Episode 38 | Host: Trev Warnke | Guest: Phil Schafer

🔥 Why This Episode Matters

Most entrepreneurs are obsessed with optimizing their business, their calendar, their sales, and their operations.

But they often ignore the one asset everything depends on: their body.

In this episode of Brotherhood Beyond Business, Trev Warnke sits down with Phil Schafer of NOW Optimal Network to talk about hormones, health optimization, longevity, AI in healthcare, and why “normal” health is not the same thing as optimal health.

This conversation matters because a lot of business owners are running on low energy, poor sleep, brain fog, weight gain, stress, and hormone issues while convincing themselves it’s just part of getting older.

Phil challenges that thinking directly. His approach is built around testing, symptoms, education, and helping people take more ownership over their long-term health instead of waiting until something breaks.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

👤 Meet the Host & Guest

• Trev Warnke — Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Profile

  Trev Warnke is an entrepreneur, coach, and co-founder of Brotherhood Beyond Business. Through the Brotherhood community, Trev works with male entrepreneurs who want to build strong businesses without sacrificing their health, faith, or family.

• Phil Schafer — Profile | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

  Phil Schafer is a family and acute care nurse practitioner, serial entrepreneur, and founder of NOW Optimal Network in Prescott, Arizona. Through his work in men’s health, women’s hormone optimization, longevity, primary care, and proactive health testing, Phil helps people better understand their health and make informed decisions that improve energy, vitality, and quality of life.

• NOW Optimal Network — Website | Men's Health Website | Primary Care Website

  Optimal Health and Performance is a chiropractic and wellness clinic focused on helping people move beyond temporary pain relief by addressing the root cause of dysfunction. Their approach centers on building long-term strength, mobility, and performance so clients can live and operate at a higher level.

📌 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why “normal” health markers are not always the same as optimal health

• How hormone optimization can impact energy, sleep, libido, brain fog, and vitality

• Why Phil believes in treating symptoms alongside lab work

• The role AI may play in helping patients ask better health questions

• Why entrepreneurs need to treat health as a serious investment

• The difference between reactive healthcare and proactive health ownership

• Why step-by-step health changes often work better than trying to fix everything at once

• How longevity medicine, gene mapping, and testing may shape the future of healthcare

🧩 Episode Summary

This episode starts with Phil sharing his background as a nurse practitioner and entrepreneur. He explains how NOW Optimal Network was built around a bigger vision than traditional healthcare — helping people understand their bodies, optimize their health, and take a more proactive role in their long-term vitality.

A major theme in the conversation is the difference between “normal” and optimal. Phil explains that many people accept low energy, poor sleep, brain fog, hormone issues, and weight struggles because they assume it is just part of aging. But from his perspective, many of those issues deserve a deeper look through symptoms, labs, education, and individualized treatment.

Trev and Phil also talk through hormone optimization for both men and women, including testosterone, thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, GLP-1s, peptides, nutrition, strength training, and the dangers of trying to fix every problem at once. Phil emphasizes a stepwise approach: address the biggest issues first, track symptoms, retest, and adjust based on real feedback.

The conversation also connects health directly to leadership. Entrepreneurs often invest heavily in business growth while neglecting their body. But if health declines, everything else suffers: family, focus, energy, emotional control, and long-term mission. This episode is a direct reminder that taking care of your body is not selfish. It is part of leading well.

🕒 Episode Timestamps

[00:00] Intro and Phil Schafer’s background
[02:28] NOW Optimal Network, longevity, men’s health, and proactive care
[06:45] Why “normal” health is not always optimal
[10:16] Women’s hormones, symptoms, testing, and education
[21:52] Why Phil uses a step-by-step approach to health optimization
[26:09] How hormone optimization can create life-changing momentum
[39:04] Gene mapping, longevity testing, and preventative health
[47:39] Health ownership, buy-in, and the problem with sick-care medicine
[49:56] Why investing in your health has one of the highest ROIs
[1:11:52] Avoiding snake oil, testing everything, and staying evidence-driven

💡 Quote Highlight

“The ROI in investing in your health is unlike any other ROI.”

🚀 Next Steps

👉 Download our Your Circle is Your Ceiling eBook

👉 Learn more about Our Method

📚 Resources & Links

• Follow BBB on: Website | Instagram | YouTube | X | Facebook | Buzzsprout Podcasts

• Watch the full episode on YouTube

• Want to listen to future episodes: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout

🚀Full Transcript

Trev Warnke (00:39)

Guys, welcome back to another episode of Brotherhood Beyond Business podcast. Today we're speaking with Phil and we're to talk about his business, life, and his legacy. Phil, go ahead and kick off with a little bit about yourself and then let's go ahead and talk about your businesses.

Phil Schafer (00:49)

All right. I'm a family and acute care nurse practitioner in Prescott and kind of a serial entrepreneur. I would say I didn't find more as a entrepreneur over a nurse practitioner at this time. I love opening businesses and experiencing the build of a business and just being a part of that and actually see people's lives change as a result.

Trev Warnke (01:12)

And that would be, in my opinion, kind of a rare combination. You're not going to run into a lot of nurse practitioners that are naturally going to be entrepreneurial mindset. Cause they're a little bit different, both like want to serve, right? For sure. But like they're different mindsets of like one's a building mindset and one's a taking care of mindset. And it doesn't usually, it's like, Hey, here's the things we got to do. versus like building has to be like, how do I like make this for the future for people? So they are kind of unique to having the same person to have like nurse practitioner and also an entrepreneur.

Phil Schafer (01:38)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's been fun. Like, I love my life right now. think being able to build something and then see your patient's lives changed because of what you're building and making them more informed about their health decisions using technology and AI and all these types of things really is empowering. I call it my art. Yeah.

Trev Warnke (02:04)

Yeah, let's take, because I know the way that you have, from my perspective from you is like the way you're kind of like changing how like the health practitioner world is, is specifically with a lot of the AI stuff that's going on has helped you be able to in a sense buy speed for what you guys are doing. And really people put together a lot of information really quickly. dive more. Well, first of all, what type you own, we're at one of your facilities and then talk about the two different clinics that

Phil Schafer (02:28)

Yeah, so I have a longevity clinic. That's where we're at right now. And we do gene mapping. We do hormone replacement for women over here. We do a lot of weight loss stuff. And we do some primary care out of this clinic. And our goal is to just prolong the life of humans. And the technology that is coming down the pipeline is phenomenal. And there's just not a lot of education or good education around.

anti-aging, longevity, and really what true preventative healthcare can look like via gene mapping and a lot of other modalities. And then I also own a men's health company specifically. It's now men'shealth.care. And we do primarily testosterone placement. We treat erectile dysfunction. We do weight loss over there.

And we also put people on workout plans and nutrition plans, and we're really getting into the FDA approved peptides. so it's really, medicine's really exciting right now. And then with the advent of AI, we can use and take information and really be able to allow patients to ask questions on their health. right now, because I think because of COVID, it kind of gave us a, you know,

the medical field kind of a bad rap. There's a lot of distrust, a lot of, government intervention, lot of government distrust. so with the advent of AI, and I don't, I don't dis this at all. is when a patient goes and sees a doctor, the, they go and see a doctor, as soon as they walk out, they get on chat GPT and they say, is my doctor full of crap? And that's fine. But I, but I would like to be able to enter in that conversation.

And because if they are asking these questions about their own health and they're educated on their own health, if I am able to enter that conversation, maybe I'll learn something about what they're doing and what they're curious about or what kind of medications they want to be on or peptides or whatever. Because there's so much information, a lot of it is disinformation. But if we can work on, if we can give the patient really, really, really good

resources by using open evidence or up to date and give them good answers instead of poor context answers with AI. That is the goal.

Trev Warnke (04:46)

Yeah, this, mean, what you're talking about is some of my favorite stuff, like coming from the fitness industry for years. So I've owned a gym for 12 years in Chicago and I owned one for eight years in Iowa as well. And the thing about people want to move the needle in their health, right? And fitness for sure moves the needle in your health. Nutrition for sure moves the needle in your health. But there's a lot of stuff that is out there now that can help people make those more consistent in their life and maximize those.

So for me in my history is I've had a history of binge eating in my life. And so the first thing that ever has that I've lost 80 pounds, I've gained 80 pounds, I've gone back and forth since was 16 years old. That's what really set me down my health journey to begin with to open the gyms because I want to like control this factor. And the first tool that's ever really helped the binge eating thing is a GLP-1. And most people like wouldn't look at a fitness person as somebody that would look at that.

