Why Your Doctor No Longer Controls Your Care | Dr. Cameron Walsh's Pathway to Peak Performance

Chapter 1: The Corporate Takeover of Your Dinner Plate

What is the most commonly consumed food product? Right, it's carbs. Well, what goes into carbs? Flour. Where is that flour coming from? Well, it's coming from gigantic large corporate-controlled farming situations. They harvest all the wheat. They pulverize it. They bleach it. They destroy it. And then they refortify it.

Like people bring up celiac disease; everybody's a celiac and we need all this non-gluten product. I'm like, well, glyphosate, right, causes the same small intestinal microvilli changes that people with celiac disease have. I pay so much money for health insurance and yet I get so little out of that. So even an annual physical that you think should be proactive is not proactive. It's reactionary, right? Let's figure out do you have hypertension? Do you have these medical diseases and let's treat them because that's how the health care system is built. It's not built around prevention. Prevention doesn't make money.

Dr. Cameron Walsh, welcome to the Pathway to Peak Performance. So good to have you here, my friend. Thanks, Jock. Thanks for having me. All the way from Birmingham, Alabama. Yeah, by way of Santa Barbara, California. Yep. Little bit of a roundabout way. Yeah. Lots to talk about today, but before we get started, we're going to do something that's kind of cool. I think you're going to love this. So, this is the sponsor of the show now, KetoneAid, and this one is K2, which is a ketone ester that just has more water in it than the K4 version. There's two different versions. A bunch—there's a bunch of different products. But just so you can see, it's unadulterated, right? Cap is there. It’s sealed. In each one of our cups, you're going to put in six capfuls.

All right. Think I can manage six capfuls. So, it should be pretty much all of it at this point. It's going to be a lot. One, three, six. I hope you're dosing me correctly. Okay. So, this is bottoms up. Cheers. Cheers. Not bad, huh? Yeah. Pretty easy. Yeah. So, this is what I use pre-workout, post-workout, and also on the nights where I really want to get a great night's sleep, I take a little bit before I go to sleep. That way, I don't have a glucose drop in the middle of the night. Really interesting. Good product.

Okay. So, you know on the show how it works, we have a charity and all the proceeds from the views go to that charity. So, which charity is yours? So, I'd like to choose the Exceptional Foundation in Birmingham, Homewood, Alabama. It sponsors and helps take care of special needs children in terms of providing resources and experiences that maybe they aren't getting in their community, whether it's education or experiences. Super important, right? It is very important. My wife's also a first grade teacher and so it's important to both of us. Wow. I'll tell you what, that's phenomenal.

Okay, bar man, you know how this show works. We go all the way back history to where you are present day and you are a guy that has a lot going on. One of the things I love about working with you is that there's never a shortage of great ideas. Usually I'm the one that's always bringing ideas to people and in working with you, it's always like we're meeting in the middle and we're having these kind of incredible things happening and it's just tons and tons of fun. So, kick it off. Tell the audience about your background and sort of how you came to do what you do today.

So, I grew up in Santa Barbara, California. My dad's an engineer and kind of throughout our entire life, we've done everything ourselves. I mean, I can't tell you the last time my dad paid for somebody to come do something at our house or anywhere. We built our house. We fixed every single car, changed every brake rotor and brake pad, every U-joint, wiring, roof. I mean, whatever. He put me to work and he took care of everything. And so, I think that kind of set me up to be kind of what you're mentioning—I'm always full of ideas. I'm just happy to work and try and make things better. So, growing up in Santa Barbara was a little bit of a unique experience, one from that perspective.

Chapter 2: Meet Dr. Cameron Walsh: From Santa Barbara to Surgery

Not everybody grew up that way there. But my whole family is also a bunch of engineers and so I was always kind of pushed more toward that trajectory in life. Become an engineer, go work for, you know, a big defense contractor and that's the way it would go. And we were fortunate UC Santa Barbara was just down the street which is a world-class institution with Nobel laureates—they invented the LED light bulb—so that was always right there in the backyard too and everybody else was engineers. So I was very much pushed that direction.

Fortunately I was fairly talented in mathematics. So going through high school and being close to UC Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College I was able to complete a lot of math before I even went to college. And earlier in life, one of our family friends who owned a small engineering business, he was a decent mentor of mine, and I didn't appreciate everything he had to share at the time, but what he told me early on in life was it doesn't matter how smart you are. It matters how hard you work. Work ethic is the only thing that is the most important thing for long-term success. And the other piece of wisdom he had was if you can do math, you can do anything. So, I just kept taking math classes while I figured out what I wanted to do.

And it was about the end of high school, beginning of college, and I was spear fishing with a friend of mine who in high school kind of got me into it and he was really good at it. But he had a friend who was a businessman in town and so then we started going spear fishing with this businessman and then he'd take us around all kinds of cool spots, teach us more about spear fishing. I think this guy was probably—there was a news article from like the late '70s or '80s where he was like the first person to free dive with an orca that was photographed. And so I mean he was an interesting person. This is the guy. Wow. I've seen that picture. Yeah. The free dive with the guy he's there and the orca's up here and it's like—Yeah. Okay.

He would get hired to go to the Middle East or bring Middle Eastern royalty over and take them spear fishing down in my islands off Mexico and get them hooked up with, you know, thousand-pound tuna spear fish. So we got to be pretty good friends with him and he'd take us diving and then his really good friend happened to be an endodontist, so a root canal specialist, and they would ask me, "Oh, what are you guys going to do?" And I was like, "Well, I kind of thought about dentistry. It seems like a good balance between hand skills, right, which I'm pretty comfortable with with my dad, and then people skills as well as a good balance with family, right?" So, those were kind of the three biggest things that were important to me. So, I started working for him one day a week in college.

Well, he happened to be boat partners with an oral surgeon. And so, I would end up going spear fishing with the businessman, endodontist, and then eventually the oral surgeon. And so from that point on, I kind of just listened to the endodontist and oral surgeon and they kind of guided me in life to what I should do. And I ended up going to UC San Francisco for dental school after college, which is where the endodontist went. And that was kind of the beginning of it. I went to dental school knowing I wanted to do oral surgery because of my experiences with all of them.

Yeah. UCSF and has just such a deep history. You know, you just rattle off name after name after name. There's so many people that have been associated with that program. So you get up to San Francisco. How old are you at that point? It's just a normal pathway. So four years after high school, so 21, 22—just turned 22. Okay. So and then dental school at UCSF, you've got what right here, UCSF. Yeah. Kind of the common rivalry. And then you decide—I mean obviously you had to be doing pretty well at UCSF to actually make it into an OMFS—whatever you want to call it for the audience—oral and maxillofacial surgery program. You have to be the top of your class. So you make it and you go to UAB which is a great program. Tell us about that.

