Habits and Hustle - Episode 102: Jason Feldman – Co-Founder & CEO at Vault Health
Episode Date: February 9, 2021Jason Feldman is the Co-Founder & CEO at Vault Health which is currently one of the largest Covid testing companies in America. Coming from Amazon’s video department with a pursuit in the health fie...ld from a young age, Feldman leads us through how he somehow stumbled into his lifelong passion and how he kept it alive launching a rebrand into a stock market crash and a global pandemic. He generates excitement for what the future of healthcare could be and one that his company could help create. Through the loosening of minds, especially men’s’, when it comes to talking about and receiving care to a focus on mind and body, he continues to rail against the costs and stigma surrounding the field while defining a path to actual solutions. The story of how he pivoted his “men’s health” company into a leader in at-home Covid testing alone is enough to inspire anyone to fight to the end. Don’t miss it. Youtube Link to this Episode Vault Health ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Did you learn something from tuning in today? Please pay it forward and write us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. 📧If you have feedback for the show, please email habitsandhustlepod@gmail.com 📙Get yourself a copy of Jennifer Cohen’s newest book from Habit Nest, Badass Body Goals Journal. ℹ️Habits & Hustle Website 📚Habit Nest Website 📱Follow Jennifer – Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – Jennifer’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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I guys is Tony Robbins you're listening to habits and hustle
pressure
This is Jason Feldman. He is the founder of Vault Health, which is a subscription-based
telemedicine. Was that the way you can call it? Telemedicine company? Great. He launched
you launch like a year ago, right? That's when you were actually launched.
You're right. That's here, yeah, for sure.
And I've been fascinated with your business for a plethora of reasons, which I was just
saying.
First of all, what I found fascinating, first of all, is that you're from Amazon.
You were the president of Amazon Prime, what is it called?
It's a real Prime Video Direct, yeah.
The part of Amazon's Prime Video business that brought almost all the content, not the
stuff from the studios, but everything else that makes Amazon Prime videos such a huge thing that was where all the
content came from, my team.
So that's a huge job.
And what made you pivot from that to now being in the health space?
Well, health care is terribly, terribly, terribly broken, right?
It's just like, you can't get worse than what health care is
I mean when you consider the number of people who are disaffected and frankly that will die younger than they should because they don't have access to health care
It just destroys me and I'm an incredibly mission driven person. I feel like I I have a purpose and my purpose has to be to make something better and
You know while it was fun to make Amazon a better place to serve
customers and there's no place better on earth if you want to learn how to do things at
scale, it wasn't as fulfilling as doing something to fix healthcare. And that was my calling.
And so here we are.
Well, I mean, even gets at that place in Amazon, like I heard a couple of friends here a
few years back to their interviewing for I think a business affairs job or some type of
like marketing job.
And even the interviewing process was so ridiculous and insane that I was like, oh my God, it
would be easier to do anything else.
It would be easier to become the president of Pakistan, being a US citizen, than to do
with that.
So, how did you become, what was the trajectory?
How did you even get to that level at Amazon in the first place?
What were the qualities about you that made you that way?
Amazon, it's a little bit probably I didn't go to Harvard,
but it's probably a little bit like getting into Harvard.
You cross that bar, and if you're good enough to be there,
they want to keep you and figure out how to make you deliver
as much value as possible,
let you be as creative, as innovative as you possibly can be.
And so, you know, the whole company's mode of operation
is around this idea of leadership principles.
It's, you know, being very customer-forward,
working backwards from the customer to invent
and have a tremendous bias for action
for being able to deliver things.
There's just a lot of things.
And one of the things that makes Amazon pretty famous in terms of talent, talent really,
there's a lot of things that make Amazon famous is that they look for people who are right
a lot.
You know, it's not so much that you have to be right all the time about every single
thing.
It's just that on balance, you think and act
and make decisions that are just right, the more often than they're wrong. And when you
continue to do that, the company recognizes you and keeps saying, well, you did a lot
of good things here. Let's try you over in this other place and give you a chance to grow
in another way that will help you not only develop, but help this business grow faster.
Well, then how did so how did vault health become?
Vault health so you were now at Amazon you decide one day you know what I want to be in the
health business because that's what I want to do. Then what was that what was the steps to get there?
You know health care for me started when I was a kid a little kid I wanted to be a doctor and
I mean I remember having stuffed animals and operating on them when I was as young as four or five years old
I just I used to have some some some family member was a doctor and gave me a whole scrub suit
And you know, it was like five times bigger than me at that age and I lived with that thing
I never washed it. It was my favorite and I wanted to be a doctor and then I got to 10th grade geometry
And I couldn't I couldn't get through it and that was the end of my medical career
So I think somewhere in my mind, I thought,
well, I'm going to come back to healthcare. And my career was always very customer focused.
I always worked for big billion dollar brands. I ran big brands and built big companies.
But I knew that my favorite thing to do was really my superpower is to think big and
do big. And that's what I did at Amazon. But then I thought, you know, if I'm going
to really dedicate some point of my life,
you know, has to be meaningful in some way,
if I'm gonna really dedicate myself to something,
it's gonna be healthcare.
And so I was gonna go, ready for this,
I was gonna go be the CEO of Jenny Craig.
I can't, you know what?
I was gonna ask you about that, to be honest.
I was gonna go be the CEO of Jenny Craig.
I like the weight loss business.
That was gonna be my foray into healthcare.
So, because, you know, that Jenny Craig, I, I mean, I'm going to get probably slaughtered
for saying this, but is, let me just, let me just like preface it differently. Is Jenny
Craig a health, a healthcare business? I mean, it's package food that you warm up. I mean,
the amount of probably chemicals that they're giving each person there is probably,
I don't even want to know. So how did that happen? Did they come recruit you? Yeah, I thought I just didn't think there was a credible way that a guy that had been in retail
and consumer brands for 27 or 28 years was going to find his way into healthcare in a way that was
credible. Certainly not in a leadership role. What do I know about healthcare except that I'm a customer
and a hypokondriac?
So that was my qualification.
That was good.
You're good, you're good.
So I got to the place where I was saying,
this is gonna be a bridge.
And somehow I will do something.
So when private equity came calling and said,
hey, Jenny Craig is a brand that has been around
for 35 years.
It's an opportunity for you to be able to take this brand and really reinvent it for the
next generation of women and bring men in too, by the way.
I got excited by the idea that there is a tremendous problem with metabolic health in
this country, probably in many places in the world, but certainly we know in this country.
Metabolic health takes a lot of different forms in terms of chronic disease, certainly diabetes,
you know, are probably one of the worst scourges of our society, it's just this pervasive obesity
that exists not just because of how we eat or how we behave, but our mental health.
And then there are things that are just fundamentally wrong with our hormones. And so there were
just a lot of reasons why I thought, all right, you know, maybe there's a way to get into
Jenny Craig and help reinvent it. And think about the metabolic health, not just selling
food, but really changing, fundamentally changing the way our bodies work.
That was my theory.
Anyway, I happened to be, I was still at Amazon, I was in New York, I was on a visit for some
meeting or another, and I was getting off of a training union square and a head hunter
called me and said, hey, this company called Redesign Health, it's a venture capital firm.
They actually, they're like a studio, they invent companies, and they want to meet you.
And I said, oh, that's nice, I'll meet them at some point.
