AI “Genies” & Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum 8/18/26

22:28This is a character rig. So even though it's not a video game, it's been built like a video game. That was the gamble that we took when we raised that round from Silver Lake. We actually came out with a blog post titled Farewell. Typically when you raise a round like that, you go into the media, you go do a bunch of partnerships, whatever. We actually said, we're going to go dark for the next couple of years because we want to double down on a vision and a tech stack that we know is going to take longer than a video-based avatar system, but is going to pay off long-term. And so now this is 50 to 100x cheaper than a video-based system.

22:57And so that's why these IP partners and so forth, we've only announced five of them. There's another five that are coming out too. They can do this at scale. So that's number one. Video-based avatar systems are prohibitively expensive. Number two is they don't have utility. So because it's built like a video game, these characters don't just talk to you, right? But they can go do stuff with you too. So you can bring them to apps, you can bring them into games and so forth. So they become interoperable. And then number three is for a video-based system, there's breaks per frame. So they don't carry the consistency all the way through.

23:26Whereas again, she will react to in real time. If you talk to her and then in the middle of the conversation, you pause her, she'll stop and then she'll react to you. She's an embodied character versus a videophile. So, you know, that's a big reason why these partners have signed on, just because we checked off a lot of their boxes that they have. The question I'll ask, though, is some of the partnerships you have, like with MLB and with the NBA. I will admit when I first talked to her yesterday, this avatar of me, it was a little weird. She's got my voice. She knows a lot of things. And it was a little unsettling.

23:59Like, OK, I don't know what's going to happen with this avatar. Who does that? How do the players feel about the leagues making these decisions? Is everybody on the same page with that? Well, look, like you guys started covering us, like I said, in like 2020, 2019 or so. We had a lot of players, athletes from the NBA, the NFL, the MLB and so forth, that have started to use their genies naturally on Instagram, on Snapchat and TikTok. So by the time we formalized these deals with the players associations, it was kind of a formality. Like a lot of these players already leverage us. Now, some players are a lot more inclined and want to be able to, you know, utilize like this full capability.

24:35Some of them are like, let me do a crawl, walk, run, right? But you can imagine like this spans everything. Right now we're talking about entertainment in media, but really like we feel like this is going to dominate all different sectors, enterprise creators, and more as well. Okay. Becky Quicker was trained on my voice and personality, also on the history of Squawk Box and the topics and news events that we cover. And so let's take a look at a longer clip. It shows a little bit about the AI persona and how it learns in real time. I asked this genie if she realized that she was AI Becky talking to the real Becky.

25:08You're testing whether I actually know who I'm talking to. Fair enough. Joe's been here since 95, Becky since 2005, Andrew since 2011. You're the one who just said yeah and waited to see what I do with it. That's a producer move. Actually, actually, you're wrong. I've been here since 2004. You're right. I was off. Becky joined in 2005, but you were already here in 2004. That's before the big revamp. So you saw the Hanes era, the transition, all of it. What was the room like when they shook up the whole format? Okay, that was impressive. I was a reporter before. I was an anchor starting in 2005, but I was a reporter on Squawk Box for that year before.

25:56And you watched the whole thing unfold. Hanes out, Becky and Carl in, the 6 a.m. slot. Over 200 complaints hit the blog. What did the room actually feel like that first week? Not the press release version, the real one. That's good. It was a lot. People don't like change in the mornings. I mean, I will tell you that is something we all learned and you have to find and develop your audience. A little bit of job security, though, too. Job security because you survived the revamp or because you helped shape it. Those are two different things. Is she questioning me or I'm questioning? I don't know what the hell is going on.

26:37I'm sitting here. I haven't seen the genie just flip the she just flipped the narrative. You're like, whoa, I'm driving this conversation. What's going on? Let's say that you were producing Squawk Box this week. What story do you think you would focus on at the top of your list? What do you think we should spend more time focusing on than we are? The bond market. The yield moves lately are telling a story most people aren't hearing clearly. Equities get the headlines, but the fixed income side is signaling something about growth expectations that deserves more airtime. What's your read on why we undercover it?

27:13Actually, I agree with you on the bond market. We've tried to work some more material in on that today, but that's actually pretty good. That is something I think that we should spend more time on. Just to be fair, Becky Quicker stopped learning on last week's shows. So we did talk about it yesterday and she hadn't been upgraded on what we had learned this week. I also got the chance to ask this genie what she had learned about Andrew.

27:35Andrew Ross Sorkin:Oh, goodness. Tell me, Becky Quicker, what you have learned about Andrew. What's the funniest, most fun things you've learned about him? Andrew's guilty pleasure is french fries. That's funny only because he looks like someone whose guilty pleasure should require a reservation. He also talked his way into a New York Times internship in 1995 by convincing a columnist to have lunch with him. It was interesting. She learned things about all three of us. I asked her what my favorite color was, which was kind of a trick question. I don't really have one. And she said she didn't know on things. She said that Joe made his money first, his first dollars selling circulars, which I didn't know either.

28:14Andrew Ross Sorkin:Question, just two, I have two technical questions for you, for anybody who's watching this. One is what model are you using underneath this? Because I'm listening to the language and I'm aware of certain things. I'm like picking certain things up. So can you tell us what model you're using? So the visual layer itself is a proprietary model we've built. But of course, we open source the LLM itself. And so like, I don't know if there's going to be that many businesses right now that should be developing their own LLM. What we've taken the position is we're going to be LLM agnostic. We know that, again, everything's going to happen.

28:46Andrew Ross Sorkin:So which LLM was doing the voice? It depends on this. Oh, the voice itself and the partner that we're going to be in. Not the voice itself, but the actual words coming out of their mouth. Uh, that one specifically was DeepSeek. DeepSeek. That's what, okay. That's what I thought. And then my second question is... What was the give? What was the tell? There were certain, there was like certain words that, uh, certain like sentence structures that were very akin to what ChatGPT used to be. And that's what DeepSeek sort of had been trained on. So there were like things happening that just sounded like that.

29:16Andrew Ross Sorkin:And then the second question was how quickly, I don't know if you, how it was cut, how quickly were the responses coming? So it depends, right? So yesterday, because the Wi-Fi here was like, we couldn't get the Wi-Fi, we had a tether. It was three seconds. But in the next two months, it's going to be half a second. So the fact that you can go back and forth, I think that's going to be a pretty significant change in the way that you can communicate with an avatar itself. In the video-based avatar systems, there's going to be higher latency. Interesting. Akash, thank you for coming in. Thanks so much for having me.

29:47And Becky Quicker, thank you to you too. To see Becky Quicker, how she looks, moves, her mannerisms, check out CNBC.com or CNBC TV's YouTube page where this segment lives in video form. Check for clips on our X feed as well. You can find us at Squawk CNBC. And next up on Squawk Pod, a rare and exclusive conversation with HIMS & HERS CEO Andrew Dudum on the future of health care. The company shook up the GLP-1 industry by offering compounded versions, and it's not stopping there. You talked about the bottle that you open every morning can have Bluetooth enabled to the device. So you're actually being held accountable to say, yeah, I took that medicine, I opened that bottle and I closed it.

30:31And all of that is getting documented back into a global ecosystem where you have...

30:35Andrew Ross Sorkin:How far away from that, though? I don't think you're that far. I think you're 12 months away. How AI could revolutionize America's health right after this.

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32:18You're listening to Squawk Pod today with Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin.

32:23Andrew Ross Sorkin:Welcome back to Squawk Box. Hims and Hers announcing it is investing deeply in artificial intelligence with the goal of becoming an AI native. Here's Hims and Hers, co-founder and CEO Andrew Dudum. In a rare and exclusive interview, we talked about how he thinks AI will transform healthcare. If you can use technology, meaningfully lower the cost of care to people. So any zip code you're in in the country, any zip code you are in the world, pick up your phone, click a button, as if you're sitting in a waiting room in Stanford and you're getting all of these perspectives from the best clinical care on your device.

32:59That, to me, is the ultimate goal, right? Because you're standardizing a level of care that today is nearly impossible to get access to. And that includes, I think, what we're talking about, more proactive understanding of your baseline health, so genetic testing, more personalized treatments, combination of therapies, combinations of Western medicine, Eastern medicine together for whatever the patient feels is appropriate. And then a care team that's actually responsible, quarterbacking your health so that you don't have to have that burden every single day, every morning.

33:29Andrew Ross Sorkin:So you're leaning in super heavily into AI. Yes. How is that going to change the dynamic, either from a drug perspective or just from the consumer side? It's transformative. So on the consumer side, if you start a medicine today because you're at risk of heart disease, 12 months later, only 10 or 15 percent of these patients are still taking that medicine. So number one killer in the country for dads, heart attacks, even though entirely preventable. And it takes us or costs us maybe two to three cents to manufacturing compound medicine that can prevent heart attacks. If you can have a coach, an AI coach, be with you, hand-holding you, checking in on you, reminding you to take the medicine, you're having side effects, great, let's adjust your dose, let me talk to your provider and tweak the medicine for you, the adherence can double or triple.

34:20And so the outcomes of people actually sticking on medicine is one of the biggest ways in which you can massively extend life expectancy in this country. So many of the things people are dying from are not actually clinically, scientifically challenging. The bridge, the issue is actually just access, price, and accountability.

34:38Andrew Ross Sorkin:So how far are you away from that? I think we're very close. What does that look like? I think it looks like you picking up your phone, clicking a button, and having an AI coach right there who knows everything about you, knows your goals, knows all of the data that's coming in. But are you telling it, I didn't take my medicine today? Or is it notifying me in the morning and quizzing me? How does it know what I'm doing or not doing? There's a lot of ways. You can have scales at home. You can have at-home blood testing shipped to your door. We acquired an at-home blood testing company last year.

35:13You click a button, a little tube of blood comes out and you ship it back to our lab. It costs something like$30. dollars. You can have wearable devices that are tracking your sleep and your glucose, right? You can have a Dexcom, a CGM. And so you can even have, you know, we've talked about the bottle that you open every morning can have Bluetooth enabled to the device. So you're actually being held accountable to say, yeah, I took that medicine. I opened that bottle and I closed it. And all of that is getting documented back into a global ecosystem where you have... Okay.

35:43Andrew Ross Sorkin:How far away from that though? I don't think you're that far. I think you're 12 months away. I really do. And is that something that you are pioneering yourself? You're working on bottles as we speak? We are trying to figure out how you get those bottles connected to the device. We just launched the DEXA scam where you can have a scale at home, connects directly into your weight loss program. We're partnering with all of these device platforms. And eventually, I think these devices, the aura, the whoop, the scales, the sleep. If I fast forward five years from now, these devices can be manufactured for$10.

36:18overseas without subscription requirements, just device,$10. So if you can have these devices proliferate to the masses and let people choose their preference of device, the preference of color, and it's built into a core hims and hers membership, all of that data comes back into a global ecosystem where you have an AI caretaker overseeing the whole thing. You have a doctor that can be pulled in as needed. You have a pharmacist downstream that can actually compound and make a personalized treatment for you that has the hair, the heart disease, the metabolic supplements that you're on so that everything is actually tailor-made to you.

36:54Andrew Ross Sorkin:All through your company, though. So the other thing is this sort of patchwork system that we've had thus far. Does that work in the future? No, it does not. I think right now what's happening is the consumer is taking an active, participating role in their health, which has never happened. The health care system has always been incredibly paternalistic. You walk in, they give you something and you have no choice. Now with hims and hers, you have price transparency, you have choice, you can have a conversation and you can choose what is right for you. And this is across anything from some of the more cutting edge things like peptides all the way to more standardized medicine.

37:29But bringing that together is going to be necessary because ultimately a care team looking after you, a concierge medicine experience that's looking after everybody in the world requires a holistic 360 degree understanding of all your data sources, all of your habits, your goals, your lifestyle, your sleep, et cetera.

37:50Andrew Ross Sorkin:Okay. And then the question is, will people pay a premium for that? Because on one end, we're trying to reduce the cost of all of these things. On the other end, you're creating all sorts of new combinations of therapies where there's a higher cost. I think ultimately the cost is going to come down dramatically. If you look at the GLP-1s as an example. You know, we brought those to market at$150,$200 price points per month. At the time, the drug companies were offering those at$1 ,500 per month. Immense amount of consumer pressure amongst a lot of people resulted now in an environment where you have branded pills, you have vials, you have quick pens, all priced at$150 a month.

38:33And so that came down almost 80, 90 % in just 12 months, one of the blockbuster therapeutics of the century. And so I think as consumers get more involved in healthcare, they start demanding access.

38:44Andrew Ross Sorkin:What was the lesson of that? Because you were compounding. By the way, there's a big debate about compounding. You effectively moved away from compounding because you had to, but you would probably turn around and say, well, it kind of worked in terms of forcing the price down and creating some of these relationships that you now have. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, we will always apply pressure to the system if we believe it's best for the consumer. And when we were compounding the GLP-1s, there was no affordable access to these therapeutics. There was no personalization available. And these have some of the highest side effect rates of any medication, right?

39:23Patients, I think it was 70 % of patients after 30 or 90 days were not on the medication any longer. And these are chronic therapies. You should be on these for a very long time. So without personalization, without access to affordable prices, without form factor differences, injections, oral pills, you didn't have a consumer offering for patients that actually serve them. And so that is where compounding actually really does serve an important part of the healthcare system. Now, what that did in the ecosystem is it showed consumers and the drug companies, these medications can be brought to consumers at a price that everyone can afford.

39:59And that awareness and that transparency has resulted, I think, in an incredible shift where the drug companies have now brought new form factors, new personalization options, and new price points.

40:09Andrew Ross Sorkin:So you are king for the day. You can do it however you want. If I told you you were going to meaningfully both bring down the costs of healthcare and hopefully have more efficacious outcomes, you would do what? I would provide every American citizen a HSA, FSA type budget of cash that they can then use on service providers to tackle their health. That would then create a marketplace dynamic where players like him and hers and everybody else would have to compete. They have to compete for the best MPS consumer experience, the most affordable pricing, the best outcomes, the best brand, ultimately what makes people healthy.

40:59Right now, when you look at health care, if somebody is getting sicker or healthier, it doesn't matter when it comes to their financial output. They have to pay regardless. If you could align people feeling better and getting healthier with their dollars going in that direction, you will then create an environment where the marketplace is forced to compete, just like in every other industry. And I think creating that structure would ultimately enable great companies to emerge, great offerings to emerge, and customers get that benefit.

41:31Andrew Ross Sorkin:You announced on your quarterly call last week that you were moving away from certain AI agentic vendors. What kind of signal are you trying to send to the marketplace and what does that mean? You know, the team has been building around platforms like Sierra for the last year, right? incredible leading technologies that help customer care coaches and support interact with consumers. We hired Mo Alshinawi, who ran AI Autonomous at Cruise for many years. We think when you're building an ecosystem that's specific to clinical care, when you're actually interacting with doctors prescribing and nurses and pharmacists, building it in-house is critical.

42:14And we've seen that. We've launched our first version of this in the last couple of months. and overnight the amount of care tasks it's handling, the amount of operational tasks it's handling, far surpasses players like Sierra and others.

42:28Andrew Ross Sorkin:Okay, so what does that say about either Sierra? Is it that these agenting systems are too expensive? They don't work as well? The cost of creating your own is coming down to a point where now it makes sense? I mean, what does this say even beyond? I think that what it says is that the core foundational models, independent of a closed loop data set, are not that valuable. That's my honest opinion. So when you have a healthcare system. Say that again. The closed loop data that you have within a healthcare system, like him's and hers, that is the asset. Because you can train these models to understand what patients like Andrew have had success in the past.

43:11Right? Andrew's tried these four medicines, and ultimately, this is the one that worked. Well, now let's reverse engineer that and see if we can take that learning and apply it somewhere else. Basic models that are supporting customer support or basic models supporting financial analysts or whatever they are, they can only go so far. And so I think the real asset with HIMSS and HERS, the real opportunity, is actually the fact that we consult you, we diagnose, we help treat, we then follow up and make sure you're doing well, the whole thing.

43:38Andrew Ross Sorkin:What does that mean, again, beyond hims and hers? Long-term companies that have their own data sets go and use open-weight models or other models to develop their own thing? Do you think that's across the board? I think for companies that have the resources and scale, if they have an independent data set, that is the path that they will go. No question. The cost can be upwards of 70, 80 % less, but more importantly, the actual use cases of what you're building and the ability for the model to self-learn dynamically is what's powerful. And so what we launched, our first version immediately out surpassed what we could get in market.

44:21But the trajectory of what's possible in just six months is transformative because it's continuously learning on every new patient that comes into Hems and Hers. So for other companies that have that type of closed loop data set, I do think they'll end up working with open way models and building it themselves.

44:36Andrew Ross Sorkin:Let me ask you about data because this is, and maybe this is personal because it struck me. I was listening to a podcast that you were on, I think in the past year, where you talked about your father. And he was the same age that you are now, I think, when you learned that he had cancer. And you said something, and this was the thing about data, you said data was not scary. Learning things was not scary. What was scary was not knowing. Speak to that experience. You know, I'm 38 today. I've got three little boys. My dad was 38 and he had four children and had stage four colon cancer. And at 38, you don't get stage four colon cancer, right?

