Finland, California, UK, London, Norway, Belgium. Man, we do have quite a bit of Europe on here. Yeah, this is great. So, you guys welcome today. This is going to be an incredible show. If you are wanting to see past episodes because we've got two in the books right now. We've got the very first one, me and Ryan, and then last week we had Steve Hatchet and we had a special guest, Amanda Carr, where we talked about the facts that we're seeing with Prism.io about how to storytell and how that converts. So you guys welcome today. Let's jump into it. Joe.
Yep. Science. Wow, that's an interesting question. It's going to take me all the way back. Did I get into science? Well, I guess overall somebody asked me, you know, how do you get into what you're doing and so on? Overall, my life has always been a series of lucky accidents, if you will. You know, I never planned for it. But there was one thing that I was passionate about and that is science.
Yeah. Ever since I was... How did you know that? Because I have a brother who's a surgeon. And from an early age, I could tell we had a book about the body and he would sit and study that thing. I knew that he was going to do something in terms of medicine from a young age. How did you know that?
Well, it's sort of similar to what your brother experienced and that is the fact that every time I sort of see a scientific book or something that's scientific, I seem to get the urge to learn more about that particular topic or you know even watching a butterfly in the forest or something like that. It sort of invokes in me or it triggers me and say, 'Wow, why is that butterfly flying and so colorful and so on and so forth?' So I start asking questions. Really? Now that I realize, you know, science is nothing except asking questions.
Yeah, absolutely. Really? Do you remember specifically like one thing that you remember being curious about as a kid and looking deeper into?
Okay. I'm going to go for it. So, it's actually about, you know, in biology and that's where I was in a class and the first thing I was asked to do is to go catch a frog and I sort of say why, you know? Well, the reason was I have to learn what's inside the frog. So, I had to do dissection. I said, seriously, I have to go and do a dissection on a reptile. And the teacher say, 'Yeah, that's how you learn, you know, what how does a frog function, what's inside a frog and so on.' And that was in my first reaction was really I'm to have to do that. I have to actually use a knife or a scalpel to open up an animal. And but as soon as it did that and I look at ammo, it was really again sort of starting to ask questions. Wow. You know that was my first experience say hm maybe I am cut out for this kind of work and then you know this discipline.
That's incredible. I do remember going through and doing the dissection of the frog. I remember my daughter just came home and she said at school we just dissected a pig and that's amazing that you have those types of opportunities and see the skills and the talents that you have innate in you. Okay. So tell us because I've heard the story about Pharminx in the past. And from what I understand, you were working at a biotech company and it was kind of like you were pulling in eastern tradition and studying eastern tradition to understand and validate it or disprove it even. So validate, disprove and then those things that were validated looking at how we could incorporate it or commercialize it.
Yeah. So some of you if not many of you who have been with Nu Skin for quite a number of years would know that I actually originally started my scientific career if you will actually in the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah. And that's what you were referring to, Bug, in the sense that when we are working for a pharmaceutical company, the first thing that we're asked to do is to what we call identify a molecular target, something whether it's an enzyme we need to inhibit or whether a receptor site on the cell surface that we would like to hit. And invariably then the next question would be if we have to intervene with that kind of approach how do you do that you know because eventually has to lead to a drug that's what pharmaceutical companies do is to develop drugs. So and what happens is we are clueless so where would we find such inhibitors or enzyme inhibitors and so on and possible drug candidates well we usually go to our so-called every drug company has a what they call a natural product library. And typically as a scientist working in a drug industry when I and together with my colleagues when we go to scientific conferences and medical and so on is usually in some kind of foreign land or exotic place we are expected to bring back a natural product from that particular location. Really? Yes. Wow. Yeah. No matter what it is, whether it's a soil sample, whether it's a leaf or root or whatever to contribute to expanding the natural library. Wow. That's why it's big and over the years, I mean, obviously has grown rich and big and many many ingredients to look at and that's where we start. We take all those natural products there and start looking and to look for hits. But what and I've been doing that and I have been fairly successful in terms of developing drugs using that approach. But what I find is the fact that we never ever developed those natural products the original natural product candidate. Because it was for an economic reason and that is drug companies don't wish to spend and commit investment working on an ingredient that they can't patent that it's natural. It's natural. You can't patent that. So say forget it. Those no commercial value. Yeah. So not coming from the business side of thing. And I say that's rather stupid because that natural ingredient actually constantly proves itself to be far safer than the eventual drug. Because the chemical structure is passed on to my chemical colleagues and they will start playing around and messing around with the molecule to come up with a patentable chemical. That is eventually transformed to be a drug. All right. But it has a lot of side effects and a lot of things that we have to learn because it's a brand new molecule. The body hasn't seen it. Nobody's ever knows about its profile and so on. So he has spent years to prove it and obviously if you watch any drug commercial, you can see the guy who speaks at what 10 sentences a second or whatever and he described all the side effects. And yet he expects you to take that drug. Yeah. So and that's why I say well maybe there's an opportunity for me and my colleagues and we started this company that we eventually call Pharminx based on natural products.
