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Traditional Medicine Models: Applying Portfolio Thinking to Modern Health with Matt Warnock · The Growth Class with Phil Masiello

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody and welcome back to the growth class.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Phil Mastiello, your host, and as a business mechanic, I'm always looking for the real unvarnished story of how a business operates and scales, especially when the CEO is thrust into the driver's seat by pure necessity rather than design.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: So my guest today is Matt Warnock.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Matt was an attorney, and as he he he says it, he's a recovering attorney with an MBA and absolutely zero experience in herbal medicine.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: But when personal tragedy and family illness struck, he had to step in to run operations, eventually becoming the CEO of Ridgecrest Herbals.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't just accept the industry at face value, he brought his trial lawyer skepticism with him, digging deep into pharmacology and challenging the one disease, one drug mindset of modern pharmaceuticals.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: So today, Ridgecrest is an industry-leading certified B Corp.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Their clear lungs product is the number one natural herbal lung supplement in the U.S.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to get into the operational hurdles of navigating incredibly strict FDA regulations, surviving fragile supply chain shocks during the pandemic and other times, and how building a sustainable ethical business model is the ultimate driver of growth.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, Matt, welcome to the show.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for taking the time to come on.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Phil.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I appreciate it.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: You got an interesting background.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you tell take us uh into the story of how you got to take over this company and and and what you do and how you do it.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I had been a litigator in Silicon Valley for about 13 years and and uh was not very happy with that.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh being a litigator is a terrible way to make a living.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I have described it as being the world's most expensive and uncertain way to move money from one pocket to another.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was definitely looking for uh some kind of kind of a way out.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I also had an MBA, so I was looking at business opportunities.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: My brother actually gave me uh uh an opportunity to step out of it, uh to step out of the practice of law and and uh do some M ⁇ A work with him.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and over the course of uh about 18 months, we did uh five different acquisitions for a public company out of Georgia.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh at the end of that time, I was trying to figure out, okay, what's next?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the company that uh that we had been working for got raided by short traders, and their stock went from about 50 to 5 over the course of about three months, and so we we recognized that that ride was over, and and so uh the question was, what was next?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Greg wanted to start a VC firm, and he did that.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh Greg's my brother.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh I was looking around, figuring out what I needed to do, and it was about that time that my mom was diagnosed with uh with uh primary pulmonary hypertension as a result of having taken Fenfen.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Fenfen was a combination of weight loss drugs, both approved by the FDA, but never tested together.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And together uh they caused heart problems for about a third of the people that took it, and probably wound up killing about 600,000 people.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Is that a pharmaceutical product?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell It's two different pharmaceutical products that were prescribed together uh routinely.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so uh as I as I was looking around, uh two problems emerged.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: One was that my dad had been had been depending for his retirement on this Ridgecrest Herbal's company that he had started some eight years earlier.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I said, sure, I'll step in and help with the operations.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but given my background and given my mom's diagnosis, I'm saying to myself, look, if two FDA-approved drugs taken together do this much damage, then how do I know that the drugs that the products that we provide, which under traditional Chinese medicine would have been termed drugs, how do I know they're safe?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: How do I know they're effective?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't as worried about the effective part because uh we had lots of testimonials from lots of people saying that that they like those products, but how do I know they're safe?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and as I dug into it, as litigators do, the first thing you do as a litigator is dive into the science and figure out how much of the science is coin operated and how much of it is real and could be depended on.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: The more I dug into medical science, the more I realized that we made a lot of assumptions back in the 20s and 30s that have not been re-examined.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, we got on, as you said, this this one disease, one target, one drug uh model, monotherapy is what they call it in the medical literature.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just purely an assumption.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a scientific simplification to make running the experiments easier.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's assume that there is only one drug and and it is being tested, and we we try and control all of the other variables, and then we test that against a placebo.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we do our science today.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: But all of that is based on a 1925 cookbook by Ron Fisher, uh Ronald Fisher out of uh England, uh major statistician.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: He designed the whole system, and we basically adopted it whole hog and said this is the system that we're gonna use from here on out.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is science has come a long way since then.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was gonna say it's changed a lot.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: One of the big differences is in the world of statistics, um, back in those days, uh, Bayesian statistics was invented first.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Bayesian statistics is uh a little more complicated, and the computation of it in particular is a lot more complicated.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so back in the 20s and 30s, we didn't have computers.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't really practical.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so we came up with frequentist statistics as kind of a stopgap measure, as something that we could calculate, and basically it makes a lot of assumptions that uh everybody involved in the experiment is the same, or that at least if you divide them into separate groups randomly, that those groups will be enough the same that you can make statistical calculations.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is we know now none of that is true.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: We've since sequenced the genome.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: We know that we share 98% of our genomic material with bonobos and chimps.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the part that makes us human, there's at least four to five million variables.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when you have that many variables uh and they're independent, that that is we all have different combinations.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're all members of the same genetic lotto.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but we all have different numbers, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so as you look at that system, assuming that we're all going to get the same result out of any given medicine, frankly, it's just idiotic.