Are LinkedIn influencers the worst kind of influencer?
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I'm Yasmin Gagne. And I'm David Salazar, filling in this week for Josh while he's out on a reporting trip. And this is Most Innovative Companies. On today's episode, Fast Company contributing writer Joe Berkowitz. There are meaningless aphorisms, like peak performance is only impressive if you don't plummet from the summit. Prenuvo CEO Andrew Lacey. I did the scan myself. I sat down with him afterwards and went through my entire body and I just felt like I was seeing the future of health.

And as always, keeping tabs. I can now identify an American robin on sight or sound. It's a classic cheap, cheap, cheap noise. But first, here's the download.

The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation. The European Commission says the Apple App Store is in violation of its Digital Markets Act. One of the examples they give of behavior that violates it is that Apple currently doesn't allow developers to tell customers that their app is available elsewhere or for a different price. And this has been something that the EU has been after for years, and it's a pretty significant move from a regulatory body against Apple.

And Apple's always pulling shit like this. Yes, yeah. You'd be hard-pressed to take a calendar year and not find someone beefing with Apple over its App Store policies. Universal Music Group, Warner Records, and Sony Music Entertainment are suing the AI music companies Suno and Udio.

The latter was used to make BBL Drizzy, which some may remember from an episode a while back. UMG and company claimed that the AI music violates copyright, quote unquote, en masse and seeks damages of up to $150,000 per work. In the defense, Suno says their tech only creates new transformative content.

It sure sounds like a fake defense to me, but I don't know. I mean, it is sort of the classic issue of AI models coming to the music industry. And this has been a long time coming, but it really boils down to what are you training your models on?

And one, if you're using copyrighted material, not allowed to do that. And two, if you're spitting things out, how similar does it sound? And I think that Google has something called Music LM that I think is still sort of in beta in development. And last year, its release was sort of stalled because the people who were making it basically found that like,

80% of the time it was just spitting out something that was copyrighted. Yeah, I would say my only take here is that BBL Drizzy was pretty fantastic. It was. I mean, clearly it's capable. It's just a matter of, you know, what's creating that. Well, in food news, Chipotle has announced a 50 for 1 stock split, which follows similar moves from NVIDIA and Walmart. Yeah.

I could make it easier for retail investors to buy into the company. And you know, I'm already looking to diversify my portfolio. I know, it's Chipotle's resident biggest fan. I actually think I eat more Chipotle now than I did in college, mostly because I didn't really have Chipotle money in college. I barely have it now.

Performance reviews are coming up. Consider paying us more. And yet another chain, this time Hooters, is closing dozens of locations across the country. The company blames economic conditions like rising labor and food costs. They are growing in other areas, though. They have a new line of Hooters frozen foods that you can get at the grocery store. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah, let me take every sort of every reason that people tend to go to Hooters out of Hooters. Like the wings seem to be the last thing on people's mind. The death of the restaurant. R.I.P. Wither the busty waitress. And that's the news you need to know today. David, if you had to be an influencer, what kind of influencer would you be? You know, I think I'm definitely torn between.

between I would love to be like an Instagram travel influencer. Right. But I also think that like being a TikTok food influencer,

would be pretty great. I feel like TikTok food influencer is actually a ton of work. Oh, yes. Whereas travel, like, you know, you take a lot of photos, but like ultimately you are relaxing in somewhere nice. Yeah, being a food influencer seems to require being a lot more type A than I am. Like, oh, let me get coverage of me julienning this thing. Yeah, you're right. Okay, I'll stick with travel.

What about you? I don't think I'd be good at influencing generally, you know? I don't know. Your Instagram pops off from time to time. It does pop off from time to time, but it's never the stuff that I think is going to do well. You know what I mean? Yeah, it definitely is a time investment.

But actually, one platform where I think it could do well, and this leads us into our first segment, is LinkedIn. And the reason I say this is because... Background is I hate posting on LinkedIn. As part of our jobs, we're supposed to post our articles on LinkedIn. And I would say I don't do it as often as I should. And I tend to just repost things where people tag me. And the reason is it's, like, cringe and weird. But...

If I really wanted to, I think I could do it. You know what I mean? I think if I use those hashtags, if I talked about what I learned from the time my cat puked on a dress I really liked. Yeah. What that can teach you about B2B sass.

Yeah, I think that LinkedIn is a space for people to be creative. So we're going to talk a little bit about business influencers. And what inspired this was a recent viral LinkedIn post. There's a photo of a smiling guy in a backward baseball cap in the photo, which seems pretty normal until you actually read the caption. In it, the guy in a cap.