So I chose UAB. It was my number one ranked program as well as I think most of my classmates, my co-residents, they all pegged it number one just purely because the medical school is excellent and the oral surgery program is excellent. Had a great—the oral surgery program was very well respected within the entire hospital system. So the scope of practice at UAB is hard to compare to any other program as well as the volume of cases that we got. So, you know, they say you need to do something for 10,000 hours to be sufficient at it and you certainly get more than 10,000 hours in pretty much any part of oral surgery that you want to do.

So, all right, UAB, first year's down, second year, tell us what's happening. So, second year's medical school, you get just thrown into it into the clinical years of medical school. You're in with every different aspect of the healthcare system: OBGYN, surgery, family medicine, and you're just in there. You got to pass the test on each one of those rotations and then you've also got to perform clinically and learn how they take care of people from a medical perspective.

How do you get through the times that are really tough? I mean there's tough moments every week for all six years. Whether it's just sleep, personal issues or family issues, whatever it is, it's always tough and it's not just you that it's tough on; it's tough on everybody around you, right? And it's so easy to forget that there are other people around you in your life and it's tough on them. It's very you-centered, right? Residency is very you-doing-your-job centered, right? But at that same time, it's so easy to forget about everybody around you. And it can be very hard on them. So, in those hard moments, you've got to go back to those people closest to you, like my wife, and you got to help each other through it. Yeah. I realize it's not just you going through it. You got to support each other in getting through it. And it's just as hard on them as it is on you.

Transitioning into private practice—how quickly does that happen for you? So, I was planning to go into private practice before I graduated. So, I was working on getting that going to go back a little bit, right? So, I always thought I was going to go back to Santa Barbara and work with the oral surgeon that got me into this. And I mean, that was the plan forever, right? And then for about three years before I graduated, I watched the guys ahead of me get out of residency and go into more of the traditional old school model of oral surgery where you go and you work for an oral surgeon for a few years as an associate. And then after that two-year, three-year time period, usually you get to buy in to be a part owner, a partner in the practice. That's how law firms and dental offices and oral surgery always worked for decades before, right?

So, I watched a handful of guys get out, go into that role as an associate with the understanding there was equity at the end of those two years or three years, and I watched five people in particular where they got to that two-year mark or that three-year mark and they were supposed to be able to buy in just like the people that they were working for. That's how they did it. Okay? And then right at the last minute, that rug comes out from underneath you and they sell it to private equity. I watched that happen to five people, right? And some came out of that situation better than others. Some, it was just like a complete restart and others found a way to kind of work with the private equity group to get into a situation where they were happy, but 90% of the time that didn't work. It was some other big transition in their life.

Yeah. And I think it's important to kind of help people understand what does that actually mean and I'm going to give you my take and then you can tell me what you think when we say private equity. Sure. So, when we're in the startup world where we often times deal with—you're either your own, you've got your own venture group and you're funding your own stuff, or you're getting money from the outside world—venture capitalists who are investing into your idea for a percentage of your company as you move forward. Anybody that's ever been through that knows that there's a couple—you know, you got to make a decision. You got to go the hard way of doing it yourself. If you have the cash to do it, then it's not as hard. If you don't, you're really struggling every step of the way.

Chapter 3: Why Private Equity is "Squeezing" Your Local Doctor

Private equity is coming in when they see something that is making money and then their job is to squeeze it down, right, to get it to be the highest return they can possibly get. Just like publicly traded companies, they do what's best for the company because they report to the shareholders. Private equity groups, they have people that they took money from to get that money, right? They report to those investors in one way, shape or form, right? And so their job is not necessarily to improve health care, right? Their job is to make a return on investment for their investors.

So this is where we get into some kind of murky water because some are better than others. Yeah. But you know, I've heard—one doctor told me, "Hey, my manager was now somebody who came from Enterprise Rental Car and they wanted me to take wisdom teeth out on a kid who had a fever. He had a flu." and I was like, there's no way I'm doing that. That's not standard of care. We're not doing that. And so I said, "No." That's just one example of the notion of—I think there's intense pressure on people who are in what is called a Dental Services Organization to see a lot of patients, to do things quickly, absolutely produce a certain quota. And I think a lot of those doctors who buy into that lose a lot of control depending on where you are in that process.

Absolutely. I can't tell you a private equity group that allows the doctor to maintain full autonomy like if they own the practice themselves. It doesn't exist and they may say it does, but it doesn't. Yeah. They go into it and they know what they're buying into and they're happy with that. So certain situations can be great for some people or not for others in every situation, right? Expectations is the root of disappointment, right? Your expectations are not aligned or set appropriately, whether it's with patients or with the doctors. Yeah. If your expectations are different than what you're going to get, you're going to be unhappy. If you understood what you're getting and you had that expectation, then it's fine.

Ultimately at the end of the day, what matters is good patient care, which is really I think where we get into the meat and potatoes of this discussion on private equity: what is the outcome of this private equity invasion into dental and medical and what happens to patient care in this situation? Well, certainly when you're just trying to drive things to the lowest cost possible, there's a time quotient. There's a—how much time can you actually spend with the doctor? How much can you really get the right result? Are they really thinking about you the right way?

There are a lot of things to think about and you can look at this from like a top-down approach from like the private equity or the doctor's perspective. But you know my mentor, the oral surgeon in Santa Barbara when I was young, he always told me forever more staff is going to be the most difficult thing you deal with as a business owner running a medical practice. And I think that's true whether you're a private equity group or the doctor that owns the practice. I think staff is still ultimately the most difficult part. Except from a private equity group perspective, they're having to manage the doctors as well as the staff. So they have two different groups of people that they have to manage that are difficult to manage.

And where this goes is, my experiences have been that some of these really large groups of dental offices, to control doctors and to control staff to drive profits, they put incentive-based pay structures in place. Like every single person has a Key Performance Indicator and based off those indicators, they get bonuses. And so they'll even go as far as two different types of bonuses: you get a bonus for your individual job that you're responsible for and you also get a bonus structure based off of how the team performs. Right? So they are very much—these large groups are very much driving the way everything happens in a dental office based off of these indicators and metrics and then paying people on a scale and you start to look at that and it kind of works, right? But are we also tracking the metrics of quality of care in those situations compared to a doctor-owned practice which is more leading from example and not trying to squeeze every little bit of profit out of the situation?

