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- [00:08]
A
All right, welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tuss. My guest today is Andrew Lacy. Andrew is the founder and CEO of Pronovo, and you probably know what that is. It's the preeminent full body scan company. I happen to be, independently of all of this, a customer. And we're gonna talk about preventative health, but we're gonna talk about healthcare in two ways. The first part is going to be Andrew as someone who's on the front lines of longevity and wellness and really cutting edge technology to make sure that people can be as healthy as possible. Kind of both how he thinks about it, what you do for yourself, everything else, and then systematic, which is sort of based on everything that you've learned. And because you're Australian, you've had the ability to sort of see multiple types of systems, what the US Is getting right, but more importantly, what we can do better. So, anyway, thanks for joining us. I think.
- [00:59]
B
Great to be here. Thank you.
- [01:00]
A
Yeah. So let's just start with your background, just to kind of level set it for the. For the audience. How'd you get into all this?
- [01:06]
B
So I grew up in Australia. I studied law. I ended up sort of moving between different jobs and was finally offered the opportunity to do graduate school in the US And I sort of took that opportunity by the horns. And that was in Silicon Valley. And I, you know, just fell in love with this idea of entrepreneurship. And it's gonna sound really sort of like I'm from the country, but in Australia, you sort of saw all these websites back in the early 2000s, and you didn't imagine that there were companies behind this and people actually building things. This felt like this magical thing. And, you know, I remember one day very early on, when I moved over, rollerblading down El Camino in Silicon Valley and seeing, oh, there's like, Yahoo's office, there's actual things. Actual things here. People are building this stuff. Wouldn't that be cool? And so I turned. I never went back to law, and it went back to business. I just went into the business of building companies, and I've been doing that for the last 20 years.
- [02:06]
A
And so what was the first company in.
- [02:09]
B
Well, the first company was really fascinating. It was the very first company built on top of the iPhone platform.
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A
Interesting.
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B
And it's so something I think about a lot in the context of Pernuvo, in that, you know, the iPhones had been around for so long. Sorry, phones had been around for so long, and people had, you know, there were these big bricks and they were useful for doing one thing, which was making phone calls. And if you're like, you could play poker on it or something, Blackjack. And then Apple came along and built this device and a bunch of 16 year olds hacked into it to put apps on and do, do cool stuff. And, and we, and I saw this sort of underground activity and we said, hey, this is not another phone. This is going to be a whole platform. So we built the very first app company on top of.
- [02:55]
A
What was it?
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B
It's called Tapulous.
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A
What did it do?
- [02:59]
B
Everything. I mean, back then it was so early that we just said, well, we want to be Facebook for iPhone. We're going to build an app that's like Yelp. We're going to do something. Like everything was basically completely fresh territory. Of course, then a year later everyone figured out that mobile was going to be a thing and so they piled onto it. But in those early days we could do everything. In the end, I bought an app called Tap Tap Revenge, which was like Guitar Hero for the iPhone. And it became the most successful sort of free meme game in the early days. And we got a bunch of musicians in and we bought their music to this new platform and it was a lot of fun. And we ended up selling to Disney.
- [03:37]
A
Nice. And so how do you go from kind of a consumer entertainment business into healthcare?
- [03:43]
B
Well, it was a pretty good start. So I was really, you know, like most entrepreneurs, you're like, wow, I must be pretty good at this.
- [03:49]
A
You're a genius. You're definitely a genius. Yeah.
- [03:52]
B
So I went, I'm like, doesn't matter what I do next, it's going to be successful. So I picked, you know, some pretty hard things to do. I worked on a sort of natural language search company for travel, which was both a hard technical problem in a sector which I don't think anyone has made any successful companies in.
- [04:06]
A
Yeah.
- [04:07]
B
And I wore myself into the ground and exited that one and then did another one which also was like very physically taxing. And I was in Europe at the time. I came back to the US and on the belief that, I guess given that these companies failed, it wasn't me, it was the fact that I wasn't in Silicon Valley at this moment in time, so I had to come back to do something else. And, and around that time I just started exploring different ideas in the health space. I thought it was really under invested and a big like the biggest sector in the world in, in the US and certainly in the world. And, and an opportunity ideally to Help people too.
- [04:45]
A
And how does that lead to pernuvo and full body scans?