CEO Matthew Baltzell of CapEx Media talks about his illuminating experience firing an employee for the first time ever. The LinkedIn influencer proceeds to detail the firing and what he learned from it. He followed that up with a solicitation for feedback on what he did. This kind of post is not a one-off. Deranged behavior on LinkedIn is at this point something many of us witness on a daily basis, unfortunately.

That's why we wanted to dive into it and look at the weird world of business influencers. Here to tell us more is Fast Company contributing writer Joe Berkowitz. Hey, Joe. Welcome to the show. Hi. We talked a little bit about that weird viral post with the guy in the backwards baseball cap, and he had a caption about what he learned from firing an employee.

On the business influencer scale, where does this post fall? This one feels like destined to have a bit of a shelf life as a cautionary tale that people can point to. It's almost the exact flip side of this other LinkedIn influencer who went viral a while back for simplifying

Similar reasons. He is known as the crying CEO. I totally forgot about that guy. Yeah, faced with the prospect of layoffs, he did a video of himself crying. And we all love empathy, but...

It was just a little too demonstrative to the point of feeling performative. And he fared a lot worse than if he hadn't posted anything at all and would have just been seen as a cold CEO having to do what's necessary or whatever.

I think it's going to be remembered. There's going to be the crying CEO and the smiling selfie. At least when it's an Instagram or a YouTube influencer, there is some money attached to it. You know, you might be able to get sponsored by a brand and get some, but LinkedIn influencers is like, that's not even part of this, right? What do you think is the goal here?

Yeah, I don't understand it myself. It seems there are a lot of influencers influencing about influencing. There are just a lot of posts that are about how you can expand your reach, how you can be your most authentic self. And they're in order to get more of an audience share. And it's like, okay, well, once you have that, then what? Yeah, what do you do with that? Yeah. Yeah.

It feels kind of like the Tony Robbins thing, like that brand of self-help and lifestyle guru. Part of it was...

always about being more of a person in that vein of becoming more influential. We just have new language to describe it now, I guess. You've been following business influencers for a bit. How did you fall down this unfortunate rabbit hole? I didn't gravitate there naturally, I'll say. I wrote a piece for Fast Company back in January, which documented my experience of using LinkedIn as my primary social media platform.

Because I had just been having a tough time with social media in general. Things are really changing the last couple years. Things are fracturing. It doesn't feel as fun or as useful anymore. No. Or at least the traditional places I would go. And...

I kept hearing about how LinkedIn was thriving in this time. And as someone who writes about business and work culture and tech and how they intersect with entertainment, that kind of thing, it felt like I should be on LinkedIn more. So I forced myself to only be on LinkedIn for three weeks. And it was a bittersweet experience. I really liked the positivity of it.

Yeah, everyone is always congratulating each other on something. That is true. It was kind of a corporatized form of positivity. I described it as positivity dressed in beige separates. But, you know, I'll take all the positivity I can get these days.

I also like that self-promotion is actually encouraged. Yeah. Whereas I sometimes feel more sheepish about doing it on other social media. It's a whole social network of people saying, I did a thing. Yes. And then people congratulating them for it, which is nice.

Mm hmm. The drawback for me was the experience of being on there a lot gave me career FOMO as opposed to like the lifestyle FOMO you get on Instagram, maybe. Yeah. Because I was like, why aren't I important enough that people are always flying me out to speak at a conference in Singapore? That's fair. I think we all feel that.

But also during my research, that's when I found out about a subreddit called LinkedIn Lunatics, which has been tracking exactly these kinds of posts that we're talking about for the last five years. I want to sort of be able to classify these people. Sure. Tell me what buckets of influencer you found. The main one was like the guy with the smiling selfie, influencers influencing about influencing people.

But there was also a lot of other common hallmarks I found. There's the obscure job title that you can read over and over again and never quite understand, like the EVP of incentivization or just something that sounds impressive until you realize it doesn't make any sense.

There's questionably sourced advice like everything you need to know about day trading in the crypto space. You can learn from watching Malcolm in the Middle, you know, just stuff like that. That's meant to catch your attention, but it just seems dubiously sourced. Yeah. There's mundane anecdotes presented as like mind altering business lessons, which is a

a bit like the smiling selfie guy, but usually it's something more mundane. Like I was at the grocery store and I discovered the secret of how to make NFTs

go nuts or something. Have you seen, I think there was a post that went viral that was like, I proposed to my fiance this weekend. Here's what I learned about B2B SaaS marketing or something. That is a perfect example. I forgot about that guy, but yeah, yeah. Stuff like that. I saw a woman on that subreddit this morning whose two kids nearly drowned and, you know, she learned an important lesson about marketing. Yeah.