So here we get into a really tricky situation, something that's tough to talk about. My take on it is that you have an oath and the oath is to do no harm. You have to put the patient's best interest at heart. But if you have incentives around driving production, I think it can lead to aggressive treatment planning that may not be necessary, which is certainly a conflict of interest. And you know, I once sat down with a person that I know that is a previous private equity person. He said—I'm not going to say the company—but he said, "Do I care about this company at all? Do I care about their employees? Do I care about anything about them? No. All I care about is getting the biggest return from my investors so I can go back out there and do it again." And when you think about it, private equity owns massive amounts of this corporate structure. It's a little frightening, I think, from a patient standpoint when we think about like that in dentistry and medical and then the combination thereof.

So, let's just say you say, "Jock, you know what? We're going to put you in a different situation. Jock, you know what? You have sleep problems." So, there's two different drugs that you go on. One would be Ambien, the other one would be Lunesta. You want me to go on Lunesta, but Lunesta is not available in my formulary. So, the only option is going to be Ambien. So, I'm going to take a drug that's less likely to be effective for me because that's what's available to me in my formulary. And then I can't really get access to the other drug even if I come out of pocket because there's a gag order on the pharmacist. If I come in, I say, "I don't have insurance, right? But I want to get a drug. It's a certain price." The minute I say I have insurance, that price goes up. That's a kickback right back to the insurance company. The whole system is a little rigged.

Chapter 4: The Humira Horror Story: When Insurance Companies Play God

I have a similar but probably more clear example. When I was on colorectal surgery, Crohn's disease is an autoimmune inflammatory condition of your large intestines and one of the main monoclonal antibody drugs used to keep Crohn's disease in remission—it's a brand-name drug that was extremely expensive. It's called Humira. Well, depending on your insurance and your pharmacy benefit managers and the pharmacies and the hospital system, they may not want to pay for the brand name, right?

So, when I was on colorectal surgery, I had a patient who was in remission from their Crohn's disease and on Humira. The insurance company decided not to pay for the Humira any longer and they were going to force the patient to switch to the generic version that is similar, not identical. They came out of remission. They had a bowel perforation which means they were leaking bacteria into their abdomen, went into sepsis, and needed a large surgery to go in and repair that—and sepsis from a bowel perforation can be fatal. Right. So in a way, that person didn't need to be taken off of Humira. They didn't need to have a bowel perforation. I mean yeah, anything can happen. There's no crystal ball. It could have happened on Humira, but they were in remission for like 6 years on Humira. And the moment you switch that medication, they have these problems.

So, you know, here's where we get into—since you're a math guy—we get into the actuary of how many of those patients who actually—I mean, they figured it out down to the numbers of "okay, that will happen in X% of patients." So, that one surgery and all of that is worth the risk, right? It's a math problem, not a patient care decision. That's pretty scary, isn't it? It's extremely scary. It's a pretty wild place for us to be in 2026 when you think that it wasn't that long ago that we didn't have—I mean, managed care is a product of like the late '80s, early '90s. Has it been good for the general public? I would say probably not.

No. I mean, my mom had stage 4 melanoma recently and got treated with Keytruda, another expensive monoclonal antibody drug, and it fried her pancreas in the process of treating the melanoma. So, she's cured of melanoma, but now she doesn't have a pancreas. So: fat-soluble vitamin deficiencies, the most brittle type 1 diabetic I've ever seen, right? And when that was all getting diagnosed, the ER doctor was just like, "Why didn't you take your insulin? You're a diabetic." And I'm like, "Give me the phone. The dentist in Alabama is going to educate you here." Yeah, this is a new problem. She's not a diabetic—now she is—like, what are we going to do about it?

It was just—and she was in Santa Barbara, California, at Cottage Hospital which has historically been a phenomenal institution and now I watched this go with her and the health care is just falling off a cliff, right? And so I was like—you know, we tried to manage her health care out there but at the end of the day it was like, "Sorry mom, you're going to retire now and you're going to move to Alabama and I'm going to manage your healthcare in addition to a concierge medicine practice that I know." So now she has excellent health care. But unfortunately that's not the reality for most Americans, right? Whose son can manage these medical issues in conjunction with a hospital system that they went and spent six years at?

Well, and here's the thing, right? We had Dr. Richard Lewis Miller on the program recently and he talked about having a medical advocate. I mean really if you think about it, it's so confusing for people in so many ways. Confusing, especially diabetes, because it's so hard; the only way to really manage your diabetes is to educate yourself, right? And you have to have a thorough knowledge of the disease to be able to take good care of yourself and I mean, who's educating these people? Yeah, I mean and then there's a whole host of other factors that may play—I mean like in Alabama, when we talk about things like a food desert, access to the kind of things that you would need in order to manage diabetes. So, you know, are these people able to actually exercise or are they working two jobs just to keep their head above? They're in a no-win situation from a healthcare standpoint. No, it's pretty scary. It's a very trying time.

And I think one of the things I like about you is that you're always forging forward on "how do I provide the best care to people and really take care of them?" And so your philosophy of care is like, "I'm going to do what it takes in order to get the best results for the patient." And you're wearing an interesting t-shirt which is—let's flip and go—zygote, right? So zygomatic implants, which a lot of people have no idea what that is. So, we have a regular dental implant. You take a tooth out, right? A molar, right off. You place—maybe you have to put some bone graft, maybe you can put a flat implant in there. You can just do it all in one day. And then you restore it with a crown. Last night when we talked about it, it was like, I don't understand why people are going to an endodontist and having that worked out or having a crown put on. Why? You just go straight to the end result and get the best result right from the gate, especially if it's not a great long-term prognosis to begin with.

Yeah, we know the way. Crowns are going to fail after 10 or 15 years. I mean, you might get lucky if you're really taking care of your teeth, but they're not going to last forever, especially not in the current medical system where everybody's being put on a ton of medications that cause dry mouth. I mean, that's going to make everything fail so much quicker. Yeah. And as we get older—I mean, just look at what people used to be on as they got older and look at what they're on now. I mean, man, how many times a patient comes in and they're like, "Here's my list of medications; it's 20 of them." And you know, I mean, that didn't used to be a thing.

Chapter 5: Is Your Annual Physical a Waste of Time?

Yeah. I mean, it's crazy just to think like what's going to happen with AI and how that's going to actually have the potential to take a look at that when we have multiple providers taking care of a patient and when you're pressed for time and you don't really have the chance to really kind of go through every single thing that they're taking. I mean, I guess when it comes to a surgical situation, you probably do have to do that to a certain extent, but the AI agent that's able to actually go through it, take a look at those, look for the interaction, look for the problems that could exist within a surgical situation, and then give you like a real pop-up and say, "Hey, here are your risk factors." I think that's going to be a game changer. I mean, as a doctor, you're supposed to be doing it anyway on every single patient, right? But it could definitely be a supportive tool.

