Tell me about your vision.
Oh, thanks so much, Harry.
Yeah, so my vision is to really transform the way
we look at men's health.
OK, so background, I have experience
as a recovering board certified urologist, I like to say.
I spent 25 years focused on men's health and performance
in the traditional health care world.
And as a urologist, I ran a very busy practice
doing robotic surgery every day in the hospital
and treating prostate cancer, kidney stones, and bladder
problems, you name it.
But what I found was missing was the focus
and the understanding of what men need to truly optimize
their health, to have the energy they're looking for,
to have the focus to be able to perform at work,
the drive to be able to really pursue daily activities,
the ability to stay focused and present for their family
when they get home after a long day at work,
their ability to perform in the bedroom.
Men are wanting to burn fat and build muscle
and have better sex and live longer,
and all these great aspects of quality of life.
But our health care system is so focused
on simply treating disease and stamping out problems.
And so the urology, the men's health world is all about,
wait till there's a problem, and you come on in
to see your doctor, and they're going to give you a diagnosis,
and then here's the drug to treat it.
Diagnosis, drug, diagnosis, drug.
And that's where I believe that we really
need to shift our focus when it comes
to peak performance, when men want to function
at a higher level, and our health care system
is failing in that regard.
So my vision is to really innovate and reimagine
how we approach men's health.
What is your why it gets you out of bed
to do this every morning?
Yeah, my why is my kids, Harry.
When I wake up, I get up at six every morning,
and I do some heart variability measurements,
and I do some planning for the day, preparing.
But then I get to sit on the couch with my kids,
and just some snuggle time with them,
and you get to just talk about what the day
is going to look like, and just enjoy that time with them.
At the end of the day, I make time for dinner with them.
We all sit down as a family together,
and I'm there with them.
And then what so many entrepreneurs struggle with
is work-life balance, and knowing when to turn off
that race car that's running in the red all day.
And so when I get home at night, it's all about my kids
and my wife, and being present, and being the father
that my kids need, being the husband that my wife needs,
and really recognizing that there needs to be
that balance in life.
And so my why is really my family here,
and that's everything.
That's awesome.
Too many people are focused on one aspect of their life,
and for a lot of us, it's very hard to balance
the family and business relationship at the same time,
and health included in it.
I was just saying when I was in college,
if you have good grades, either you have bad sleep
or no relationships, or if you have a good relationship,
you either have bad grades or no sleep,
and you have to sacrifice one or the other.
That's true, that's true.
Yeah.
It's very interesting to see, yeah, go ahead.
It takes being really strategic about it.
It takes recognizing that you can have it all
if you structure your life, structure the way it needs to be
and recognizing what are the big rocks.
I talk about with my clients what's most important,
and everything has to wrap around that.
You brought up sleep.
Those seven, seven and a half hours of sleep
that you get every day, every night,
are the absolute foundation of everything else.
You have to have that first.
You can work backwards by whenever you gotta get up
in the morning, you can count back seven and a half hours.
That's when you need to be asleep,
which means you need to be in bed half an hour before that.
So that's your give it eight hours window of sleep time
that's non-negotiable.
You're gonna have time that you're gonna devote
to your family.
That time is non-negotiable,
and then everything else you gotta do
has to be within that other block of time.
And so now you can start to think about
how can I be more efficient in that time that I have
to get done what needs to get done.
That's awesome.
That's, thank you for sharing that.
That's very insightful, turning back
from what's more important, you mentioned your rock,
and taking that from, tracing back from what you're doing.
That's very helpful.
I wanna go to talk about your practice
and things you do with aging and urologist
and all the things that you do.
How did you get started into all this?
Yeah, so I was about halfway through my urology career.
I didn't know at the time that I was halfway through,
but I hit a wall.
This was about 12 years ago now.
I hit a wall 14 years ago now.
Hit a wall with my own health.
I was very overweight.
I had a lot of stress.
I wasn't sleeping well, wasn't taking care of myself,
and I was doing all the wrong things
because I was so focused on my career,
on my patients, my practice.
I was in the hospital every night doing surgery.
And I went for my first physical exam ever at the age of 40.
And holy cow, that was a real eye-opening experience
when I came face to face with no mortality
and saw numbers don't lie.