There are meaningless aphorisms, like peak performance is only impressive if you don't plummet from the summit. Stuff like that, just things that are completely meaningless but almost sound good. And then laying out the perfect schedule for achievement, which is either impossible or very specific to this person's job. There's always this element of like dudes being like,

I wake up at 4 a.m. and then I exercise and then I go to work. And then you're like, OK, does this guy have kids? And you're like, yeah. Does this guy have a stay-at-home wife? Yes, that's correct. You know what I mean? It's like... Yeah. I packed the kids' lunch while I was meditating in the middle of my workout. Exactly. You're like, thank you so much. You know, there's a lot of bragging about how busy you are while also clearly investing an incredible amount of time in your social media presence. That's accurate. Now, are you a LinkedIn guy now? Oh.

Or have you sworn off the platform? What is your relationship to it? I try to do more than just post my articles, but that tends to be what I end up doing. And while I'm doing that,

I'm also taking a look around and I do like to congratulate my friends. That has been a contagious thing for me is that people are posting their wins there more often than I see on X. And I take the opportunity to congratulate my friends and stuff and post my articles. And that's about it. Are you a LinkedIn guy, Salazar? Oh, absolutely not. You post

more than me, but I'm like, I'm a disaster on LinkedIn. So we are supposed to post articles on LinkedIn, but the amount of...

shame and anxiety it gives me is actually kind of through the roof. And also, and I love my parents for doing this, but they're always the first people to congratulate me. Aw, that's very nice. On any article, which is really cute, but I'm also like, what about my peers? Why isn't it Mark Cuban congratulating me instead of mom? I like the ability to post something on LinkedIn in a way that feels un-

Like there's not a lot of shame attached to it because everyone understands that LinkedIn is sort of exists to post your W's and the ability to sort of like give some insight into the background to the piece or whatever that, you know, you obviously can't put into the piece and like no one really cares about on other platforms at all. It's an interesting space because at its best, it does function as like a decent little microblog for people, right?

At its worst, it is everyone doing their best, like, Carrie Bradshaw impersonation without any of the, like, self-awareness. Like, Carrie Bradshaw is a villain. Yeah.

Yeah, if you watch the show long enough that you come to realize that. There's a lot of people I know who, you know, maybe I knew in college or maybe I know outside of work who are so funny and interesting and creative. And then their LinkedIn presence is so divorced from any of that. You know what I mean? Instead, it's like, I am so passionate about consumer experience on SaaS platforms, you know, and it's like,

There's always a divide between who you are on social media and who you are as a person. But the gulf between somebody's personality and LinkedIn, to me, can feel so big. I don't know if that makes sense. No, it makes perfect sense. That was my eventual conclusion. Because during the course of writing that article back in January, I felt selfishly

Self-policing, like I would have thoughts and I would just say, oh, well, this isn't going to fly here. God forbid it, you know, offers some extra personality and stuff. So, yeah, that's what made me realize it was never going to be my primary social media forever. That's why it's interesting, right? You have the level of artifice that comes with social media. Yeah.

And on LinkedIn, you add the level of artifice that comes with existing in a workplace, or at least ideally you do. There are some people doing out-of-pocket things on LinkedIn that obviously like LinkedIn lunatics documents, and sometimes you come across it in the wild and it really blows your mind. But like, Joe, you said earlier that like a lot of people on LinkedIn are posting about like being your authentic self and

I don't think anyone really wants that in the workplace. And that's maybe the beauty of LinkedIn. I think it might underscore the importance of like having a private self. One thing that I thought it was really insightful was your observation that kind of a single post can rob someone else of their dignity and kind of use their experience as a source for content. And I think that's the case on social media. You think about like,

parents who are using their kids to do all kind of weird shit. But at the very least, there's some money coming out of it. This sort of like weird relationship seems like such a sort of specific business influencer one. Tell me more about that. Well, yeah, just when your goal is to have new content as often as possible and you're just mining your life for experience and

then other people are going to seem like anecdote fodder for you. And sometimes I'm sure it works out perfectly, but in this instance, we don't have enough information to know whether the person fired was like a terrible employee, the kind of person you might privately, not publicly, but privately smile after firing them. Like, okay, good. Whew.

whoo, they're gone now. Thank God. But either way, the photo is the main thing that he got wrong. If it had just been a story about firing someone for the first time and the challenges of that, it would have been fine, I think. But the fact that he centered himself in the story about firing someone and

throwing in a smiling selfie not only centered himself, but it also made him look like it was a story of triumph over adversity. Like, I fired someone and lived. Can you believe it? I did it, you know? It's a read the room situation, right? Tons of people are getting laid off at the moment in the tech industry. Exactly, yeah.

