Okay, we are here at the All-In Summit at an amazing trailer that Brad Gerstner brought. You bought this how long ago?
Okay, so Brad, tell us what we're standing in front of.
Yeah, so we're standing in front of a mobile calcium CT scanner. So most of the folks who followed us on both the All-In Pod, the BG2 pod, etc., know that one of the moonshots I'm working on is we have 800,000 people die in this country every year from heart disease. It's the number one killer in the world. If we turn the calcium CT scan into the mammogram for the heart, we will save 50,000 lives a year. That's like ending a Ukraine war every year in the United States. It will save the government $20 billion in care for people. But most importantly, we're losing our most important friends, brothers, dads at the prime of their life in something that's totally preventable. So, this has a calcium CT scanner in it. We've had hundreds of people coming through here. We found scores over the last two days that most definitely have saved people's lives. It costs a hundred bucks and it takes 15 minutes. So I lost my father too early and my good friend here, Rob Goldberg, I want you to hear from him. But this is the type of moonshot that we need to have. We're working with Washington. We want to get this covered by insurance so that we get 40 million people to take the scan. Mammograms, which are super important in this country, we have 40 million a year. CAT scans, which is the number one killer, we have one million a year. We need to have 40 million CAT scans in this country every year. But Rob, we're gonna do a tag team pod here. You are a key inspiration. Your family was a key inspiration for me in wanting to do this along with Jason Chang and the rest of the besties. Talk a little bit about how this touched your family.
Thank you, Brad. Thank you. And thank you and Jason for doing this and for you showcasing it. It's my unfortunate connection to this is that my brother and I and a number of our friends were on vacation for a friend's 50th birthday, another bestie, Phil Deutsch. And in the afternoon we saw him. We were all hanging out by the pool and then 6:00, 6:30, couldn't find him. My sister-in-law and I started looking for him and we unfortunately found him in the gym of the house collapsed. My adrenaline was going so fast I couldn't tell if it was his heartbeat or mine, so I just started doing CPR. And unfortunately we brought him to the hospital and he'd been dead for hours because he had undiagnosed heart disease. And these are folks — so my sister-in-law is Sheryl Sandberg. She wrote a book called Option B about his death and about grieving. And you know, top medical concierge doctors, he had actually passed. So, this is a really important point. So, my brother had passed a running EKG five months before he dropped dead from heart disease, from undiagnosed heart disease.
Unfortunately, EKGs have a 4% either false positive or false negative rate. He had actually done so much cardio that it taught his heart to overcome the heart disease. And so it was pumping harder and harder and harder. And then eventually when we were in Mexico, we had just stopped. He died of ventricular arrhythmia. There were reports of — because we found him near — I gave the report. We found him next to the treadmill. He did not fall off the treadmill and die. He died of heart disease. And thankfully due to Sheryl, due to Chamath, through some other folks, we got him back to be able to do a full autopsy and found his heart disease. But it's truly tragic and it was completely unnecessary. He was 47. My niece and nephew were seven and 10. They're growing up without a biological father. They have a great stepfather now, but it just completely — as Brad just said, we are losing people in the prime of their lives who have no need to die for something that is completely preventable and screenable.
And Dave was such a legend, so loved, the inspiration in many ways for All-In and the bestie group. I mean, Chamath would say he was the original, you know, who got everybody together. Way to argue a few points with everyone on stage, but yes, to get together for poker. And so like, what better, more fitting way to honor Dave, but also to take this and say like, we can do something. We can be biased to action. We don't have to sit here as though we can do nothing. We have agency. Why aren't we doing 40 million CAC scans a year? Why don't Americans know about this? Why are they all tracking their cholesterol and doing EKGs and thinking — or you know, doing stress tests and thinking they're totally fine, right? Like we've served people up some stuff that's just not accurate. And so this tells you dispositively yes or no: do you have calcium in your arteries, which is a precursor, your predisposition to build black plaque, and you don't have a heart attack if you don't have plaque.
Correct. And so to me this is — you know, we started the Center for Heart Attack Prevention and we have three missions with that. One is awareness. It's doing this right. It's bringing a trailer so that more people talk about it, more people know about it. And I can tell you, while the scores are anonymous, we had scores from people who took their exam yesterday that they are definitely in the danger zone. Right? And so these people — here's the great thing. Here's the great thing. A high score is not a death sentence because you can do something about it. Heart attacks are almost totally preventable, right? It's not like brain cancer that we don't have a lot of treatment for. We can do everything with statins, with ezetimibes, etc. We can lower your ApoB, we can lower your LDLs, and we can get you on a path to heart health. And so, number one is just awareness. Number two is making this more accessible to people. So, we need to have changes in Washington that make this standard of care in the country. Cholesterol as a standard of care is ludicrous, right? We are way past. How did we get to that? Why is cholesterol — how did cholesterol become the key marker? And like, where did we go so wrong?
