, you know, I got away from the quantified self community because it was so heady and I stopped going to the conferences. But I believe in it. I think when we look at behavior change, like what allowed me to change my behavior was constantly looking within. And sometimes in our world where we're constantly outside of ourselves, we need stuff like this to bring us back to our intuition, which is actually where all of the decisions are come from anyways, if we're conscious. So man, as we say goodbye, how would you define everything we've discussed today? The encapsulation of why you're in the world and what the hell we're doing here. How do you live your life well? What does that even mean to you? How would you define wellness?

You know, whatever I do doesn't apply very well to people that have. I have a lot of motivation, right. So it's like as a base level, right. So that part is kind of taken care of. Like I get up every day, I just want to work, right. So I don't have to like worry about that part. So me, for me, it's mainly trying to direct that somewhere where it's actually connected. Like I was saying, you're not just running the engine, it's actually connected to the wheels. So that's really what I like. What makes me happier is when I actually see that, okay, all this work I'm doing, it's leading to something, right? I'm not just doing cycles, right? And so that's one of the reasons that even though, to be honest with you, the actual technology, like the hardware part of this company intellectually is super exciting to me. Like I love working in the lab, you know, I'm still doing it all the time and so on, and working with our scientists, you know, who are in the lab on a daily basis, like I'm very involved in that. But the seeing people actually using the blood test, even this version of it, that's not, you know, it's going to be 10 times better when it's fully at home, seeing them get real benefit from it and seeing how like the science actually bears out in people's lives, like, in a practical way. That's been really exciting for me, and it's very rewarding. Right? So it makes it. Again, people talk about, like, the stress of. Of being a founder and everything like that. I think if you. If people are really using the product and getting benefit from it, it kind of smooths over a lot of that. So I think that that's been great, and that's something that, you know, it's. It's amazing to be on this podcast because it's just exciting to get. Get this message out to more people, get more people running blood tests. That's. That's kind of what makes me happy at this point.

I'm with you, Mike. This has been exceptional, y' all. Share this podcast with somebody that needs to take this test, which is, I think, all humans. Anybody that breathes. So thank you for coming on, Mike. Until we see you again, we're all wishing you love and wellness, y'. All. Go out there, do something you enjoy, make meaning of this world, because life is finite and we don't get off this earth alive. So we'll talk to you guys soon. Wishing you love and wellness. Peace. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you love this video, hit subscribe. That way you'll be automatically notified when new videos come out, new episodes. And also share this video with a friend. If you loved it, they're gonna love it, too. Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based on the video you just saw. Make sure you follow me, and I'll see you in the next video.