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So in traditional Chinese medicine and in Ayurvedic medicine, to a lesser degree in Arabic herbal medicine and European herbal medicine, they got away from that one disease, one target, one drug model thousands of years ago, at least a thousand years ago.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what they did instead was adopt what we would call what well, what what we call at Ridgecrest, a portfolio formulation, where, like your stockbroker, you don't put all your eggs in one basket.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: You don't put all of your money in one stock.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: You get a number of different things working on a problem in different directions.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: As a result, you can reduce the dosage of each of those individual things.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: That does two things for you.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, it means that uh when you use a smaller dose, if there's a chance that you're gonna have a negative reaction to that thing, it's a smaller dose, and so the impact is smaller.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the second thing is because there are more things in the mix, the chances that you're gonna respond to one or more of them is higher.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, you get a more predictable result, you get a more uh a a safer result.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way traditional herbal medicine approaches the problem.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's very different from what Western medicine is currently doing.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when um there's a uh restaurant chain out of Boston called Legal Seafoods.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember that the owner of Legal Seafood at the time he had gotten um I think some form of cancer.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he started using Ayurvedic uh treatments.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he believed in it so much that he started he put a section on the menu of products made with i Ayurvedic uh intent.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I don't know if they still do it, but they did it for a number of years, at least while he was still alive.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: But uh it was it was interesting.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we have uh I have a friend up the road whose uh family is from uh India, and that's how they produce what they do every day.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't um really uh they don't seem to have problems.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they're all quite old.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, going all the way back to Louis Pasteur, uh Louis Pasteur originally kind of put forward the idea that germs were responsible for disease, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a big debate at the time because he said, no, the germs are responsible for the disease, and his uh his principal rival, whose name I've forgotten now, um basically said, no, it's it's it's the terrain, it's the it's the defenses of the body that prevent us from getting sick.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that debate has been going on for hundreds of years.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh unfortunately, I think we in the United States take a very simplistic view that it's all about the germs and let's just kill all of the germs.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let God sort them out, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: But uh over the last few years we have come to discover that uh most of the most of the microbes in our gut are not human.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Our microbiome is responsible for most of our digestive uh operations, and it's all bacteria that are good bacteria that live inside us all of the time, and about two-thirds of what's in our body is not human.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the I my wife and I have this conversation every once in a while because, you know, we always talk about it in terms of our grandparents and my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my uh my parents, and some of my, you know, a lot of my family came from Italy, and they didn't they didn't use drugs.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: They but they never really got sick.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it was, you know, like they were certainly.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's absolutely well, that's what my point was gonna be.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I can remember growing up, I grew up in the Bronx in uh in an Italian section, and I can remember my family shopped, like my aunts and my grandmother, they shopped almost every day.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: They just went up and down the street, they bought, you know, they figured out what they were gonna make for dinner, and that's what they made.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the refrigerators were smaller, the plates were smaller, things were smaller.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And um but everything we we didn't have processed food.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like I didn't grow up with processed food.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember my grandmother or my mother opening up a a thing of of uh deli meat, you know.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: It just we didn't do it.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And um and I think that we've gotten so far into this processed food world, and I truly believe that processed food is part of the problem as to why we have so many health concerns.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then it becomes, okay, now we've created this problem, and then we develop a drug to fix the problem, and then the drug leads to a problem, which we then never-ending cycle goes around and around.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing is like even when you go to other countries and you see the same products on the shelf in other countries that are made by the same companies here, ketchup.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you see it in Canada, it's completely different label.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you see it in the UK, it's completely different label.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we were in the cosmetics business, we were in the beauty business for a number of years uh early on, and uh we sold worldwide.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we had to pick uh a uh regulatory group that we wanted to to uh you know go by because uh we wanted to be able to sell everywhere.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we went with the strictest one, which was in Europe, and of course that made it okay in the U.S.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: and made it okay in Canada and everywhere else.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, some of the things that they outlaw we talk about today, like dyes, you know, they outlawed dyes years ago, a lot of sugars and fake sugars and things like that.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I have, you know, and I I I do struggle with my with my weight all the time, and it always comes down to sugar.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: I have a terrible, terrible sugar addiction.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, whenever I break the sugar addiction, I lose weight.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's got nothing to do with everything else I eat, it's just the way my body d does or does not process sugar correctly.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a one of the reasons I don't really drink, because it doesn't work for me.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you drink your body turns that into sugar.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, you know, I think that processed sugar personally is has a big impact on my health.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: I can feel it.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: If I don't have processed sugar in my diet for a month, and then you hand me a piece of cake, I wake up the next morning feeling like I spent the night in a bar.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So wow.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I uh we've all been graded on a curve, right?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that bell curve with the long tails uh is uh uh the keystone of statistics.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: When I was in business school, uh that was really my first exposure to statistics at all.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I uh I just fell in love with it.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh because I realized that it explains so much.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um I can see that.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: That that bell curve, there's a bell curve for almost everything.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: You want to measure the the the rate of hummingbird wing movements or or heartbeats or uh whatever, there's a bell curve for it.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: In my case, I stand six foot five.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: That puts me in the one percent of of uh American men.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: I get on an airplane, I can look around.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm taller than everybody except, you know, maybe one guy and a or two guys in a in a plane flow of of three hundred people, right?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: That means that plane seats are particularly uncomfortable for people.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say I was gonna say.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then that's gonna be tough.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And and sometimes some some weird things happen.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I was sitting on a back seat on the window seat, and uh and a guy came down the aisle.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's a he's a big dude uh my size, and he sits in the aisle seat, and then we see a guy bigger than either of the two of us walking down the aisle, and we say, What do you bet the odds are that he's the seat between us?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sure enough, right?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: As happens.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes random stuff is weird, but um my point is that that when you're in that one percent, I can't buy stuff off the shelf in any store.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I can't buy my shoes in any shoe store.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I have to order it off the internet.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um these are daily battles that I have to deal with just because of my height.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: But you look at those four to five million variables in human beings, we all fall in those tails of that statistical curve for something.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some drug you want to take, maybe you overreact, maybe you underreact.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna be part of everybody's life.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and when you think about it, if if we're all randomly distributed across those variables, then that means that of those four to five million, forty to fifty thousand, you're gonna be in that one percent tail.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, it's interesting that you talk about statistics, because I I personally love statistics as well.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: I love numbers.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, statistics play a big role in in business, especially in marketing and who you're targeting, you know, um, because like you can you can look at you can look at statistics and um so so for example, startups.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: I know you do a lot of work with startups and entrepreneurs, but you know, we always talk about, and I always talk about when I coach them to find your um, you know, your ideal market because you can't be everybody, everything to everybody.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to look at, again, the bell curve or whatever of you know who really statistically is going to be the target for your product, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because you that's your addressable market.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can say, okay, I'll give you an example.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: I owned a I started a shaving brand many years ago, and uh, you could argue, and people did, well, everybody shaves, men and women, and they shave.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're 100% correct.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody shaves.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is our addressable market were guys and women, men and women between the ages of 28 and 45, because there we're coming out with a new razor, a different razor, a whole different approach.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're more easily convertible to something new.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: A guy that's over that, he's he's been using the same three-blade razor by Gillette for 15, 20 years.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: He's not going to change, it's gonna be really difficult.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the guys under 28, they don't care yet about shaving because they're they're of that age.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you have to build that addressable market.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all statistics and statistical analysis.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I uh I I agree.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you do a lot of work with startups and entreprene and things like that, which I think is great to give back.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you give us a little insight into uh what you're doing there for the next we have about five, six years?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, happy to.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, when I when I moved up here to uh to Salt Lake to work with my brother Greg, uh one of the first things he told me was there's this little uh uh startup uh accelerator.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's all volunteers and and you should get involved with this group.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I I started volunteering for this group, and I've now been doing it for 27 years.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh this this accelerator is is really kind of unique.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: They were founded in 1983, long before accelerators were a thing.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Y Combinator came along in 2005, then everybody started talking about accelerators, but uh we were doing it a lot earlier, and we were doing it very differently.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the accelerators you look at uh are created by a group of investors to attract deals to them.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so you go and you get all of the learning and the stuff they have to teach you, and then you go to demo day and you pay.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Rich to their investors.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: But are those the right investors for you?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's the golden question.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: The thing I always tell startups is you need to vet your investors at least as well as they vet you.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: I agree 100%.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: I try and coach when when when if I do my job correctly when I'm coaching someone to raise capital, I try and get them in the mindset and positioning that you're going in there with a deal that they can't turn down.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: So don't go in there like a beggar begging for money from a VC, because that's going to put you in a bad position.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And don't be afraid to ask questions.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: So many entrepreneurs, so many startups, so many guys with founders walk into the room and they're afraid to ask the question.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: I said, you know, you need to start asking the question, what can you do to help me?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: If I take your money, how are you going to help me expand this brand?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because they become your partner.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree 100%.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's so important.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's uh, you know, we we talk about it in the industry as smart money and dumb money.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um smart money is the money that can help you get your goals accomplished.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Dumb money just gets in your way.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: It clutters up the top table and it it it makes your life miserable.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Yeah.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Dumb money is just going to ask you for your income statement and balance sheet at the end of every month, and they're not going to help you in any way.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, you know, it's it's bad.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I've I've I've made that mistake a couple of times in my life.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I made that mistake once in my life and I said never again, but um, you know, never say never.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: I might make that dumb mistake again.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Well, you know, it's interesting.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when you look at startups, one of the first pieces of advice we always give them is make sure that you have tested your idea with actual customers.
• 23:54
  unknown: Yeah.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: That you've got the traction that you need before you ever even go into the investors.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of entrepreneurs, especially first-timers, have this idea that investors are fond of risk.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, they uh they will do anything they can do to avoid it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh they're counting on you to eliminate that market risk before they put their money in.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: They want to scale up your business, not prove it out.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, no question.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I think the other thing that gets confused with young startups and entrepreneurs is the difference between having your minimum viable product and having your product market fit.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because minimum viable product does not give you product market fit.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: That just is the minimum uh um idea or or the minimum example of of what you're trying to build that you're gonna share with people.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when you have product market fit, that you want to talk about people buying your product, you know, who came and bought and bought again.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: And who are excited about it because it really solves a problem for them.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and one of the frustrations is that, you know, in the medical industry, uh, we have basically said, we're no, we're gonna put the government first.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: The government has to decide whether this product is safe and effective.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And those are two very, very different questions.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: But uh but but we're gonna rely on the government to determine that for us.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, for example, in drugs now, it takes$2.2 billion to bring a drug to market.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: It takes 10 to 14 years out of a 20-year patent life.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh it violates every rule that we teach to startups.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then we wonder why medicine isn't advancing as quickly as computers are, for example.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what what's interesting to me is um the growth of the GLP ones that, you know, suddenly within two years, they're everywhere.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're advertising them on TV.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's so easy to get.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've got digital medicine that you can get on there and speak to a digital doctor and get a prescription and you know, and and then but but they haven't really been and now all of a sudden I saw the other day that one of the weight loss drugs, uh uh I can't remember which one, um Zbound, I think, they're now promoting it as solving sleep apnea.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: So is it a GLP one weight loss drug or is it for sleep apnea?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, so you know, there's a little confusion there, but now they've made GLP one pills, and so now you've got Serena Williams out there talking about it.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: But everybody that I know that got on the um GLP ones, whether it's Ozempic or whether it's, you know, Zetbound or whatever, you know, they all got on it.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: They lost a ton of muscle.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they lost weight because they lost muscle, and then as soon as they stopped, they began to gain the weight back again.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it didn't really solve the problem because the problem you have to figure out what the issue is as to why you're overeating, right?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like for me, I know, I know what my issue is, it's sugar.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: I have a sugar addiction.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Once I cut that out, I'm perfectly fine.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's an addiction like anything else.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care what anybody says, you know, it's it's it's very difficult for me to give up sugar.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we have to basically clear the house of having it.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: But but you're absolutely right.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be looking at the root cause of the problem, not discussing the symptoms.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's the real issue.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um we spend way too much time talking about symptoms and controlling symptoms.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that uh it's what Abraham Maslow used to call uh well uh Abraham Maslow was a psychologist back in the 60s, wrote some some really powerful books.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: But uh one of the things he said was that uh a guy with a hammer in his hand thinks everything's a nail.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that with entrepreneurs all the time, right?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, I I'm selling XYZ, and and XYZ is good for everything.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, it isn't.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Come on.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: We've heard that story before.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, it was a good conversation.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: The time went by too quick.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: We we're we're down to about our last minute.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could anything to wrap up?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Any any uh any last parting words?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just uh uh I when it comes to health, I think everybody needs to be their own best advocate.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would agree.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um get the smartest advice you can, but make sure that you're reasoning it through and m seeing whether it makes sense for you in your situation.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because we all have those differences, and we need to be able to deal with those.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: That means we need options.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: That means that that government can't decide what's best for everybody in healthcare.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: It j the standard of care, it's a meaningless concept.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: We all need different solutions.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and uh thanks, Matt, for uh coming on and sharing the reality of of what you do and how you think.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh I love the authenticity of it all.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: I love the fact that you uh, you know, you're very authentic in what you talk about.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh if everybody make sure you check out Richcrest Herbals, uh look into the work they're doing.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And if you just Google Matt, I mean you find some interesting stuff.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's uh if you're an entrepreneur and take a look at what he's uh what he's doing.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, thanks uh thanks again, Matt, for coming on, and I appreciate it.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hi.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.