I told them what I was going to about to go and do.
And he said, well, you're in New York, right?
And I was like, yeah, I just hear, but I'm only here for the afternoon.
He's like, well, they'd love to meet you.
Could you maybe make that happen today? I said, no, I've got two hours to my next meeting. They said, yeah, I just hear, but I'm only here for the afternoon. He's like, well, they'd love to meet you. Could you like maybe make that happen today?
I said, no, I've got like two hours
for the next meeting.
They said, well, where are you?
I said, you need square.
They're in Union Square.
And the rest is history.
And so I stopped in just to say hi.
I wasn't really sold on any ideas in particular,
but they told me about this idea that they had for men's health.
And there were three compelling stats that they gave me.
And they caught me off guard.
One was that 70% of men don't get any kind of consistent
healthcare, just men don't get healthcare.
Five years younger than women, men are dying.
So you take a heart number.
So 70% and then five years,
and then the number one reason for death
is cardiovascular disease.
And it's entirely preventable.
There's no reason a guy should die of cardiovascular disease,
especially if he knows what's up.
And then they told me what their business idea was,
and I said, that just didn't track with me.
I just didn't get it.
And they said, why not?
We've got this big idea, and we've raised a bunch of money,
and why not?
This could be a really great opportunity.
I said, I love the opportunity.
I love the idea.
It's just not for me.
I don't think opening up clinics and helping guys
with their hormone health is going to be the wave
of the future. I think it needs to be something I don't think opening up clinics and helping guys with their hormone health is gonna be the wave of the future.
I think it needs to be something completely different
and they challenge me and they said,
well, what would it be?
I said, I'd have to put some thought into it.
And they're like, great.
Build a PowerPoint, tell us a story.
And I said, I work at Amazon, we don't do PowerPoint,
we write documents.
They're like, great, write a document,
tell us what you think, we'd love to hear it.
I don't know what happened, but one thing led to another,
I wrote a little document, told them what I thought, and the next thing you know, I'm leading
a healthcare company.
Oh my gosh.
So the initial idea was to do actual brick and mortar clinics?
Yeah, so it was to open up, basically, hormone health centers for men.
So they weren't retail.
It could have been a medical office, and we opened up a couple of them in New York City,
but my real idea was, you know, that's great because men, you know, just back up for a second.
Women have gynecologists and from a young age, right?
I don't remember.
How old were you when you had your first gynecology appointment?
Oh my god, I don't know, maybe like 15, 16, probably like around men.
Yeah.
I've got 18-year-old triplets and one daughter.
What? Yep. And she, my daughter, let's say a whole second. Last year I took her to so she
was 17 took her to her first gynecology appointment. No idea what really happened, but what I recognize
is that she has, you know, year by year, decade by decade, a consistent appointment that she will
always have. Yeah. That will guide her sort of decade by decade into the kinds of things
that she's going to need to know about.
First, growing up and growing into her hormone health and then eventually obstetrics and
then whatever it is.
But along the way, she will know, as you probably did at a young age, that somebody in her life,
some female figure in her life will end up in hormone therapy.
For a reason, because you get to metapause and your body is going to need a recharge
Well, guess what men need the same thing
But what's very different from women is that men start meeting it after the age of 30 and they don't know
Men don't know that we start to go through that young that young I call it manopause
I call it manopause
That's a good name. You should you should coin that your turn
Yeah, the coin the toward the term that that I coined is what I really wanted to become.
I wanted to become the guy in the college, the GU.
That would be great.
By the way, why did you call Voltaeus Manipause?
That would have been awesome.
Because I had a bigger vision and that's what's very happy.
But we, that would have been good.
That would have been a great name too.
Pause.
But we talked about, we talked about how are we going to help guys? That would have been good. Now I've been a great name too. Pause.
But we talked about how are we going to help guys?
And the reality was if we knew that if we didn't take the care to guys directly, take
it to home, take it to where guys are, we would never get them to pay attention.
And that's exactly the business that we ended up building so that we could help guys understand.
Hey, guess what?
After the age of 30, about every year, you're gonna lose about 2%
of your hormone balance, your testosterone,
you're gonna start to lose it, and that's your mojo.
That's not just about building muscle,
it's everything to do with your health,
and it actually leads to, if your low T,
is left untreated, it leads to heart disease,
and diabetes, and all these things,
women have somebody caring for them, men don't,
so that's why men end up aging, thinking like this sucks.
This is what it's supposed to be like, but it's not.
And also, I would think that there's
like an element of shame, right?
So people don't want to go.
Men don't want, it's like a provotto.
Like you were saying, like people don't want to go
and get that checked and have to deal with somebody
face to face and all that other stuff.
It's kind of a, there's a shame aspect and embarrassing,
even though it shouldn't be shame around it,
but, you know, human nature is human nature in a way, right?
How many, how many girlfriends have you talked about
your period with over your life?
Like a million.
A million?
A million, right?
Yeah.
How many girlfriends have you ever talked about, you know,
just pick a problem that'll wanna happen?
I can know, yes, I can know, there's a bazillion. I mean, it kind of becomes like a joke,
and every commercial can talk,
I mean, it's like you go to Ralph's,
and you can go get any kind of, you can get a tampon,
you can get like a yeast infection medication,
or whatever it must be, you know what I mean?
But guys, you will never find two guys,
not ever find two guys who will say,
hey dude, how's your penis?
I mean, it's never gonna happen.
Never gonna happen.
100%. And so because of that, because guys just will not talk, it's your penis? I mean, it's never gonna happen. Never gonna happen. 100%.
And so because of that, because guys just will not talk,
it's your word, the bravado is there, the shyness,
the, all the words you can think of.
It's comfort.
It's so just, yes, it's incredibly bad.
And so because guys don't feel free to have this
conversation with each other, they don't have it at all.
They don't have it with their significant other,
they don't have it with their buds,
they're just not having it. And so consequently, what happens? They don't have it at all. They don't have it with their significant other. They don't have it with their buds. They're just not having it.
And so consequently, what happens?
They don't take care of themselves and bad things happen.
Yeah.
And also with low testosterone, that's how you get weight gain.
All these other problems happen too, right?
That's why they say like even the dad bought, right?
Because over time, your test,
your prior testosterone gets lower and lower.
You're not working out.
You're not burning fat. You're metabolic rates lower. So guys end up,
so here's the thing that really drives me crazy. You've seen these companies out there
that sell, I'm going to be a little bit crass, but they sell the dick pills, you know,
Niagara, whatever, you know, they're selling all the generic stuff out there. See, I
Alice, and guys unfortunately come to think of everything as being a problem.
If it's a function around sort of sexual performance, they can think of it as that.
And that's unfortunate because erectile dysfunction or something going wrong in bed has as much
to do with your heart health as it does to do with your mental health.
But very often, it is not what you think it is.
And for a guy that is actually suffering,
and it's almost 50% of men that have an ED issue,
that are having a cardiovascular issue,
that don't recognize that.
So they think if they take a pill, they'll solve a problem.
And then for the other guys that are suffering
a real problem with libido.
So imagine having a girlfriend or a boyfriend,
whatever you have.