But that was the first thing that ever allowed me to control my binge eating for the first time in my life to be able to like, okay, now I can go down to the weight that I can actually control, lift and do all my other stuff, be able to control that stuff. But like you were saying with the AI stuff is like, I've had to do a lot of research on AI and luckily I have a background in as a nutrition certified nutritionist to know enough to like, okay, I know what avenues to, when I'm hearing the input from a chat to be to be kind of like, that's bullshit. Cause most people don't realize most AIs are not perfect by any means and the information that they're giving out.

is context-based, right? And so when you're that feedback from there, I know how to navigate like, I know this isn't true, or if this is true, this is like in terms of the health marker. So what I believe in what protein recommendations are is different than what medical doctors usually are for gaining muscle, right? And so if I'm looking for one gram per pound of body weight, I know the AI is not feeding me that number. They're looking more a lot of medical literature, but there's different avenues to kind of look at. the idea is like with AI in general is a great tool if you know the parameters you're looking through.

Whereas that's when you guys can come in like, hey, one, you're not looking, from what I know about, you're not looking for the bottom of the barrel like numbers, you're looking to optimize their health metrics.

Phil Schafer (06:45)

100%.

And our position is we know that a lot of people are living quote unquote normal lives. think everything is normal. And my position is that normal is not normal. And because of the things that we've done, the foods that we eat, the lack of sleep, the high cortisol levels, the systemic low testosterone as a society, all these types of things keep us between living an optimal and really healthy life. And it doesn't have to be that.

Like just with education and optimizing hormones first, before we get on all the other pills for ills, GLPs, whatever, that is what I aim to do. I want to basically optimize what our creator naturally gave us. And then we can use the other tools, ancillary tools to really help change your life. But sometimes, you know, the GLP is just a really quick way. It gives people hope. It gives them like, okay, I can actually get control of

And so we put people on those. But there's so many other things that are associated with them that a lot of people don't think about, like the muscle loss associated with those. And that to me is really concerning. It's like, is it an ethical position for me to prescribe GLPs to somebody that's not working out? Massive. It's like, I personally refuse to do it. Because if you're not maintaining that muscle, GLPs are going to eat that muscle, right?

and then they're gonna have the hanging skin and then they're, you know, that's really hard to fix.

Trev Warnke (08:12)

Yeah, and that's a good thing for the people. The way you pointed that out is like for my history, I lift consistently. I lift four days a week, strength training. Me and my wife have been doing nutrition coaching for years together. So my issue was always that had binge eating happen no matter how well I was on nutrition. So our nutrition was on point except for an occasional binge eat each week. That was from stress from running for businesses really where most of it comes from. But the idea was we lift consistently.

We have a high, high protein intake. We're probably more carnivore than the average person is closer to that spectrum. Not that I don't eat carbs, but we just eat more meats in general normally. like, yeah, so I love that feedback that you brought in there because a lot of people, when I bring that up, like, GLP worked one great for Trevor, but also the other aspects that you brought up, I knew all those things and was really, really good with those habits. I just couldn't kick the binge eating.

Once I add the GLP-1 in and kick the binge eating, holy crap, the weight came off, yes, because the GLP-1 does great for that, but also because I'm taking 3,000 extra calories a week out of my diet that wasn't ever supposed to be there.

Phil Schafer (09:09)

Yeah, so it like you're doing everything right. You had the ancillary tools and that's perfect, a perfect thing for, that's a perfect GLP use, I would say, because you are consistently working out. Yeah, so just those types of things that I just want to be able to, I know that my patients are gonna go out and they're gonna ask Chachi Pati and I'm fine with that. So we created an app where,

They can ask chachi PT, but then they can press another button that says ask my doctor and automatically goes into the chart. So next time that we see them, we can ask them and talk about if they want about the things that they're searching. And that to me is really where the gold is. And it's like they're searching it. Then I can research up to date or open evidence and really get good information so that I can give that to the patients. So that's, that's really the next step. think of medicine.

Trev Warnke (09:59)

Let's go take a step back first to your, on the women's health clinic side more of that, to start there. On that side, so when somebody comes to you, what is the initial thing you guys put them through? Do you put them through like, we're gonna do blood testing first? Where's kind of your initials are with somebody?

Phil Schafer (10:16)

So we initially do a full physical and then we give them a symptom checklist or symptom checklist is pages long. Like I really get in their kitchen, specifically with females. I wanna make sure that they're serious, number one, about changing their lives because women are very, very complex. They're the most complex creatures, I think, because they do not just have testosterone. Like men, you just increase their testosterone usually.

Optimized with thyroid and they feel great. Women, they have progesterone, they have testosterone, they have estrogen, and you treat a woman with a hysterectomy different than a woman with a partial hysterectomy, different than a woman that's menstruating normally, different than a woman that's transitioning to menopause. And you mess any of those things up, they go crazy on you. And so there has to be a lot of education, a lot of conversation.

And we really have to listen to what they're saying, what they're willing to tell us. And if they're willing to tell us what's going on in their lives. Yeah. I have no libido. I have hair loss. I have brain fog. I am exhausted all the time. I can't sleep at night. I'm like, my gosh, this is likely testosterone, estradiol thyroid problem. do a full panel of labs and then we try to connect all of them. And then once we have all our data.

then we dose them appropriately for testosterone, estrogen, or progesterone. And we may not get it right the first time. I prefer pelleting because I understand pelleting really well. And I may not get it right the first time because I don't know how their body really drinks the testosterone, metabolizes the testosterone or hormone. And so I bring them back three months later and I...

or I bring them back five weeks later when they're kind of peeking in the hormone and I redraw their labs, give them new symptom checklist so I can objectively see whether I'm helping them or not. And then usually by the second time I have them really dialed in. And I always do those really conservative and I always go really slow with women because you don't want to mess that up and you want it to be a somewhat good experience. And I haven't always done it right. I've really educated myself in female hormones.

Trev Warnke (12:17)

And that's what you're talking about there is perfect because I think most women, and we'll talk about men here in a little bit too, but most women think what they're going through is just, that's normal. Everybody else goes through this. And it's like, well, it is normal in terms of hormonal fluctuation is normal through it. You know, that's, that's the way we were designed. But there's a lot of things out there that can help there and optimize and realistically in their thirties before menopause, they weren't optimized to begin with, let alone going then into menopause, which is changing those hormonal levels. So they're not optimizing their normal hormones, let alone changing hormones.

I think what you're saying there is awesome. I think a lot of women deal with lot of hormonal imbalances and just think like, I just have to deal with this for like 10 years or whatever. This is something that you can work on right now, improve your life instantly. And just because you come out of menopause doesn't mean you're going to be going into a good hormonal state naturally.

Phil Schafer (13:02)

And I tell people we have to look at medicine a little differently. Traditional Western medicine treats numbers. They don't treat symptoms generally. We weigh heavily on symptoms and then we match them with the numbers. We want to get the labs as a baseline to treat the symptoms. And it's a different way to look at it. So normal testosterone for women is likely between 10 and 80.

But when we often get their total testosterone to 180, because that's generally when women feel really, really good and do not have a lot of bad symptoms like the hair growth or the lower voice or anything like that. And so it just, there's just so much education. I love to teach and I love to teach. I want my patients to really understand what I'm giving them so that they can be, play a part in this journey because it's not, it doesn't happen overnight.

Like I said, women are very, very complex and I don't want to mess it up. I mean, I feel like we get one chance with this, right? I mean, you come into a provider, you're burying your soul to them and they may not get it right the first time and you need to build that trust in order for them to want to come back and actually feel like you know what you're doing and actually are a partner in helping change their life.

Trev Warnke (14:23)

That's where the AI really comes in important too. For most women, a low testosterone level usually will mean that they have low libido. That can be big issue with libido. Most women though are really nervous about testosterone because they think of it as a male hormone and they think about all the negatives that come with that. Where AI comes in important there is you could know, this person left my office and the first question they had is why is my doctor recommending testosterone? No matter how well you explained it, still like, they in many ways probably weren't even listening that well because they were like, man, why is he talking about testosterone? I don't need testosterone.

and then they go back to the AI and ask those questions and that gives you feedback to be like, okay, like good. Like now I know the questions that they're really asking that I, in the moment you couldn't, even if you answered them, couldn't really answer them because they had to get out of that office to be like, to sit down and think like what's really bothering.

Phil Schafer (15:06)

And then what is AI saying at that time? Like is it saying old data, like the WHO study? mean, recently women's hormone replacement therapy, just the black box label was removed from hormone replacement therapy for women. This is massive, huge. Now is what AI are they getting this information from? What if I can enter in

the conversation and give them a couple of books on where I get my data from or where I get my training from and what the latest research is and have that conversation. they can, they may be like, is testosterone going to make my voice deeper? the answer is yes. But it also depends on their free testosterone, the sex hormone binding globulin, their total testosterone, how their, body metabolizes the hormones, how much they're pelleted, all these types of things, where they're at in their

their whole menopausal journey, you know, and that's why we get all the labs that we get so that we can actually make a really good conservative college try at this, right? Because we really want to change their lives. We really want to improve, objectively improve their lives. And we can do it. I mean, we give them a symptom checklist at the start, and then five weeks later, we give them the same exact symptom checklist. If I'm not helping them, then I have to go back to the drawing board and fix them. Usually by the second time I see

They're objective labs, they're objective symptoms, and by the three month mark, I have them dialed in. And then it really gets fun. And when you have a woman that's like, whole life has changed, it's truly the best medicine. It's like the joke around my church is that I turn 80 year olds into rabbits again. I've had 80 year olds come up to me and like, I haven't had sex like that since I was 18 years old. I mean, that's amazing.