And it can't feel good for those workers to log on to LinkedIn and see this clown, right? Yeah. First of all, the employee who got fired, there's a chance he's a LinkedIn connection. Yeah. He might have seen it. Other co-workers, even then, they would have seen it too. I think in the caption, he was like,

I'm not going to share why they were fired because I don't want any drama. And I was like, dude, that's all people are going to be talking about. Yeah, you're doing this for the drama, my friend. I don't think that worked out for him. It's like you clearly live for drama. Now, based on your experience on LinkedIn and on LinkedIn Lunatics, what can you say about the future of the business influencer? Where is this going from here? I think people are going to keep doing it.

And as long as some of them are successful, more people will try it and see how difficult it is to get a following. We have no idea what the incentives are at the end of the rainbow, like why do this? But I do think people will keep trying it. And occasionally one will do something so ridiculous that the rest of the world finds out about it outside of the LinkedIn bubble. We have a friend from college. Former classmate. Not really friend. Girl we went to college with.

who has become an incredibly successful LinkedIn influencer. Top female influencer, according to her LinkedIn bio. She's one of the top female influencers. And let me tell you, it's crazy. She's hawking her newsletter. She's got a ton of subscribers to that bad boy. Maybe we're in the wrong business, Yaz. We're not in the right business, Yaz. We're going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with Pernuvo CEO, Andrew Lacey.

All right. Now we're stepping out of the LinkedIn influencer bubble to talk about something that's gotten a lot of attention in more mainstream celebrity chatter. A full-body MRI scan that touts the ability to screen for 500 different conditions. The machine, developed by medtech company Pernuvo, was called life-saving by Kim Kardashian and has been endorsed by a lot of other celebrities.

there's still a catch. Getting a scan from Pernuvo costs $2,500, and some medical professionals have said that full-body MRI scanning does more harm than good. I interviewed the company's founder and CEO, Andrew Lacey, to see what he thinks about the criticism and how the company might bring down that astronomical price.

First of all, I want to talk a little bit about how you came to found Pernuvo. I think your co-founder has a medical background, but you previously worked at McKinsey and at Disney. How did you first hear about full-body MRIs? And when did you think that could be kind of a viable business? Well, I think like most entrepreneurs, when we think about starting a business, we think about things that might be relevant to us. And I...

entered my 40s and I had been building companies for the last 15, 20 years. Like most entrepreneurs, I worked very hard and I had a decent amount of stress and didn't exercise as much as I could. And I remember just waking up one day and looking in the mirror and sort of asking myself the question, how do I know actually that I'm going to be around for this future that I guess I'm trying to build here? How do I know what's going on underneath my skin? And that started my own personal exploration to try and answer that question.

And it turned out no one really could answer it very comprehensively. I got my skin tested. I did a colonoscopy. I did some blood tests. But these were all very sort of patchwork solutions. And then I ran into a radiologist in Vancouver, Canada, that were doing these incredible clinical quality whole body medical examinations.

So I got on a plane, I did the scan myself, I sat down with him afterwards and went through my entire body. And I just felt like I was seeing the future of health. It was so obvious that this was something that needed to be everywhere. And so five years later, we're on the journey to bringing it to as many people as possible. It sounds like you kind of went full biohacker. I'm curious, what is the profile of most of these people who are taking the test? So we get people that come in from all walks of life. We have folks...

that are biohackers, probably most biohackers in North America come and do the scan. But we have other people that are just curious about their health, or they might have previously had cancer and they want to make sure it doesn't come back, or they have a family history of disease.

and not getting scanned for them is a source of anxiety. Not everyone has a six pack and runs Ironman and does intermittent fasting. I think patients come from all walks of life. I have to believe that patients come from all walks of life, but they do come from a certain economic background because the test is really expensive. It's like $2,000. And you're kind of recommending, or I don't know if you're recommending, but it's possible people might want to get them regularly. Yeah.

How have you thought about kind of positioning the service? Like how did this sort of price work out for you guys? Yeah, I think there's two ways to look at it. First, to compare what we do versus what was around before. And then second, to start thinking about the future that we want to create. So before us, it was very, very difficult to do whole body screening. And about the only institutions that would do it were large tertiary hospitals. And they would charge something like $50,000.

So in some ways, what we're doing is orders of magnitude less expensive. Even when you think about standard of care screening, which is fantastic, but you know, colonoscopy is $1,000, breast screening is a certain amount, PSA tests, skin tests and things like this. So we have this patchwork of tests that each independently are also quite expensive. And I'm not suggesting people shouldn't do them, their standard of care.

But what's really interesting about the exam is that we are looking at the entire body and we're able to almost screen about 80 to 100 regions of interest for something like $20 per region. So it's a completely different way of thinking about health screening compared to our health system. And then where are we going? We're working really hard to scale the business, to introduce AI more fundamentally as a way to bring down costs.