And you are not performing very well, and you think it's down there, but what it really is is up
here. It's in your head. And it's a libido issue. Unrelated to sexual function, but related
to sexual function, you're really not feeling it. You're not getting, you know, your
mojo is not cranked. That's a different problem. And taking a pill won't make that problem
any better. And so the frustration in a relationship is compounded by the fact that he's not talking about it, he's embarrassed about it, he's
trying to solve it, he's not solving it, it's making it worse. And then you know, you
can stretch your imagination to guys we've talked to who've done some pretty bad things.
They'll go out and they'll have, you know, a little extra fun somewhere to figure out
if it's there.
Yeah.
Or whatever, right? Like, or porn or that's my porn.
What? I'm such a hot, I'm such a right rise right now, right? Because or
in my interest now, always, right? But also what happens.
The great desensitizer. Yeah. Exactly. And I think what also can happen is that once it gets
in your head, that's becomes actually does become a mental issue, right? Because then now
you're constantly thinking about it and nervous about it. So, and you know, do you remember it used to be a really huge business. It still is when people
spam, when people would be selling those erect, like that would be like a $1,000,000
business just by going online in the gray, in the black market and buying whatever online,
or at these online pharmacies. What is really, is that the difference really between telemedicine and like online pharmacy?
Is that you have a doctor?
There's a lot of things that...
Yeah, so for us, look, we practice medicine, and I'm not saying that the other guys out there
that sell the pills don't.
They do what we call asynchronous health, asynchronous telemedicine.
They're basically saying here, answer these six questions, or whatever number of questions
it is, send it to us, a doctor will review it basically to make sure that if we give you these pills to give you a better
erection, you're not going to die of a heart attack.
That's effectively what they're doing.
It's not great medicine because what you're saying to the guy is, hey, your problem is
your problem.
Self-diagnose, you think this problem, take the penis pill.
You're not any smarter because of anything you do in that process.
You're just going to get the pill you really want.
At some point, you're going to take the pill and go, you know what, this is not what my
problem is.
You're going to sit there with a whole stack because you signed up for subscription.
And every month, you're getting a pile of these.
And eventually, you're going to look at it going, I'm not having nearly as much sex as
I thought I was going to have.
And what is wrong with me?
It's not that.
So, with the way we look at it is that we take guys
and we say, look, what is going to get you
to come to see a doctor?
What's going to get you to take control
and own your health?
Well, for most guys, it does have something
to do with their sexual performance.
If you said to a guy, why would you go to a doctor,
they'll say, well, if it makes me look better,
feel better, perform better, you know,
or think better, cognitive health is a really big one.
If any of those things are true, and you can make me perform better, a very guy word
perform, well that will get me to the doctor.
And if, oh by the way, you help me with those things.
And in the process, find out I have hypothyroidism, I have a cholesterol problem, I am pre-diabetic.
Well, that's great.
I'll take care of that.
That was not what was going to get me to see you
I really want to just perform better and better. I want to get some weight gain with some muscle gain
I want to lean out whatever it is all those other things get me to you
But then if you can help me because you find these things that are really big problems for me
I'll totally totally be grateful for that and that's how we practice you do
Okay, so I didn't even realize that I actually thought like walk me through it because what I thought was
You have verticals right so if it's a hair issue if it's a loop loop like a libido problem a hair issue
You pick your poison weight loss or whatever right and you get a package sent to you and before you you do all of that
I thought you you sit like this with a doctor you do you do you do you do with art with us
You are sitting with somebody who's an expert in men's health.
That guy, necologist, I was talking about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's the moment of truth.
Because all the things that you could do online
don't matter.
Getting a guy to come in, I say this very carefully.
You come in, if you come in through our website
or we've got a funny podcast called Get It Up
or there's some other stuff you do.
Who's coming up with these names?
Is this you? You're like a branding expert. These are all three of those names, the
you know, Manipaz, the gynecologist. It's a great, I can see why you're at Amazon for so long.
We're having fun. We're having fun. Thank you. These are great names.
The process of getting a guy to pay attention is you know, is like getting his attention.
You know, we think all right, if we get his attention, sorry, if we bring him in and get his attention
and get him focused on himself, then we get him in a situation like this where you and I
see each other on a screen and we're talking expert to man.
And the man finally gets to unload and, oh my gosh, do they ever unload?
The minute you start opening them up saying, well, does this feel like this?
Is this how you're, we kind of know. And
that guy goes, oh, I finally get to tell you the problem that I'm having. Because the
last time I went to a doctor, which was like four years ago, was a primary care doc. And
no disrespect to that doctor. But like, you know, when I sat in that office for 30 minutes,
waiting for him to show up, you know, everybody told me I have to tell him the one thing that's
important today, because he doesn't have a lot of time. And so, you know, right at the time,
I was, I was going to say goodbye to him and see him next year,
I had this fear, like I was sweating bullets, like I got to tell him about this thing that's
wrong, but I'm embarrassed and he seems to want to leave.
And now I get to tell you everything.
And they unload on us.
And as they unload, we start to understand what's really leading the charge for them in terms
of what's wrong, what's making them anxious.
We then send somebody their home.
We take blood. We do a quick, quick, quick, quick, quick.
Do you do that so you do a take blood?
Everyone, and my own earth.
Yeah, we gotta see what's up.
We gotta get a benchmark of that.
That's another big difference from the online pharmacies.
We actually know what's happening in your body.
So we put that together with what you're self reporting
and then we come back to one of these appointments.
Again, we're word together and we talk about what we now know
to be the facts and then we come up with a treatment plan.
And that's how we help guys get there.
And then we see them regularly.
We're available seven days a week, and we just keep up with them.
And that is where guys end up understanding
that when you take control of your health,
you can actually make a difference in perform better.
I tell you what, real example, I started some treatments
last fall, and then I started progressively adding
I'm like an experiment in my own biohacking. I just figured you know on the leader of this business
I should try it. I've got a chief clinical officer chief medical officer that are standing around me at all time
So I'm kind of like all right if this is the chance to try I'm gonna go for and between March and now October
I've lost 46 pounds. I
Have gotten mine durns back. I don't exercise like I probably should.
I really am not a big exerciseer, but I definitely changed my metabolic health.
I've changed a lot of things about my endurance and my physical strength.
I've leaned out and I started to understand how this stuff really works.
And now I'm actually advocating for myself.
I wouldn't sell this to just anybody, but I'm just saying, for myself, this is working.
And it's working because I actually understand what wasn't working, because I have guys telling me now,
doctors telling me now, here's why you weren't getting
the results you wanted, because you were deficient
in these areas, and I can fix that.
So wait, so you lost that much weight in that.
Okay, so what did you do?
What package did you go on?
I mean, did you go on the hair loss back?
I mean, you didn't do that.
You did you do the... I'm obsessed with my hair too,? You didn't do that. You could do the...
I'm obsessed with my hair too. I've tried everything. But you do have a full head of hair,
so you don't need that pack. So, was it the libido package or the... What did you do? Tell us.
I ended up turned out that I was borderline low T. So, borderline, what does that mean? What
means that I was definitely heading in the wrong direction.
And part of it was because I was just heavier,
I was carrying more weight than I should have.
I didn't look like it, but I mean to lose 46 pounds
and I'm wearing my kid, one of my kids,
I'm wearing his pants.
I'm now at the weight that I was
when I was a freshman in high school.
It's crazy.
Wow.
So I'm doing that.
I'm using some peptides.
Peptides are an interesting way of treating yourself.
It's a little bit like a dimmer switch.