Life is too short to not have a great sex life, to not have vitality, to not feel good, to not get good sleep because it's there. It's like within reach. The technology that we have with optimizing hormones are absolutely amazing right now. And that's my stake in the ground. It's hormone optimization because I am just optimizing what God or whatever you believe your creator to be naturally created us to be. We just messed it up. By the foods we eat.

what we do to our body, all vaccines maybe that we take, I don't know, but generally I think we messed it up as human race. And if I can optimize it, then I'm just helping move that needle forward.

Trev Warnke (17:26)

What is that side where as technology technology has gotten better, the idea is like we used to eat a certain way in the early 1900s. Now we eat completely different. So well, as technology has gotten better, we should eat, we should be eating better. But realistically we're eating worse, not because of our choices, because the food that we've been given, something like that, that stuff that's certainly out of our control. and meaning like we haven't, we aren't the ones that created that information that was created over time about us.

But that's the issue with AI is AI is pulling from that data over that timeframe. Who knows how far you go back. Got to go back to find out when truly we were eating as close to how God created us to eat was because that's human intervention over time. We make our own choices and it's not always in the best interest of the people that are eating it for best health or we get kind of like with the heart attack stuff that was given to us back in what the 1950s and they started changing what caused cholesterol, cholesterol information around

I remember what president died of a heart attack and that's when that started the whole process of them changing that cholesterol information. Way different than what we used to think about cholesterol then, now we think way differently. And cholesterol for the most part isn't really as big of an issue as the average person would think it is. We have a lot of things in place that can negatively impact that, specifically on the male side of things, because that's obviously important for heart attack knowledge. But there's just a lot of misinformation out there and misinformation is so hard to figure out what the real correct information is because we're not studying all that information.

But I do love kind of finishing up on the female topic is how you're going into a lot of symptom based stuff because one, you can give the exact same doses to each person and each person is going to come back with different symptom results, right? Like, Hey, this improved, this didn't improve. I'll use like a GLP one specifically for as an example for me is like how I reacted to a GLP one was different than other people that I knew were on GLP ones in terms of like, had really, I had a lot of struggle with skin sensitivity that other people just

didn't have that issue, but they also had trouble where they couldn't eat enough calories and I could eat enough calories and dosage. And there's so many other equations that go into that, but it's not a perfectly perfect across the board on how symptoms are reacted, how our body's recovering from those, how our body's reacting to those. So having an interventionist like you, somebody that's okay, I'm obviously going to give you the here's a starting plan, but we've got to keep adjusting this and adjusting this and adjusting this almost for all time. You know, it's never, never going to be perfect. And I would say one of the obstacles that I run into the most being the fitness industry.

Because people just aren't the most patient, right? This is all industries, but most patient. How do you kind of overcome the fact that people are like, hey, I got this, like, is it five weeks later? I don't, plus especially one weekend, they're like, nothing's changed. Like, how do you kind of deal with that?

Phil Schafer (19:53)

realistic expectations and I hammer realistic expectations. say, I may not get this right the first time. I say, this is for women specifically, say, give me six months to change your life. you know, if I cannot change your mind in six months, me the finger and say bye Felicia. You know what I mean? Like that's fine. Like I'd know, but generally I am so confident that I can make a tangible difference in your life that you'll keep coming back.

That's all there is to it. can objectively show you that there is an improvement in your life by what you are saying, not me trying to make things up. I mean, yeah, sometimes the frustration is like three months later, they're like, okay, I felt good for like three weeks. I'm like, okay, well maybe your dose was not where we needed it to be. And I checked for five weeks and sure enough, they're suboptimal and I have to increase their dose the next time. Or you overshoot them because they're drinking the hormones too well in their body and I have to decrease the dose a couple.

And so that that happens to every woman is different. I mean everybody weighs differently everybody You know if there's prior drug use they'll have bad sex hormone binding globulins and then they have to we have to give them a lot more hormone to get them therapeutic because all those those hormone receptors are burned they're not they're not You know, you have to everybody's different and that's why I love the term bioidentical hormones because we are dosing them based on their symptoms on their weight on their height on their labs

And it's specific to them. Their dose is specific to them, conservatively based on thousands and thousands of women that we pelleted. And the more women that we pelleted, the more conversations that we have with them, the more data that we get, because we keep track of that stuff. It's just, it's fun. It's fun medicine. It's fun to be able to objectively have a very defeated, balling woman in my office and three months later, or six months later, have a completely changed woman and see their whole quality of life changed.

Trev Warnke (21:47)

And do you encourage like good nutrition and fitness and kind of having that routine as well figured out?

Phil Schafer (21:52)

Initially, easy wins, man. Easy, easy wins because it just getting them through the door and burying their soul is a lot. So I try very carefully to, go really slow. change one thing, come back five. And I'm, I'm, I'm their cheerleader basically more than anything. It's like, don't, I don't try and put them on generally. I don't try and put them on GLPs, change your thyroid, put them on testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone all in one visit.

Like it's a stepwise process because, you know, for thyroid, for example, mean, testosterone fixes brain fog, but so does thyroid, right? And so if I put them on both at the same time, I don't know which one's working. So I optimize one hormone or three hormones, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, and then I optimize their thyroid. And then if they still want to lose weight and those two, I call them the elephants in the room, because why would I want to put somebody on a GLP

If I'm missing the big elephant, the big elephant is hormone optimization. The second big elephant in my world is thyroid optimization because most patients go to a doctor and they say, your thyroid's fine. Your numbers are fine. You don't have hypothyroidism. I'm super passionate on this because my wife, after our third child had normal thyroid, but every doctor she went to

And told I am exhausted all the time. I'm sleeping all the time. I have severe brain fog. They just like your thyroid is normal, but a thyroid was not normal at all. It wasn't optimized at all. so, like Matt, dude, was, I was afraid to leave her at home with my kids. She'd leave the oven on, she'd the stove on. I thought she'd like burn down my house. Like, and so was like desperate for help. So it was very personal to me. And so we optimize her thyroid, change her whole life, whole life.

Like no more brittle nails, no more brain fog, sleeping through the night, better quality of life. I was just able to tangibly see it. And it just, that's why I believe in this so much because it is so personal, know, hormone replacement therapy changed my life. lost 50 pounds on it. I feel vigorous and the healthiest I've ever been. I'm 41 tomorrow. And I just, feel the best shape of my life because of hormone optimization. That is the elephant. That is the elephant. We have to do that first. And then

everything else.

Trev Warnke (24:10)

Yeah. I mean, this is all this stuff is awesome. Cause I always think about just optimizing everything, right? Like I just want my life perfectly optimized. Yeah. it is, it's you're trying to figure it out stuff all out is the way I go. But the way you said it is like, if the peptide craze has happened and I think peptides are awesome personally, but like what happens is most people will go out and like, here's all the symptoms I have and they'll go out to something online and buy four different peptides to try to fix everything they've ever struggled with. it's like,

But you have no idea one, there's a safety component, all that kind of stuff. But if we just go out, you have no idea if one of those even was the thing that fixed it, like you said, is like we need to start one thing and try to solve that problem first. if this example for that, for like a male, like maybe it's your testosterone and we'll fix that first. And if that didn't, maybe then it's the thyroid next. But if we try to fix them both, we have no idea which one actually is the thing that improved it. And then from there to be able to gauge what other symptoms could come off of that happening.

Whereas most people, go in and they try to fix it all at once because they want quick results, but they're going to already, by changing one of those things, they're going to get amazing, incredible results. Then they change the other one and it's just going to keep scaling. And if you could take your life right now, if you could take the average person, say, if in two months from now, I could say your life was 10 % improved, just energy wise, 10%, you have 10 % more energy. Most people are like, I would take that right now. You can even tell somebody in two months from now, you lost 10 pounds, would you be happy? They'd be like, But a week into something,

And you're like, I haven't lost 10 pounds yet. Like you just said, you'd be fine two months from now. I've lost 10 pounds. But in the moment, it feels so like I want to change right now. But that was a good advice. I hope people listen to that part is we got to slow down with how fast we are making changes. Cause these changes with the stuff that we have hormonal hormone therapy, peptide therapy, even fitness and exercise changes can happen in a really, relatively short period of time overall. But we've got to slowly integrate those. And I do like probably said with nutrition and even fitness things like

If you haven't done those things in the past and you're not doing those, let's start and get some of this stuff optimized. Once you get more energy, fitness and stuff will be so much easier to go to Planet Fitness and show up and do Planet Fitness because man, I actually have enough energy to wake up today.