And our hope in the future is that this is a $200, $300, $400 exam that is not only within the reach of more people, but also is at a price point where we hope it will be adopted by insurance companies and health systems around the world. So I was on your website and you're growing really fast. I mean, you're expanding to a ton of locations in the U.S. When do you expect we'd be able to see those kind of price decreases? We did introduce one can.

cancer screening exam of the torso that now is $999. So that's a significant discount from the comprehensive exam that we do. Since I began, we've not changed the price of the exam in the face of a lot of insurance, particularly in the health space. So the scan is slowly becoming more affordable. And with these technological advances, we think it'll become a lot more affordable, probably in a, I want to say four to five year timeframe.

And some of that is in our control because we are building AI models and some of that is outside of our control and depends on the FDA and the approach that they take towards AI and medical imaging. I want to come back and talk about costs in a little bit, but what are some of the sort of AI applications or how are you planning on using that technology? We're investigating AI in three areas.

The first area is using AI to speed up image acquisition. So if we can screen you in 15 minutes rather than 45 minutes, we can save a lot of costs and we can pass it on to consumers. The second area is around using AI to diagnose disease. Obviously, the more of the workload that can be either uplifted from radiologists or augmented and help make the radiologists more productive,

the more we can lower the cost of the radiology involved in doing the work. And then the third area of AI which I'm really excited about is using AI to help us understand how our bodies are aging. And here we're actually using AI to identify very small changes

in our bodies from one scan to the next that a radiologist wouldn't normally see. But tell us how the way you're living your life is impacting your underlying physiology. That's interesting. You mentioned other tests that people might get and the fact that those costs could mount. But a lot of those tests for a lot of people are covered by insurance. This obviously isn't. Is being covered by insurance, you know, part of your roadmap? Or is that not something you think about at all? Absolutely. Medium term goal of the company is really to

have a very, very clear understanding of the efficacy of the exams so that we can then start engaging with health systems and insurance providers to help get these covered.

It seems to me like the exam is efficacious in the sense that like MRI is sort of a proven technology. I have spoken to some physicians, I've seen this covered a lot, who say, you know, that maybe these kind of tests are overkill. There's a famous New Yorker article by Atul Gawande about this, which is that running too many tests on someone actually just kind of increases their risk of getting something.

Tell me how you think about that or how you respond to that kind of criticism. Well, I think working backwards there, I think a lot of the criticisms of these tests causing problems mainly relates to CT screening that was done actually 20, 30 years ago. You could go to a shopping mall and find someone that would screen you in a CT machine for cancer. And we know CT involves radiation. So if you do these exams enough times,

They may well find cancer, but they probably have caused the cancer at the same time. So that was a universally problematic technology. And luckily, you don't see it very often these days. MRI is a lot safer, doesn't involve radiation. And the exams we do don't involve injecting any heavy metal contrast or anything that can be toxic to the body. I think the real challenge with new screening exams is to ask the question, why do we only have a few exams? You know, why do we only have mammogram or colonoscopy tests?

And I think it really speaks to just the challenge and the timescale involved to really get these scans approved by the healthcare system. Mammogram took something like 30 years. PSA testing for men took 20 years from the time it was clinically proven to when it was covered. Even something like a pap smear, that was invented in 1910 and was not adopted until the 1950s. So unfortunately, the adoption curve of screening exams is sort of measured in decades, unfortunately. And I hope...

that it is speeding up like most other things in the world these days, but it still takes time to educate the medical establishment, to collect evidence over a large enough timeframe so that we understand how this really does impact mortality. I think a lot of the

criticism that I've read stems from the mental health toll that these kinds of scans can take. The fact that someone might be incredibly anxious, you know, after getting the results and take more tests and it may be fine. How do you think about that? Well, we actually ask people when they come in, are they feeling anxious about their health before they come in for a scan? And about 30% of our patients already have health anxiety. And that health anxiety has come from

the medical system not providing them with clarity around what's going on with their health. We also poll people when they come out of the scan and less than 1% of people feel like we have made them feel unnecessarily anxious about their health. And these are important metrics for us because if anything, this shows that in fact, these scans are not only effective at diagnosing cancer and disease, but they're effective at like making us happier

at overcoming this health anxiety that a lot of us feel. Should one day the business get, or scans get accepted by insurance, how would that change your business? Like, what would that look like as far as bottom line, for example? I think, obviously, the advantage of being covered is that you'll start to see these services offered not just by us, by other providers out there,

I would hope that screening clinics would be as common as primary care physician offices. So there would be just much greater availability of these exams. Obviously, when you start screening at scale, you can also do this a lot more cost effectively. So that in and of itself will bring down the cost a lot.