You're telling your body, this is all bio-identical kind of stuff that I'm doing.
I'm replacing some of my testosterone, replacing DHA.
There are some things that are wrong in my hormones.
I was producing a little bit too much estrogen.
All guys have estrogen.
My body was taking testosterone and converting a little bit too much of it to estrogen, so I had to temper that back down. But then the
peptides are interesting because what they do is they basically help your body regulate
something. So in my case, I wanted to regulate my growth, my growth hormones. Now this is
not taking growth hormones. This is telling my body, it already produces growth hormones
when I go to sleep at night, do a little bit more of that, and it helps me to really improve my metabolism in my case, and lean me out.
And you see, with that, that 1295 CP?
Yeah, C-J-C-1295, yes, and if I'm a rel in, yes.
I mean, not complicated stuff. This isn't rocket science. This is being able to tune the kind
of treatments that work for my body, which would not be the same that would work for somebody else, maybe.
I'm glad you brought up the peptides because I'm really interested in that because there's
been a lot with those, right?
Because people have seen amazing results.
It's not one of those wellness trends that most people even know about.
I feel because that's kind of what I mean, I'm in the world of wellness and the loss of
Angeles.
So, a lot of people I know are doing them.
But there's been issues with it because I feel
that I've heard a lot of people don't have access
to them anymore because of the FDA.
So a lot of people who were prescribing them
aren't able to prescribe them if they don't have access.
Do you find that to be an issue?
It's one of the reasons why the men's health business
is so good for us because guys just don't know where to go.
They don't know who's legit.
They don't know if they're gonna get the care
that's going to take care of them
or they're gonna be expected
to actually prescribe themselves.
You know, you couldn't,
you'd be hard pressed to find a doctor
who can really prescribe peptides
or even frankly, if you were to go to a primary care doctor
as a man and say, take care of my hormones, they would send you somewhere else likely to a urologist
and you go what urologist well because testosterone's made in your testicles that's a terrible
reason to go to urologist they're proceduralist it doesn't mean that they can't and that they
won't help you with your hormones they totally will that is the discipline that will and
around urologists all the time but it just doesn't make sense that you have to wait to
go to see a surgeon to get your hormones fixed.
So it's just that medicine has not trained people in a specific discipline to take care of things.
Whereas if you're a woman and you go to your gynecologist, she will totally, I'm saying she could be a guy gynecologist.
I suppose.
But they will take care of you. They will give you what you need as a hormone replacement and they will take care of you.
And that's something that guys just don't have the ability to get.
And so we, we're making that far more accessible and easier and it's helping us actually help
help more people.
So the, how are the doctors, so you have, you have doctors in the actual, in these cities
to not just do a conversation on a computer, but they come and physically see the person
at their home, like a concierge, medicine situation.
So we actually, so everything happens on telehealth.
The phlebotomy, the blood draws, and some of the vitals,
and some of the other things we're doing,
that happens in home.
We will come to home if we need to,
if we need to, I don't know, sir.
We'll send somebody to you.
And then all the rest, yes,
all the rest of the care is happening through telehealth.
It doesn't, we don't need to physically, you know,
see you every single time we treat you.
We'll see you, you know, two, three times a year,
but on balance when you need to see us,
it's probably something that we can do in that way.
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And so I feel like there's been like a big trend with this too, right?
Like there's been a lot of companies coming on like, you know,
hymns doing something, you're doing like a lot of people are like in this space now.
Like what happened?
Is it because there was like why now?
Is it because of the fact that was there like a big screaming need somewhere that someone saw it?
And now they're jumping on it.
What's the difference? Like how on it. What's the difference?
Like how do you, like what's the difference?
Man, man, man, like everything else,
you know, you fill the gaps when you see them.
And if you're clever and you're an entrepreneur
and you know, we just did that with COVID testing,
I'll tell you about, but the, yeah.
But the reality for us was in men's health care,
there is such a care desert.
It's a term that's used in a different way, usually.
A care desert tends to be somewhere in the US
or in the world where there isn't great healthcare
and people really suffer as a result
of not being able to find practitioners
who can take care of them and then they end up
suffering things that they shouldn't suffer.
But I kind of talk about that for men
a little bit more broadly because if a guy doesn't know where to go and the most he's ever going to do is walk into a quicky clinic
and something's not working, something's broken and he'll go get it taking care of or he's
gotten the flu or something's happened and that's the only occasion that he goes and gets
healthcare. Then he doesn't have a benchmark that he should have to know where he is in
his healthcare. So even simply knowing where you are relative to your blood health, you know, where is all
your chemistry, what levels are things that?
So if something goes wrong, and the last time you saw a doctor was six years ago, no one
knows what's normal for you.
They just know where to look at you now and say, well, something doesn't look right, but
I don't know if that's your normal or that's just a situation that you've created or that
has been created because of something that's happening to you right now.
So we like to think about this as a way to say, let's go fill the market by filling the
place where guys haven't been able to get the kind of care.
And then if we can build that space and others come in and follow, great.
But the guys that are out there, the companies that are out there selling the pills, that worries
me.
It just worries me because the more pills and potions and lotions and other things that
they put out there, the more they're giving guys the opportunity to just cheat
Yeah, say not go to the doctor not check up and see where they are and and get a good line of health
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So how are you marketing to guys then, right?
Because obviously you're a master at direct to consumer, right?
So if anyone could do what it would be you,
what has been
kind of your, like how have you been doing it? How have you been able to, like, did you start with
a couple markets and then expand? What was your process? We did. We did. When we started the
business, it all happened in New York and, you know, talking to guys in New York is not particularly
hard because it's a small town, you know, it's big town, but small town. And then we expanded out to South Florida and we were talking to guys that look totally
different from New Yorkers and then little by little we expanded.
But most of the way that we started this business, which was kind of ridiculous, was using
the digital channel, the traditional digital channels of Facebook and Google.
And I railed against them.
It was one of the things that I complained about when I was joining this business.
I was like, what the hell are we doing?
48-year, I was joining this business. I was like, what the hell are we doing? 48-year, I was 47 at the time.
But 48-year-old guys are not buying testosterone
by scrolling through their Facebook feed.
What the hell are we doing here, people?
We've got to have ways of reaching them
that are going to be where they are.
So it's all the vehicles you would think about.
But in launching the podcast and being able
to put marketing and channels where they're listening
or reading or following along other people, influencers, and then just lots of media that guys are
exposed to.
That's where we started going, but ultimately it's getting guys to a place where they
won't talk or recommend necessarily the kind of treatments that they're getting, but they'll
say, hey, you might want to check this out.
And so we've started to get guys to have excuses
to sort of pass on that they know Vault
and they like Vault and Vault's kind of helping them.
Maybe not on what we're helping them with,
but they're kind of talking about it and that worked.
But the ultimate thing that really worked was that,
in March, when it looked like the world was starting
to fall apart, which feels like 30 years ago, doesn't it?
It does.
Tell me about it.
Sure does.
We, I was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
We were relaunching the Vault brand.
We had just converted our entire brand and website.
Before that, we looked like an Eastern European car
brand called the Vault.
It's horrible.
And we rebuilt this whole brand experience.
And we were on the floor of the Exchange, our PR team
had organized a TV interview that just was down there.
I'd always wanted to go to the floor of the Exchange
and the market crashed that day.