95. So your initial products that you took to the market, was it a big lineup of products or was it there was one initial one or?
Well, interesting that you should mention that because the first one that we had was actually developed from a very traditional Chinese food ingredient and it's called cholestin. There was the eventual name of the drug oh not drug sorry of a natural supplement and it came from a red yeast that most Asian chefs use in their cuisine.
So what is it? What's the value in cuisine? Is it like umami flavor or?
Okay. Many of you would have seen roast duck hanging in Chinatown and so on restaurants and if you look at it carefully you would see that there's a reddish tint to it. That reddish tint comes from the yeast. Yes. And it imparts a certain flavor to it. A unique flavor. Yeah. So, and that's what you mean that's how roast duck are being prepared. Yeah. And then as we look further into it, there's another Chinese compendium on all these natural ingredients and we discovered this particular ingredient was rather good for blood circulation. And again, right, I mentioned to you science is about asking a question. Three, five, six hundred years ago when they described this they have no clue what blood circulation mean except they know there's blood and you got the flow right so but when we looked at it with modern science we say maybe it has something to do with cholesterol. Cholesterol the reason why cholesterol is not good in the blood vessels is the fact it blocks right. So one thing led to another and we say okay this is where we can marry our traditional Asian or whatever have a natural product history of use together with modern science and prove that it works. And we did all the classical or what we call classical traditional clinical studies and all eventually we got it published and in a medical journal and it got quite well known and that's where we started our conversation with Nu Skin.
Wow. That's so was that was like the Pharminx product. Yes. I imagine there were other products.
Oh, yeah. We have five others that went out.
Were they all focused on cardiovascular?
No, no, no. There was one for brain, one for immune system, one for muscle recovery and so on. Yeah. We covered a whole slew of all kinds of different benefits that natural products can deliver. Yeah. That was back we were in 28,000 stores. Traditional business by the way. Yeah.
That's incredible. Okay. So, let's talk a little bit about Nu Skin. I somebody I can't remember what exactly what the comment is or the question. We'll get to the questions you guys. I still have my own questions and I get the prerogative. I get to ask the questions first. So, we'll get to your questions. But Joe, when I came to Nu Skin, you invariably you start to see like this is from my perspective and I'll give you my background, okay? I wanted to be an artist and I still I paint. I draw in the background. It's one of those things that I absolutely love. And coming here, one of the things that I noticed is that we talk about the colors of specific nutrients and the value that they have on the body. And so when we looked when I looked at like LifePak or when we look at G3, there are specific colors that are in there that drive benefits for the body. And then when I looked at shortly after I came here, I think it was about a year after I'd been with Nu Skin, we rolled out Meta. And Meta was yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was seven years of studying the color purple and blue and black and the value of those colors naturally found in our environment on our body. And so is this just my perspective and I'm putting something on it or is there have you and the team intentionally focused on color and the value of color within our diets?