- [04:48]
B
So I was working on something completely different. And I remember waking up one day and just looking in the mirror and saying, okay. For the last 20 years, I've been like taking credits out of my health into the things I was working on. You know, working seven days a week, 16 hours a day, not sleeping enough, not exercising and so on, by the way. So many people can probably relate to that.
- [05:10]
A
Yeah, of course.
- [05:11]
B
And I just said, hey, you know, before I embark on another one of these things, how do I just make sure that I'm making sort of risk informed decision? So I went to learn more about my own health and I found a gentleman who was doing an early version of the prenevo scan up in Canada, of all places. So I got on a plane, I did one of these sort of early scans and just found it. Incredible. And.
- [05:34]
A
And then. So this thing's incredible in your view. Your sort of aha moment is like, hey, we gotta bring this to the masses.
- [05:41]
B
Yeah. And it was incredible in sort of not in the typical founder story. So it's not like they found cancer and, you know, saved my life.
- [05:48]
A
Right, right, right.
- [05:49]
B
It's sort of. In spite of my worst, My best efforts to sort of like destroy my body, I was generally okay on the inside. Right, right. I had good genes, but I had this like incredible peace of mind. I remember coming back to San Francisco and I was walking around the street and I felt like I was in a secret club of one person and every. Everyone I passed on the street in my mind, I'd be like, you don't know about your health. You don't know about your health. You don't know what's going on. I know what's going on. And I was sort of, you know, I was bouncing off the walls with this sort of peace of mind. For the first couple weeks after I would have a headache or might have some pain, I'm like, I know that's nothing. So I got back on a plane and went back to this guy's clinic for a few months and actually met like 100 or so patients that went through there. And those guys were. These were people that might have learned. Some of them learned they had cancer. I remember there was a woman who started feeling bad the day of her scan and she was having an active stroke. They called an ambulance and sent straight to the hospital. And there was a bunch of people, had wear and tear, you know, no one's completely fine, as you know. From doing a scan, it's always something that you find. But. But, you know, at the end of this session with this radiologist, they would get up and they would hug the guy, and they were just, like, overwhelmingly grateful that they had this new understanding into their health that the health system hadn't told me that told them their entire lives. And that just felt super special.
- [07:12]
A
So do you buy his company?
- [07:14]
B
And then. So we partnered up and I mean, back then it was like an hour and a half the scan, and now it's, you know, half as. Yeah, it's twice as fast and captures twice the amount of data. So. So we've actually taken a long way. But yeah, he. He was the founding radiologist at the company.
- [07:30]
A
Got it. And so how do you take this thing where you know that if people use it and if it could really spread, it will have a meaningful impact on individual health and societal health, but it's not something that is broadly understood. How do you take it from what's in your head into a kind of widely understood consumer and health product?
- [07:53]
B
Well, it started with just some level of conviction because every single physician I spoke to said that this was a bad idea. That we had tried screening in the US 30 years earlier using CT machines inside shopping malls. You could literally walk up to a store and get a heavy radiation dose. When they tried to look for something inside your body, everyone hated it. The FDA shut it down. It sort of poisoned the space. And I, you know, I just couldn't reconcile what I had seen people experience of the process and what these doctors were saying. And I sort of told myself at the time, this is either the worst idea in the world to pursue or like a truly breakthrough, transformative idea. This is not straight down the fairway.
- [08:39]
A
Right, right. It's kind of binary.
- [08:41]
B
It's binary and it's kind of cool. And maybe a little part of me wanted to prove doctors wrong.
- [08:45]
A
Right. And so you get, you know, obviously, a lot of pushback because the status quo tends to, one, like things the way they are, and two, they like to poo poo anyone trying to do anything different or new from both a business standpoint, but also just, you know, from a kind of personal, psychological standpoint. How do you push through that?
- [09:07]
B
Well, I mean, I guess the business side is the easiest. It sort of meant that we first of all had to focus on consumers. We couldn't. Like most traditional healthcare ventures, they're going after doctors, or they're going after health systems, or they're going after insurance. We, from the very Beginning said, hey, maybe that's the future of the company. But right now we have to speak to consumers. Like, we have to find more people that have. Have the potential for profound experience. Like we all had having the scan in the early days. And we have to operate a business that is not sort of marketing smokes and mirrors, but something that just provides just an incredible experience. Because if I can't get a doctor to endorse this scan in the early days, I can at least get you, Bradley, to tell all your friends, which is funny.