And it was like, oh shit, like this is bad news,
especially when we're about to go tell the story of the brand,
to vault the big men's health business.
And we had all this stuff lined up, all this media.
We were gonna go kill it.
We got to go tell the world billboards,
all this stuff, like TV, radio, all this stuff.
And that was the day the market crashed.
And I was like, this sucks.
Cause now, you know, what are we gonna do?
So I remember exactly where we were, it was March 12th.
Like we go back, you know, our tails between our legs,
tail between our legs, go back to the office
and we're like, all right, immediately,
we gotta do something.
Our offices on 23rd Street in Manhattan, where a bunch of startups are, a bunch of people
were starting to think about going home, not coming back to the office anymore, furlowing
people.
We knew people were going to start losing jobs.
It was crazy.
It's right before New York killed 13,000 people.
And we said, all right, we got to do something.
This is going to be bad.
So we immediately stopped all spend, just kept our power dry.
I ended up having to build a plan. I knew I needed to build a plan to like, you know,
what would I do if I had to kill a company to survive, live off of our cash,
and what was that going to look like? That was miserable. And then the third thing was I launched
every product we had planned to launch for 2020 all at once. And also launched, we were only in
four states at the time, and I told the team, I'm going to do something insane. If this is going to be a sinking ship, bring everything that we have on deck and we're
going to launch 37 states and we're going to become national and we have to do it in two weeks
because if we're going to go down, we're not going to go down without swinging. And so we did
something insane. Everybody, everybody was working crazy hours to try to do this and we got it all
launched. And then what the hell are we gonna do?
Because this is still not gonna save us.
And we were working on a really cool fertility test for men
to tell them their biological age using their sperm,
pretty funny thing.
And we were doing it, yeah, it's really cool to tell you about that.
But we were doing this program at Rutgers University,
their genomics lab.
And I saw that the team at Rutgers was building a saliva test using, I'm sorry, a COVID test
using saliva.
And so I asked them, I was like, can we maybe, we built this whole telehealth thing?
You know, could we launch an at home testing business?
Because you know, you can't get a COVID test in America anywhere.
Maybe we could help.
And they said, oh, that'd be great idea, except two weeks ago, the FDA said no more at-home tests. So I was like, all right, I didn't mean at-home test. I meant,
what I meant to say was, can we launch a physician-ordered test that might happen at home? And they're
like, well, that's a good idea. And so, so I, you know, I got the team refired up again, and for
another two-week solid, we built this crazy thing.
By the way, I might have told them that we could handle more than 100 telehealth calls.
We had 43 people, could handle about 100 calls.
That was in March, April the 10th, at night, on a Friday night, the FDA gave Rutgers
an emergency use authorization, and by Monday, we launched
a testing business across the United States in all 50 states.
And in October, our businesses now, a few hundred million dollars, about a thousand people.
And we're one of the largest testing companies in America with millions of tests to help
people get back to work, back to school, back to life as much as you can in COVID.
It's crazy.
So you totally just pivoted to becoming that, right?
Like just how some companies were like manufacturers,
they pivoted to make these masks, right?
Everyone was making masks for a while
because they couldn't sell anything else.
So you actually made that kind of money
just in the last few months from pivoting to COVID testing.
And I saw also your partnerships
with like JetBlue and all the, you know, NHL and MLB. And so are they all just using
your, is everybody just using your testing?
Let me ask you this. Would you, would you like to have a nasal swab that like touches
your brain? Yeah. Or would you want to spit in a tube and find out? Like that's the answer.
And so, you know, the, we made the right decision. We're still,
so the saliva test, this is the biggest saliva test in America, but it's the only test in America
that you can actually still do at home. Now, we have three accurate. Yeah, accurate test.
Yeah, it's the most accurate test out there. And the reason for it is the nasal swab, think about
this, when a practitioner who has to, by the way, full PPE, right, mask, hard hold, head, everything, because they're going to get up in your nasal cavity, they're
not getting near you without having the full PPE.
They get up in your nose, they're making you squirm, and they have to touch virus on the
tip of that swab, and then they have to get it back to the lab.
In our case, we're taking a tube that you're spitting about a tablespoon full of saliva into
this tube.
If you're sick, there is a lot of viral RNA in that tube.
So you get a lot of accuracy because you now have all this sample as opposed to that one
little swap touch that goes in the back of both of your nostrils.
So yeah, so the false negative rate, which is the thing we're most concerned about, like
telling people when they get their results, you're negative when you're actually positive.
That's a disaster.
The false negative rate of nasal swabs
are about 25 to 35%.
But for saliva, it's less than 1%.
So the accuracy is really great.
The sensitivity and specificity,
which is the famous terms that are used around a genetic test.
This is a genetic test, are 95 to 98%.
So this test is super accurate, super easy,
and really fast.
Wow, how about the other swabs?
The ones I've gotten a few times,
because a couple of my friends who are here,
they basically, now they're concierge doctors,
and they basically are doing a ton of these tests.
They have those, they prick your finger,
and they also, the ones that go in your nose,
but it doesn't go that far.
It goes away.
Yeah, the mid-terminal ones.
Yeah, so the finger prick I'll tell you about,
but there aren't other nasal swabs that you can do.
The problem in general with all of this is that,
you're really are concerned about
the person administering the test.
You wanna make sure if somebody's doing it right,
you're good.
When one in three tests come back with a wrong answer, you might not be good. So if you're getting
tested regularly, it doesn't matter what test you're using. You're just glad that you're using a test
to make sure so you can get out in public and do what you got to do. Stay safe. The finger prick
is a different thing. That's an antibody test. And that's a whole other story. That is completely
not useful unless you just want to know if that sickness that you had
in the early part of the year, that cold or cold, you know, that you couldn't figure
out and didn't know why you were so sick before we all knew what COVID was.
You want to just find out if that's what you had.
You can do an antibody test and find out if you test positive, which for that test is
the right answer.
That tells you, yeah, you know what?
You have antibodies in you, which means you were sick, but that is not a useful test at
all to know if you're sick right now. That could be a problem, not at all,
because you could be sick and actually be producing antibodies and you could
still be in that phase of being sick and not know that thinking, well, if I'm
testing positive, I probably was sick at some other time.
You know about 45% of Americans right now probably the world but we know it at least in this country.
45% of people are asymptomatically sick. They have no idea they're walking around.
No symptoms and they're sick. And so if you don't get a test I mean I can't tell you the number of people that we test
that are saying I'm going to Hawaii and going my family vacation vacation. And then four or five people in the family are fine.
And one of them shows up as positive.
And you're like, well, first of all,
this might not be good for the rest of your family,
but second of all, even though you feel great, you're sick.
You can't go.
And they're like, no, no, no, I'm fine.
I feel fine.
I'm good.
I gotta get on this trip.
We planned it.
I gotta get on this, and you can't, you're sick.
How about those ones that go halfway up your nose?
It's fine, any of them can be fine. Listen, if you're going to get a test, be glad that you can get
a test, that's fine. Just recognize that those halfway up the nose, the ones that go in your throat,
the ones that swap your cheek, they all come with some kind of potential false negative rate as all tests will and false
positive, by the way, as long as you're taking a PCR test, this is the genetic test, you're good.
The ones you keep hearing about now, they're like the $5 tests, they're called antigen tests.