And I saw how bad my cholesterol numbers were,
my liver, my kidney numbers, and my weight.
And I realized something had to change,
and I realized that I didn't even have the answers myself
and that as a urologist,
I was this men's health expert, in air quotes,
but I realized that I didn't really have the answers
that I needed for myself
nor any other man who walked in my practice.
And so that got me to start studying
and going back to school.
And I spent about eight years going back to school,
getting certifications and going through courses
and learning functional medicine and learning epigenetics,
which is the science of how our lifestyle
and our environment affect how our body works.
Learning hormones the right way.
Never really realized it.
Never really learned them in residency somehow.
Learned about nutrition.
They never teach you about nutrition
in medical school or residency.
Learned about how to use wearable technology
that's coming at us every day.
How can we use those tools to track things like blood sugar
and sleep and stress?
You can actually measure this stuff,
track body composition.
And how do I put all these pieces together
into a cohesive approach, if you will,
to help myself to get back in shape,
to really turn my health around for the sake of my family
that was up and coming at the time.
And that changed everything for me.
Harry, I was able to turn my health around.
I lost 30 pounds that I was overweight.
My kidney function recovered.
My lipids came way down.
I had a renewed energy and sense of focus
and drive and passion.
And honestly, I fell in love with medicine again,
because for a while there,
I was getting just very frustrated and disillusioned
with urology, with men's health.
And I felt...
I think you muted yourself.
Yeah, I can unmute you from here.
No, I can't.
You're muted.
You might've hit some button somewhere.
I still can't hear you.
Yeah, there it is.
Yeah, I don't know why, just automatically somehow...
I'm so sorry, man.
That's totally happened.
So, I found a new...
I'll go back a few steps for you.
I found this renewed passion for medicine that I had lost.
I fell in love with medicine again.
I really found my passion for medicine.
I found my passion for medicine.
I really found my passion, my purpose.
As I recovered myself,
I realized this is what I was meant to do.
And so, I started sharing this with my patients
in my urology practice.
And they would lose weight.
They'd regain energy and focus and drive.
And they would tell me how they felt like men again.
And I realized that was onto something.
And so, I did what every insane person does.
And I jumped off a cliff and I just left a very lucrative,
very busy urology practice to start over.
And so, I launched the Gap Institute
where I can focus on helping high-performing men
optimize their health and have the energy and focus
and drive that they want and that they need.
Knowing that that's gonna affect how they show up every day
for their kids, for their family, for their community,
for their business, in every other aspect of their life.
And that's really become my passion and purpose now.
And I tell you, Harry, I love what I do.
And the results that we're seeing now
is transformational.
And that's what medicine's supposed to be.
That's what it's supposed to be all about.
It's not supposed to be just treating disease
and problems and symptoms.
So, tell me more about that.
Tell me more about the Gap Institute
and what exactly do you guys come in and do.
And what gaps are filled.
Yeah, so I created a peak launch system,
which is a four-step process for helping men identify
and solve those issues, those, I call them blind spots
in your health that are holding you back, really.
And I'll give you an example to help shed light on why
this is so important.
Guy Bob Harper.
Bob Harper is the head fitness trainer on the TV show
The Biggest Loser.
You may not have ever seen the show,
but he's this very fit guy.
He looks the part.
He looks like the epitome of good health.
He's teaching guys, men, and women how to get in shape
and lose weight.
And at the age of 51, Bob Harper had a heart attack
that almost killed him.
He looked healthy.
He was not healthy.
He thought he was healthy.
He was not healthy.
This is the problem we have is so many men are walking around
thinking that they're doing fine, thinking, yeah, I'm okay
because my primary care doctor did a few blood tests
and told me I'm okay.
And my response is, excuse my language,
bullshit, you're not okay.
You need to identify some blind spots that may be lurking
under the surface waiting to cause a problem.
My brother-in-law, John, he was this larger-than-life guy.
Looked incredible, big buff guy, worked out all the time
in great shape.
Age of 49, my brother-in-law, John, dropped dead one day.
And so these stories point out that we need to identify
what are the issues with our health
that may be holding us back or may be lurking
under the surface.
And so that's where the peak launch system comes from.
It starts with diagnostics, which means it starts
with doing advanced blood testing to find
what are some basic key issues that need to be addressed.