Which, you talked about patient education—let me take a moment just to talk about Quantum since you're such a huge Quantum advocate. I am a huge advocate, yeah. When we built that, it was like, let's create something that really delivers the knowledge to the patient. So we're talking about the problem right now, right? The problem is the doctor—you have to see so many patients; how do you actually get them educated prior to, and having to spend so much time in the consult where what the patient really wants is that interaction with you? Yeah. They want to know what's specific to them.

Talking about this education piece—they want to know, "What is my situation? How does this—" and I think when you're in the consult, one of the things I've observed over the years is that there's too much going on for anybody. We talk about this memory lapse over the years—well, I couldn't remember that whole thing from that entire period of time. That happens in the consult all the time, doesn't it? Not most of them—all of them. It happens on every single person. Every single person doesn't get enough education at their appointment. That's the assumption. Yeah. And that's my experience. And so, you can try and get your staff to teach people more. You can make more printed papers for people to read through afterward. But my experience has been a video of me going over it again that they can rewatch before and after all their appointments has been by far the best educational tool. And I get feedback all the time that people really enjoyed those videos because they will watch it on their time when they were focused and actually could comprehend it.

Yeah. I think about it all the time where it's like, "Hey, we're taking this piece that it would normally have to take place inside the practice; we're doing it in preparation," so the patient arrives, they're already educated on the things that they need to know. Now, of course, things may have changed or there may be specifics that you've got to cover with the patient, but it just gives you a lot more breathing room to make it much easier for them to understand, less pressured, and also to build more of a bond with you. Yeah, which is I think absolutely critical. Well, and I've also seen patients ask better questions, right? People come in for their appointment and they kind of freeze and they have these very generic questions like, "What do I expect?" But when the people get to have some education beforehand, they come in with better questions that are more specific to their situation and now you're able to educate them on their specific situation a lot longer than you were if you're trying to go over all of this generic knowledge. And so that I think significantly improves the quality of care.

Yeah. And so like, let's talk about zygomatic implants. Let's get into it because it is—it's pretty intense. Well, it's been around for a little while, right? I think zygomatics were put in three or four decades ago. But they're two or three times as long as a regular implant and they anchor into your cheekbones, right? Where the bone here has been denser, stronger, and hasn't resorbed or gone away as we've gotten older. So, when people lose all their bone in their mouth after they've had teeth taken out, usually the cheekbones are still a decent source of nice cortical dense bone that you can get good, strong implants into. So, if we're really trying to get someone into teeth to improve their quality of life and health—yeah, you want fixed teeth. You can chew and talk and function so much better and have a better smile.

But, you know, you start to talk about zygomatic implants and cheekbones, there's a lot more complexity to it, right? There's a lot more anatomy. There's a lot more risk factors. There's more risk for complications. It's not something that you just want to take on lightly. And I think, they seem cool. And that's part of why I wore this shirt, right? Like the shirt tries to make it seem that zygomatics are these cool, new, fancy, awesome procedures that we should be doing. And the reality is that couldn't be farthest from the truth, right? You shouldn't be saying like, "Hey, these are so awesome. These are the best. We should do them on everybody." Because the reality is the best zygomatic implant is the one you don't have to place.

Yeah. Right. You should not be jumping right to them. And what I see on social media now is you've got a bunch of general dentists putting zygomatic implants in. You've got everybody—periodontists, oral surgeons—you got all these people putting in so many more zygomatic implants. And they do them partially because they think it looks really cool on social media to kind of boost their reputation or their ego or whatever. But I look at these x-rays or pictures or cases that they post and I'm just like, "I wouldn't have had to do that," right? And I mean the amount of times I have to put a zygomatic implant in is just so far and few between that I really think we're doing a better job for patients by avoiding them.

But to avoid them, you need to be much more trained on all the different ways that you can use regular implants to avoid zygomatic implants. And it's not to say that zygomatic implants are bad, but they need to be used at the appropriate time as a backup to keep people in teeth. So, everyone all across the country—there's a couple major implant centers with tons of offices across the country, all marketing and pushing all these big fixed-arch cases. And just for the listener, when we start talking about implants, immediately oftentimes people go, "Oh, that's a breast implant." So, we're talking about a dental implant.

Yeah, dental implants. And implant centers are large organizations that are geared toward—when you say fixed arch, that's where we do a complete restoration. We take the denture that would normally—those things move around in your mouth, they're not stable, all that stuff—and you really restore somebody's function. Dental implants can be used to replace a single tooth, multiple teeth, or all of them.

Chapter 6: Why Zygomatic Implants are the "Cool" Trend You Should Avoid

Yeah, right. And there's different prosthetics that go on them and fixed teeth are certainly better than removable teeth in terms of aesthetics and function, right? Talking, chewing, eating. So, yeah, when we're talking about zygomatic implants, it's really with respect to replacing all of the teeth, right? And in particular, people that need all their teeth replaced with a fixed solution that have very little bone in their mouth. But even when you have very little bone in their mouth, there's more special ways of getting implants in that can avoid a zygomatic, at least initially.

And so, when I'm talking to patients, I'm like, "Look, nothing lasts forever." You buy a car, it's not going to last forever. If you change the oil regularly and follow the appropriate protocols, it's going to last longer. If you don't change the oil, it's not going to last very long. Same thing with full-mouth dental implants. It’s not going to last forever. And as people are put on more medications and have more issues, people are needing all their teeth replaced at a younger age. If you're getting all your teeth replaced at 30 years old for whatever issues, whether it was drugs or medical problems or whatever, you think a fixed arch is going to last till you're 80—50 years? I mean, it's possible, but you got to have meticulous oral hygiene and really improve your health.

But as an ethical doctor, you need to plan on what's going to happen when it only lasts 15 years, right? When they're 30 and they get it all done, what's going to happen when they're 45, 50, 55, or 60? What are you going to do to keep them in fixed teeth and maintain their quality of life? Are you going to say, "Hey, sorry. 15 years ago, I just removed all your bone and used up all the space in your cheekbones to put zygomatics in because it looked cool on Instagram, and now I don't have any more real estate left to put new implants in to keep you in fixed teeth"? Is that what we're going to do? That's pretty scary. Yeah. It's an immediate satisfaction thing because it was the easy choice today, right? And we're burning a lot of bridges for people's Plan Bs in 20 years when they need a revision, right? And do you believe that people are on a whole thinking that far ahead?