Sometimes I ask you about that. That's not so good. I'll tell you why. It can be good, but those are tests that you have to take basically, you know, every
day or a few times a week to make sure that you're okay.
And the reason that those tests are good, they're cheap.
So you can do them often, but they're only used for screening purposes.
They're, it's the kind of thing like if you were a sports team and you couldn't afford
to do the PCR test, which can be a little pricey.
And you're doing these antigen tests, you're taking them a couple times a week, you're
going to know they just have a lower level of sensitivity.
They're not as accurate, but if you take them every day or every other day, at least that
lower accuracy will prove out when you're just continuing to take it on and on.
So there's just, these are things that people don't broadly know because who's educating
anybody?
The federal government isn't doing it.
Right. Right.
Let's tell each other what the real story is.
So if I went on your website, girl guy, whatever, I can just buy one of these
tests and I, how was the price point?
I'm just a test.
So if you were to get one today, jet blue is out there today and they're,
they're helping us and it's about $143.
If you get it on our website, it's about $150.
We're pushing that price down as low as we can go.
So I'm looking forward to that.
Something really cool is coming.
We just figured out how to do a test for the flu
along with the COVID test.
So think about this.
What happens to you when you, in the next month,
God forbid, you wake up one day
and you just feel terrible. What are you gonna think you have? forbid, you know you wake up one day and you just feel terrible
What are you gonna think you have right? Let's not go. Yeah
But you feel terrible. What do you think it's gonna be? It's gonna be like oh god now I have code I have it
Yeah exactly like everybody thinks but the flu is out there
It's as big as it will ever be. I mean it's out there
And so if you find out that you have the flu, you know nowadays is almost silly to say this you're like oh thank God
It's just a flu, right?
You can't go home.
You can't drink juice for six days and I'll be fine.
I don't have to have contact tracing.
I don't have to be in quarantine.
I just need to stay in bed, get better, I'll be okay.
So we're now gonna go ahead and we're gonna build that in.
So it'll be the same price.
So you'll get a COVID test and a flu test.
And now we'll be able to tell people.
So we do a lot of testing on college campuses.
We do a lot of testing in corporate America.
We're testing entire states.
Now we go into states and we're responsible
for all the testing in these states.
And the public health departments are so glad
to know that we're gonna help them in testing
because the COVID testing is taking up
all the capacity in these labs.
And they aren't gonna be able to diagnose
who has the flu and who has COVID.
And it's so much more expensive to take care of people
with COVID than it is with the flu. So we're going to try to help them
settle that. When will that be ready? And two weeks. We're going to start that in two weeks. So it's
going to be going. So is anybody else have access to these saliva tests like you or that's just
yeah, there are some other people out there. I mean, listen, we just got we got we got into it early
because we thought this was going to well,, I told you it's a story why.
Yeah, it's great.
We needed to do it, you know.
But because we got ahead start, no one knew back in April.
I mean, we were ready to go as I told you on that first Monday
back there in April when we were approved.
And on day one, there were like some friends
and family members that took the test.
And like, for a month, we were like, oh no,
no one's getting a test.
But everybody was at home, you know, being quarantined.
And then the PGA called us and they said,
we wanna get golfers back on the golf course.
Can you help us?
And that was the start.
Once the golfers did it, then the NBA,
what you do it, and you know,
sports came back and then college, sports came back
and then colleges came back and then businesses came back
and it's just been building ever since.
And that's the momentum, yeah, that's it.
You got, you get one,
and then everyone else kind of comes and follows.
So then like now what?
So you're still gonna be doing the test.
You mentioned a test about the fertility,
taking a test as your age.
Is that like a telomere test?
Does that what it was?
So it is an epigenetic test.
So you know, your DNA is your roadmap.
That's what your body is working off of to decide, you know, that you're going to have,
you know, long hair and you're going to be a certain height and I'm going to have this
hair and I'm going to, you know, whatever.
DNA is your roadmap.
Your epigenetics, so that's your genetics.
Your epigenetics are the, is the effect that the world and that what you do, the way
you eat, the way you behave, the way you sleep, you know, if you smoke, that's what you do to create change to your roadmap. So this is an
epigenetic test. And what it does is guys donate a sample. And then we take, we take this,
yeah, that's, it's the most fun test you can actually take. But you donate a sample and when it gets to the lab, it's a genetic test. So what
it, epigenetic test. So what we're looking for is to understand the impact of all the
things you do in your life on, on your DNA. And so what happens is is that it comes
back and it says, all right, Jason, you are 48 years old, but your sperm, your biological age, is 51.
And here's why.
Your weight is out of balance.
I don't happen to smoke or drink,
but if you did, that can do it.
If you eat poorly, if you don't exercise,
there's a whole series of things that you do to your life.
And this test comes back and says,
these are the things that are actually making your sperm
older than you are, which is to say, your biological clock,, which is to say if you're at the age of having kids,
that can be an impact because if you're chronological age is 27, but your biological
age is like 38, and you're 27 thinking, well, I just, you know, I'm not going to get
married, I'm not going to have kids for another few years.
If you keep up that trend, by the time you're ready to have kids in your early 30s, your sperm might be well into its 40s,
and that's where you can lead to birth defects
and other bad things happening if you get pregnant.
As opposed to, and this is what's so interesting,
if you get those things under control
because you know about them and you understand the impact,
you can actually roll back your biological age.
You can actually roll back the clock.
It's the only thing you can do.
You can change your genetic age, but you can change your biological age by getting your health back
in order and you can bring your sperm or your, you know, again, your frontal health back down.
But it really is an interesting indicator and it tells guys, this is your clock.
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So what an act. So now I know you're doing all the code that that test is a great test
for for men. Are you going to start expanding now into female to women and females and doing a
whole different vertical just for them? Yeah. So what has happened now? I mean, imagine that here
is a company that was really young, just trying
to come out of the ground, just relaunching our brand. And now we've built basically our entire
roadmap, our entire strategy for 2021, a year from now, we built that in 10 days, and then
maybe a few months after that. But, you know, in this last several months, we built everything we
had planned for 2021. So, you know, that old expression is sort of, if you, you know, once you achieve your dreams, you just got a dream
bigger kind of thing. Yep. That's what we are doing. So we're now in the process of
launching a really a full-scale diagnostics business. I mean, we figured out how to give
you the kind of care at home. We figured out how to give men that care at home. We did
a pretty good job of it. We're doing a good job. We're still very much in that business.
And then we said, all right, well, now we can do testing
on a national level.
So let's just go ahead and expand this.
There are lots of people that are sick with lots of different
things, lots of chronic conditions.
Lots of stuff is making harder to live in life.
Why go to a doctor and have to sit there for a visit
that you really don't have to sit there for if you can be
at home.
And as we all learned during COVID, if you wanted to go see a doctor, guess what?
In the last few months, you probably had a telehealth appointment because you couldn't
get into the real doctor.
True, right, right.
You couldn't get into the office.
I mean, so now, so like telehealth is the wave of the future period.
I mean, that's just going to happen.
But why would you ever, from this point forward, ever want to go into the doctor's office
if you don't have something to do there physically?
If it should sit there and talk to her or talk to him for a
minute and then go down the hall to the lab and give blood, we can just do that at
home. Let's keep it simple. And that's what we're doing. So we're expanding now,
you know, as we do business anyway across the whole country, we're expanding now
all over the place. And yeah, you can you can look forward to some cool things
with men and women. But also for women, I like that. But for women, your website is very male centric.