- [09:57]
A
That's how. That's what I've done. Should I get. When I'm like, I think you should. Right. You know, yeah, that. That's exactly how it happened. So is that kind of what happened was you had early adopters and then everyone had a really good experience and then it kind of spread that way.
- [10:10]
B
Yeah. Then we. And then we opened a clinic in LA and we started to get people come in that had these incredibly huge audiences and we didn't do anything. This is what a lot of people don't understand. We didn't do anything crazy. We didn't engage them as paid sort of like promotional speakers for the company. We would just sit down, like I might with you and say, and to say, hey, man, you know, like, the single biggest challenge we have as a company is people don't know that we exist.
- [10:38]
A
Right.
- [10:39]
B
Can you help us? If you have a good experience, let other people know that we exist. Now, you can bring a few folks in, but if you have that conversation with, you know, a Kris Jenner.
- [10:53]
A
Yeah, right.
- [10:54]
B
You know, Kate Hudson, Olivia Wilde people. And they're grateful because they have an audience and they have a great experience and, wow, why not share it? And you're going to hopefully save lives. And that really sort of helped put us on the map.
- [11:11]
A
Was there a moment where you felt like kind of the social norm changed and all of a sudden, okay, we're in the zeitgeist. People get it, it's working.
- [11:22]
B
Yeah. It happened just after we started coming back from COVID To be honest, it was really interesting. In the early days, someone might post on an Instagram or Twitter, hey, I did this scan. They found this. It saved my life. I'm very grateful. And a bunch of physicians might sort of go onto that thread and they'll be like, oh, this was a bad idea. Who knows if that cancer that they found was ever going to kill you. You put yourself at unnecessary risk doing a surgery. I mean, it was. And imagine like we're sitting there Watching these threads, like what we thought was going to be a very nice thread turn in this direction, and we're like,
- [11:59]
A
no good deed goes unpunished, man.
- [12:02]
B
And we're like, wow, you know, how do I feel like we're trying to build a company here that helps people? Why do I feel like people are telling me I'm killing people now? But something happened sort of towards the end of COVID where we didn't even need to get involved in that dialogue. Customers, consumers, were just saying, oh, typical doctor. They only want things to be caught late. Or this is how you make money by, you know, requiring me to have expensive chemo drugs because you found my cancer too late, or so on and so forth. So the dialogue really started to change. It's like Covid meant that people, for the first time started to understand that doctors weren't there to keep them healthy. They were there to maybe hopefully fix them and, you know, when they got sick. Right. Yeah.
- [12:45]
A
So this may be a weird question. We can edit it out if it turns out to not have a. But, like, it seems to me that there's almost two competing mentalities within the population. Right. Clearly, there's a mentality of people who are not focused on their health, because I don't think you could have this level of an obesity crisis, this level of addiction, everything else. But there's also a mentality of people who are saying, I really want to be as healthy as I can and live as long as I can, however long that might be, and I want to use the tools available. They just coexist, or is it like, how do people think about their health from what you've learned over the years?
- [13:23]
B
Well, I think they coexist to some extent, but I would say that there's a really important and fundamental difference between taking a picture of the inside of someone's body and showing them and showing them, say, a blood pressure number or, you know, blood test.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, cholesterol result or something. It's like very hard for you to connect these things on a piece of paper with what's going on with your health. But what's really interesting, when you sort of take these pictures and you say, okay, you have high blood pressure, you're not taking your blood pressure meds. We can show you the damage in your brain. And so you can really start to viscerally connect, that becomes a catalyst for people to actually not ignore things that they probably subconsciously know they shouldn't be ignoring.
- [14:03]
A
Right. So if I'm an individual listening to this Podcast and I have the mentality of I kind of want to maximize my health long term. What are the things I should do? Obviously full body scan is one of them. But how do you handle your own personal health?
- [14:21]
B
Well, first caveat, I am not a longevity bro. We're not on video, so you can't see my absence of a six pack here. You look fine.
- [14:31]
A
You look pretty good.
- [14:31]
B
Yeah, but you know, I'm, I'm sort of of the. A good entrepreneur is all about 80, 20, you know, what's the 80% of the, you know, impact you can get from 20% of the effort? And I think longevity in my mind is pretty similar. There's a small number of interventions I believe that you can do that really make a massive difference. And then there's a long tail where the evidence is pretty spurious. It can be very expensive. It can take a lot of time. And my full time job is not to live longer. My full time job right now is to build, you know, to build this business.
- [15:00]
A
Yeah.