No. There are so few people I've interacted with in my life that truly are long-term planners. Most people go day to day, week to week, month to month. Some people plan year to year, right? But in general, most people are short-term planners, right? Immediate satisfaction over delayed gratification. It's interesting something about you. We talked about it last night—you're big on preventative, right? Which from a business standpoint is counter to your business. It's absolutely right. You'd rather not see a patient in your office than see them. And so that notion of "Hey, I don't want to do something unless I absolutely have to because that's the core of last resort" makes perfect sense. It aligns with your values and who you are as a person. So when someone comes to see you, when you have patients that are coming to you that you had no referral, you don't know anything about them, how are you handling that workflow in your practice?

Well, my staff would like me to do it quicker, but I sit down with people and I go through every little detail, right? You got to go through the medical history. You got to understand what the patient wants, right? And then you got to look at all of your data and give them their options. I mean, I'm not here to tell them what they're getting. My job is to educate them. Look at all the information, compile it, and educate them on their situation and their options, and then let them pick. I did have a mentor once that told me, "You'll never regret the surgery you didn't do." And I think that fits into this situation where I'm not here to sell treatment. I'm here to educate and provide a service if that's what you choose.

"You'll never regret the surgery you didn't do." Yep. That's a great statement. So, only when necessary. Yeah. You should be more conservative and take care of the patient where they're at. They may need a fixed arch, but they may not be ready for it, right? And if they're not ready for it, then it wasn't the right treatment plan for them, even though they were a perfect candidate for it. Well, we're in the midst of implementing some stuff in your practice that is going to be pretty cool, which is the whole AI front desk. And I think this is a really interesting period of time where we can take people that were doing communication that I think drives employees nuts and move them into—you know, give them an opportunity to do more things that are beneficial to their overall well-being as employees, which helps the patient. It also helps the practice on a whole.

But this notion of having an interface with an actual digital human—it's a real, you know, a real autonomous, it's an automated experience. So I can have this conversation with—there are a bunch of them out there, right? There are these bunch of them out there and they can have a conversation, but they can't do anything. The difference with Quantum and Grace is that it can actually really take you and explain stuff to you and then, you know, book you in for a consult and make sure that it's the right thing for you and appropriately get you to the right people or however you need to. I think it's going to be fascinating to see how people respond to this.

I agree. I think trying to predict it is a little bit difficult. There are going to be some people that adopt to it easily and like it, and there's going to be some people that are indifferent, and there's going to be some people that are against it 100%. Those are the three buckets and you're not going to be able to change it. I think at some point, any way you look at it, it's better than a phone tree. So many practices, so many businesses, so many whatever have just a phone tree and there's nothing more annoying than that because you got to wait to hear for "what to this that." If you can just have a conversation really quickly, you really got to chop that down by at least 50%.

And I think what's also interesting is we've had a lot of people talk about this recently where they say that they actually don't want to interface. We saw that with the texting first—the chat stuff—and then they don't want to actually interface. They don't want to spend the time to go, "Hey, how's your dog? How's your this? How's your that?" They want to just get down to it because they have so little time. The next piece is really going to be interesting to see as we move into this AI phase where it's going to be the whole notion of AI talking to AI. So your assistant, right, your agent that operates for you and you have—probably, you know, we're seeing it now. I think that notion of taking away some of that friction out of people's lives, automating past that friction, is pretty exciting.

My prediction is there's going to be a much higher adoption rate. I think it was a little early on; I said "Hey, by the end of 2026, we're going to see the majority of healthcare workers move to a different role of front desk healthcare workers." However, the reality is that one of the things I've learned as we've gotten deeper into this—to really make this effective, it has to be so specialized to the practice and there are so many different things. We were talking about the mathematics of it last night; it's pretty intense really when you try to think about the nuances of how you want to practice. Making that happen within that agent is pretty difficult. There are a lot of steps in the front office in any healthcare situation. Everyone that runs a business is trying to find systems to do it well within what they want it to do.

And so, we're already seeing AI talking to AI with respect to like claim submissions, right? If you're submitting a claim to an insurance company, you have a person do it or you can have an AI company doing it. There's a couple of them out there and that's what their agent does and they submit the claim to the insurance company. And so what we see is, it's pretty easy for a human to like skip over a zip code and have the digit be off by one, right? And then if you're having people submit it and your zip code's off by one, the insurance company's AI is scanning for any error. Boom, denied right back to the practice. And then if you have people managing it all, it could take that person like five days to get back around just to update the zip code. So I think when insurance put all these AI agents in place, which they've already done—everyone has done it already, that's a done deal.

Chapter 7: The Truth About "Gluten-Free" and Corporate Wheat

You may not want to do AI, but at least a first line of defense is an AI agent responding to their AI agent, making sure that there are no errors—silly errors—that are preventing your revenue cycle from continuing at a normal pace, right? And that's a huge piece for any practice, keeping that financial health in place. I mean, you can't employ people if you're not doing that.

So, all right. Well, we've gone off on a number of things. We've talked about corporate practice of dentistry and private equity. We've talked about the different types of implants. We've talked about AI. We talked about Quantum. I know I'm just so delighted how you've really just jumped into Quantum and really used it at a level that I think is pretty impressive. And it's great always to get that feedback from you. I always love to hear from you when you're like, "Oh, this thing's amazing. I can't believe it. It's so great." That's always super cool to hear that from you.

Moving forward, what's the future look like? That's where I would go with this conversation. The future—I mean, you take all the points we've just talked about and the question is: how does this progress into the future and what changes do we expect to see? You know, I think we're at a point where there are so many options now and so many things that are changing and a lot of patient care is suffering and a lot of doctor autonomy is suffering. Those two things are just going to—at some point—get to a point where it drives massive systemic changes in our health care system and all these other tools and other things we're talking about, it's going to change how they get integrated together.

I mean, we're seeing it right now in the longevity and cellular medicine markets where people are aware of it. Obviously, the GLP-1 thing kind of kicked it off, right? So then that made people aware of peptides on a whole. Insulin being the first peptide, people have been using it for years, and GLP-1s have been around for a long time also. Just the bottom line is that they figured out, well, you lose a bunch of weight on these things too. Now, I had a conversation yesterday with somebody who's pretty high up in that world and she was talking about how now people are designing things so that people will eat right through those GLP-1s. So we've got GI GLP-1, which is semaglutide, then we've got tirzepatide, and then now the new one coming which has been out—the pill version now of Wegovy.

Yeah, instead of the injections. The interesting fact was actually the head of our research and strategy team—no slouch, PhD fellow from Stanford, Dr. Labarusha—was talking about needle phobia and how many patients just have needle phobia and they won't actually self-inject until that oral came along. There's a bunch of new oral stuff that's out. Times are just growing. Yeah, it's taking off and I think the whole longevity market is causing people to think about, "Okay, well I pay so much money for health insurance and yet I get so little out of that, and I'm really controlled in what I can take, and it's not really a preventative model. It's more of a reactionary model." Very much so.