It's great.
Are you going to have not to compare you to a hymn or hers,
but are you going to have a female centric website
and a female centric of taking care of female,
even though they can go to gynecologists
and do all those things, taking care of helping them
with weight loss, recovery, leviton.
Because women can have the same issues maybe too, right?
Um, you are, you know, it's like you're reading from a strategy book inside.
No, yeah, stay tuned.
I'm good like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a lot of cool stuff coming.
I, I, I, every day, I, I, you know, my, my mojo's on full tilt now.
Like I'm excited every single day because my, my whole reason for being, I've felt this isn't isn't about making money isn't about trying to, you know,
have all the things that happen in business, you know, being successful in business. It's it's about doing good for people. I really genuinely have had the mindset always in my life. And now putting it in practice in business and a business that I'm, you know, founding and helping to lead, that if we can, if we can do something that simplifies
and makes healthcare more accessible to more people, everybody wins.
Because healthy people are productive.
Healthy people innovate.
Healthy people live successful, happy lives.
Unhealthy people are the opposite of all of that.
And when you have a society with
that imbalance of people who just don't have access, who are certain they should be, who will not
have the advantages that everybody else has, that can afford health insurance, and can afford good
care, then you have all these other things that I believe come from that, which is a society that
we don't want to live in. So, you know, maybe you can accuse me of being too much of a do-gooder in some sense,
but I think for us, if we can make it available at healthcare,
more broadly available to everybody,
men, women, children, you name it,
then we will have achieved what,
or at least we'll be on the path
to achieving what we really meant to set out to do.
Okay, now I have a couple of questions here.
So, besides the COVID testing,
which I know that's how you guys exploded, right, with
all these saliva testing, just on the verticals you had before then, what was the most popular?
Was it libido?
Was it hair loss?
Or weight loss?
Which one was the most popular for men?
The two most popular, I'd say, it's a definitely sexual function.
There's no question.
Right. I think the guys that were able to discern
that it was their libido and not their penis,
that was the problem.
It comes down to that.
Or the happiest ones.
They're the ones who are like, oh my God,
you turn this on and everything changes.
She loves me, I love me.
This is all great.
I didn't know it could be this good.
I feel like I'm like 18 again.
Right.
At one is pretty amazing because it's a big unlock for guys.
No, hair is insignificant.
Most guys are like, they get over that pretty quick.
I think there are some guys that are obsessed.
I'm a little obsessed with my hair,
but it's kind of like a little superficial,
but it's my thing.
But the other one, really.
That's okay.
You're allowed.
It's my thing. But the other one is, you're allowed. It's my thing.
But the other one is their body, endurance.
You get to an age as a guy and it usually is your late 30s, but definitely in your early
40s where you just, you start getting that weight in the midsection, you start losing muscle
mass in places that you're working out and trying to put the muscle mass on, but no matter
how hard you work out, you just can't do it.
And then if you go to the doctor and inevitably the doctor says, well, you should eat better,
you should sleep better, you should exercise more.
And you're like, doc, like fuck you.
Like I know that.
I don't need that one right here.
Like don't tell me that.
What I need is something that's going to be a pill.
I need, you know, and no, you don't need to get your life in control.
But in many cases, if your hormones are out of balance, you are not going to perform a pill. And no, you don't need to get your life in control. But in many cases,
if your hormones are out of balance, you are not going to perform the way you can. And so that's
part of where we've been really magical and giving these guys basically the unlock to
their health. They understand if they get that fixed, all of a sudden, all the things they want
to do, the working out, the playing heart, all those things start to happen because now their body can accept it.
Can you, that's great.
I like that answer.
Good once.
I wanted to, I wanted to pick your brain here because I think there are a lot of people
who probably listen to this podcast and the fact that going back to the Amazon just for
a little bit or your background with direct to consumer. Can you give a couple
of good, easy, or not easy, I shouldn't say that's not easy. Tips on how to really get
to the consumer effectively and efficiently beyond just saying Facebook ads, Google ads,
make some strategies, like some tips on strategy. I want to pick your brain since I have you in front of me.
Yeah, I have a really hard time with the fact
that Facebook and Google, which are obviously
massive marketing engines for everybody,
that they take lots of your money,
and love both products just in daily life,
but they're not great in business
because they take lots and lots and lots of your money,
and like every other brand out there,
they're deciding algorithmically who they're gonna serve it to
and who's gonna see it.
And then you have to kind of have the right audience.
A lot of things have to work and it's expensive
and it's hard and it just doesn't work for everything.
So I always believe you have to look for
not only who your customer is,
and that's a, you think that's kind of common sense,
but just because we serve men, but it's not that we serve all men. We serve men that have particular issues
in mind, you know, if you try to serve any guy and he's not interested or it doesn't resonate
with him, you're just going to miss. So we try to be in the places where he is. So where
are guys? Well, you know, they're in a lot of different publications. There are a lot of
different podcasts. They're reading different kinds of news.
They're using different kinds of apps.
They're engaging in society in different ways.
And so you have to really go back and say,
who does your target audience look like?
Who does your target audience use for information?
And who does your target audience listen to?
And when you ask those main questions,
you can come back very quickly with a list
under each of those categories and start to say, all right, what can I afford?
Because we don't have the luxury of being Coca-Cola or the worst healthcare brand ever.
But I love the company, but it doesn't matter to me if I find another Coke at.
It's like I know Coke exists.
I'm trying to figure out as a healthcare brand, how do I put myself out there to make
sure that people can see me.
I have to be seen in places where the guy is already in the mindset of, I care.
So, you know, any of those health journals, blogs, influencers that talk to guys and
that tell guys, like, this is how I'm thinking.
You may or may not think like me, but if you're thinking like me, here are some of the things
I'm doing.
Guys are really responsive to when they see or hear another guy who's like them.
They respond really, really well.
So it's not the traditional marketing that you'd like to think it is.
It isn't just slapping an ad up and hoping a guy will see it.
There's some of that.
Can you get on the radio?
Sure.
Can you get on TV?
Maybe if you can afford it.
But if you can be in the place where guys are having those exposures, you have a much
better shot of winning.
I'd love to say it just doesn't work for our business.
Referrals would be awesome.
There's just a lot of reason why it doesn't work.
I told you with some of them, guys just won't do it.
That's a big one for you.
They won't.
They'll refer their gym, they'll refer their favorite restaurant, they'll refer a drink
that they love, but when it comes to like, hey, I feel a certain way, you may be a little
bit of that, but that doesn't really work. For us, we've had to find ways to do that. But we've spoken to them. We've built an
enormous amount of content. We're cranking out content like crazy. And we're making
sure that our content lives in other parts of the web, especially. Guys are very famous
for using Dr. Google, which is like the worst possible way to cure yourself. But you know,
guys will go out and look for things because they're privately stressing over what's wrong
and they start searching for things.
So we try to go out there into the places
where they ultimately land, you know,
any form of communication out there,
especially things that they're reading,
like the blogs and the vlogs and some other stuff.
Yeah, so I wish I could say that it's totally
formulaic and every other business I've ever been in,
it is totally formulaic. every other business I've ever been in, it is totally formulaic.
It is based on healthcare.