- [15:02]
B
So that said, my personal regime, frankly is, is a small list of things. Obviously. I get imaged every year with our company. I do comprehensive blood every year. I try and walk two to three hours every day. Now. How do you do that and work really hard? Pretty simple. There's only one solution, which is pacing while you're talking or what I have is a treadmill desk.
- [15:28]
A
Got it. Yeah.
- [15:30]
B
So, you know, on a good day, I can, I will walk a half marathon. I have walked a marathon a couple of times. That's a long day when I have a lot of meetings. So it's fantastic because multitasking and get as much sleep as possible. And that's, you know, try and get at least seven hours of sleep, you know, every night, which a lot of people don't get.
- [15:50]
A
Right.
- [15:51]
B
That's it. That's my plan. I've, I've investigated every six months. I do extensive research to see what else I should be doing. Nothing else has evidence.
- [16:00]
A
Diet.
- [16:01]
B
Diet for sure. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Diet, obviously. Exercise, do high impact, high intensity training a couple of times a week.
- [16:08]
A
Right.
- [16:09]
B
Together with my walking. And that's basically all I do.
- [16:11]
A
Right. So basically, to summarize it, yeah. Healthy diet, seven, at least seven hours of sleep, physical activity ranging from, you know, going to the high intensity to just getting all the steps and kind of the motion and then, you know, learning as much as you can in a preventative way to then deal with whatever problems arise. Is that. Yeah. It's funny how like you Always kind of get back to that. No matter how many sort of forms look into for longevity, whatever else, it's basically exercise, sleep, diet and the best healthcare you can have access to.
- [16:43]
B
And I would put sleep at the top of the list because what I find is if I have a lot of sleep, if I have enough sleep, then the exercise and the diet comes really easy.
- [16:51]
A
Right. If you're tired, everything else feels terrible, then you eat like crap and you kind of make all of these different sort of trade offs that never work out in the end.
- [17:00]
B
But you know, that's, I would say this is that minority opinion quote, unquote, longevity space. You know, the expectation seems to be that we're popping like 50 pills every day and you know, doing a bunch of red light things and, you know, infrared saunas and ice baths and. And I'm not saying that those things can't be helpful.
- [17:18]
A
Right.
- [17:19]
B
I just think they're outside of my 80, 20.
- [17:21]
A
Yeah, totally. AI in terms of how you're using it, I would imagine for analysis, it's got to be a useful tool. Where does it fit into the business?
- [17:31]
B
It's huge. It's sort of the piece of the iceberg that a lot of people don't see. We operate these clinics around the US where every day we're imaging hundreds and hundreds of patients and we spend a lot of time doing what we call structured radiology, which is actually really helpful for many reasons. Typically when you do radiology, a radiologist just dictates into a dictaphone and you get a Word document and there's no real standardization. So two radiologists might see the same thing and give totally different recommendations. Sort of like an ugly truth of the industry.
- [18:02]
A
Right?
- [18:04]
B
So we work really hard to standardize everything so that two different radiologists, one could be in Florida, one could be in la, they see the same finding, they'll make essentially the same recommendation for the most part. And that really helps out, that helps consumers get confidence. So when you come in for your second scan, if there are conditions that are unchanged, the recommendations should be unchanged. But it also means that we have this incredible structured data for AI and we're working on models now to help us diagnose disease more effectively, to help you understand how your body is aging. So we look at every organ of your body and say, hey, you know, like, I'm 50 but my brain looks like I'm 60, but my liver looks like I'm 40. So I should, you know, focus more on brain activities and I can continue to drink if I want to, you know, like, you can start to really personalize the interventions for people. And AI is really good at picking up these subtle signals that a radiologist wouldn't be able to. So these are the two main areas. I would say that we're looking at AI, and there's a lot of people that say that AI one day will replace entirely radiology. And I don't know when or if that will happen, but if it does, it will definitely change the cost curve for providing these services.
- [19:09]
A
I mean, they still have to scan you in some way. Right. The AI can't just. You can't just look at your computer screen and it tells you everything, I would imagine.
- [19:16]
B
You still have to lie inside a machine. You still at the moment have to have a person put you inside the machine, maybe a robot one day. But yeah, the single biggest cost of providing this. Why? I mean, we offer a scan at 1,020 500 and people ask, well, why is it so expensive? Well, the biggest cost component is radiology. Those guys are very. Every radiologist in the company owns more than the CEO.