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's so interesting. If Bill Gurley was here — okay, and he is here somewhere — but if Bill Gurley was here, he'd say regulatory capture. So 50 years ago, you know, heart health became a really national issue. I believe it was Eisenhower who had a heart attack in the Oval Office. There was a race in Silicon Valley to see who could solve heart health. One path that people went down was to invent the stent. The other one was the calcium CT scanner. Who do you think won the lobby in Washington? The stent lobby won. Okay. So they said, 'Don't worry. Cholesterol is good enough to track. That's what we already do. And if you have a heart condition, we'll solve it with a stent.' Wrong. Wrong answer. Okay. So here we are many, many years later. My father died too early from heart disease. So, I hijacked a session, the Science Corner on the All-In podcast in 2022 is when I first started talking about this. And over the course of the last three to four years, we made amazing progress. Once I started talking about it, people went out and got their CACs. And I started getting hundreds and then thousands of letters from my dear friends to total strangers saying, 'You saved my life.' I gave it for free at my investor day at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road, and famous CEOs in Silicon Valley found 98% blockage and had three stents put in within three weeks of having the CAC done. So this only costs 100 bucks. We got a live audience here, so I'm talking to them. This only costs 100 bucks. It's not invasive. It can be done in 10 minutes. And the fact that people don't know about this — it's the highest ROI in healthcare, not only to the country, but to each of us and to our friends. So, in our group, it's non-negotiable, right? Everybody, you know, has to get this. And so I appreciate your interest in this, but I would finally just say, finish up on this. I say to my kids all the time, and this really inspired the Trump accounts as well, right? We can sit around, you know, at the All-In Summit and we can talk about the problems, but we also — what do we do in Silicon Valley so well? We start movements, we start companies, we do things, we have agency, we have a bias to action. And now we have a connection to Washington, D.C., so you can bring these pillars of policy together along with pillars of action together and re-education that we do through podcasts and other things to help people help themselves. And so I'm really thrilled you are here. I just want to thank Brad for having me, but more importantly, much more importantly, what Brad and Jason are doing. And Brad overall, whether it's Trump accounts, whether it's this, Brad is the epitome of putting words to action, thoughts to action, and passion to action. And I just love having you out in the world doing more of what you're doing. And it's amazing. I mean, my brother would love this obviously were he here. But what you continue to do, and you're doing it to help others — you really, I mean, you have a day job and it's a pretty important day job and you're doing that one pretty well too. But to spend the time to go out and do this is amazing. And I just want to thank you and call you out for it, and the Trump accounts as well. Like, just helping people, helping future generations with health and with wealth. This is an amazing — you're amazing. You know, if you ask — so I went to the heads of preventive cardiology at Stanford, at Harvard, at Columbia, and they would start giving me their corporate speak. And I said, I don't want to hear the corporate speak. What do you do for yourself, your friends, and your family? And I would just push them on this. What do you do? And every single one of them said at 30 or 35, I have them all take a CAC. If they have a nonzero score, I get them on a statin. I get their LDLs below 40, which is way below the national standards. The green zone in cholesterol, I think, is between 80 and 120. Right? So, we would go get our cholesterol test. It would say that we're in the green zone. I was in the green zone at 100. You feel good. You talk to your general practitioner. They're saying, 'You don't need a CAC. You're good. You're in the green zone. You run marathons. You do whatever. You're Dave. You're in incredible health.' Wrong. Right. Take control over your own heart health. Right. It's the number one killer in this country for a reason, because we're complacent about it. If we're not complacent and we turn it into the mammogram for the heart, we're going to have a transformation in heart attack prevention in this country. And we're on a mission to see that through.
So, I have to ask, because with many new health protocols or treatments and, you know, just testing in general, people get afraid of it. Like, people might be afraid to know the results. They might be afraid to do it in general. So, how do you help break down those barriers and how does this get brought into standard of care for doctors?