Well, because you had, well, you had $30 million, I think I read, that you guys were first
initially.
So, how did you divvy up where that went?
We took it into the world.
An enormous amount of it went into building a tech stack.
I mean, I come from the world's greatest tech company and building something that could scale at the level that it has. You know, we build
our men's healthcare business and all the cool capable of the telehealth and the e-prescribing
all that stuff. We built that and because we had that, we were able to go do this massive
COVID business. So we've built a lot of really cool software that lets us do things that
companies that are years older than us,
and much bigger than us, or at least were much bigger than us,
now we're probably right up there with them,
have spent years building, we built all of that.
That was my number one focus.
We spent a lot of money there,
but marketing is so expensive.
Those other companies that you talk about,
some of those competitors in the online pharmacy space,
they spent $5, $10 million a month.
So if we did that, we'd be broke in five minutes.
So we had to get really humble
and we got to get really clever
and very grassroots and gorilla
in the way we were marketing.
So you don't spend that ton of money
that they would spend that time.
Oh, away, no.
And my favorite thing to do was PR.
If you can go get other people to advertise for you
and tell the story.
And listen, I mean, I'm gonna say this
and I'm gonna tell you, I am a really, really,
really, really humble person.
I probably am too humble in a lot of ways,
especially when you're leading a company
and trying to get people to pay attention to your company.
But because of the good work that the team has been doing
around COVID and helping people get back to life,
we've been very fortunate that the PR has been,
you know, very generous.
So whether it's today's show or CNBC or whatever, all over the place, and the New York times
every other week, we're constantly getting exposures.
So that PR, somebody showed me the other day that we've had something like 800 billion
impressions.
And impression can be a lot of things.
That's amazing.
But it is amazing for a company that's less than it's sold.
It's really cool. And I'm very proud. The team did this. This was not me. That's amazing. It is amazing for a company that's less than it's sold. It's really cool.
I'm very proud.
The team did this.
This was not me.
It's not me.
Because the team was able to do this, we're benefiting from getting guys now to pay attention
to vault.
Now, while I can't spend the money to get 800 billion impressions, I can definitely
win people over to say, look, we're helping people.
Come check us out and let us help you in a different way. So, with your podcast, get it out, which is a great name.
Who do you have on then?
Is this basically guys who are sharing their stories or is it like experts in the male
area?
Like who goes on there?
It's our chief medical officer, Miles Spar and our chief clinical officer, Alex Pasishek.
They're both doctors on the healthcare idiot.
I never know what's really true in healthcare or not.
I play the foil and the guys are experts.
It's pretty funny, actually.
Then there are guys.
We opened up a call line for guys.
We put out an APB doll.
We said, call us with your issues.
Then we'll take those issues and tons of calls. We took those issues and then we made the whole show around that issue and then and then we started
having some guests come join us because that was fun. It's really turned out to be a lot of fun.
The best part is I you know we were new to podcasts or at least I was when we started this thing
back in the beginning of the year and it's funny we're we're really big and all of the the
Middle East countries right now it turns really. Yeah you rock Jordan yeah Afghanistan we funny, we're really big in all of the Middle East countries right now. It turns out really.
Yeah, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, we're huge, we're big, Libya, we're big, we're really
big and Libyan, Saudi Arabia, yeah.
So we must be doing something right, but I don't know in the US.
And are you able to, I'm too bad at being a Kenyra subscription packages go that far?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Interesting, isn't it that you think about where some of these countries are?
And you've got to think that there are guys out there that would love to be able to ask some of these questions too. I make't think so. It's interesting, isn't it? You think about where some of these countries are, and you gotta think that there are guys out there
that would love to be able to ask some of these questions too.
I make the joke, but it's true, it's funny.
I saw this whole chart.
That's funny.
You point.
Guys, think about this.
You're wearing headphones, you're in the gym.
You don't know how to have this conversation.
It's uncomfortable.
And you get three guys talking about penises
or something, whatever the topic is
that we're talking about, ejaculation.
I mean, the conversations are really fun.
But they're serious, too, in a lot of ways.
And guys are getting answers.
And so they're laughing, but they're actually learning.
And they're doing it in a way that's kind of private and very personal.
And then hopefully we're helping some guys think about, all right, I shouldn't feel bad.
I can do something about this.
I mean, there's so many regulations regulations though, with medical stuff, right?
Like, you have to go through,
probably so many hoops for every different region,
sit not, there's just for every different state.
That alone must be very timely, right?
And is it expensive?
Is that expensive?
I would imagine that's very expensive to kind of.
It practicing medicine, I mean,
one of the problems that makes healthcare so damn
inaccessible in this country is just exactly that.
You are spot on.
The law does not support or regulations don't support broad availability and an easy way
of practicing healthcare.
Licenses everywhere.
The way that you prescribe drugs.
Just everything is just hard.
In order to order a car, order a dinner,
order anything online, it pills for that matter online,
it sure seems like healthcare should be able to be that simple.
And so that's part of the challenge.
We're saying, all right, tell you what,
at least guys for now, but for everybody later,
we will make this so much easier for you
that you won't have to struggle like everybody has always
struggled.
We're just going to simplify this and make healthcare
available for you.
And we'll do all the hard work behind the scenes
so you never have to.
And do you think that eventually insurance
will be able to kick in or that's just not going to happen?
That's a tough one.
We take insurance for COVID testing,
for a lot of the places where we do a lot of testing.
But for men's health, women had to fight for decades
to get care for basic things like mammography
or pap smears or things that you can't even conceive wouldn't be covered today.
It would be horrifying to think that a woman wouldn't be able to check for breast cancer
at a young age because insurance wouldn't cover it.
But a few years ago, a little bit more than a few years ago, that was not always the case.
Right.
And are exactly where women were.
And that much of the care that we go and get is not covered
by insurance unless something's just broken. So I can go in and claim to be sick and have my
insurance cover it. But if I want to do something that's preventative, not covered. So we're working
hard to show the payers, the insurance companies, that the kind of care that we're delivering is
actually making it easier to keep people
out of the healthcare system
and for them to want to pay for it
so that guys will just be thinking prevention
before they think recovery.
Prevention, right?
It's always going to be cheaper down the road
if you're vent, for sure.
I mean, I think that's it, Jason.
I'm done with you.
You did great.
Thank you.
Thank you for being a guest on habits and hust hustle pleasure. This was so fun. I'm hoping that the hustle
part will get me to the rest of the day. I really, I love talking to you.
Thanks for giving me the time and sharing with me. This was fun.
Oh, absolutely. I love talking to you. I just learned a bunch of stuff about
the male, just basically the male health care system or whatever.
I can't wait to have a female, the women stuff.
When do you think we can get,
when do you think that will happen realistically?
Stay tuned, 2021's gonna be a very busy year
and we're coming upon it fast, so it's gonna come.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much.
How do people find more information on Voltaelth
or you or whatever?
Yeah, you can Google the hell out of it.
You can definitely listen to the podcast get it up.
But you can also come to VaultHealth.com or if you need a COVID test,
that's the big one, VaultHealth.com slash COVID.
And we'll be here to help you.
Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much. Excucess we in heaven that the habits and hustle podcasts power by happiness
Hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm Heather Monahan host of Creating Confidence, a part of the YAP media network, the number one business and self-improvement podcast network. Okay, so I want to
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