- [19:38]
A
Right, right. Yeah, until one day I might change. But so let's use AI as the jumping off point to kind of go more systemic. When you think more broadly about the role of AI in healthcare, what are you excited about?
- [19:53]
B
I mean, the biggest thing for me is it's just sort of democratizing access to information. One other thing. And when you think about what we do, I mean, we give people a lot of information about their health and give them a lot of agency, but that agency is only useful if they can then do something with it. So, like, figure out what to do with it. And so AI right now is giving people a lot of insight. You know, you can plug in. Here's three very esoteric pieces of information about my health. You know, what might that possibly mean? And I think those models are getting more and more accurate and it's really helping people be empowered. Now, is AI better than the best doctor? Probably not, but there are a lot of doctors that are worse than sort of like the average AI now.
- [20:31]
A
Right, Right. We're investors called Doctronic, which is kind of an AI medical advisor. And yeah, I mean, what we found is that our recommendations are pretty like consist over 99% of the time kind of with what doctors would say. But, you know, we have the benefit in this case of like, you know, continuing to evolve in a way that a human, an individual human just can't. Right.
- [20:56]
B
So what I would add one more thing just from an equity point of view. So we're running a clinical trial of our technology in Boston, and there's a big social equity component to that. And I remember when we started, I'm like, this is going to be great. You know, it's going to be. We'll be giving these scans to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to afford them. So that the trial is more representative of the population.
- [21:16]
A
Yeah.
- [21:17]
B
And we found initially it was just really hard to give away scans to people.
- [21:20]
A
They were skeptical, busy.
- [21:22]
B
No, they were busy because, you know, a lot of people that we were targeting were work. You know, there might be, like, single mothers with, like, two kids and they're working three jobs. And. And so actually access to healthcare and healthcare information is, I would say, like, it's. It's a. I would say, like one of the biggest disparities. And so if you can solve that in a form factor, you know, that anyone can interact with, whenever they can, at midnight, they can say, oh, I've got this problem in my stomach. What do you think it could be? What should I do? And so on. I think you're going to get. You'll end up with a much more equal health system. Because that, for me, is when you're diagnosed, there's good doctors and bad doctors to treat something. But the biggest disparity is in getting diagnosed.
- [22:03]
A
Right, right. That makes sense. So then, based on overall, now, you know, you've been in the US healthcare system for a while, building this company. You've seen what it's like in Australia, you lived in Europe, obviously, wherever you've lived, you've needed health care in some way. What are we getting? Right. And more importantly, like, if I just gave you a magic wand, said, okay, Andrew, you're now in charge of health care in America, you have the power to do whatever you want. What would you do?
- [22:28]
B
Well, yes, I think the challenge is I've now lived in eight health systems. I would say that they all look very different, different on the outside, but they're still all fundamentally based on the same premise, which is they're reactive. So whether you're in Spain or France or the UK or Australia or Canada or the us, we wait for symptoms to present before we do something. And that's the biggest source of cost in the health system. 70, 80% of our healthcare costs are driven by, you know, treating essentially advanced disease. So. So we sort of have to, like, change that if we want to change the economics of health care. Now, why is that important? That's important because it's already a $5 trillion system in the U.S. some people projected to go like 15 trillion in the next 15 years. The U.S. government share of that 5 trillion is something between 1 and 2 trillion dollars. So if you sort of project it forward, the entire federal budget today will be spent on health care in 15 years time. Well, this is something no one's talking about. We're all sort of like trying to figure out at the margin what to do. But the reality is there's nothing really at the margin that is going to solve this problem. We're optimizing essentially a system that is built on bad assumptions.
- [23:43]
A
Right. So if we could remake it, and we're starting with the notion of being able to know what's happening with your body as early as possible, makes it a proactive system as opposed to a reactive system. Would that work? And if so, like in your mind, what does that look like?
- [24:02]
B
So I, I've changed my thoughts about this.
- [24:04]
A
Yeah.
- [24:04]
B
Since I started the company. I think in the early days it was always like, how do we get reimbursed? What do we need to show? How do we convince insurers to reimburse us? I would like to think that that would happen, but I don't think that's my like, primary assumption at this point in time. I, I think the solution is patient choice. I think the solution is instead of signing up for healthcare with employer, employer has a, you know, assigns you a certain amount of money and you can allocate some of that to a healthcare plan, you can allocate some of that to other health care eligible expenses and you allow consumers to choose. And we have these models already in place and they're growing in popularity. There's a couple of plant one's called icra, another one is Cachera, and there's one called Cafeteria Plan. We're not short on like models actually. The challenge is that they're not yet fully penetrated. They're probably, you know, 1, 2% of employers have these types of plans.
- [24:59]
A
Right.
- [24:59]
B
But I do think those sort of plans are the future because what we find even in Pernuvo, I offer a scans to every one of my employees and when people join, they elect typically a PPO plan which is expensive for the, for the employee and expensive for us. After they do their preview scan and find out everything's pretty good.
- [25:18]
A
Right.
- [25:19]
B
They switched to a HSA plan which is way less expensive for us and less expensive for the employee. And so we've, by giving them more insights into their health, they've made A better risk appropriate decision about where to spend those dollars.
- [25:34]
A
Are there kind of societally things that we do, mistakes that we make, that if the behavior were changed, then the need for reactive health care is lower simply because people are making better choices on the front end. And if so, like is like, is Maha on the right track? Do you think that that's kind of, that's what that's about or like how would you do it?
- [26:00]
B
Well, I think they, the, the positive access to Maha is there's a focus on individual agency and one's healthcare in one's sort of personal health situation. There's a focus on inverting the food pyramid. A lot of people have been talking about that for decades.
- [26:16]
A
Yeah.
- [26:18]
B
And therefore changing the typical American diet. There's I think, an openness to the idea that not everything is about doctors and surgeries and expensive drugs. There are other ways to affect positive health change. So I think there's a lot actually that's very interesting in the Maha agenda. And even most recently these ideas of like, maybe we should give these subsidies back to consumers and have them figure out what to do with them. I think one of the challenges of healthcare in the US is it's so expensive because of the way healthcare is negotiated.
- [26:52]
A
Right.
- [26:53]
B
And it's sort of one of the reasons why people come to prenuvo oftentimes for exams is because it is cheaper for them to get a whole body scan with us than it is to get like a back MRI with a typical health system.
- [27:04]
A
Right. And probably by the way, when you do take takes twice as long to get an appointment and is half as pleasant and everything else.
- [27:10]
B
So it would follow like in my mind, like cash pay is way less expensive than insurance covered services right now. So if you can find a way to give people more cash to allocate to health services that are meaningful for them, they're probably going to get cheaper care.
- [27:25]
A
Yeah, look, I mean I see that even outside of healthcare. You know, when I was the deputy governor of Illinois and I ran the state's budget, it was just so clear that if, you know, if we collected a dollar in taxes from you, by the time that that money reached the person in need that was trying to be helped, at least 30% was gone. Right. If not more. And that's why I actually became a supporter of universal basic income because like, let's just give the person the dollar. And like some people make stupid choices, but by and large I think people will make better choices and they're getting a dollar on the dollar, not 60 cents, 70 cents on the dollar.
- [28:00]
B
Yeah. I mean, I'll give you an example of how reimbursement might affect us. Actually, a lot of people don't realize this, but there's a small number of people that get reimbursed for whole body scans in the US they have a cancer predisposition syndrome. They can go to Sinai or Stanford or any number of large academic centers. The cost of that procedure is 50 to $100,000. So let's say tomorrow I go wave my wand and all of a sudden we have reimbursement. All of those health systems have such negotiation power vis a vis insurance companies that, you know, they'll figure out how to get reimbursement. They'll figure out how Holboy scan is going to be $20,000 and. And your Bradley out of pocket is going to be $2,500, which is, by the way, what we charge now.
- [28:46]
A
Right.
- [28:48]
B
And so. So you have not saved anything at all. Right. We will have been beaten down by insurance companies because we don't have anything that they absolutely need to have. We don't have emergency rooms.
- [29:00]
A
Right.
- [29:01]
B
You know, we're not. Obviously, I would like to think that we have sort of the brand recognition of Stanford Health or Harvard or mgh, but we're not there yet.
- [29:09]
A
Yeah.
- [29:11]
B
So we would get beaten down and the quality of service that you are expecting today, probably we would be unable to provide. So it's not universally obvious that reimbursement actually even makes the scans more accessible to anyone. Right?