What it will mean for us, I mean, our primary goal, the reason we got started at this and the reason why a lot of people work at Prenevo is because we have been touched by people that have died from late diagnosis. If what we do at Prenevo ends up creating a world where

tens of millions of people are getting scanned and we're saving millions of lives, that would be a fantastic outcome, irrespective of what it means for us as a company. I'm curious about your personal views too. What kind of healthcare system do you want to see? Do you believe in universal healthcare? I grew up in Australia, so I've lived most of my life in healthcare systems that had universal coverage. I unfortunately see the flaws in the

The US style healthcare system, and I see the flaws in the more socialized medicine systems. I think there's a fundamental flaw underpinning any healthcare system today in any country, which is that it's a reactive approach to medicine. There's this core assumption that you are healthy unless you feel sick. And what we're learning through screening is

tens of thousands of people is that you might be suffering the early stages of something and not know about it and be asymptomatic. And the earlier you catch it, the more you can massively change the outcomes for individuals and for populations. If you were king for a day and had to give your country one healthcare system, what would it be? I think my personal philosophy is that, you know, healthcare is something that everyone deserves to have. And there should be a level of healthcare that's provided

by a government of a country. And I think Australia actually walks a pretty interesting line where we have universal healthcare, but we also have private insurance. So the challenge, I think, of a universal healthcare system is you end up with healthcare rationing.

And so if people want to do something else, if they want to look after themselves, it's very hard to access care. And I think in Australia, we actually managed to do both to have a great universal system. But at the same time, if you want to take private insurance and have other things that might be covered that aren't covered by universal health care, you're able to do that. You know, the first time I heard about Pernuvo was after seeing a post by Kim Kardashian about the service.

And so you had celebrities kind of take the test and encourage them to post on social media. Tell me about that strategy, because that's not something we see very often with kind of medical tests. Well, it's less of a strategy than something we sort of have leaned into. So we've had this philosophy in the company since the very beginning, which is we just want to be the best at providing the best clinical experience and the best in-clinic experience.

And if we do that, then sort of in a very old fashioned sense, the rest will look after itself. We'll have more than enough sort of demand for the service that we provide. And we've seen this in almost every market in which we operate. The thing that really changed in the last two years is that as we opened in Los Angeles in particular, but also to a lesser extent, New York,

we started to get people coming in who themselves had really big audiences. And they had a great experience. And we always encourage people to tell friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, because maybe you might save their life. And it just so happened that a lot of these folks decided to tell very, very large audiences about their experience. And we kind of leaned into it. And the influencers that have chosen to talk about us were eternally grateful for because it really helped raise the awareness not only of Preneuvo, but

of screening and of preventive health more broadly. - You're in a weird position, I think, with sort of celebrities who post in that kind of the best thing for Pruva that could happen is one of them comes back with a serious result and they can say this test saved my life.

How do you think about that? That's sort of pretty different from like a celebrity talking about how an eczema drug was amazing for them. We hope that everyone gets a clean bill of health. And you see this in the stories that influencers are telling there. I mean, I think it's just as powerful to say, hey, you know, like there's nothing better than getting a clean bill of health.

There's nothing better than not having to worry about that part of my life and be able to focus on living it. I think the outcome is independent of whether someone finds something that is potentially, you know, life-saving or not. I feel like there's a really powerful story here, which is having agency over your own healthcare and really understanding what's going on.

Something that is really interesting to me about Pernuvo is I've been trying to figure out what I guess you'd call the end goal of it, if that makes sense. Do you think about it as like the end goal is to prolong human life or is it to give reassurance? What do you think is sort of the best outcome for this test? Now we start to speak about longevity, which is a little bit more outside of my field. Whenever we look at someone's scans, I mean, what we've come to learn is that

Our underlying health is a function of our genetics. So what we were born with, we can't control it. Our lifestyle, the way we live our life, and just simple, plain dumb luck. So two out of those things you actually can't control. So no matter how much you want to live for a long time, no matter how fit you might be, if you're not looking inside the skin, you can never be 100% certain that there might not be something there that you should learn about earlier rather than later.

But then the reverse is also true. We give someone a set of activities that they need to follow up on. I mean, it's still incumbent on us to modify our lifestyle so that the early stage of a chronic disease never arrives at the chronic clinical stage where you need medicine and treatment. But we're humans as well. So, you know, I think a combination of

that routine surveillance and encouraging positive lifestyle change is probably the best way to maximize the likelihood of living to 100. You obviously are gathering an enormous amount of data from doing all these tests over a period of time, sometimes on the same person. How can you use that data or what do you use it for? I mean, it's really fascinating. We calculated that we're collecting something like 1.3 billion three-dimensional pixels of your body when you come in and get a scan.