Yes, Bug eventually we did but at the very beginning right because we are scientists and we for intents and purposes we do experiments right and science by the way is a discipline that you just cannot talk you just cannot sort of say oh this is great and it's true we have to do something and the doing something is actually to conduct scientific experiments that's really for all the essence of science if you will is a very arduous kind of discipline because you have to do it and it takes time anyway. So the more we do experiments, the more we sort of play around with these natural ingredients, we find many of them are very colorful. And obviously it's always been rather strange to us at the very beginning. Why is it that these molecules when we have it right when we look at it and test it, it's always some color, whether it's orange, whether it's yellow, whether it's red and so they're colorful, right? Then over time, that's when we say most likely, you know, these colorful ingredients are the ones that most likely going to have the most what we call bioactivity or health benefits. And sure enough, you know, when you look at the highest level, the government and everybody else now, the health agency and so on, they're now saying, you know, the easiest way to adopt a great diet is to eat colorful vegetables. Yeah, they're all coming together. We have connecting the color. This is an important point to remember too, right? About how we eventually got to Prism is the connection of something that is seemingly unrelated to its activity. But it is because we know what the molecule is.
So this is a question for me and I don't know which came first. This is a chicken and egg type of thing. Did our study of carotenoids and that yellows, the oranges, the reds, did that come before the S3 scanner or did LifePak and did that come before the S3 scanner or did the scanner come first?
Yeah, you asked it in a very sneaky way. Some competitive criticisms when we first had the scanner was, did you develop the scanner as a LifePak detector? They were so biased. They think we were so biased that we actually had the scanner developed just to make our products look good.
People actually thought that?
Actually thought that. And so that means we had LifePak first. Yeah. But if they actually had looked at the timeline of our product launches and the launch of the scanner, it was at least 15 years. Oh my gosh. After we have all these products especially LifePak as many of you would be aware of there we had it in the field for 15 years before you even thought about.
So we were studying like carotenoids, antioxidants 15 years before we even found the technology for the S3 scanner.
Absolutely. Wow. Because we had back then technologies that we can actually look for these kinds of natural color ingredients and so on, but it was a very sophisticated and complicated method. We can't do it right. We tried to tell you or we tried to tell the consumer, 'Wow, this is great. We done the experiments and show you all the data,' but at the end of the day, it's like, wow, that's pretty technical and difficult to understand. Yeah. So, that was the question we asked. Wow. You know, we soon realized if that is that difficult, perhaps we should be looking for a technology that we can put into your hands, the consumer hand to learn how powerful these products are.
Okay. Somebody is asking that they said this is interesting. What color do you see missing in most people's diets?
Oh, the most likely the one the wavelength I think in terms of wavelength guy. So look at the carotenoid is around 515. So it's between the blue and the purple.
Really? Yeah, that's the one that's missing the most. It's around there. Do you think it's because those vegetables, fruits and vegetables are less available or that we're just naturally geared to eat the brighter colored stuff first?
Look at how we grow our vegetables. Yeah, we don't grow it the way that it should be grown. That's the problem. Yeah. Our dirt, the dirt, it grows in dirt, right? Vegetable is being depleted of nutrients. Yeah. That's where the plants are getting the nutrients from is to soak it up from the dirt, right? So, if your dirt is poor and the dirt is sort of almost decimated and polluted and so on, what you're going to get is although it looks like a vegetable that you it looks like a good one you should be eating and you should, but it's not going to contain the optimal levels of all these colorful ingredients.
It's so it's interesting that you bring that up because I've read recently a couple of things like the avocado that we eat that's in the grocery store. I believe it's called the Hass avocado. Yeah. And it's one avocado, but if you went back 50 years, you would have multiple different avocados. But to get the supply chain going, it's one avocado. The banana that we eat is one strain of the banana and it's been genetically modified to be big and beautiful and the same and that's what we eat, but it doesn't have the same nutrients. I was reading about oh apples. I've got a friend who has apple orchards down here just south of the company and he sent me a video recently of a guy that has spent his career going back and finding lost variations of the apple and trying to bring them back. And there's all of these incredible apples. I went to his orchard this past year and he had grown a couple of one tasted like licorice, one tasted like I mean these are variants that have been lost but they're starting to bring them back but I imagine that's where we get the loss of some of these nutrients.
You're right next to the tree that it fell from. Yeah. Okay. The apples that we get in big grocery stores that had been sitting in some cold storage warehouse or whatever for months sometimes, right? They were particularly grown in a way not to fall off from the tree when it's ripe. They were picked at a time and they spray it to preserve it ripen or to stop it ripeness so that it can be stored. Yeah, that's the challenge. In fact, sometimes I feel that apple that I eat sometimes it's just nothing but mush. Yeah. Mush or just water.