- [29:24]
A
Right. Yeah, I think that's right. How do you think about, if at all, the ability for full body scans, whether today or maybe even just out in the future to start dealing with and diagnosing mental health? Right. Because I'll give you a specific that why I'm asking. So I had OCD my whole life, and then last August, I went under a procedure called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a nice way of saying electroshock therapy. But the reason why is at Stan, doctors figured out that if you have ocd, what it means that in the prefrontal cortex, your neurons are dormant in certain ways and they're not serving as the inhibitor that everyone else has to obsessive compulsive behavior and thinking. And the stimulation reawaken those neurons for me and put them back in action. I mean, is there a world one day where a scam can sort of say, hey, Bradley's neurons are not functioning properly? That's the issue.
- [30:26]
B
Well, I mean, let me geek on the technology for a sec. And this is sort of. There's parallels to that first company I built. You know, MRI is a technology around for 30 years. A lot of people think that they understand exactly what it's good for. But, I mean, it's an incredibly powerful machine at the moment. We tune it to listen to hydrogen in the body. And that's important because it's hydrogen in most of the tissue in the body. And where we use that to sort of like, sort of image you a bunch of different ways. And we get contrast for blood and fat and protein and so on. But MRIs can, in theory, listen to any odd numbered element on the periodic table. So you can listen to sodium pumps, you can listen to potassium. So you can actually start to understand a lot more functional information about what's going on in our organs, including the brain. And the kind of crazy thing is I go to these conferences every year. There are. There are people doing this incredible, insane research to start to explore some of these questions exactly like what you're asking. But there's no obvious path to market. So what's exciting for us is, you know, we in some ways have a path to market for some of this really interesting technology that people might be willing to pay for rather than wait for insurance to reimburse.
- [31:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. And there's so many different pieces. Right. Like when I was getting the tms, my doctor there were talking about the microbiome and the effect of that on mental health. Like, it's all clearly connected. And I feel like you guys are gonna help figure out how it all comes together and then how it gets treated holistically. Cause I think right now you kind of have one set of doctors for your mental health, one set for your physical health. But it's all, I think, from what I've been learning, kind of different versions of the same thing.
- [32:04]
B
I think so. And it also plays out over a timeframe where you have. If you're able to see these things earlier, you have real possibilities to intervene in a much more successful way. So we just launched a advanced neuro exam, and it's, you know, it's what we think is the best exam in the market to really understand what's happening with the brain, particularly in the context of neurodegeneration.
- [32:26]
A
Yeah.
- [32:28]
B
So we're just scratching the surface. Pretty exciting to sort of. We'll be launching some pretty interesting services during the course of the year.
- [32:35]
A
Yeah, very cool. All right, well, whenever you do that, we'd love to have you back on to hear about it because I think this is the kind of thing that we, at least we at Firewall and our listeners are really into. And then randomly, it's when I was looking at my schedule and tomorrow, I had a Prenuva scan two years ago, found it helpful. My doctor said, time for another one. And it's tomorrow. And I'm like, I can't believe this. I'm meeting Andrew today and then I'm being there tomorrow. So I'm very much, at least for a couple of days in your world. So thank you for. Thank you for doing this. We appreciate it.
- [33:07]
B
Thank you very much.
- [33:08]
A
And how do people learn more about Pernuvo? Follow your thinking, everything else.
- [33:13]
B
So I have a great team that can answer any questions people might have about whether this scan's appropriate for them.
- [33:18]
A
Yep.
- [33:18]
B
I would say one thing that we really pride ourselves on is we're a clinical practice first, not a technology company.
- [33:24]
A
Yeah.
- [33:25]
B
So I have 150 medical practitioners, some wonderful radiologists, preventive care physicians, nurse practitioners, folks that are there to help people understand, you know, how this can really help them or if not, what else they should be doing.
- [33:38]
A
Yeah.
- [33:38]
B
So they can reach out to us on prenuva.com they can chat with us there on the website. There's a phone number. People can call us. And I believe, you know, we can arrange probably also a discount for your listeners, if you like.
- [33:51]
A
Great. All right.
- [33:52]
B
Yeah, put it in the show notes, let us know.
- [33:54]
A
Yeah, we will definitely put in the show notes. Yeah, see, that's why you listen to firewall. Good discount.
- [33:59]
B
We can. Folks can go to pernuva.com firewall and we'll give them $300 off scam.
- [34:05]
A
Perfect. We'll get that set. All right, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us.
- [34:07]
B
No worries.
- [34:12]
A
Firewall is recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks, or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley Firewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack@bradleytus.substack.com thanks again for listening.