So, if we could move more toward a preventative model that essentially takes us to a place where we're really focused on "Okay, how do I stay out of these acute situations?" Then really all I need to do is get insurance that's for catastrophic, and I want the best catastrophic that I can get. I've seen some physicians and doctors kind of have this conversation on their social media pages that even some doctors are moving toward that direction. Let's just do a lot of prevention in our own family and go to a catastrophic model for their family and decrease their overall insurance costs—and the savings can be pretty substantial, can be far more beneficial to a patient.

I mean, like when you go in for your annual physical—I mean, I found that my annual physical is just less and less—it’s just not much, right? I mean, there's not much going on there. My primary care doctor is sort of like, "What are we doing here?" Maybe look for some labs and some stuff that's pretty basic, but it's not like they're really super progressive and they're also sort of shut down with regard to thought process around some of the new things that are happening. Like you said, it's all reactionary. So, even an annual physical that you think should be proactive is not proactive. It's reactionary, right? Let's figure out do you have hypertension, do you have these medical diseases and let's treat them because that's how the health care system is built. It's not built around prevention. Prevention doesn't make money.

Yeah. So, I'm curious. What do you do for your own healthcare? You know, exercise, diet, sleep—what are you doing to make sure that you're staying on top of all the things? Well, fortunately, I went to medical school, so I can manage a lot of it myself, which is not to be taken for granted, right? But I think the biggest thing overall in terms of my family and myself is diet, right? I mean, right now you've got food deserts like you mentioned before. You look at grocery stores—day-to-day grocery stores and good grocery stores with high-quality products don't exist in most areas of the country. They literally just don't go into areas that are low socioeconomic statuses.

And yet you see this kind of counter to all of that, which are these local farmers markets that are popping up almost everywhere. Super important that those are popping up. Yeah, that's where I was going with this. And it boils down to: what is the most commonly consumed food product, right? It's carbs. Most people are consuming massive amounts of carbs. Well, what goes into carbs? Flour. Where is that flour coming from? Well, it's coming from gigantic large corporate-controlled farming situations. They harvest all the wheat. They pulverize it. They bleach it. They destroy it. And then they refortify it.

You think "fortify" would be a good word. "Fortify" means don't stay far away, right? So you get all of this wheat that gets turned into flour. So they genetically modify the wheat to maximize volume per acre of what they're growing. Then they destroy the wheat. They bleach it just so that it could stay on the shelf for years at a time, so that it doesn't go bad as quickly, but you're still going to get more mold within those flour particles there. So I think the number one thing you can do to improve your health is stay away from any processed carbs; it has no nutritional value. The "fortifying" means that they added back in stuff that your body doesn't absorb well.

So, when people bring up like, "Oh yeah, I went to Italy. I was able to eat all this pasta and I felt great and I didn't get bloated." That's because all the wheat did is have—pesticides, oh, GMO. Yeah. So, it's super high quality flour, organically, naturally grown, and you tolerate it, you process it well. And the biggest thing is like people bring up celiac disease. Why do we have so many celiac patients now and everybody's a celiac and we need all this non-gluten product? I'm like, well, glyphosate, right, causes the same small intestinal microvilli changes that people with celiac disease have. So I would say that evolution hasn't happened in the last 20 years. Right. We don't have more celiac patients because evolutionarily humans developed this genetic condition.

Yeah. It's really changed the entire landscape. And yet there's a bunch of heirloom wheat that's out there that people are producing. And I buy flour from a small mill in Canada. Homegrown, small family grinds it. They store the wheat in wheat berries and then when I place an order, they pulverize the wheat berries and ship it to me. It's not going to sit on the shelf for six months; it would go bad. But I get the wheat flown in and then I make our own bread. So, we consume mostly all of our own homemade carbs. That's huge. It is the number one thing you could do.

Yeah. Get away from processed stuff, right? And then it brings up the next one: produce. People need to consume more produce. One for gut health, two for natural vitamins. Well, I can't tell you the last time I bought a thing of raspberries for my kids and it didn't go moldy in two or three days and it looked bad to begin with, right? And it's like you need to go back to the old way things were done with those mom-and-pop supermarkets that locally sourced from the surrounding farms. All of this produce that was organic. You got to get back to that.

I mean, it's just like right up here. We have strawberry season and the berries that you get—I mean, they're just so incredible. That notion of eating seasonally also has to have some sort of effect on how it's giving you the nutrients that you need within the timeframe in which you exist. It's so powerful to think about that. I think we're way over-carbed by the way. Way over carbs. Yeah. Way too much. Not enough produce. Well, and also not enough protein, too. I mean, now we know that it's muscle, visceral fat, and VO2 max. Yep. Well, and you get into that, too. It's way over-carbed, but it's also not enough protein and not enough fat. Fat is not bad for you. You just need healthy fats and to consume enough of it. Yeah. I mean, it's true. If your fat goes too low, your hormones are all out of whack. Yeah, it can have all sorts of detrimental effects in many ways.

So, yeah. And then when we get into like, okay, what kind of meat are you going to actually eat? What kind of fish are you going to eat? Where are you sourcing it from? I mean, I'll never eat salmon in any sushi place. There's no way because it's all farmed. All farmed. Yeah. And that's probably—most people think that's healthy. All kinds of hormones and antibiotics and everything that's terrible. Yeah, it's terrible. And yet people think it's good for you. So, from a protein standpoint: beef, elk—what's your go-to?

I am pretty much any meat product—any meat is good as long as you know where it came from, right? I mean, just don't have the farmed stuff. So whether you want to find a small local farm that has cows and buy a quarter of a cow at a time and put it in a chest freezer, or you want to—there's some of those fish subscription services that are from Alaska and they contract directly with the fisher and they go out, they catch the fish fresh, they flash freeze it right there, and then they ship it right to you on a subscription model and you know that it was all wild-caught stuff from remote areas of the world.

Yeah, it's so funny. I mean, having fished in Alaska so many times, I can just say that the difference in a piece of halibut that you get that's fresh caught and a piece of salmon that's just fresh caught—it's just totally a different world. It tastes so different. So I personally do one of those fish subscription services and then you're also getting a variety. Right. And a variety in diet is a good thing, right? So a variety of fish—we do some beef that is from—we kind of have to know where it's coming from. And then I actually stay away from chicken a lot of the time because I don't know where it's coming from.