Phil Schafer (26:09)

You just have to do stepwise process. Take care of the elephants first. If I can get their energy improved, if I can get them to feel like they have control of their health, their whole life could be changed. And I've seen it. had a guy that looked like a toothpaste. mean, he was just 350 pounds. He could barely walk, barely fit through my door and defeated. He is a very, very wealthy guy in this town. And we started

just with hormone therapy, optimize hormones. He started to become a fanatic. Now he's absolutely a fanatic. Like his whole life has completely changed. He works out twice a day now. He weighs 180 pounds. He's having an operation to take all the fat off and he just looks like a completely different person two years later.

Trev Warnke (27:02)

small time in a lifetime, right? Two years is not very

Phil Schafer (27:04)

He lived, he lived six, you know, several years, several years of his life. don't know, 20, 30 years.

morbidly obese. Like he's been given a new lease on his life. And now he's like, Phil, I need you to check this lab, this lab, this. He's reading all these books, books that I have no idea about. And I'm like, Hey man, let's talk about it. I'll order whatever you want. You're to pay for it, but I'll order whatever. I love the conversation. Love the conversation. And so it helps me be a better provider when they are like this, because man, I don't know everything. I just know a lot about very specific things.

And, and if there's more that I can learn to help better their health, man, I'm all in. Like most, most my extracurricular activities are going to longevity conferences because I am nerdy now on how to prolong life. go to these conferences. see 80 years old. looks like not a day past 50. And I'm at 40 years old. So this is personal for me. Like, what do I have to do now to look like that at 80 years old? mean,

the foods we eat. That's a big them. Everything's going back to the foods we eat. And then it's also like insulin resistance. Where are we keeping our triglycerides? Where are we keeping our blood sugars? You know, I put in patients on continuous glucose monitors, we mapping their genetics to prevent, prevent, do real preventative care? I have some stories on that if you want to get into that. Like to me, that's the next step of medicine is genetics.

Trev Warnke (28:34)

So let's go take a step back from that, because all this stuff excites the hell out of me personally. So I just turned 40 a little over a month ago. so me and my wife talk about, aren't having kids, we aren't even going to think about having kids until I'm 45. She'll be 43. So we're going to adopt, which gives us a lot easier equation for we don't have to be on a time clock specifically. But the thing that we always talk about that allows us to think, I'm not going to have kids until 45. You're going to be an old parent.

I'm like, but I'm okay with that because I've always thought about, can take care of, I have all these things that are my controllables, right? My controllables are, I've been doing fitness my entire life. I've been really concentrated on my nutrition for a good portion of my life. And now with the peptide stuff coming out, hormone therapy, optimization, all that kind of stuff coming out, I can be a 65 year old dad, 70 year old dad at sports games and look just as good as the 40 year olds. I have no doubt in my mind that by the time I get to that age, because of all the stuff that I want to optimize health-wise in my life.

that when I get to that point, God willing that nothing else happens outside of that, I have these controllables that will make me feel just as young as those guys, but I have patience and stuff for the kids at that point in my life. Right now we have a very active, very busy life. Hopefully this will be a little bit less, more boring that time when we do have kids. So that excites me about where the future is going.

Phil Schafer (29:47)

But you also want to keep up with these kids. You don't want to be a 60 year old dad that can't even get out of his, know, lazy boy. Yeah.

Trev Warnke (29:49)

Exactly

And that's stuff like, uh, that that's awesome. But also that's a whole nother fitness conversation, but the fitness stuff is as I've aged, my fitness philosophies changed a lot too, because it used to be just getting as big and strong as possible. And now it's like changing to mobility and stuff like that for longevity purposes. So I used to weigh at my fittest and pretty jacked thing. I was like two 55. And when I, the more I learned about longevity realized like, that's not good for me long-term because the lighter you are, the longer you're to live. So I've been working my weight down, hopefully trying to get down to the 200 range eventually in two 20.

221 right now, but we're trying to transition you over in the male conversation now But as I move down that path is like, okay now I got to move over to like longevity training more like okay How do I become more mobile they would have like not be a sword stiff and stuff But the peptides and the hormone I use some I do TRT right now And so TRT replacement kind of stuff for that too that stuff has helped me out hormonally a lot But I look at talk when I talk to men because obviously with the brotherhood our focus is me and men I don't really talk to women much about that stuff

my wife is really into that stuff. So I'm going to have her start doing some stuff with you because she's 37 and it's like super, super fit, but she's worried about menopause coming sometime in the future. So she's trying to figure that stuff out on the male category. I talked to a lot of men that are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are not the healthiest group of people. for the most part, it's like, goes business, then family and family is a very small chunk of that category and health is even a smaller chunk of that quarter.

So when I talked to men a lot about where their future is going, was like, hey, you guys, we actually have the ability to put a minimal effective dose towards a lot of things and make amazing results. So example would be like, hey, I can tell you exactly how many hours a week you should be doing strength training. I can say 60 total minutes, 20 minutes a day for three times a week. If you maximize that strength training window, you can actually get all the strength you'll ever need for rest of your life and just maintain that every single week.

along top of that, the idea from here, now we've got to more, spend more time on mobility as we age, because now we're going to end up with kyphosis and all these issues with that kind of stuff. And the other part then is nutrition. And then I start, I've been starting to talk more about hormone optimization because I'm like, guys, that's like, that's taking that little bit of time that we have to focus on our health. It's just a smaller window, but we're taking it using these other things to like literally multiply that.

like take this 20 minutes, but all the other things that we're doing to optimize is taking that 20 minutes and making it worth the two hours we used to spend in the gym.

Phil Schafer (32:10)

I think it just annexes everything. Yeah. I'm going to optimize my mom's. I mean, it's just, I just better.

Trev Warnke (32:16)

It is. the more, my mind definitely aren't to the full optimization of where I think they need to be. But I can tell as I've gone down that route more, the better I feel. And being somebody that does health and fitness consistently, I've always felt good until I got my hormones more and more optimized. Like, holy smokes. Like I've always thought, you know, compared to the average person that in 40, I probably feel like I'm 27 is what I feel like. And this is without hormones, but as I've optimized more and more, like, man, I feel...

I was back at wedding this weekend with my nephews and nieces and I'm sprinting with them playing football at 40 years old and they're in high school, right? I haven't done that in years because I just feel so physically good.

Phil Schafer (32:53)

That's awesome.

Trev Warnke (32:55)

So for men, when they first come to let's go down the male route kind stuff, where, I mean you're gonna go through the whole symptoms and stuff like that, but where is like probably the one or two areas where like this is probably where most men have to start. This is usually what they're lacking the most when they're walking.

Phil Schafer (33:08)

Ego.

Trev Warnke (33:10)

That's probably a good start, right?

Phil Schafer (33:11)

straight up. if egos, everything, they don't want to share everything. It's really personal to them. Yeah. You know, no guy wants to come in and, and tell you that they can't get it up and that, you know, their wife is not happy. They can't please their wives in the bedroom. They can't, they don't have a voraciousness or vitality or longevity in the bedroom. That's a big part, you know, so getting over their ego to, really have them feel comfortable enough.

I think and to feel safe enough to talk about this is always the biggest thing. And so you've been over to my other office and we created that to be a place that looks like no other doctor's office ever. mean, we have guys come by and just hanging out and my doctor is so great. Dr. Witten is amazing. You just go over there and you hang out with him and it's a cool office. And we have all the generals hanging on from every branch. mean,

We're really big and supportive of veterans and first responders. We discount them heavily. We care deeply for our community and we want them to be very comfortable. So generally that's kind of our main priority first is to earn the trust of men. And so that they hopefully will.

know, and trust us so that we can ask them the hard questions. Like, Hey, what's going on? Really? Are you turning over and cutting sheets or have you not had, can you not remember when last time you had a hard on, you know what I mean? And, you know, that's personal. And a lot of guys, you I'm a man. don't, you know, like, come on, bro. You're not a man. I want to help you be a man. Like that's the way, the way that's the way God designed us. And we can, there's so much hope here, but you got to tell me what's going on so I can help.

And generally, that responded real well.

Trev Warnke (34:57)

Well, that's the part two of like the ego side is like, we also have these associations that as I get older, I should be losing these things, right? So I've been told for most of my life that like, you know, I will get less erections as I get older and stuff like that. And it's like, well, that's not actually how it works. Hormonally, can, we're in a day now where we can actually hormonally control those things too, to be, you can be 80 years old and still be getting hard on this kind of stuff.