Yeah. No, it's a terrific question. So, you know, I find that increasingly because people have Oura rings on, they have Apple watches on, right, we're breaking down the barriers to health data. People now want health data. Of course, there are those people who say, 'I don't want to have the information.' I always say to people, data is power. If you get information and you can't do anything about it, that's a real bummer. This you can totally do anything about, right? If you have 98% blockage, you get stents. If you don't have serious blockage, then you can get on a statin to reduce your LDLs, reduce your ApoB. So, because there is that power to do something about it, I find that many, many people want to do it. You know, we have our tech over here who came all the way from Florida. He's also got four kids who each got their Trump account. We hooked them all up with a hundred bucks in their Trump accounts yesterday. But this guy, you know, knows what I'm saying, that when people come here and they are empowered with that information, they can now take action. They can now do something about it. But yes, that's part of our mission. We have to explain to the country there is nothing unsafe. This is effective for mass screening. I met with Dr. Oz now several times. I've talked to many leaders on Capitol Hill. I've talked to many people in the White House about it. I think by the end of this year — knock wood somewhere — but I think by the end of this year, you know, that CAC scans for diagnostic purposes, I think it will be approved and covered by Medicaid and Medicare. If that happens, then that's how it becomes a standard of care, because doctors ultimately treat standard of care based upon what's covered by insurance.
I was just going to add that, you know, people afraid of the results and afraid of resisting — it's like, why do you wear a seat belt? Why do you eat anything healthy? Why do you have greens? Why do you exercise at all? If you're trying to preserve your life, this is literally one of the few tests that is literally — the alternative is death. It's not just, oh, I'm gonna live, you know, three months longer when I'm 90. This is literally you could drop dead if you get a negative result. And if you get a negative result, you can still fix it. So, take the test and hopefully survive.
I'm doing — so a lot of people have asked me, we could go through all the common questions. One of the number ones I get is this: should I take the calcium CT scan or should I take the angiogram? So the calcium CT scan, you're in and out of the tube in about two minutes. It's not invasive at all. The angiogram, they put dye in your bloodstream so that they can see more specifically the level of stenosis in your arteries. They can see the soft plaques, etc. That costs well over $2,000 and it's a little bit invasive. So, it's not really needed for mass screening. What I would recommend to people — and again, I'm not a doctor, and some people who are doctors think I have no business talking about this, but I'm an analyst, I can read all the information. And by the way, I think we've been misled by the medical community about not doing this. So my answer is: take the CAC. If you're over 35 — I mean, obviously if you have any family history or high cholesterol, then it's a must, must, must do. But I would do it as a preventative measure anyway. If you have a nonzero score, which demonstrates you have a propensity to gather plaque, then I would say take the angiogram. The angiogram then gives you a lot more information about soft plaques and the level of blockage, if any, in your arteries. Get a baseline. Now we have great AI, like Clearly and other services, that can sit on top of this. They're radiologists, AI radiologists, that give you really refined readings. But so I did the Science Corner three years ago. I'm going back in on Friday and I have almost no plaque, almost no stenosis, but I'm going back in on Friday. I'm having another angiogram just so I can biohack myself and share — I shared on Twitter a picture of my heart right through Clearly so that everybody could see exactly my level of stenosis. I will reshare that again after my angiogram on Friday because there's nothing to be afraid of. The data is power, and I know because of all the messages that we've received, we've saved hundreds and hundreds of lives. If you save one life, it's enough. But the fact of the matter is, if we can get this done at scale in the country, the mammogram for the heart will save 50,000 lives a year.
Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it. And where are they — where can you find the trailer next? Where's the next —
Oh, so that's a great question. So we bought this trailer because I was frustrated with all my friends in Silicon Valley saying, 'Where do I get one of these?' And so I rented a trailer for my investor day at the Rosewood and that was too much of a hassle. So I said, 'Let's just buy one of these.' And then we had this idea that we could take it to companies around Silicon Valley and we could do a buy one, give one. So we could get Marc Benioff and Salesforce to give it to all of his employees for free and then he would pay twice as much. So instead of paying 100, he would pay 200. And then we could go give free CAC scans in East Palo Alto and other neighborhoods where they couldn't afford it or they were afraid of it or whatever. And so now we have lots of companies in Silicon Valley — I don't want to dox any of the companies that are doing it, but I would say major companies in Silicon Valley are doing this, that are doing the buy one, give one. We did it with the NFL when the Super Bowl came to San Francisco. So you know, we're moving it all around slowly but surely. I have, you know, a tentative agreement to take it to Capitol Hill and to give it to all members of Congress. By the way —
No, by the way, by the way — so I started — I probably now am responsible for 40 or 50 members of the House and the Senate having taken the CAT scan, and I can tell you that they are a target-rich population. You know, and so again, what happens is people are dismissive of it until they find something or their family finds something, and then they become very devoted because they know that this is a lifesaver.
Amazing. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much. It's great to learn more about this. Really appreciate it.
All right. Great. Thank you.
All right. We're going to go inside the CAC.