And this includes things like blood sugar regulation,
things like hormones, things like advanced lipid markers,
inflammation, gut health.
These are things that most traditional medical doctors
don't ever look at.
These are things that I learned along the way
through this additional training that I found
that they never teach in medical school.
And it requires taking a much more extensive perspective.
So diagnostics is the first step.
Number two is deep dive.
And deep dive is where you have to look beyond
just the blood testing.
And this is where most doctors stop.
They do a basic lab panel, CBC, basic metabolic profile,
look at a few other markers, cholesterol panel,
and tell you you're fine or you're not fine.
What we do is we look at things like your microbiome,
which is the gut, basically the balance of microbes
in your gut.
And remarkably, they control everything.
The microbiome, this milieu of bacteria and viruses,
not the organism in our gut, controls our immune system,
controls our neurotransmitters in our brain,
controls blood sugar, controls hormones,
actually tied to longevity.
And so we know that the microbiome is massively important,
but yet most doctors don't ever look at it
and don't even know what to do with it.
I have a couple of great colleagues of mine,
they're actually gastroenterologists.
They do colonoscopies and upper endoscopies all day.
And I was talking to one of my buddies about this stuff.
He's like, how'd you learn this stuff?
I have no idea because they don't teach even GI doctors
this stuff.
They just teach them how to look for colon cancers
and peptic ulcers, stomach ulcers.
So looking at the microbiome is critically important.
Looking at things like cortisol.
Cortisol is our stress hormone.
And cortisol is very important.
We need it for our body to function properly.
But when there is an imbalance in cortisol levels,
then it can wreak havoc on our whole body.
And most guys will never admit that they're stressed.
That's okay.
Cortisol doesn't lie.
And when you're a race car in the red all day,
like most entrepreneurs, it will affect cortisol,
which then affects other hormones.
It affects your ability to build muscle,
your ability to burn fat, your ability to get in shape
and maintain cardiovascular health.
And so we can measure this kind of stuff.
We look at advanced imaging.
We look at advanced cardiovascular testing
and markers that look at cardiovascular risk.
There's something called a coronary calcium score,
which is a CAT scan that can look at the calcifications
in the blood vessels of your heart.
And then there's a special type of angiogram
that can actually look at the blood flow to your heart
that is incredibly valued for normal guys like you and me.
And it can assess your risk of cardiovascular disease
10, 20, 30, 40 years before you have an event.
Wouldn't you want to know if you're at risk
that you could do something to prevent it
rather than wait until you have a heart attack?
And that's what it is.
It's being proactive and preventive.
And it's being personalized,
understanding that every one of us is different.
So going back to Bob Harper,
who almost died at age of 51 from a heart attack,
he had very high levels of LP little a.
LP little a is a type of LDL
that most doctors don't ever check.
And that was his risk factor
that if he would have gotten that checked,
if he would have had a calcium score,
he would have picked this stuff up ahead of time.
So that's deep dive.
It's to go much deeper than traditional medicine can ever do.
And then design is the third step.
Design is where we create a personalized blueprint
for our clients that includes things like,
what the hell should you eat?
And most doctors don't ever get taught.
We don't ever learn anything about nutrition.
And so I have functional medicine trained health coaches
who work with our clients to tell you,
what the hell do I eat?
What do I not eat?
How much do I eat?
Macronutrients, protein, fasting, carb cycling,
all these key parts of nutrition that are so important.
And it's not just what my doctor told me 12 years ago,
just go eat vegetables and exercise.
It takes a lot more than that.
And so we create a blueprint around nutrition and fitness
and supplementation and hormones.
And this is where we tie in some really cool
cutting edge things like peptides.
We can use stem cells
and we can use all kinds of cutting edge tools
like, you know, sauna, red light cryo, PEMF,
all these other additional tools are ways to augment
our approach with everything else we're doing.
And then data, you know, the fourth step,
and then I'll quit talking.
I know this has been a long answer to your question.
The fourth step is data where we use wearable technology
to actually track outcomes,
to actually measure if what we're doing is working or not.
And I like to say one size fails all
because what works for some guys does not work for others.
And so we use wearable data tracking
to look at blood sugar and sleep and stress
and body composition, et cetera,
to really understand what's working.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.