Yeah, I've heard a lot about that recently. A lot of people are sort of anti-chicken and what it's being fed here. You know, in Northern California, we have a lot of free-range chicken. I mean, they literally are not fed anything. Exactly. Go out and get the bugs and the grass. Usually like the chicken breasts—chicken that's raised for meat—is different chickens than the chickens raised for eggs. Right. So, I eat a lot of eggs. They're free range, right? Where's the chicken breast coming from? I don't know. Yeah. I eat a ton of eggs. And I find that that's been super for a number of reasons.

Chapter 8: How to Take Control of Your Own Healthcare in 2026

So now let's talk about exercise. Yes. What do you do? Exercise is a tough one because life just has gotten so busy. Kids, work, businesses. Exercise is the toughest one. I think what matters more than how much you lift—I think what matters more is consistency. You have to move every day. As long as you do something and you're moving, you get your heart rate up a bit every day, that's sufficient for most people as long as you're controlling your diet. Yep. I mean, I moved recently to a standing desk and just having that standing desk has had a huge impact for me. And I really can see the difference. Whenever I have to sit now for a long period of time, I really notice the difference in how I feel. So that notion of keeping the body upright. I don't think we're meant to sit in chairs. I mean, just watching TV laying down—we're not meant to spend that amount of time not moving in weird positions. Yeah. The walk after you eat, you know, just 20 minutes of walking after you eat at night when weather permits. That's a huge thing.

Well, we've covered so many things. What other stuff should we talk about before we go? I think it goes back to: what are we looking at for the future, right? We've kind of gone over where we should go from a personal health care standpoint in terms of diet and exercise, but the future of the health care system, right? And kind of where I'm at as a younger oral surgeon in a community running my own practice and some experiences I've had in that situation. What is the future of healthcare looking like in Alabama? There are certain things happening that make me concerned. I think the future of the models of private equity, larger groups, and what role doctors play in the management and running of these practices is going to be huge.

Yeah. I think at the end of the day it also comes down to consumer awareness. If you kind of just look at the progression—so let's go back to 1990, go to 2000, 2010, where we are now. Over the last 30 years, we're in this place now where people are really waking up. They've had enough of it. They're tired of the care that they're getting and they're starting to seek alternatives. I think when that kicks off, it's going to be tough to contain that. Absolutely. And it'll take off quicker, I think, than people realize. Yeah, people are going to demand more and they deserve more. AI and the internet only makes it easier for people to find resources and look into what they want.

There are a number of things that are popping up right now. The world is changing quickly. And it's great providers like you, great people who are really committed to the right outcomes for patients and are focused on "How do I deliver this every single day?" So, you know, one of the things I've really been impressed with you is that commitment to really be the best in the field. I think there are some people who are sort of happy just to get along, go along, whatever. That's fine too. I just like a challenge and I'm willing to work hard on those things that may seem like a waste of time to others just because I like it.

So, one of the things that's kind of interesting too is that oftentimes now there's, what, 10 million wisdom teeth cases in the United States per year? And kids have their wisdom teeth extracted. What do people really need to know about that? On a whole, I think people need to know that there are risks associated with it. Most of the time it's a pretty straightforward procedure but sometimes you need follow-up care, right? And so if you're going to an office and they're bringing in an oral surgeon or a dentist—sometimes it's a dentist, sometimes it's not an oral surgeon—but they're bringing someone in to do the procedure and then that person's going to leave. Where'd that person go? And who is the professional or the expert to take care of if you have a complication? I mean, you can get abscesses. You can have real problems and need surgical intervention after you get your teeth out. It's not very common, but it happens. You want a professional, an expert that is available to you for follow-up care, not someone that comes in, works based off of production, is incentivized to do as many cases as possible and get out.

And there are also some developments in the last handful of years. We can take wisdom teeth out now in a way that's much better than the options we had five years ago. In particular, there's a type of extra long-lasting local anesthesia called Exparel, and you put it in right next to where the wisdom teeth came out, and it keeps that area right on the sides fairly numb and comfortable for up to 96 hours. So, you might only need one pill of ibuprofen three or four days later to get through your entire recovery period. I mean, that's huge because you're not taking narcotics, right? Narcotics are nasty. Narcotics lead—they call them the gateway drug and it's true. You really want to avoid narcotics and most people are used to asking for narcotics. So then doctors just reflexively give it because the patients want it and they want their five-star reviews and it goes down that whole rabbit hole. I think that we really need everybody to know that you shouldn't need narcotics after getting your wisdom teeth out and you should be demanding Exparel after getting your wisdom teeth out.

Having worked with oral and maxillofacial surgeons for so many years, one of the things I've heard—I'm sure you've heard this in your practice—it's like, "Hey, I've had the kid in a chair for two hours. I can't get the teeth out. Can I send him over?" Think about that. That's the worst. It's terrible. It's the worst situation for a patient. Why the dentist thinks that's a good idea—I don't think I would ever bring my kid back to that dentist ever again if that was the case. Why didn't you just send them to the oral surgeon from the very beginning?

That's right. And that actually ends up being the absolute worst complication you can have when it takes somebody two hours to get a tooth out and you've burned the bone trying to cut the tooth into pieces. Those cases are the ones that turn into osteomyelitis, which can be six weeks of IV antibiotics through a PICC line. I want to really break this down because this is something that people don't really know anything about and is absolutely critical for people to know because it's serious business. Go ahead and break it down.

So osteomyelitis—osteo meaning bone, myelitis meaning like inflammation/infection—it's when you get an infection of the bone, right? Of the jawbone, and it's infected in a way that's very difficult to treat. Lots of bacteria getting in there non-stop. And once you have osteo, it's not because you still have all this bacteria in your mouth; it's in the bone. The bacteria that was in your mouth is now in the bone and it's made a home. It's there and it's hard for your body to fight it off. And so that usually happens when bone starts to die a little bit because of heat from the surgery, and that dead bone is a perfect home with nutrition for bacteria. So you end up getting this bad infection in the jawbone that can just be painful and fester for a long time. It can get bad enough you can break your jaw in that area and it's a bad complication. A lot of times it can require six weeks of antibiotics, and sometimes through a PICC line, which is an IV and it stays in permanently.

It doesn't make sense to me. I think you should stay in the lane in which you're trained and it's really clear that, as you mentioned, oral and maxillofacial surgeons from the gate have a better understanding, a better capability of extracting wisdom teeth without a doubt. There's just no debate, right? Doesn't mean that a general dentist can't take it. Are we taking wisdom teeth out down here? Yeah. Right. It's a 13, right? It's easy. So, let's use that. Would I want to have somebody who's stretching to actually take out wisdom teeth and to understand that the mandible has a nerve and I may or may not have a CBCT in order to get a full 3D scan of where everything is and how that tooth is positioned, or the ability to know exactly how to make the incision, how to actually remove the tooth in the way that's the most effective?

The reality is: do you want someone taking out your wisdom teeth who does it once every other week, or do you want someone who takes out five sets a day, 10 sets a day—repetition? You're the person that if I'm in a car crash and I've crushed this side of my face, more often than not in a trauma center, it's an oral and maxillofacial surgeon that goes and treats it. You're going to restore the orbit, you're going to plate everything, plate the jaw, you're going to do all the things that you need to do in order to actually fix that. So you have a deeper understanding of the structures of the face. So why, when you're going to pay the same amount of money, would you not go see an oral and maxillofacial surgeon?

Oftentimes it's more to get someone who's lesser trained. Because you have to go back and deal with the issues over and over again. Right. And what I see is it's cheaper for me to put an implant in than it is for some of the referral sources. I see it all the time. I charge less because I'd rather do more of it so that I can take good care of people, right? I'm not trying to maximize my profit; I'm just trying to take care of everybody. A specialist versus a dentist—there's a massive misconception in the community that a specialist is always more expensive. Certainly, sometimes that's true, but I would say that a lot of times that's not necessarily true. I mean, you could get the same care for cheaper or the same.

I've been in a practice in the morning where there were 13 cases that happened. We started early in the morning and it wound up at like 11:30 and it was just boom, boom, boom, all done with the highest level. Everything was prepped. It was a total system. When you have the systems and all that care and you're able to do the surgery efficiently and quickly, there's less swelling, there's less pain, there's less risk of osteomyelitis, there's less risk of infection.

Well, and I want to also talk about something that's never really talked about, which is the neural component. So, if you're under anesthesia rather than local, where you're taking teeth out—under anesthesia, you don't know what's going on. You basically say, "Hey, I'm going to go to sleep. I'm going to wake up." I can tell you it's sort of weird when you wake up and you go, "Whoa, it's like I was there and now I'm here." But that notion of the neural effect of just reducing that cortisol, the stress associated with it. Because if you've got somebody and you're in a chair for two hours, think how uncomfortable that is for a patient. Have somebody really in there kind of wrenching on you trying to get stuff out. That's just not a good way to go.

Well, and the thing that I've seen sometimes that is more of a medical issue as well is, there's definitely a trend where a lot of patients go to the dentist and they get a steroid afterward. And dentists just give steroids out. And I'm like, well, that should not be taken lightly. Steroids have side effects. Shouldn't just be taking a bunch of steroids. Even though sure, maybe it helps with a little bit of swelling or a little bit of discomfort, but how about just do the surgery quicker to minimize those risks rather than just mask it with a steroid? And the issue really is, how many people are diabetics? Was every patient's medical history thoroughly gone through, and for every diabetic, did they recognize not to give a steroid? Because you give a steroid to a diabetic, those blood sugars are going to go through the roof and not be controlled and you end up in the ICU on an insulin drip.

Chapter 9: Final Thoughts: Why "Local" is the Future of Health

So, there are real risks. All right. In the pathway to peak performance for you, if you were to sum it all up into one statement, what's the thing that you would want people to know about really achieving at the highest level? There's a couple sayings I live by. One of them is, "Anything worth doing is probably hard," right? I'm not going around trying to find something easy, not trying to take shortcuts. Anything that's a get-rich-quick scheme or seems like a shortcut, I'm not interested. I just move on past that. Let's do something hard that creates real value, right?

And then from a more specific standpoint, there is a right tool for the job and you need to know how to use that tool appropriately and apply it in the right way, and then things usually go well. Things don't usually go well when you're using the wrong tool, right? So, from a peak performance perspective, know your equipment, know your tools, and use them in the right way and don't take shortcuts. Put in a real good work ethic and tackle the hard problems and create real value.

Great words to live by. All right, so now we're at the tail end of this. So often, you're spending hours and you're just going, going, right? And I hear this from so many surgeons. It's like, "Oh man, I just didn't have time to eat." And those ketones really are anti-catabolic for muscle and they can kind of keep you fueled in a way where you know—caffeine, you have a crash; sugar, you have a crash; all the stuff that those reps are bringing in or stuff that you might find in the hospital, it's just junk. It's interesting—so I'm curious, here we are, how do you feel?

It's interesting; like when you're not moving I didn't notice it as much, but the moment you go to stand up or talk to other people, everything seems a little bit more intense and you almost feel like you have a little bit of a buzz on, right? Like you're definitely excited and energetic and noticing a lot of things and you're trying to focus. I find that when I use them, I basically am locked in. Everything just kind of comes much easier. Not as much of an ADHD effect or taking like an Adderall or any of those medications that kind of ramp you up but you have a hard time focusing. You get that energy, but you also can choose to focus and stay focused without feeling as distracted.

Yeah, since I started using them, I've been just really impressed with them and they're really powerful. And I use them—you know, some people are into that keto diet and they're using exogenous ketones as part of their ketosis. I have a metabolically flexible diet. So, I'm eating a balanced diet, but I use them in conjunction with that and I found that it's been very phenomenal for me. Theoretically, the ketones should go right to the brain and be used for energy, right? So, you're either burning glucose or ketones. If your brain has extra nutrition, it should theoretically function well. Yeah. Good for the brain, good for the world.

Which, by the way, if you want to get free shipping on that, you can go to ketone.com/jock and you can get free shipping on all of your K products. So, K2, K4—they even have some hard ketones. Hard ketones are like the alcohol version; you drink them and they give you a very sedative effect. Probably don't turn that many people on, but some people really like them.

Final thoughts wrapping it up—what's the last thing you want to say? You know, I'd say that overall in life, I think everybody will move toward a better direction if we try and keep things local, support small local businesses, and support doctors that own their offices because they're the ones that are more likely to help out the people in need, right? Because they control their business and they can give away their time for free if they want to, right? Whereas with corporations, that's not going to happen.

So from a food, exercise, lifestyle, kind of a peak performance perspective in anything—I think it's really important that everybody really take a moment to maybe spend a little bit more, which is a hard thing to say, but keep it local in your communities. Improve your community. Do what you can in your own community to make it better, avoiding large corporations. You know, it's interesting when you think about it: spending a little bit more within your community actually has a boomerang effect which is so powerful. We can talk about that another time. Yeah. Keep it local. Support your friends. Support your family. Support your other local business people. Support doctors that own their own offices. Because you support a doctor that owns their own office, they'll take care of you when you need it.

All the more reason for doctors to use Quantum to make sure patients know that there's more to supporting small local businesses that'll have their back. I love it. Thanks for coming in, Dr. Walsh. It's good to see you, Jo. You, too.