Phil Schafer (35:20)

Dude, I seen 80 year olds have kids still. Like it's just, that's, it's crazy. It's like, can still have a very, extremely high quality of life at 70 or 80 years old. And it's what we do now. The, you know, being intentional about having the most malus skeletal muscle on our body going into aging. That is what the latest research is showing. And it's like, you have to be strong. You have to be, you have to build muscle to prolong longevity later on in life.

there's a lady that I follow that I've seen at a few longevity conference. name is Gabriel lion and she's all about stuff. I love her club for a while. Really? Like I, you know, I follow her diet. I just love that. What she's about and her like, she's just amazing doctor and she, lives it totally lives it. And, I think, you know, that's what I'm trying to get my patients to get. It takes a while. can't over, you can't overnight look amazing. You have to work at it.

Trev Warnke (35:56)

her book.

Phil Schafer (36:15)

You have to be intentional. And, but the first thing is how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And the first bite is getting over your ego and telling me what's going on. And, and, and if you're not there yet, that's fine too. Like I'm, I'm here for that. And just, but once we earn their trust, like we can really, really make a dent and change your life. That is, I mean, man across the street to give me a hug because of what we're doing in their family. And there's just no better. I personally don't think there's any better medicine.

You have a defeated guy. are a lot quicker. You can change your life in three months, not six. And it's fun. It's so fun.

Trev Warnke (36:52)

Yeah, it's as we've kind of focused our business on male entrepreneurs and kind of narrowed that down to that group. I look at that. So in our model, we go like we have our 10 domains. Domain number one is faith because nothing happens without God. Right. And number two is physical dominance because I think by becoming a physically dominant man, and that can be in a lot of ways, but strength, getting fit, lean, also being able to like jujitsu, like be able to be strong. I had podcasts on Friday with the owner of the jujitsu studio in

pescavali, Michael. so we were just talking about that. so we're going through, but yeah, physical domicile that you did is like, part of being a man is being physical, being physically like strong, feeling good. Like you said, as they age, it's important to keep that muscular strength. And I think most men don't realize that. mean, owning gyms for years, we have guys that are at our gym there in their mid sixties now, and they look like they're probably early fifties. And that's without doing, I don't know if they're doing any hormonal replacement, but that's just like being doing fitness and being with us 10 years now.

or 10 years, it proves to me watching these guys go from 50 years, start training when they're in their early 50s, and now they're still working out there in their early 60s. like, Mark, I don't think you've aged in 10 years because they're doing their physical fitness. But we really push hard on entrepreneurs, male entrepreneurs, the idea is like, this is part of one of your roles and responsibilities as a husband, as a protector, to become physically dominant and take care of that component. Because if you want to be, you want to make all this money from 30 to 50 years old, you want to make all this money. And then you're,

quality of life just literally starts going down so fast that the money doesn't do anything for you after that point. But all that money that you had, you can reinvest in yourself and get all of that back in tenfold. But if you started earlier, it would be better still.

Phil Schafer (38:31)

No, 100%.

Trev Warnke (38:33)

Cause we're both, what we're both in our early forties. It's it's the idea is like, want it to be able to like, okay, we're already starting to optimize that early 40. Cause I'm like, I know I don't feel as good as I did at 27. I feel certain ways about that. I'm 27, but I know I don't feel hormonally the same. did a 27. Well, I'm not there yet. hoping that you pick your brain more about that going forward is being able to optimize some of the other hormonal things that down the route. But that is the side where I think.

Phil Schafer (38:46)

I do.

Trev Warnke (38:57)

I'm just so excited for where the longevity and I do want to get into just the gene mapping just a little bit because I don't know much about that. So go ahead and tell me a little bit more about that.

Phil Schafer (39:04)

So I didn't understand a lot. I mean, even as early as maybe seven or eight months ago, but I've been going to several longevity conferences and just really trying to educate myself and then testing it. So I found a company that can map almost 15,000 DNA strands. And to me, that is mind blowing. A lot of gene companies, genomic companies, they only do like...

30 or 50 or 100, but to be able to do 15,000, man, that to me is just so cool. And so I did an objective test. I took one of my patients that I know really, really well, that I've known for the last couple of years. have all his labs. He is like the, you look up Greek God in the dictionary and his picture's right there. Like he's 50 something years old.

Optimize on testosterone. He looks great can hike forever. Just a man's man. I'm like he's perfect. He's perfect He doesn't really have any major health issues and so we did the cheek swab and we sent it off he answered a novel of questions and It came back with some very very interesting things And and it just blew my mind so one

thing that came back as you're super high risk for fatty liver disease, that x-teatosis. And so I'm well, let me look at your previous liver enzymes over the last year. And maybe they're on the high side of normal, or maybe they're slightly elevated, but nothing that would concern me at all. And he's willing to spend the money for the, what I call preventative diagnostic tests. Like you have no reason to get them, just because, the only reason is because of this genetic testing and saying, hey, you're at high risk for this. And so.

We do that, and we do an ultrasound of his abdomen, and sure enough, has hepatic steatosis, fatty liver disease. I'm like, whoa, that's interesting. That is preventable, not preventative. We can prevent, we can actually change the way we eat and actually improve that, right? And so the next thing that we found was it's super, super, super high risk of thyroid cancer. Look at all those thyroid labs, thyroid lab's perfect. Granted, he doesn't have an optimized thyroid, but his thyroid looks...

Not bad. You know, normal numbers as most doctors would say. So you do an ultrasound of his thyroid and this one just like emotionally just really gets me because they found five nodules on his thyroid. There's nothing wrong with his thyroid. Two of them are super highly suspicious for cancer and I need you to watch it. So like, I'm like just getting chills, man, because that had nothing wrong. He looks perfect. Right. The other thing that, that really gets me is like,

Okay, when you go to a doctor, you ask them, do you have family history of cardiac disease? But then that's all you ask. And so I knew he had a family history of cardiac disease. I just didn't know what extent, right? Because I didn't ask those questions. So another thing came back, super, super high risk of early cardiac death. And so then I'm like, hey, tell me more about your family history. And he's like, yeah, my dad had multiple stents. had quadruple bypass. He like...

He barely lived after his like last bypass. I'm like, holy smokes. gotta do a cardiogram. We gotta do an EKG. We gotta really see what's going on there and see if there's, know, maybe a CT angiogram to see kind of what's going on with your heart. This is, and if you're willing to spend the money that we can actually really get on the front end of this and truly.

prevent disease. And to me, that's like, that's really kind of as a practitioner, the only word that comes to get off on like, I just love that. I freaking love that man, because this guy looks healthy. Like he is, he's a man's man. And in every, I mean, he's an entrepreneur, he's a businessman, he's, he's optimizing testosterone, he works out consistently, he just got married, he's very sexually active, like all these things perfect.

But I can just tell you some things that like, holy smokes, I'm so glad we found these things. So let's build you a plan to now help you eat right, to optimize your thyroid, to make sure you get that thyroid ultrasound every single year on the dot. So we can see if those suspicious nodules grow. That's true medicine to me. That's just like, I wish we could sell this to the insurance companies and get them on this. I wish we totally changed our whole.

our whole paradigm of medicine for this. And then take all that data, all this data, and get on your phone, one device, and ask questions. This is Peptide.

Is this medication good for me? Should I be on a stent or should I be on red yeast rice and cook you tin for my cholesterol? You know what I mean? Let's keep an eye on that. And then you're asking questions on your own data and you press a button, say, Hey, let's show this to my doctor next time we talk. I'm curious about this. That's where it gets fun, man. And I, as a provider, get better because there's so much out there. don't know, but I want to have those conversations with my patients that I care deeply about.

Trev Warnke (44:12)

yeah. And I look at it from like, so working with a lot of male entrepreneurs is so if, conversations, we start to go down the wealth route, people start talking about wealth and like, where should I invest this money? And this kind of, it's like, there's a category where this is one of the most important things that you're talking about where money should be invested, right? Because this is creating the ability from an entrepreneur, maybe living till 71, 72, which there's a lot of studies that show, as they break into entrepreneurs, they live.

a little bit less, not as long as the average male does. The average male was 78, is that right? Something like that. And entrepreneurs, think 72. It's usually probably stress related is probably the reason that happened and not taking good care of their health. But the idea is like, you're getting your most entrepreneurs over time have created decent amount of wealth with investments and stuff. Well, we should be taking a portion of that money. And it's probably a very small portion of that money realistically with comparable how much people are usually investing. I mean, this is how much I need to be investing in this kind of stuff. Cause like you said with that guy, as he's going through all these things like,

Well, I mean, he's just invested a little bit more money. It probably wasn't outrageous comparable what he made to invest a little bit more money in his health and kind of figure out what these like smoking guns are. Right. Things are like everything else looks perfect. And what, I mean, they, had these with some professional athletes that die at 51 and they look like Greek gods. And all of a sudden they die at 51. Like why didn't this guy die? Because his whole health, when you look over his whole health history, it was like the heart attack that was coming was impossible to avoid because nobody would ever pay attention to that was in his history. He could have been look perfect and done everything right, but he couldn't prevent that without.