So it is a tremendous source of insight. And when you think about radiology, really, I mean, what makes a great radiologist is that, you know, they've been doing it for a period of time and they have this sort of sum total of knowledge of all the other radiology exams that they've done. And in some ways, that's what AI is doing. You know, it's able to benefit from the sum total of all the exams that are sort of fed into it and produce models that are like highly accurate. What are the drivers of human health?

And, you know, what can we learn that can then inform the way we coach and recommend our patients to live a better life? And an example of this is just last year, probably the most popular article in the Journal of Aging was a article that we collaborated on, which established a connection between visceral fat levels and brain volume loss. And so here, for the first time, we're able to see that our physical fitness is actually affecting the size of our brains as we age.

And that was really fascinating research that spun off other research that we're doing this year. I think we've probably investigated as a medical profession, 5% of the insight that's in these examinations. And I'm super excited for the papers that will be published and the advance in human health that hopefully we can derive from. I know you started in Canada and you were just mentioned expanding internationally. What are the markets you would look at next?

Right now, it's public that we're looking to establish a location in London. And we hope to have that open later this year and probably another couple of locations in Europe as well. And then we're also actively looking in Australia...

which is a market that's obviously very important to me. It's a market I grew up in. And then over the next two years, I think you'll find us at least have one location in most regions of the world. As you sort of like continue that push or with the research that you generate, as you say, to

to maybe get covered by insurance or something. Is that something you would do in every country? I just have to imagine that's like a huge legal effort, if nothing else. Well, at the root of it really starts with collecting evidence of efficacy. So once that evidence is collected, it doesn't matter really if it's collected in the US or Australia or Europe. I mean, for the most part, those findings are going to be applicable to whatever jurisdiction in which we operate. I think the interesting question that I don't yet know the answer to is,

There's actually a real incentive for socialized medicine systems to think long and hard about these types of technologies because

Unlike in America, the government that's paying your health care is paying your health care from the time that you're born until the time you die. In America, of course, your health insurance often changes every time you change jobs, which is two to three years. So there's not a tremendous incentive to invest in preventative screening in the private insurance market in the U.S. And that's why a lot of screening has been mandated by law to be covered by private insurance in the U.S.,

So I don't know. I'm curious to see and I expect maybe that it will be a social medicine system that will adopt screening like Renuvo earlier potentially than even the US. So we might see that outside of North America before we see it inside of North America. Got it. Especially because there are certain markets where they're very forward looking on health in Asia and the Middle East and where...

They are very interested to try not incremental solutions, but fundamentally transformative solutions and see if they work at population scale. So you're basically saying, you know, tests like Pernuvo might show a bunch of stuff that could be treated far earlier and less expensively. Correct. Yeah.

That makes sense. What are some of the, I guess, the trends you're seeing? Like what is something everyone seems to be suffering from, for example? I would say the most common is fatty liver in one shape or another. And fatty liver is obviously highly associated with type 2 diabetes. And we see oftentimes fatty liver in people that are completely healthy and normal and, you know, might be very athletic. So there's a big, like what we're learning, obviously, is there's a big genetic component to this.

And in particular, it affects Asian populations, black populations, also Latin American populations. So that's obviously very interesting for social equity as well. I don't know what else are we seeing? I mean, it's amazing when you look inside the body, just what you find sometimes. We'll scan people and they won't realize they've only got one kidney. Oh, wow. Or they won't realize that they have two kidneys, but they're fused together. You know, when we're born, when we're a fetus, we start with like one kidney and it sort of splits into two.

And some people have what's called a horseshoe kidney. I think you told me about one that was related to the fact that we're all looking at our phones all the time. Yeah. Right? It's like a spinal thing that is affecting all millennials. Yeah, we noticed this when we first moved into Silicon Valley. So when we were screening Justin McHugh, the average age of our patients was 52 years old. When we moved into Silicon Valley, the average age dropped into sort of the late 30s.

Which means we scan people in their 20s even. And what we discovered was when we looked at their cervical spine in particular, so this is just below the neck, that the average age of a 25-year-old, if you showed their images to a radiologist and said, guess how old this person is, oftentimes they would say late 30s, early 40s. And these are people that don't have any pain.

But they spend all their time working at desks or on their phones. And our head is not used to being in that position for a long period of time. We're used to looking up at the horizon. And this asymmetrically loads the spine and can cause disc bulges. And we see the very early signs of that in the 20s. And those people, if they don't do something about it, may well be in chronic pain in their 50s.

early 60s. And we know that longevity is so closely linked to mobility. So just knowing about this when you're young means that you can take corrective action. And I am testament to this. I have problems with my cervical spine and now I work on a walking treadmill desk and I walk maybe two or three hours every day.