Oh my gosh, Joe. I'm going to have to go down to my buddy's farm and get you a box of apples because from the tree they are so amazing. They're incredible. Is different. Okay, so how do we take this and bridge this gap into where we are today? We've got the S3 scanner. Yeah. Sorry, the S3 now with all the technology and the advancements we've made. You and the team were very instrumental in working on the algorithms, this spectral ray technology that's allowed us to put it into this Prism. Yeah. What I mean can you tell us a little bit about some of that process of bringing that to life?
Well, I think it goes back to the question or the comment that I just made, right? We have all the studies and we have all whatever we've done to substantiate that all products are really safe and effective. Okay. But the challenge is right when we then launch the product and get it into the hands of our consumer, it's hard to articulate all that science, if you will, I'm going to lose people. Yeah. Right. I don't think they will truly completely appreciate the power of these products. Yeah. Right. And therefore we needed something or some technology that can help them to understand quickly whether the product is getting into the body because here's another myth in this particular industry right and this is always interesting to me yeah this product is great but they never talk about no matter how great the product is if it doesn't get absorbed and it doesn't get into your blood and finally to the tissues it's not going to do you any good right. It really doesn't matter how powerful or potent your antioxidants are and so on. You know that is really in a way pulling wool over your eyes frankly you know so and therefore and yet yes we have the data but we can't we give you the proof but it's difficult to understand the proof and that starters is to think you know if we can somehow have a technology that you can have and within a minute or so you can measure and see whether the product works it would be great so that's how it came in 2003 I think it was we had the scanner. Yeah. And at that time now this is an interesting transition here and this is why science is so important and it's part of the Nu Skin ethos and a foundational cornerstone. Okay. And that is at that point in time and we have many many of our leaders understanding at that time of the scanner very exciting that we were measuring antioxidants. We were measuring carotenoid antioxidant that has been ingrained. That was the message we sent off together with this when we launched the scanner. Yeah. Right. However, what I find it's great, it's powerful, it's compelling, but yet there's still a level of technicality related to that term. And frankly, you know, in what we do, it's sort of like, yeah, we have a technology that can measure antioxidants. What do you think a new person would respond would be? I'm willing to bet with you that the first response, huh? What is an antioxidant? You have to go through a scientific explanation before you can get that person's attention. Again, that's a fairly significant process. Yeah. Don't you think? Oh, yeah. Bug. Yeah. But however, I mean, frankly, some of the leaders, it took me 20 years to get that antioxidant story over and now they can do it and say, 'Whoa.' Yeah. And you're still married to that story, which is actually the wrong narrative with the Prism. Now, yeah, we have taken a great leap forward because over the last 20 years, we have done over 21 million scans. This is around the world by the way, B. Not just the US so on. Well during that time we also had gathered lifestyle choices or lifestyle profile of the individual who has been scanned which included smoking, what are you eating, vegetable intake, your intake, your BMI, lifestyle things you know we just were curious and we so we had this database. Yeah. So once again, science is about asking the right question and say what is there a connection. We couldn't do it at that point in time. 21 million scans would take us forever to manually try to find statistically whether there's any relationship between those lifestyle factors and the scanner the antioxidant number. Yeah. Gosh, that's incredible. That's the change, right? So now your so-called elevator speech or whatever you would like to call it within a minute you would say we have a technology that can actually help you understand your nutritional health status better. Yeah. What would your response be? Tell me more.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, instead of going down the path of being able to explain carotenoids and antioxidants, I on a I think it was two weeks ago when I was with Ryan, I looked up while he was talking and we found that I want to say it was 10 12% of the population actually knows what an antioxidant or carotenoid is.
But the other 90% are lost. And so this nutritional health score, it helps people understand, okay, this is what it is and what it does, right?
Okay. I mean, that's your what do you call it? Invitation or whatever. This is an invitation that everybody can appreciate and will actually respond in a positive way.
So tell me spectral ray. Somebody asked the question, what is spectral ray? How does that relate to all these ants in the AI? Because so is that the name of that process? Is it? No. Okay. Tell us what that is.