digging into the things and figuring out how to avoid that, maybe eat differently for that kind of stuff. But I think from an entrepreneur perspective is this needs to be a true investment in like the wealth category. should be, different types of wealth for sure. And that health category should be an actual financial of the investment. Like this is how much money out of the things I'm diversifying accounts. It's actually making me think as I think through our system for the brotherhood with the wealth category, I needed like, hey, this longevity health should literally be part of your thing because if you're somebody that's going to make a lot of money, lot of entrepreneurs have built businesses that are

can extrapolate their whole life. I they their recurring income or they can keep getting this money until they're 90, 100 years old. But if they're dying in their 60s or something, what's the point of that? I mean, for your family's sake for sure. But like now you can take yourself and live from 60 to 90 and live with good health. amount of money, if you're just thinking money you could create in that 30 year window of time by just investing your health in your 40s and 50s and 60s, like it just blows my mind. Cause I'm thinking obviously longevity for stuff, but I'm not nearly there the way you are thinking about. you've obviously seen.

the effects of that stuff's done for you, also other people you've done. So it's just really cool to sit there and think about what the potential looks like in our lifetime of what we can do. I don't, mean, biblically, I don't believe in the people that are going to like the idea of like that Brian Johnson's going to live forever. like, I wouldn't want to biblically because I want to my creator. Like I want that, but I want to live the best life I have while I have the time to and maximize my ability to give back, you know, like

I just heard of this guy that he's 93 years old and he's going overseas to do mission work to build a business over there. And people are trying to talk him out of building a mission business over there. You're 93, you should enjoy your last three years. Yeah, and he's like, hey, I'm 93. I want to go out dying, putting my energy forward because I'm doing this at the Lord's work, right? And I'm like, that's the idea. Like I want to be 93 years old and be like, I'm still going as hard as I can for moving God's mission forward in life.

Phil Schafer (47:08)

Thank

Trev Warnke (47:22)

because I have the energy to do so instead of sitting on my couch for the next three years and dying in a nursing home. Like I'm going forward and we have the ability, you specifically have the ability that, and you're starting to like, well, you know, every year he said in the last seven months, look at what you've learned. Imagine the next year, what you're going to learn, be able to scale people's health so much faster.

Phil Schafer (47:39)

Man, so fun. it's like, that's the, that is my whole life. I opened a primary care insurance based primary care, and I just lost the passion for primary care because it's insurance based insurance based model. It's very entitlement driven. And it's like, when somebody puts their own cash forward to better their health, they have more buy in. It's like, I can't make you be healthy. I can't change the way you're going to eat. I will not give you a pill.

You know, well, not, you know, I truly so much believe in hormone optimization and buy-in. If we don't have those two, you're not going to get healthy. So it's like everything that I'm trying to do is trying to be your cheerleader and help motivate you to have buy-in for your own health. Because, you know, that's why it's like, I think the insurance based model is going to has to be there, but I wish we could like change that model to

to empower people to be healthy. And you can. It's just there's so much money in sick medicine, so much money in sick medicine that it just doesn't make sense.

Trev Warnke (48:49)

The physical therapist I see here, see him just for like, I don't have anything wrong, but I'm just trying to maximize my overall health. And Justin has said that he's like, you know, he has cash-based people and he has insurance-based people. he's like, the insurance-based people never really get better. Like he's trying to do his best to improve them, but they don't really want to improve. They just have to improve to these certain metrics to get out of this. Right. And he's like, my cash-based people come in and you know, they see me for one session a month later that so much has improved physically because they do the work outside of there as well because

they're in it for like personal gain, which is so much different. So yeah, I don't know the correction for the insurance based system because it's so deeply ingrained in the United States and how we do things. But I think the correction a long term looking at from a perspective of somebody that wants to take true ownership in their whole life is like, by taking care of my own health, I instantly take care of the rest of my life, I'm better for everybody else. So like, if I'm going to spend extra money, it's going to be on the health and I hope

Wish more people would be like going out and buying new cars, like, that new car, you bought like a $70,000 new truck and you could have bought like a $30,000 used truck and put $40,000 into your health and you would have been amazing for the time you get your next truck, you know? But people just don't think that way.

Phil Schafer (49:56)

The ROI in investing in your health is unlike any other ROI. I've talked to several wealthy, generally my patients are higher income individuals. I very high income individuals. They do care about their health and they haven't always cared about their health. And I've asked them, you give up your health for millions and millions of dollars? I haven't had one person say yes. And these are healthy men.

that have given up their health before for their money making venue. they're like, man, this is having a good, a body that functions and functions well. can't put really put a price tag on that, I think. And so I think the ROI on really investing in yourself and investing in your body, you got one body, man, take care of it.

Trev Warnke (50:41)

mean, specifically in the Bible. The Bible points out like your body is your temple kind of idea. And that's why we need to take care of it. It's biblical to take care and be in good health too for a lot of our audiences, Christian entrepreneurs. And so the idea is like, need, this is a God given thing for us to take care of our health. it's financially, it will be an investment, but it's such a small investment for what you

Phil Schafer (51:04)

It's

pennies, The soap is pennies. You don't have to get generic mapping every year. Do it one time. It's like $1,500. It's not crazy.

Trev Warnke (51:14)

Yeah, I mean, if you think about $1,500, that's depending on where your financial range is, that's like, take your vacation on your kids this year on maybe one less vacation than you're normally going to take them on. If you're going to Disney World, like it's a lot cheaper than Disney World is, right? Kind of stuff. It's like, but this is going to pay dividends for a long time for the investment. I'm investing my kids by having better health over the next 10 years while they're at these prime ages where I can be physically active with them and do these things before they graduate. I don't get that same time.

Phil Schafer (51:39)

Yeah. And you're going to, you haven't started the raising kids things like you want to be six years old. Like I have a goal. Like I started jujitsu six years ago, five, six years ago. My son had been doing it a little bit about a little bit longer than me. He started when he was six years old. The reason I started is because I was literally worried about him being able to beat the crap out me at 16 years old. I don't want to be 60 years old and him like think twice about going after me, you know, and I still want to be a hard role for him.

Like that is my dream. That is living for me. That is my goal at 60 years old is that my son will think twice before, you know, rolling with me, you know, and it's just a fun thing. It's like the most bonding thing that we've had as a dad son relationship is we do dishes together all the time. We're always coming up behind each other and putting each other in rear naked chokes or wrist locks or whatever, you know, and it's like men need that.

Boys need that and I just want to be present for that. I don't want to miss that. I don't want to be a malisey boy. I want to be more...

more vital, more vibrant at 60 years old than I am even now. And I truly, 100 % believe in it. I see it, I see it at these conferences, And I just keep going on.

I remember I went to this hormone conference two years ago and I talked to this guy that, he looked maybe not a day old, 50 years old and he was urologist. So he was in that field. He was a urologist and he was at a testosterone replacement conference with Dr. Neil Rosier. And, I just had a conversation. like, how old are you? What are you doing? He's like, man, if I knew he's like, he started to your replacement 20 years prior. If I knew what I know now, would be so much healthy.

And asked him, how old are you? He said, 70 years old. And dude looked amazing. And he's just been really intentional about taking care of himself, having, and he's a urologist. So, you know, there's been so much disinformation on TRT replacement from that. And if you, you know, there, is a dark side to it. I mean, there is a dark side to TRT, but if you're managed well between nine and 1200 and, and, uh, you're, you're.

you're taking your injections on time, you're getting your preventative screenings, the potential that you have to have a really, really good quality of life from just that alone, astronomical. And so, and that's just what this guy did, just TIT replacement for 20 years. And so that's when it's like, okay, I'm on the right path. That's what I, that's number one. But now, man, we're getting, now that we're able to,

map genomics and actually take that data and ask questions on that data, we're going to change people's lives. And I'm still super early in it, man. I've only mapped two people so far and I'm so sold on it. so right now I'm building, like what I'm doing right now is I'm building the infrastructure to be able to ask questions on all your genes. Like that's my passion right now. And so I see a whole lot less patients because I'm doing that and that's okay.

That's what I'm working on right now is my passion.

Trev Warnke (54:52)

I know 2 % of what you know about this stuff and I get geeked out about the 2 % I know because I feel like, I probably still know more than 90 % of the world about this stuff. And I'm just touching that surface level stuff of what I've been diving into because it's super exciting being in fitness and stuff my whole life. I've always wanted to optimize in general business, my schedule optimized, everything's optimized. So as I learn about this kind of stuff and optimizing the male side of things, I'm excited the journey you're going down and be able to pick your brain about this stuff you're going through because like...

I mean, we don't have time on this podcast for me to geek out all the questions I really have for you and the stuff I want to go down. like, man, I could go. know last time we talked, talked for hours. So it's like, the idea is like, there's a lot of cool stuff coming on that stuff. I want to just, but we're going down that path a little bit there. want to, deviate to your, your personal life a little bit. so how many kids you have three kids.

Phil Schafer (55:34)

Three kids, 11, eight, and six. One boy, 11 years old, and then the other two are.