And my spine problems over the last five years have not only not progressed, but my spine has got better. So it's never too late to sort of undertake corrective action. And it's never too early to really understand what's happening underneath the skin. Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on our show, Andrew. It's been great to be here. Thank you.

Okay, we are back with Joe, and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each one of us shares a story, trend, or piece of pop culture we're following right now. And Joe, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? I have been keeping tabs on birdwatching, or birding, as it's also called.

It started years ago when I read that book, How to Do Nothing by Jenny O'Dell. Oh, I love that book. Yeah, it's a great book. And the bird section really made an impact on me. Just the idea of listening to the birds as you walk around a city and

And if you do it more, you realize that there's this whole world of communication that's happening overlaid on top of your world. And that just makes me feel good to think about and to find a way to connect with that world and get outside of kind of the digital bubble that I'm in most of the time. So for five years now, since I read that book, in the back of my head, I've been like,

Bird watching. That's going to be a thing that I do. And then, uh, Ed Yong recently wrote an op-ed for, uh, New York times called when I became a birder, almost everything else fell into place. And, um, after reading that, I was like, this is going to be the time I'm going to do it. So I bought a, uh, a book about, uh, the birds of the Midwest since I live in, uh, Minneapolis and I downloaded two birding apps. And, um,

And I went out and did it recently, and it was pretty great. What'd you see? Well, I can now identify an American robin on sight or sound. It's a classic cheep, cheep, cheep noise. It feels like Pokemon Go a bit. I went to a bird sanctuary once.

And I was walking around and I was like, is that a blue jay? All right, I saw a blue jay. And this app I have makes it feel even more Pokemon Go-like because you can either take a photo of a bird or just turn your mic on to record and it identifies birds for you. And that is helpful, but it also feels like it defeats the naturalism of the experience, like some of the intended unplugging techniques

Because I would see a bird, and rather than just sit there and appreciate it, I would be like fiddling with my phone. Right. And trying to get the camera and point it. And by the time I did do that, the bird would fly away and it would be like, oh, is that self-defeating? So it's a work in progress, but it's something I'm keeping tabs on. David, what are you keeping tabs on? It's kind of like a slow burn keeping tabs because this movie is not out until December. But...

I did see that Robert Eggers, the director of The Northman, The Lighthouse, and The Witch...

has a new Nosferatu movie coming out later this year. Oh, the trailer came out. Yes, yeah. And it's got, I mean, it's a real... Willem Dafoe is in it, of course, as Aaron Taylor-Johnson, not Anya Taylor-Joy, even though she's usually in his movies. And it just looks great. I don't know. I love a vampire adaptation. It's kind of in a fun lineage of... There's the Werner Herzog sort of adaptation of Nosferatu, and...

There's also that really unhinged... Isn't it Francis Ford Coppola who did, like, a Dracula movie? Yeah. That one's great. Isn't it with Winona Ryder or something? It's got a pretty good cast, but it's... Keanu Reeves. Yes. A famously miscast Keanu Reeves. God bless him. A well-cast Anthony Hopkins, though. So that's what I'm excited about. I'm a big fan of Robert Eggers. My, like, American Studies brain still loves The Witch just because, like...

It's a really great look at what freaks Calvinists were and why American culture is so paranoid and sort of given to hallucinations and fantasy. What about you, Yaz? I hate to bring this up because I think it's a real downer.

But what's going on with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez? I am so sad about this news cycle. I feel like everyone is really devastated, but I'm also kind of fascinated and I don't really understand. This is not a novel observation. I think I've seen it on Twitter. Like how fast everybody turned on JLo in a weird way. Like I feel like now people are like, fuck this woman in a way that we were all kind of in the tank for her.

Up until recently, I'm like fascinated and sad. And it feels like we're watching some kind of car crash in slow motion. That's sort of all I have to say on it. He should have stayed with Ana de Armas. If you're going to get back together with your ex that you broke up with famously like nearly 20 years earlier, you'd think that you would just know in your heart of hearts, this is it for life.

I think that's why we all had like a weird amount of faith in that relationship. I think if the second breakup happened five years from now, it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's pretty recent. Yeah, exactly. They just got married. I don't know that it's easy to be married to either of those people. JLo is, you know, not the biggest star in the world, and she really thinks she is. That said, some of her songs are like real bangers. Waiting for Tonight holds up so good. Jenny from the Block, great. Yeah, whoever sang it did a great job. Yeah.

Amazing place to end this. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Yaz. Thanks, David. Watch me meet J-Lo and have to publicly apologize in five years. You'll tell a story on LinkedIn about it. Like, here's what I learned from the time I slagged off J-Lo and then had to apologize to her five years later. So that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Joe, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Jo. Thanks for having me.

Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, editing by Julia Hsu, mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen.