Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We help you modulate the stress pattern. So what I mean by that is there are certain testing that we can do to see if certain hormones like dopamine or epinephrine are elevated chronically. Cortisol, being another one of those different hormones, are elevated chronically. And if they are elevated chronically, that's creating a fight or flight response in the body. This is your I'm getting chased by a tiger mentality. And if your brain perceives that you're being chased by a tiger, it's gonna activate the whole body to then run really quickly. Right? The beauty of the body is that it's dynamic, but the curse is that when it learns something, it reenacts that same behavior over and over. So if your brain is perceiving stress, whether that be from scrolling all day long on your phone to worried about the next day's work, or, you know, worried about your next proposal that you're putting out for another client, whatever the stressors are, if that's a continuous stressor, your body starts to understand that as the same fight or flight response.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Hey, everybody, welcome back to the trust. This podcast today we have a treat.
We're going to be talking about your health and artificial intelligence. So it's all going to come together here.
My guest today is Doctor Samji. He's a physician here in Orlando. Doctor Samji, first let me disclose you are my doctor, and I am perfectly happy to discuss anything about my health or anything that we've done. So don't feel, you know, concerned about leaking out something about my health. I'm very open about how much I watch out for my health. And one of the things that I talk to our listeners about is this exercise that I did years and years ago in one of my coaching programs. It was called the Exile Project. And the first question the coach asked us, they said, hey, think of the most important employee in your organization who works for you. Who is this person? And it may not be somebody who works for you right now, but what would happen if they walked into your office today and said, hey, I'm going to take a three month trip around the world, and starting in three months, and I need to get a plan in place and how we're going to handle my work while I'm gone for three months. So we sat there and we wrote furiously, furiously for, you know, about 15 minutes, about what we would do to get ready for this person to be gone for three months. And then when we got to the end, they said, okay, so what are some things you thought about. We went through that, then they came back and they said, okay, now imagine it's you. You're the most important person, and now you're going to have to be gone for six months because you're sick. Because we had a colleague who had gone through that. He had leukemia and he had to be out of the office, gone for six months, but he knew about two months in advance, and they took two months to get ready for him to be exiled from his firm. While he was gone for six months, the firm actually increased its revenue, did better without him, took on more cases because they had planned so well. But it got us all thinking about our health a lot. And then we realized it's like, hey, we are the golden goose in our business, and so we're concerned about that. So I really watch everything, you know, I track everything about myself. So first, I want you to sort of tell us just a little bit about yourself, what you do, and then functional medicine in general.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Sure. Thank you for that introduction. That was very kind of you, Joe. So I am doctor Samji. I do internal medicine. Been practicing for a long time here in Orlando, 14 plus years. And I kind of jumped into functional medicine kind of backwards, if you will. I was kind of learning about working in the traditional hospital setting and then seeing patients back and forth, and they would keep coming back. And I was like, what are these guys doing on the outside world? Why are they not able to maintain their health? So I started learning about primary care medicine because I do hospital based medicine, and I was learning about primary care medicine, and I was like, well, that makes a lot of sense, but they're still coming back. So there's a gap. There's a portion of their care that's not being attributed or not being attacked. Well, from the medical perspective. So I started learning about what we can do to help people without really pharmaceutical care, because that's what's already being done. And I stumbled into functional medicine, and once I uncovered that pathway, I couldn't stop. I was inundated with information. I mean, there's so much data out there that we as medical professionals tend to not necessarily overlook, but we're not even taught. And once I started learning about these things, I was like, why isn't this in medical school? We need to learn about this stuff earlier. And I kept digging and digging and digging, and the more I dug, the further I was from reality. In that sense, like, what we understand is medicine today, and this needed to be shared with people. So I went ahead and did as many courses as I possibly could. I spent about four years learning functional medicine, in addition to all the medical school training and residency and everything like that. And I was just blown away about what it could be. And so then I founded my clinic and patients just like you, Joe, who are doing phenomenal with kind of duality to our care, where it's not just me as a physician giving you advice and saying, get the heck out of here. We are partnering in your health. I think that's the biggest step of functional medicine. So kind of pivoting to what functional medicine is. It's different than traditional healthcare. And I want to make something very clear. Traditional healthcare is supposed to be there. It is a part of our world, just like hospital medicine is part of your acute care. Like if you get a pneumonia or a heart attack, that's where you belong. You don't belong in your primary care office, you don't belong in my office. You belong in a hospital. The same way can be said that we are tracking diseases right now with laboratories and symptoms that patients present. But there is a world, an entire world of symptoms that occur, laboratory, small, finite changes that occur before the big diagnosis is being made. And that's the world of functional medicine. The root cause analysis. We are going upstream from where the diseases are diagnosed to where they start, and hopefully preventing them from turning from symptoms into a disease. So I'll give you an example. High blood pressure, for instance, a lot of people have high blood pressure. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're deficient in a high blood pressure medication. That's not why you have high blood pressure. There is something that started that, whether that be stress or lack of sleep or nutritional deficiencies, hormonal imbalance, gut pathology, there are so many different things that can lead to the symptom of having high blood pressure. And that's what we do in functional medicine, is the root cause analysis.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And that was the thing that really turned me onto it. I started studying, I think it was doctor life.
That's his actual name, doctor life, up in West Virginia, up in Charleston. And he wrote a book about it years ago about, hey, we need to focus on what leads to diabetes, what leads to dementia, what leads to mobility problems, what leads to heart attacks and strokes and everything else. You know, they call them, what, the four or five horse cancers, detecting them early, and it's called medicine 2.0. Now, medicine 1.0 is sort of, well, medicine originally leeches and humors, but now and then it became, well, we just treat you after you've got diabetes. Now we'll just load you up with drugs after you've had a heart attack or a stroke. Now we're going to load you up with drugs to treat the symptoms after the fact. But functional medicine, the thing I've loved about it. So we're like, well, no, we're going to try. We're going to do lots of testing to get to the point where we figure out what you may have a propensity for.
And I think that's the thing, too. What kind of testing do you do that maybe you wouldn't normally get in just going to your primary care physician?
[00:08:22] Speaker A: That's a huge question. There's so many tests that are available.
In fact, in my clinic, we created a testing menu, the same way you go to a restaurant and be able to choose what you want. So again, that partnership is very important to me. But we started the foundation of all health, which is your genetic genetics. So pretty much a lot of what we do starts with a genetic analysis, but it's not just like a 23 andme where you're kind of, here's your DNA, good luck. Try to figure it out. We take that and then we base that against research to see which genetic variants that you might possess. And we all have millions of these. But which genetic variants do you have that genetically predispose you to having medical conditions in the future? And the way I like to give this analogy is, I'm sure when you and I have talked about your genetics, too, we've kind of talked about it, too, is it's like a loaded gun with genetics. So we are looking at a gun that's locked and loaded. However, the lifestyles that we lead, and as you mentioned, highly functional professionals, people that are busy on the go, they don't have time to focus on their nutrition or their sleep or their exercise habits of these things are the lifestyle changes that can actually actuate that trigger. And when you actuate that trigger, you're then causing that bullet to leave the gun. And so this is what I like to say about genetics, is it's the most important thing we can do. We can test on someone because it lets us know where the issues could be. And that's the whole function of functional medicine, is to get rid of the potential problems and not necessarily the problems that exist or diagnoses that are made. So that's one of the first things. First test that we do, the second test that we do is an advanced blood work panel that we do on pretty much everyone, most traditional doctors they test you with your normal CBC, CMP. These are all normal tests that we do with thyroid analysis. Very basic. It's about 15 to 20 markers, roughly, give or take total. My advanced laboratories are on 90 plus markers. We're looking at in depth things about cholesterol and hormonal analysis. We do gut and microbiome analysis as well. Where we're testing your gut to see which good bacterias are there, the bad bacterias. We do stress analysis, looking at cortisol levels throughout the day, and trending that. We look at neurohormonal changes as well with urinary excretions of your hormones. So we're able to check things like dopamine, norepinephrine, progesterone, testosterone, all these types of hormones that are multifaceted in the body, from energy to sleep to cognition to brain fog. All these things, we can trap them. And so, you know, I don't know if I told you this, Joe, but I was also an engineer before I became a doctor, and so that engineering background made me extremely data dependent. I need to know the data before I can actively treat somebody. So, you know, for us to understand what we're up against rather than just treating with, like, a shotgun approach. And that's really the core of my personal functional medicine clinic. We need to know where you're at. So, you know, part of that is, like, doing, like, urinary hormones, saliva testing, stool testing. Basically, if your body excretes it, we can test it.
We do breath testing analysis.
We also integrate trackers as well, which is pretty cool, where we can trend that information. Joe, you track pretty much everything about your health.
We're able to take that data. I'll give you a small example. I have a patient who came to me for insomnia, and we were able to track her insomnia curve because of the sleep trackers that she wears against her nutritional analysis. And we found a correlation between the two, where the more protein she consumes in a week, the better her sleep is for that week. So, literally, my recommendation to her was eat more protein, you sleep better with it. And it didn't take a doctor to necessarily figure that out, but what it did take was understanding that the more data you have, the more actionable your insights can be. And I think that's one of the biggest concepts. So the more data we test for, the more you track, the more you're understanding of why we're tracking, because, again, there's a commitment level required for that, the better the data will become. And once, the more data we have, as everyone knows in these entrepreneurial spirits that we all have, the more data you have about what you do, your ROI is going to be that much better.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And I know the tracking. A lot of people go, oh, well, I just don't. I can't keep up with all that. But with the smartwatches, the phones, everything that's built in now, the scales, the blood pressure cuffs, everything talks to your phone, which then talks that. And then once you get in the habit of doing it, like, I take my blood pressure every single morning. I take my temperature every single morning. I wear the oura ring, I wear the apple Watch. I have a scale that does an EKG, an EDma electrodermac, something neurological check every morning. It. It checks my body composition, how much fat to muscle ratio. I have, my. My genetic age, my vascular age. It checks all these things. And then that just goes right in my phone. And then, you know, before I meet with you, before I meet with my primary care physician. And this actually happened the other week, I was. I had my annual physical. And he goes, you know, your blood pressure looks a little high, Joe. What? Are you taking your blood pressure medicine? I go, yeah. And he's like, well. And he takes it again because he thinks maybe their machine was bad. But then he goes, well, what? And I pull out my phone, and I go, my average for the past six months is this. And he goes, okay, that's too high. So the average is that. So he tweaked my medicine a little bit. And I know you and I have worked a lot. I had insulin resistance.
I had to have a cookie. I had to have something sweet. Every single time I ate. I had it sort of ingrained in me from childhood. And wearing a continuous glucose monitor for, gosh, probably a year and a half, two years, I wore that every day, and it just watched spikes, and it tracked to my food. And that biofeedback for me got me out of that habit. So I just. I don't do that anymore. I don't have that problem anymore. My. My cholesterol is down this. But. But another thing that you did with me that blew my mind was when we first started, you said, okay, well, I need your. Your medical records. I need all of them that you can possibly get ahold of. And I think I was able, with the electronic records, was able to pull together over 900 pages of medical records.
Yeah. And you go through it, and our very first meeting is, okay, you're on antibiotics. Here, here, here.
You know why was it so important to note the instances of when I was on antibiotics throughout my life?
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really good question, Joe. So antibiotics, as we know they are meant to kill an infection, but those infections are typically bacterial in nature. And you have a lot of good bacterias in your body as well. It's not just the bad ones. We have a symbiotic relationship with these bacterias, so we are dependent on them for certain things. Certain things like short chain fatty acids, are produced in our gut because of that bacteria that feed on these prebiotics, that we feed them. So they need us. We need them. When we take these antibiotics, we start to disrupt that balance. We start to affect the production of these molecules, like short chain fatty acids, that we have become dependent on. We cannot produce those on our own. So as we start to kill off some of the good bacterias, we start to become malnourished, if that makes sense to a certain level. And when that happens, we are not functioning at our max capability. So when people come to me with stress and anxiety, one of the things we look at is the gut. It may not be a direct correlation or understanding of why we're looking at the gut, but again, like I told you, we can be deficient in certain things. So I looked at your history specifically. There were multiple instances of antibiotic therapies. And so we did a gut analysis, and I think that helped us to determine putting on an after a gut protocol. It helped us to remodel the good and bad bacteria balances within the microbiome ecosystem that you have, and hopefully resulted in some of the beneficial changes that you've noted. And so, understanding that the gut is the first interaction with the environment that we have, it is literally the lung and the gut are the first two interactions we have with anything that we ingest, whether it be air or food or drinks, anything like that. So if there's disruption in that, you're gonna have altered absorption of those things. You're gonna have. The bad bacterias are kind of growing out of control, possibly cause the good bacterias are knocked out. There's so many things that can happen, from dysbiosis to small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, to fungal overgrowth, to all the way down to ulcerative colitis. I have one of my clients who was consuming Doritos for a living practically all throughout college, and now, unfortunately, he's been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. One of the things we do with him is we avoid all these artificial flavors. I don't know if you know, Doritos actually has a bunch of red food colorings in them. And there's actually multiple studies showing those red food colors are tied or associated with ulcerative colitis. So we just started knocking that down. And his symptoms have gotten better drastically just from the lack of Doritos, believe it or not. You know, again, those quick snacks on the go, you don't really know what's in these things. And I know one of the things you and I did, Joe, is we started, you know, examining the labels a little bit more carefully and understanding that if it's got seven or more ingredients in it, you probably shouldn't be touching it. Again, there's moments where we all kind of give in, but it shouldn't be a consistent thing. Your body's meant to handle stress. Don't get me wrong, we're supposed to have some stressors, but if it's every day, then it becomes normal life. And that's where we see a lot of these long term issues happen.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Well, that's what I found, and I think you and I talked about that one time. It's sort of like, well, the gut fell into place, and then, okay, well, now we're going to work on a different system. And what, you know, I think you said it best. It's like, yeah, a car doesn't run with a transmission alone. It doesn't run with an engine alone. It has to have the tires. It has to have the suspension. It has to have a body. Your body is the same way. All of these systems work together. But as you start to get the gut and then, you know, the different systems in better shape, they, everything else sort of just falls into place. Your body just. Just does a lot better.
So how does functional medicine differ than traditional medicine and how people deal with stress and burnout that a lot of people suffer from?
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's another really good question. You know, the traditional allopathic world, when they look at stress, like, if you go to your primary doctor and say, I'm feeling anxiety, I'm feeling stressed, the first thing they talk about is they kind of quantify your anxiety level, your stress level, asking you several questions, and then they see if you qualify to get on a drug, these typical ssri's, which I'm sure we've all heard of, you see all the commercials for those drugs. You know, these medications are there to help modulate dopamine and norepinephrine levels. That's kind of how they work. So in essence, they're not treating the underlying problem like, why are you stressed? That's the one question that's never asked. I mean, you might say, like, I've got family requirements, entrepreneurial desires, job issues, marital issues, whatever it could be. And these are my causative reasons. And from a functional perspective, we don't say that eliminate the stressors. That's what will help your anxiety. We help you modulate the stress better. So what I mean by that is there are certain testing that we can do to see if certain hormones like dopamine or epinephrine are elevated chronically. Cortisol, being another one of those different hormones, are elevated chronically. And if they are elevated chronically, that's creating a fight or flight response in the body. This is your I'm getting chased by a tiger mentality. And if your brain perceives that you're being chased by a tiger, it's going to activate the whole body to then run really quickly, right? You might not, you know, go to the restroom because you got to run. You might not necessarily want to digest food at that moment because you got to run. Like, the whole goal is to run away from that tiger or that lying whatever is chasing you.
The beauty of the body is that it's dynamic, but the curse is that when it learns something, it reenacts that same behavior over and over and over. So if your brain is perceiving stress, whether that be from scrolling all day long on your phone to worried about the next day's work or worried about your next proposal that you're putting out for another client, whatever the stressors are, if that's a continuous stressor, your body starts to understand that as the same fight or flight response. So maybe that anxiety that you're feeling is not necessarily just the marital issues or the stress that's going on at work or with the. With the company that you're starting, maybe it's something yourself enacting, like, you know, doom scrolling or going to bed a little bit later. So these little. Little caveats, we can start to tip the scales in a different direction. And these little micro wins that we get throughout the day result in massive changes over time. It's that same 1% rule, 1% better every day. After the course of a year, you're over 100% better. And that same mentality applies. But then we take it one step further. So there's lifestyle changes that have to occur. And after that, from a functional perspective, we use all this hormonal analysis that has to happen. And once we understand which hormones are out of whack. We can then modulate those. So we use adaptogens and herbs and different natural forms of supplements to help the body cope with stress better. We use breathing techniques, boxwork, breathing, grounding. There's so many things that are available to help us with stress. There's certain hertz of music that helps calm the body down or even wake the body up. Like waking up in the morning is a process. It shouldn't be. Just wake up and go running and grab your phone and answer 17 emails and 25 text messages. Right off the bat, there is a process to waking up. And if we start to do those things, the stress levels start to melt away and you start to be able to focus so much, so much better. So the anxiety starts to melt away because it's self induced.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Well, that takes me to another point. Your clinic. Whenever someone subscribes to your services, they don't just get you. You've got sort of this team built around that. So whenever you're talking about nutrition, when you're talking about working out, all these things tell us about the team that you have around you too.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really good point. So we have, we have a pretty large team, but we also like, you know, we're going to talk about later. I have an AI concept built into my clinic, which makes me a little bit more unique than traditional doctors. So we have a health coach, and the health coach will then kind of understand the medical plan. So the way my clinic works is you meet with me first. After all the testing is done, we put together an entire plan. And like you said, Joe, it's an entire plan for you. Nutritional needs, macronutrients, from proteins, fats, carbs, caloric needs, water intake, sleep recommendations. I mean, it's a whole nine yards. With that, we then put that into our system where you can track that on your phone.
After you meet with me, you'll then meet with our coach, and then with our coach, you'll then go through, how do you make these goals, smart goals, these smart, measurable, attainable, relatable and timeline oriented goals to get these things accomplished. So she's working with the mindset of your medical plan first, and then how do we get these goals established and then keep you accountable to these goals? So this, it's really a different perspective. It's not just medical care, it is a lifestyle I like. I was just talking with a client the other day, actually, and I told her I should rename my clinic to the Phoenix clinic. And she asked me why. Why do you mention that? I was like, well, if you remember the story to the Phoenix, right? The Phoenix was, like, burnt down, the bird was burnt down to the ground, and then reimagined and rebirthed into a brand new, more beautiful version of itself. And I think that's a really cool metaphor for kind of what we do in our clinic. So there is a contemplation there. I know you guys can let me know in the comments if you guys like that idea, but. But I do think, like, breaking your lifestyle down, breaking what you do down into small bite sized pieces, modifying those to make them a little bit more cohesive to a common goal, and then reestablishing that, putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, if you will. And as we do that, we notice massive benefits for you. But I'll take it even one step further, because then we sprinkle AI on top of that. So what I do is I run all your medical records, I run all your histories, all your symptom reports, and, Joe, you remember filling out those questionnaires I sent you? They're quite long and way more in depth than your traditional doctor. And I take all that data, and I run it through an AI algorithm, and the AI algorithm spits out to me any kind of stones that I may have left unturned because I'm fallible, too. I'm a human being just like you are. And so I may miss stuff, but the AI software doesn't. I mean, it is a well trained, functional medicine AI bot that I've created that helps me to understand your care even better. I feed your labs through it. I feed all your advanced testing that we mentioned. I feed that through it as well. And it kind of understands your symptomatology as well as your medical care of what's going on. And I put all that together to help me better understand what's going on with you to make better recommendations for you. So it's, I call myself an AI powered doctor, if you will, because it's a really cool concept that most people.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Don'T have, and it really is the future.
One of the big things I find is traveling work. It's the nutrition side is, I mean, I've got a trainer, so twice a week, try to make, you know, time. I definitely, I'm paying her whether I'm there or not. So I try to show up for twice a week for my trainer, and we do weight training. We do this. So I've got that set. It's the nutrition that's always so hard to keep up with, because you're in airports, you're traveling, you're on the road. What kind of advice do you have for folks to, what kind of things to watch out for in their nutrition and how to keep, to build that habit of better nutrition when they're traveling so much?
[00:26:46] Speaker A: That's the hardest thing. I can't tell you how many of my clients ask me that same exact question, and it's hard. I'm just going to be honest with you. It's really, really hard to be able to juggle all these balls at the same time. And something has to kind of fall occasionally. And the easiest thing to fall is kind of nutrition, like you mentioned, even sometimes physical activity. But the best thing you can do, honestly, is try to plan ahead as best as you can. Try to make sure that you, if you know you're going to be at an airport and there's really nothing to eat, I probably go to the healthy side of the cafeteria and try to get something. It doesn't have to be organic, like you can let something go, you know, just to get a healthier meal. Because again, what you input into the body is kind of how the body receives it. So, you know, the unhealthier foods, you know, the burgers, the fries, the pizzas, the pastas, et cetera, those types of foods, they can make you feel full and feel satiated, but at the same time, they're going to have a long term ramification, either insulin resistance or disrupting your microbiome or not providing you the nutrition. It might be stealing nutrition from your body as well. So you got to try to plan ahead. I would tend to recommend if you're going to be in a stressful environment, don't consume as much coffee, for instance. Try to rely more on the, the teas giving you antioxidants, being on the plane. So be cognizant of what you're putting in your body, understanding that it's not just about production from the body, it's necessarily about protection of the body as well, and understanding that as well. Focus on your macronutrients. Try to get as much protein and fiber in as early in the day as possible. So eating in that order, having fiber as the first portion of your meal. So if you're out, try to get fiber first. Focus on the fiber rich foods. You know, your salads, your vegetables, things like that. You can even take a fiber shake with you if you want, getting your proteins in next. And again, they don't have to be necessarily clean while you're traveling. Ideally, when you're home, you can fix that. But while you're traveling, just focus on getting protein. Try to get as much protein as you possibly can. I don't think there's an upper limit on that.
And then after that, if you're still hungry, you're still craving something. That's when the carbs and fats are available to you. And we tend to lean towards the carbs and fats as our main source of fuel throughout the day, especially when we're stressed and having anxiety, we kind of crave those foods and maybe trying to adjust that to the proteins and fibers first. That'd be my honest advice. So there's no, like, cookie cutter program I would give you. It would be individualized, just like everything is in my clinic. But focus on fiber, focus on protein. If you're still hungry, you can eat the carbs and fats. Afterwards, reduce caffeine intake, and try to focus on more teas, green teas, specifically for the antioxidant effects.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: So how would someone, let's say one of our listeners goes, you know, this sounds great.
How would they start with you? Where do they go? How do they get going?
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Good question. So thank you for asking that question. So we have a free discovery call that we offer to all of our clients. It's either done with me or my coach, coach Amy. And we would kind of sit down with you for about 30 minutes and kind of chat about your goals, your reasoning for wanting to sign up. We don't accept just anybody, so we do like an interview, quote unquote, where you interview us, but at the same time, we're kind of interviewing you as well to see if you're a good fit for the program. We would talk about everything from, you know, from birth, literally, to where you are today. Your goals of signing up with us and understanding kind of which one of our Jumpstart programs would be beneficial for you. We offer six different types of jumpstart programs. They're all based on kind of the big categories. Cardiac health, digestive health, stress, longevity, anti aging, et cetera. And sugar balance is another one, big one that we started up. So we kind of understand better what your goals are, and we try to obtain those goals. And then that free discovery call is available. I'm sure we can put it at the bottom of the link to this video, and you guys can sign up. It's completely free, completely complimentary. So I'll spend about 30 minutes with you, get to know you, and then kind of suggest a program if you're.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: A good fit, your website is. It's beyond medicine clinic. Is that right?
[00:30:48] Speaker A: That's correct. That's correct.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Not.com, beyond medicine dot clinic. So everybody remember.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Well, you said, okay, so you're, you're a physician, you're an internal medicine specialist, you're a functional medicine specialist. Now, you were an engineer, and you have now also moved into this side hustle. That's called more than that.
This extra things you do with all this extra time you have in artificial intelligence because you've really got this dual career going. Now, what inspired you to move over or to really jump into AI so heavily?
[00:31:32] Speaker A: So I'm a techie, I'm a nerd for sure. If you can't tell by now. I definitely like to learn stuff. When I was growing up, my superhero power, I wasn't flying around the universe saving people with my x ray vision and lasers from my eyes. I was learning something all the time. Putting together stereo equipment at the age of like five. Like, I was like, I was that kid. Okay? So understanding that, you know, when I started beyond medicine, I was looking for ways to market, looking for ways to improve the functionality of my clinic, improve the time I spend on creating plans for my patients. So I stumbled into AI, and I was kind of like, wow, this is a really cool experiment with the world. And as I started incorporating AI more into my business, I was like, this is amazing. I need to be able to show other people how to integrate AI into their world because the use cases are endless.
So I sat down and I started learning more, just like I did with functional medicine. I started learning like a sponge, absorbing as much as I possibly could. And I stumbled into this whole world of automation and I paired the two together, automating your world, using artificial intelligence as the brain behind the automation. And it just blew my mind, the possibilities, because it's not just a matter of like, okay, let me automate my emails so that I only get the emails I want. It's like, let's create an automatic response using AI for all those emails that are in your inbox waiting for you at the end of the day. So you're not spending, you know, every 15 minutes looking at your inbox. You can spend time with your family, you can spend time with the next, you know, important thing in your world, something that's maybe generating revenue or spending time with family. Whatever it is, it opens you up to not doing these mundane tasks. And if you ask me, the one thing I'm passionate about in life, amongst many, many things is spending time with my family. I want to be there for them. And now that I have these kind of multiple jobs and businesses, I'm juggling all the time I need to find a way to be better. So I created this automation company and I rolled my company beyond medicine into that company. And it's been phenomenal growth for me since I've done that. To be able to automate emails responding to clients.
I mean, when I used to create plans, like Joe, when you first signed up with me a long time ago, it took me about 9 hours to create your plan because there's a lot of data I have to go through. There's no way I can go through that data today and like lose an entire day on one client. There's no way. I don't think anyone can do that. But what I do now with AI is summarize all that information, pull all that data together, and now I create plans for my clients in about one and a half to 2 hours. So it's a lot faster.
What is 6 hours look to you, Joe, like, I mean, if I could save you 6 hours per client you normally spend, like this is my use case, obviously. But you know, that's valuable, that's hugely valuable. If you, if you contemplate how much your value is on an hourly basis and you give that back to yourself, you can now give that to family, friends, you know, new clients, maybe possibly interviewing new clients, creating proposals, or getting back to those leads that you haven't gotten back to in a long time. Time. So like, that's where my business started to develop and grow because I was able to expand my capabilities using AI and automation and I just had to do this for other people. There's no way I can keep that kind of secret to myself. I had to share that with other people. So that's what spurned audify, my other company.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: Yeah, we call that the mad lab. We've done that over the years. We'll come up with an innovation internally and then we test it on ourselves and we go, hey, this is really working well. We can actually sell this outside to other, our competitors. That's when you know you've really got a market leading innovation is when it's something you would sell to your competitors and say, well, here, I can make money doing this too.
So tell us exactly what I mean. The way you explain it to me is you take, a lot of people have their existing software systems, so they don't want to go, well, now I have to go and invest in something else to do this AI. What exactly how do you work with companies whenever they're looking for integrating AI into their business?
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that's the most troublesome thing of business ownership, is the constant change of softwares. I mean, to learn a new software system is very challenging, especially if you have a large team behind you. So one of the cool things that, that when I developed this business model, I was like, I'm not going to disrupt any business owner's workflow. That is the number one goal. I'm going to make it as easy as possible to adapt AI into your workforce.
The key here is we are able to take your existing platform and link it to decision making. AI agents is what we call them, or assistants. So we then think about the thought process behind that decision that you would normally make, and then AI can then go and make that decision for you. Based on learning how you make that decision in the background, it makes that decision in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. They're making these decisions based on how you think. We train it. We train these bots to think how you think using the existing platform that you already have, and then deliver results to the client, whether that be creating proposals or responding to the calls or text messages that you just don't have the bandwidth to get to, whether that be, you know, setting up appointments. Like a lot of realtors, I do this all the time for realtors where they need to get a showing from, from the homeowner to a potential buyer. They need to coordinate the two together. And sometimes that can be challenging for people. They may not have software systems or if they do already, we link it so that they can understand you don't even need to technically be present for that. And that's really cool to be able to showcase that. I'll give you another example. I have a realtor client of mine who really hates drafting up contracts, and they're kind of in the investment business as well. So they're kind of flipping back and forth from homes, buying homes, selling them very quickly. So part of the process is getting people to buy and sell in the same 30 day window and coordinating that with a title company, etcetera. So having that happen in real time without active involvement is very challenging. I'm sure most of your viewership knows what I'm talking about here. And we automated the entire process for them. We didn't change a single workflow for them, but we automated the entire process. So as soon as something comes in, we're able to send it out to the title company, to potential blast emails to sellers. They're sleeping. This whole thing is operating at 03:00 in the morning. They are sleeping. When they wake up in the morning, they could have an offer already done on a sale that happened the night before. And it's really cool to be able to have all that happening in real. You basically are getting a workforce that knows your brand and doesn't sleep. They are working 24 hours a day. They know your brand, we're trained them in the brand, and then they go and execute these big concepts for you. So some of these things are very convoluted and difficult to create. But as long as we understand your business, which is the first step in our entire process, is our free consultation. I offer on that side as well is to be able to understand your business model. We map it out. Literally there's an entire program I use to map out your entire business. And once you map it out, we then sit down with you again, learn where those individual manual steps are located in your business, and we then start to develop AI agents and bots in those agents customized to your business, your SOP, your website. I don't even need you to create an SOP. I'll do it for you. And we'll then understand your business better on a granular level. And then make AI agents kind of complete these mundane tasks that you're doing all day long. They're taking up all your day, you know, you're not there actually earning business, you're just kind of maintaining business, if that makes sense. And the goal for you is to expand your business at all times.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: Well, and I remember you told me R1 World case where it was a wholesaler, where they were using, you had set it up to where it would evaluate offers and really just through a text message. Yeah, yes. No kind of thing that your client, all they got to do is say yes or no. Yes, I'll take the offer. No, want. So ultimately it's still their decision. But all that work that normally takes tons of human capital, labor sitting there and investment and training and process mapping for them and decision trees for them. Now it's all, well, there's an AI who sits there and 24/7 receives information on the property, evaluates it, can put together the contract. Yes, no, do it, don't do it. And then blast it back out after they've got the contract to potential investors who may want to take the contract. It just, it blows my mind what kind of things it can do. I mean, we use AI a lot, don't get me wrong, but we've never taken it to this level where it's literally taken labor off of us. We just more or less use it as a really souped up Google, a conversational Google is, unfortunately, the way we're using it to a large extent and in the marketing for editing and things like that.
So a lot of entrepreneurs are interested in using AI, but they have no idea where to start. I think we've given them some really good use cases of things it can do, but they just don't know where to start. What advice do you have for business owners who want to leverage AI to streamline their operations and reduce those overhead costs that they may have?
[00:41:13] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I would tell you, you gotta dive in. This is the future of business. The way I see it, if you're not using AI, you're basically not using a computer at this point. You gotta think about it that way. In the 1980s, a computer was like unheard of. It was a pen and paper for everything that you did. Forget about Google sheets or Microsoft Excel. Like that was not even heard of at that time. And now look how dependent we are on those resources. So I want you to think of it in that light. AI is the future. Whether we like it or not, it is here, and more than likely, it's only going to get more involved in every business. So my advice to you is just please, please just learn about it. If you don't want to necessarily adopt it in your business ecosystem right now, that's totally fine. I think you will be left behind eventually, maybe not today, but in the next coming years, you will definitely be left behind because everyone's going to be using it. I mean, just imagine the amount of customers that come to your website or call you and then learning about them before you even get on a phone call. So you understand their pain points directly without even touching that client yet. So I just imagine the use cases that exist out there, you'll be left behind. So that's my biggest fear for people listening, is that they may not be willing to adapt it or they're worried about how it's going to affect their labor force. And what I want you to understand is that even the job market is going to be changing with AI because a lot of these jobs are going to now be AI driven. They may not even be required anymore because they're AI driven. But this is the future, whether we like or not, this is what's going to happen. So to me, I think adopting these concepts earlier in the business would be ideal. If you don't have the bandwidth or time to necessarily learn these things or spend the time to develop these tools, then, you know, partner with a company that can help you understand these concepts and then customize it to your use case scenario. And that's exactly what I do with my company. There's no cookie cutter programs that I do. It's all customized to your needs. We work with all kinds of people, from hair salons all the way through million dollar construction companies. It just depends on kind of your needs, and we adapt our AI and automations to your needs. If there's a scenario where you can use your existing systems and then sprinkle AI and automation on top of it so that they become more robust, more efficient, time saving, value saving, and the ROI just drastically increases when you don't have to change existing softwares. And that, I think, is the biggest key to what I do in audify is we don't change a single thing about you. There might be different places you store a file, for instance, to make AI run, but that's about the most change we'll make to you. So that would be my advice. Learn about it. If you don't have the time to learn about it, please, please at least consult with somebody to kind of learn more about AI and how you can use it in your business.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm finding actual pushback in my own companies about people going, no, I don't want to use AI.
And you would think it's from the old folks. Actually, the x ers and boomers are the ones who are adopting it fastest. It's disease. And millennials who go, no, that's cheating. Or how do I know what they're doing with my data? Or, you know, and I've learned enough about AI that I understand how the large language models work in that they take every single word, they assign it a number, and then they put it into phrases, and then that receives another number. So it's basically like you're cheating by having a dictionary or a thesaurus. That's all it is. That's cheating. But I look at it as, I mean, I remember when I first started practicing, there were lawyers who refused to have computers on their desk. They're like, that's my secretary's job. She types, I don't type. You know, that's how backwards they were. If you walk into an office today and see a lawyer who doesn't even have a computer on their desk, or anything. It's really rare. And then we moved. We had fax machines. Oh, well, nobody's going to use a fax machine. That's, you know, it's a flash in the pan. And then emails. Well, I'll just send a memo. I'll mail them a memo. You know, those are the people who got left behind, and they are done. And I agree with you, artificial intelligence, everybody, you know, you're hearing a lot right now of OpenAI is really hurting for money. They're not doing well. And that's, I would not be concerned with that. It truly is. The future of work, of life is having this conversation with your computer and chat GPT right now. Yes, it's a loss leader for them, but chat GPT for Omni, $20 a month, and you can have everybody in your office on chat GPT for Omni at $20 a month apiece. And now they're, everything that they're doing is together in this little model. So it's learning about your business now, and it's not sharing it with everybody in the world. It's not sharing secrets. And that's another thing I've heard is these companies are like, well, I don't know what they're sharing with everybody else and they're giving away my secrets. It does not work like that, period. It simply does not work like that. And yes, sometimes it gets it wrong. I gave it a question the other day and, and it was a legal question, and it gave me the citations of the Florida statutes that it was working off of. So I was like, let me go back and check it. And unfortunately, it had scraped that information from about four years ago. And that information four years ago gave you five years to do something that now you can do it anytime. So I'm glad I went back and checked them, but I find that, you know, there's so many things that it's faster for me than going and looking for maybe an assignment of mortgage form somewhere in my system or even filling it out online. I can just tell chat GPT to, hey, prepare a Florida assignment of mortgage from this person to this person. The previous mortgage was recorded in this booking page in this county, and it was for this much money, within less than a second, it's preparing it on my screen, and I look at it, I go, yeah, that's right. Even the notary section is up to date, so we're good.
So it really, it just saves you so much time. What what is, what's your company again? Autofi a u t how do you spell it?
[00:47:44] Speaker A: A u t o f y. So I want you to think of the word automate. Like, I want to automate something, but just replace that with autophy. So I want to audify this or audify that. So it's a u t o f y, modified consulting agency. So I don't want you to think of us as like a chat GPT salesman. That's not what we are. We are definitely looking to consult with you. That's the whole goal, is to understand your business first. And then we sprinkle AI and automations on top of that, from chatbots to an intelligent website to many, many different use cases from it finance, Hr. I mean, who doesn't want to automate their billing at the end of the month for all their employees? You know, tracking all that, like, I'm sure that's a headache for pretty much every business owner. You know, we do things from security sides as well to make sure the data is safe. We have HIPAA compliancy as well. So, like, we do a whole bunch of things. It just, it just depends on the use case scenario. And it's very, very much customized to your needs comparatively to, like, kind of what you mentioned, like going through and putting, you know, chat GPT on for every member of your entire business can either be expensive, but it's also, there's no big brain thought process occurring from the business aspect. It's an individual account that's kind of linked to a high mentality. But who's running the business at the end of the day, the goal for me is to, with this business is to really showcase to business owners that you're working too hard.
Like, why not work smarteen or intelligent, if you will? Not that we're not working smart already, but there are things that other people can do at a faster rate and more efficiently and more accurately than you can because you're split in 25 different angles. And how are you necessarily going to give that contract the details and the nuances that it needs consistently? So if we can train an AI bot to do that for you with just a minimal amount of inputs from you, you'll see that the workload that you have will reduce the output that you're able to generate on a weekly basis will drastically fold, maybe three x fold, five x fold, and you're not working harder. You're actually working less and producing that much more.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I actually feel guilty sometimes because somebody will say, hey, do you have an agreement for such and such? And I go, well, no, but while I'm sitting there watching tv or something, I will talk to chat GPT and say, hey, I need assume the role of a, you know, a Florida corporate lawyer and I need an agreement about, you know, non circumvention of blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And these are the, these are the parties and this is that, and make it very favorable to this party and it'll kick it out. And now I don't just go, okay, here's your agreement. Of course not. You know, I sit there and I read through it and a lot of people go, well, that's cheating. Yes, in a lot of people's eyes it is cheating. But I look at it as I just save that client about probably two and a half hours of my time simply going around trying to find the right form and the right language and sitting there drafting it where now I can focus on. Okay, this is the meat of the agreement. Now I just need to see if there's anything else I need to add or maybe tweak or take away.
And it's usually, it's very little I have to do to do it. So now you're balancing a medical career and an AI engineering career with the AI business.
How do you manage your time between both and what skills or strategies from your medical side have you find, have you found help you cope with the stress and the pressure you have on the other?
[00:51:29] Speaker A: Really good question. Let me tell you, the first thing I do every day is the hardest thing I do every day.
I make it a point to knock out the most difficult task of my day. Right at 615 in the morning when I wake up, I go to the gym. I hate working out. I can't stand it, but I make it part of my life. I have no choice because I want to live to a bajillion years old. So that's my goal. I work out as much as I possibly can in the mornings. There are occasions where I don't get to it. Don't get me wrong, I got two kids, so dropping them to school is a priority for me. I want to spend time with them. So, you know, that's the first thing I do from the medical side, is I rearrange my lifestyle to be cognizant of that. I do intermittent fasting as well. I don't really break my fast till around ten or eleven. I'm not a full 16 hours fast, but in that timeframe. And then the first thing I consume is a bunch of protein, fiber and protein, like I mentioned before. So, like changing the mindset, you know, like using that to help me. I take a bunch of supplements as I'm sure you know as well, Joe. I take, you know, my vitamin D, my fish oil. I take, you know, I take some peptides as well, oral peptides as well, which we could talk about on another podcast if you like. But you know, we do all these kinds of things, fish oils. If I mentioned multivitamin to make sure I'm not missing any nutrients, I take about nine different supplements throughout the day and I can kind of give you my whole list. But since I've been on that kind of regimen, I think my energy level, my sleep, my mindfulness of being available for my family, for being available for my friends, it just skyrocketed. I don't know if it's one particular thing, the combination of everything together, but has given me, I want to say unlimited energy because I go to sleep at night at like maybe 1010 30 and I'm like, my mind is like ready to go. I could work out again at 1030 at night. I could play Monopoly with my kids and be fully present, not worried about the next day's list of to dos to take care of. I'm just mentally there and I don't know what it is. Maybe the fog has gotten better. I'm not sure how it's all working out, but the combination of it is, what I'm trying to say is the secret to that, you know, from the functional medicine side is like finding that combination, that lock and key for you specifically, that's what works for me. And then the other thing I do is I time box a lot. I kind of set certain time windows in the day for working on beyond medicine, my functional clinic. And then I certain time blocks are working on audify, my consulting agency as well. And then once it hits, you know, clocking out time around four, five o'clock at latest, I clock out, turn everything down. No more electronics for the day, focus on my family, my kids, making dinner, getting everything ready for the next day, and then, you know, going to sleep dreading that workout I'm going to do at 06:00 in the morning.
But that's kind of my entire day. And the only way I can stay focused is because I made myself focused, I made myself organized. We have family calendars, I know what's going on here and there. I know my responsibilities are. So I hyper organized my life. And then I stack the hardest parts of my day first thing in the morning.
That's, I think that would be my secret.
[00:54:47] Speaker B: Smart. Well, that's one of the things I do, is the last decision I make every day. The last decision is what I'm going to wear the next day. And I go ahead and I take it out of the closet and I hang it on the hanger in the bathroom. So that's my last decision, and I'm done making decisions. Once I've made that decision each evening.
One final question. I always ask everybody this.
Our mission as a company is to help people aspire to a better life. So I always like to ask my guests, who is someone who has helped you aspire to a better life?
[00:55:19] Speaker A: This is going to sound kind of corny, but my wife, believe it or not, and I'll tell you, we have a lot of friends and loved ones around us, but I'll tell you, there's nothing like having a supportive partner in your life.
They, you know, one of my good friends is not my quote, but they said that, you know, they can either make or break you, your significant other. And it is so true, because your confidence to do things in life, to aspire to be something more than what you are, you need a good support, a good foundation for that. And I'm so blessed to have her. My family, my parents, my children, everyone is amazingly supportive of me. So I would look to my family, specifically my wife, because they help me to be better. They offload me in certain areas when they see my stress levels are heightened. They understand that dynamic. No words are being spoken about it, but they understand the dynamic. So I aspire to be like that because I want to be cognizant of other people. I want to understand their needs and then supplement them when they need to help support them. You know that phrase that, you know, when the tide rises, all ships go up, or whatever that phrase is. You know, I think that's kind of really what my wife does for me, and I really envy that. That's a really good quality that she has.
So I envy that. I want to be like that one day.
[00:56:42] Speaker B: Well, well, thank you so much. It's been so great to talk to you about things other than data and bodily fluids. My own. Today we were going to. We're going to put your information down in the show notes so everybody can get in contact with you about functional medicine or AI, either one, whatever they're looking for. And again, thank you for coming. And until next time, everybody, trust this. Do. Thank you for coming in.
I can't thank you enough for this. I think it was great. Now, your autofi is autofy.com so it's audify agency.
Agency.
[00:57:24] Speaker A: All one word. But yeah, you spelled it correctly.
[00:57:26] Speaker B: Okay, so we want to get that in on the show notes, audifyagency.com beyond medicine clinic. And then we need a your glamour shot. Whatever your picture, whatever your picture is, you can send that over.
Rick, I will get that information so you can email doctor Samji and tell him what you want. And another thing we do, I don't know if you have a marketing agency or anybody you work with, but another thing we do is we share the entire a raw recording with you. So you can then give that to your people and they can slice and dice it into videos on your website or social media, shorts, reels, whatever you want.
[00:58:11] Speaker A: Oh, that'd be great.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: It'll be available for you out there. So cool.
[00:58:15] Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate that. It was fun chatting with you, Joey. You're so natural at this.
You made it easy.
[00:58:21] Speaker B: I've gotten a little bit better. I've got a little bit better. Fortunately, last night as I was getting in bed, I was like, oh shit. I didn't, I didn't think of any questions to ask him. So I talked to chat GPT and he gave me the questions to ask, but some of them were still my own. But no, it definitely gives me something to talk about. Thanks for listening to this edition of trust. If you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next. Next time, keep a great life.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: You too. Take care.
[00:58:52] Speaker B: Bye.