Trev Warnke (55:37)

Boys, girls.

And then how long you've been married? 15 years. I've only been married for four and it's been an awesome, amazing four. So with like your family life, what kind of excites you? Obviously there's the health perspective that what excites you as being a father, a husband and kind of stuff like where is it where you kind of go with your personal life once it's really exciting on that side of it?

Phil Schafer (56:01)

Um, yeah, so this, could easily get real emotional and try not to, um, drugs and alcohol are really a part of my story. And so I, I almost lost everything and, I'm really involved in recovery. It's a big part of my life. And, uh, um, I know that I personally deserve a crepe behind circle K and I believe that every day. And that if I'm not intentional about my recovery, my sobriety.

that I can lose all of it. And so where am I today? Well, just for today, I'm sober and I'm grateful for that. And I hope to be tomorrow because I want to be present for my kids. So several years, you know, probably four or five years, I wasn't present for my children and that was hard. And so now it's, that's my goal is to just be sober and present for my family. And I have to take care of my mind.

My mental health is everything. Like I have an alcohol problem, I have a drug problem, but it's all really a mind problem because I'm trying to get outside of my mind. And so generally that's, it's a loaded question, but it's to be sober and to be a good dad, be a great husband.

Trev Warnke (57:15)

And that's like, people can say like the idea of sobriety, it's so easy in a certain way until you're having addiction to something. My brother-in-law went through alcohol issues for years and when we meet him, talk about some of the stuff he dealt with there and like the way that he, mean, fitness has been a huge thing for him being able to keep his mind clean and his like literally the thoughts clean running, long distance running has been big in his life to be able to overcome that stuff.

A lot of people are like, oh, just that seems so simple. It's like, it's not simple. It's not. For a lot of people in my life that struggle with it, it's a hard thing to do. like I said, that alone, like just being like the thing, it's like that can affect everything else too, just keeping the sobriety in your life.

Phil Schafer (57:51)

So I think it's just, I want to be as healthy as possible. I want to be as sober as possible and have a very, very full life. This last weekend, I'm a pilot. flew my little plane down to Lake Powell and my son and I foiled and we just foiled all over Lake Powell and like flew back. Like this was not available to me. Like that is a blessing, man, that I can do that with my son and be healthy enough. I am the best shape I've ever been in.

I want to be the best shape I've ever been in as 60 years old. And it's possible there are dudes that are in the best shape they've ever been in as 60 years old. They're like Greek gods. Like you have to eat, right? Number one, optimize your heartworms. Number two, get lots of sun and take care of this. This is a big thing. Cause if you don't have this thing taken care of, everything else doesn't.

Yeah, doesn't matter. ⁓

Trev Warnke (58:47)

It's kind

good for you when you look at the dark moments you have that helps bring the light to what you're doing now too. A lot of people that have had dark moments in their life, when they find the other side of those dark moments and God gets them out of that, what they have, their life is so much more full because they've seen some of the hardest times to really appreciate what's going on in life right now.

Phil Schafer (59:05)

what it could be,

and what it has been, and what you came from. So it makes you appreciate those things a whole lot more. And man, I'm so happy right now. I got a great life, but I don't deserve it. My God, it saved me. And that's generally like, I thank him every day because I deserve a create behind circle. Okay, totally. And I know I can go there right away, depending on the decisions that I make, right? And so.

Yeah, that's my goal for my life.

Trev Warnke (59:37)

We're gonna end with your legacy, but we've already kind of talked a lot about what your legacy is. But one thing that I think about, just from what I've learned about you so far in our few conversations we had, is you have a ability to learn so much faster than most people I've known. Just like from the little conversations we have, the way your brain digs into stuff, becoming a pilot is not something that's not time consuming. know what mean? Their ability to learn things. So can imagine like your legacy, you're 40, and now with longevity and health, your ability to think the way you do for

50, 60 more years, I just can't imagine like where are you gonna go over the next 50 or 60 years because I feel like I'm a pretty quick learner. I learn things and I have passions and I dive into them and build mobile business and that kind of stuff. But even when I talk to you, some of the things that the way you think, like, man, certain ways you're on a different level than me on your ability to see. So I can't wait, like the coding and stuff you do and how fast you've learned that stuff and picked that stuff up. I can't imagine where it's gonna go in 50 years, but like what is, you've talked a little bit about the AI stuff. Is there anything specifically like,

It's on your horizon right now and this is where I'm going over the next four or five years.

Phil Schafer (1:00:39)

just want to change medicine. truly believe what I'm working on right now, I'm such small potatoes, but I truly believe that if we empower our patients to be able to ask questions on their own data and give them really, really good data and a lot of data, then that can change medicine. That's what I truly believe. And if you can make it easier for providers to chart really, really well, to do less administrative stuff and spend more time with the patients through, I don't know, scribing.

through evidence-based practice, through having more options when they're trying to diagnose diseases and having more databases to diagnose more data sets. Like right now we're able to include labs, imaging, genomics, and what they're eating, what they're drinking.

sleeping what my SBO2 is. To me, it takes...

questions on it. It's just to me it's just like so freaking exciting like that's my goal and I'm building this thing as a patient, as a patient with with myself in mind because I want to ask this question about my own genetics that you know I don't know my genetics. That's what I want to know. I want to take all my lab work for the last five years that I've been on testosterone and just put it in there like okay what what trends do you see?

based on everybody else that has these same kind of symptoms and issues. How does addiction play into this? I mean, to me, that's really where, that's a cheese, that's a goal. As if you could be like, okay, this is how I'm wired, this is how God created me, and the more data that I can put into this box and ask questions on, it's good information based on thousands and thousands and thousands of research papers.

amazing.

Trev Warnke (1:02:23)

The other part I look

at that with the AI scientists. So you're building inside a system, Inside that system, you're capturing all this data in this pretty much just big like web, right? Well, the cool part will be the more data that gets in there from other clients actually having their experiences and their stuff, right? Meaning like, here's the results this person got by following this plan. Well, then you can already do it right now on a small scale, but on a larger scale, you'll be like, here's the exact nutrition program we can spit out from AI that will literally give you, here's the meal plan that you're going to follow for the next two weeks, right?

Phil Schafer (1:02:51)

Specifically your GMAC. Some people tolerate these foods a whole lot better than these foods. And then you actually bring in even more exciting stuff like the microbiome, the gut health, the leaky gut syndrome. The gut is fascinating what they're doing with gut ID right now. They're mapping the whole microbiome. To me that's like...

And if you can take that data too, and you can put that in there.

Trev Warnke (1:03:20)

That's

where AI is going to give us the speed and the health side. And I hope the government allows that stuff to happen because they're already trying to put stamps down on peptides and other things that they're trying to take their control already. But I'm hoping that they don't get themselves too intervened. And luckily, ingenuity helps us get around a lot of things that the government tries to do to us in general. I'm excited for like, because that's where I see AI from the health perspective going is the more it learns about the system you're building, I love that it's going to be in many ways an internal system where you guys have control.

because AI is taking ideas out there from stuff that doesn't need to be pulling from, know, false information, that's what kind of messes up the system. But you're getting a more enclosed loop system that you guys control the parameters of it, that's gonna allow you to spit out information for people that can change your life in such a small period of time from nutrition to, hey, these are the workouts that maybe you need to do your body doesn't tolerate doing long endurance stuff, maybe you need to be doing HIIT stuff, or maybe you can't handle HIIT stuff your body was designed for doing, you need to be running three miles a day, or not, like three miles, because your body is actually designed to be able to

Phil Schafer (1:03:57)

system.

Trev Warnke (1:04:20)

of this because you're type one fibers that you have, right? So it can tell people where maybe their training would be ideal outside of that. There's just so many things that as you continue to build this network out of stuff, I mean, in general, you and could probably sit here and give a 90%. Like we could probably get pretty close. But once you get to the AI side of it, it's like, well, now we actually have enough records of not just research papers, but also enough actual testing people that are actually doing it in the system and show the numbers improving. And now it's all in comes in. This is the result. And this will cause the

90 % resulted. ⁓

Phil Schafer (1:04:51)

Yeah,

I think the sky's the limit. I think it's a billion dollar idea and I think the sooner that we're able to get this so that patients can literally get on their phone and ask questions on their data, they're gonna, it's gonna be life changing.

Yeah, man, I agree. 100%. Like, yeah. I,

I'm excited for how it's going to improve my own health. you know, I feel healthy now, but there's so many more things I can do. There's so many more things I want to try. There's so many more, I mean, good stem cells, researching stem cells, amazing stuff that's coming out there. It's like, are we optimizing it? Are we doing that in an ethical way? All these things. I really think RFK is doing a good job, personally.

I love what he's doing. He's dysregulated some peptides. We haven't even talked about peptides. I personally think peptides are the greatest invention in last 100 years. Yeah, agreed. But we have to take care of the elephants in the room before we even have that conversation. that's my flag also. It's like people just go, give me those peptides stack. And I'm like, you're insane. Why?

That's like, have these blatant warning signs right here and you're just trying to just, it's like giving a pill for an ill. I wanna be strong, I wanna lose weight. body is not optimized, I'm a natural gay man. Gotta fix that first.

Trev Warnke (1:06:14)

Yeah, that's the issue with the social media world is like you see an influencer that's jacked and like well He takes these peptides and like well first of all you don't realize that he didn't get Jeff and take those peptides He's been the way training for 20 straight years. That's step one. You need to be consistent in the gym before IGF one's gonna help you do too much improvement It can help improve them but not nearly the same as if you have a consistent training routine the nutrition is on point this guy's been eating like a bodybuilder for 20 years he's got an advantage because he's in and he probably's on steroids and you don't know that as well which can change body size so

A lot of people like they jump down because I do think that guys are amazing and in my life because I had a lot of things optimized They've been really really beneficial But for the average person that doesn't have things people that asked me about that guys I'm was like guys like you don't even train you don't work out like so Conversation is mutant until we actually get in training program a simple training

Phil Schafer (1:07:01)

You

and I are on the same page there. I often don't even have the peptide conversation to optimize our hormone and I know they're working out. Because if they're not working out, I'm concerned that, I mean, what do some peptides do? It stimulates pituitary gland, produces natural human growth hormone. Having too much human growth hormone and not stimulating growth in your body is bad. And so, people can die from it.

And so it's just to me being educated on peptides is something I'm very, very passionate about because this stuff does work absolutely 100 % to make sure it's good stuff that you're getting and you know exactly what it does and how it's going to impact your body.

Trev Warnke (1:07:39)

Is that something you guys are currently dabbling with like with clients yet or not?

Phil Schafer (1:07:42)

So we have RFK just released 14. I think there's 14 now that are FDA approved. And then we will have conversations with patients about the non-FDA approved one. We want to have the conversation. Like I can't, you know, it's like...

You're gonna probably get on this whether we like it or not. Yeah, but let's talk about it. You know, it's the same thing with steroid. You're gonna have patients that are gonna try and take steroids and you know, we have hard no policies like we're not gonna we're not gonna treat you if you bring your testosterone to 2000.

because I can, you know, like I can, I'm giving you just the specific amount we moved everything to like, we give people exactly, we fill the syringes themselves because we don't want people stacking testosterone. We are prescribing testosterone specific to who they are and their symptoms and we don't want them to abuse that. Same thing with peptides. There's so much, I mean, there's so much information, disinformation associated with those. you know, go to somebody that is,

about them, maybe somebody that's taken them themselves, and just have that conversation. That's all I ask because, you know, there's so many influencers that are being financially compensated based on the Chinese version of these peptides and it's like, like, if you know they're good peptides and they're, you know, third-party tested and you've also done third-party tests, great. Peptides, peptides, peptides, peptides. But do know why you're taking it? Have you taken care of the elephants in the room? You know exactly what this is gonna do to you.

long term. These are questions, are you okay with the risk associated with them? And if all those are yes, absolutely great. But to get on a peptide stack because your body's completely different. Your goals might be completely different. Peptides for insulin resistance and collagen production and...

injuries, you know, is this an acute injury, is this a chronic injury? The doses are going to be different. Like we have this Wolverine blend that, you know, BPC157, TB500 that you would dose differently based on acute injury versus a chronic injury. What is it doing to your body? What is it doing to your kidneys? Are you tracking those? Do you care about tracking those? Or is it going to put you in real trouble? What is it going to do to your mind?

These are all like, these are the things, the questions that I love to talk to with my patients. I love to just talk because they don't think about this. They just want to get on the peptides stack and be like pew pew pew. It's just, it's scary for me, honestly. But I just, if they're willing to have a conversation with me, we'll have it, we'll have it all day long. We'll take as long as we need to help you understand the peptides you're taking and why you're taking them.

other than meet your goals. I have judicious guys, all of them are pretty much on Wolverine blend to help with all the injuries that we have. Then I have guys in the gym that want better sleep at night, skin elasticity, better vascularity, best rolled out around the belly, taken care of and performance enhancing, I have to agree with that. But they have to take care. I keep hitting it, I feel like I'm hitting a dead horse. You have to optimize your home insurance. Because all that doesn't matter if you're not doing that.

Trev Warnke (1:10:33)

and then pairing that together with quality nutrition. But that's still another great tool that everybody goes back to these things is like balancing your hormones without good nutrition is probably not going to end up in the lung because you're still probably going to end up with some hormone disruption over time if we have poor nutrition.

Phil Schafer (1:10:36)

you

yeah, and that's like, especially in the recovery space, it's like, how can you come in to a longevity center and still be an alcoholic? you're literally drinking poison in your body. You obviously do not care about it because you're not taking this big mountain elephant, right, in the room and taking care of your sobriety first. Once that's taken care of, then we optimize your hormones, then...

Then we help you in the gym. Then we put you on the peptides. Then, then, then, then. But to do everything at once is unethical. Very, very unethical. And I just want to be a part of it. I love being a part of the journey, Like that's what I, it's fun. Cause you get to see people at their depths of despair. And then three months or six months later, they're completely different people. Like what other areas of medicine do you really see that? I only ate plastic surgery.

But still, you know what mean? Like true quality of life changes.

Trev Warnke (1:11:43)

Yeah,

because the issue of plastic surgery is for a lot of it is like where you look like at 50 with that plastic surgery, where you look like at 75 with that plastic surgery, it's kind of a weird difference. It's not always the best looking. I always my wife about some Botox and stuff like that. like, honey, we just do what we do. I see these 80 year olds that doesn't look good, doesn't look natural. So let's go ahead and wrap up on where for your different clinics, what's the best way for somebody to get ahold of you to get something started just going to the website or?

Phil Schafer (1:11:52)

Doesn't look natural. Doesn't look natural.

so much you can

Yeah, they can go to nowmanshealth.care or nowprimary.care and longevity, I'm still, that's my baby. That's where all my time is really focusing right now and to develop and do it right. Because I am in the testing process, man. I don't want to snake oil. There's so much to go to these conferences and there's so much snake oil out there.

And so when I go to these conferences, I'm recording every lecture that I'm listening to. And then I have that checked against the research papers. I use AI, the actual lecture to record them, and then I put them in Notebook LM, which will break the whole lecture down into like...

infographics and podcasts and whatever I want to do and take that data and you put it into good AI engines where there'd be open evidence and say, okay, give me the veracity of this. Like how legit is this? Is this PS or not? And man, that's the gold because the best lecture, best lecture of the last longevity conference that I went to was this lady, wasn't selling anything. She was amazing woman. She was, I think she's like hyped.

Everest and multiple, multiple, 15ers and all over the world. And just, just a healthy woman in 1998, she started her own biohacking journey. And she said, if you remember nothing else about this whole lecture is test everything. There's so much disinformation out there. Test everything. And so that's really what I'm doing now is I'm testing and trying to figure out what the BS is because there's so much BS out there.

And I just, you know, it's like, don't want to sell snake oil. I really want to impact and move the needle of your life. You're going to pay me the money. I want to be able to sleep at night. Like when I first opened my men's health clinic, because it was things that we do, I put every guy on a estrogen blocker. I didn't know why I was doing it. I did it because all, you know, I now know that we do it because testosterone aromatizes, converts to estrogen and too much estrogen can cause bad things to happen.

Like, okay, but what good things does estrogen do? And so I went to Dr. Vinod Rosier's conferences, I went to multiple conferences, followed him for several years, and he just pulled no punches. He was like, Phil, you should not be putting these guys on these aromatase inhibitors. You can't block the estrogen. You're putting them at super high risk for osteoporosis, and you're destroying the libido, and how do you sleep at night?

And I was like, I was really pissed off. I am, was a brand new clinician in a men's health clinic. had like 40 guys. And then, and I tested him on this. He was like, well, what you're doing is wrong. And here's a research study after research study, after research study, after research study that I potentially may be doing harm to my guys. So I came, came back home with my tail between my legs, took them all off of one of two of inhibitors and sure enough, their libido increased.

Estrogen's good for us. There's a whole conversation we can have about that. But yeah, just have to, ego is everything. You have to have, you have to be able to be okay being alone, I think. And it's like, I don't have it all together, but man, if I can enter in the conversation and find the right resources to be right, let's do that together. And then you can make whatever decision you want, because this is your health, it's not my health, it's your health.

I want to be that vessel to help you get the right information.

Trev Warnke (1:15:14)

Thanks for everything you taught us today, Phil. I really appreciate it. Guys, if you're interested in anything else about his businesses, all this stuff will be linked at the bottom of the YouTube video. All this stuff will be linked on our website as well, and you'll be able to find him there. Thanks for joining another episode of Brotherhood Beyond Business Podcast

Phil Schafer (1:15:27)

Thanks