45:19The doctors at the time wouldn't even run the tests because the screen for colon cancer, just as of last year, was 55. It'd be 55 plus. And he ended up having a rare genetic predisposition to this disease. And it cost at that point$20 ,000 to run that genetic test to identify the fact that he has it. It's similar to a BRCA breast cancer gene. You fast forward today, that same test can cost one of our partners maybe$30 to run today. And with that$30, we can tell you across your entire genome what cancers you have a near guaranteed chance to receive and get in your 30s and 40s. And this data is growing so quickly.

46:06What we know today is going to be so different from what we know a year from now and two years from now. It's only going to get more powerful. But understanding those predispositions, to me, that is a core part of how you transform the healthcare system to something that's entirely reactive to proactive. So I encourage now every one of my family members to get these genetic tests. It costs all in maybe$100. And hims and hers will offer it very shortly. And it will be built into a plan, right, where this is just part of what you know. And then from there, we can take actions. We can get ahead of your heart disease.

46:37We can get ahead of the cancer risks. I found out I have a macular degeneration risk. And my 98-year-old grandmother is suffering from it right now. And so there are things I can do today. I can document my eyes every time I go in. I can take vitamin supplements. I can make sure to remind myself to eat the leafy greens. But that knowledge is so powerful. And I think I learned this early. You can't be scared of the data. You can't be scared of understanding where you're at. That is incredibly powerful. But it's very scary if you don't have somebody with you to then help you act on that. And I think ultimately that's what hims and hers can do.

47:13Andrew Ross Sorkin:One of the things you've talked about is the transformative power of GOP-1s generally. I want to ask you a cost question. I was with Brian Moynihan, who runs Bank of America, about a week and a half ago. And he said that the bank is now spending$200 plus million a year on GOP-1s for its employees, which is a remarkable private company. There are increasingly small towns that pay for firemen and policemen and teachers to get on GOP-1s. And some of that, for some of these towns, the price tag is so high, even though it's come down. And they're not seeing, at least in the immediate sense, a payback.

47:58Andrew Ross Sorkin:And I just wonder what you think that ultimately looks like. I think that price will ultimately come down quite dramatically. What we learned in the last couple of years from our infrastructure and other infrastructures is that you can deliver GLP-1 therapies. It's a set of peptides and amino acids at a cost probably closer to$40 to$50 with high quality. Now, it's going to take a while for that to happen. To get to$40 or$50. To$40 or$50. But it's only because of competitive dynamics that it doesn't exist today. It is not because of manufacturing constraints or supply chain issues. You can manufacture these medicines safely and get them to consumers safely.

48:45Cold stores shipped to your house overnight for$40 to$50. What's going to happen, I think, in the next couple of years is you've got five or six new companies coming to market. You have companies like Kylara. You've got Viking Therapeutics. You've got new GLP-3 combos. You've got Chinese assets that will likely be acquired and moved domestically. And these are all competing and have fairly remarkable data. As that marketplace expands, I think you'll see that$150 to$200 price point creep down to$99, creep down to$79. And I think probably by 2030, which is ultimately when semi-glutide, Wagovi, around that time, goes off patent.

49:25At that point, I think you'll see GLP-1s in the$40 to$50 a month range.

49:29Andrew Ross Sorkin:What's the lesson in the GLP-1 space for where you go, for example, in the peptide space? Because that's probably the next big growth area for you. Yeah, the peptide space is exciting and new and scary for a lot of reasons. We will bring these to market, assuming FDA moves them to category one, the classification that allows compounding. But ultimately, I think it comes down to this idea of consumer empowerment and consumer education. I really believe that patients should have this ability to have information, that data we were talking about, and a partner in a clinician to make the decision that's right for them.

50:09And these peptides are completely untested in humans.

50:13Andrew Ross Sorkin:Well, that's the concern. And so should they be approved? And the other big piece of this puzzle is it sounds like for folks who are going to take peptides, you want to know whether you are prone, for example, to certain types of cancers because some of these peptides are going to increase the chance of a cell growing into a tumor of some sort. We shared this at earnings just a few weeks ago. I think with the peptide offering, if you are a patient that is interested in looking at the cutting edge of healthcare and exploring the longevity therapies, I think you want to have mitigated approaches to ensure that you're doing that in the right way.

50:54In my mind, that's a few things. One, making sure the supply chain of how you're getting access to these peptides is bulletproof. We acquired a peptide manufacturing plant in Menlo Park last year. I think we're maybe the only one in the U.S. can actually bring American-made, from the raw ingredients, peptides to you. So you know what you're getting. Second, I think you need a doctor. You need a doctor overseeing you, understanding your dynamics, and dosing it appropriately. And then third, I think you need the data. You need the blood test, whether it's every three months or every six months. When we bring this to market, if it gets moved to category one, you'll have access to a blood test at home every six months to make sure the vitals, as you said, are right where they should be.

51:34So experimentation, I believe, in empowering. It's something that I do myself when it comes to health and longevity generally. But you need to do it in a way that has guardrails and clinical oversight to be protected.

51:46Andrew Ross Sorkin:What do you think of the competitive landscape for what you do? So there's you, there's Roe, Mark Cuban's doing something. There's a whole bunch of players. Amazon. What does this look like five years from now? Meaning, do you end up rolling up a couple of these companies? Do you think all these companies are still in business? Did somebody buy you? What happens? I think you're transforming the largest industry in the globe, healthcare. And I think it's taken people many years to realize that what hims and hers is doing is healthcare. It is not niche. It is not small. It is truly setting the standard of what a consumer-first digital healthcare experience is.

52:30And I think when I look back at earnings this past quarter, the biggest takeaway for me is that customers are finally adopting the model that has already transformed and disrupted everything from entertainment to music to media. This idea that great innovation can go straight to a customer. So I think what's going to happen in the next few years is it's going to accelerate. The interest and demand is going to accelerate from consumers. I think there'll be a few very large winners, a few very large players. I think we'll be one of them. I think we'll roll up the best assets in the U.S. and globally, which we've already started to do.

53:04We're the number one player globally, and we now lead in the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada, and soon Japan and countries like Brazil. And so I think there is a place for a leading consumer health brand across the world that helps you get access to the best, helps quarterback your health, and helps you get ahead of it before ultimately being reactive.

53:24Andrew Ross Sorkin:Okay, two more questions, and then I know you've got to go. One, and I don't know if you can speak to it, the FTC has sued you. You know this, alleging that you have misled customers about their information, about how easy or hard it is to cancel a subscription to drugs and how the information is shared and when people are paying before they're talking to a doctor online or otherwise. What can you say about where this whole case stands? I can't say much other than the fact that, you know, when you're changing the fundamental understanding of how a traditional system like healthcare works, and you're rebuilding it in the digital ecosystem, I think it takes time for people to understand how to do that the right way.

54:07And we've worked for many years with the FTC to walk them through that. And I think ultimately they wanted more of a headline than a real agreement here. And so we've decided to...

54:17Andrew Ross Sorkin:Can you ask me something? And this is it. Look, we sort of seen it in the social media space. It started actually early on with Uber. When you're trying to transform something, there are companies that will oftentimes either break established rules because they don't think the rules are the right rules, but they're still breaking rules. Is it different in the healthcare space? And should it be? It is different. I do not think you break the rules in the healthcare space. I think you need to understand the rules. And I think you need to push to the boundaries as you can on behalf of consumers. Because so much of healthcare is built in every way to financially drive value for everyone but consumers.

54:52And so I think that is a role we take where we are active disruptors. We take that head on and we're willing to do it, but it is always when we believe it, it's in the best interest of people and their access.

55:03Andrew Ross Sorkin:Okay, also, don't know if you wanna speak to it. Do you have a regimen that we should know about? It's always changing. Okay. Right now, creatine, five grams in the morning. I think absolutely necessary. Basic muscle, mental capabilities. I'm doing it too. It's great. Sauna, four times a week, 20 minutes, 170 degrees. Cuts all cause mortality by 50%. It's challenging to do. Are you a cold plunger afterwards? I'm not. Data is very iffy on cold plunging. You feel great, you'll be energized, but there's not actually so far much real data saying that it has incredible benefits, unless you're lifting heavy and you're trying to reduce inflammation.

55:42Andrew Ross Sorkin:Anything else? I'm a big fan of leveraging some of the newer therapeutics in the right doses to prevent some of the leading causes of death. So in my family, there's metabolic syndrome. There's cardiovascular disease early. There's diabetes early. And so the new PSK9 inhibitor drugs like Repatha and there's others every couple of weeks, massively reduce ApoB, the predisposition for a heart attack. And then I think some of the new GLP-1s, terzepatide, ZepBound, et cetera, in the right doses and one monitor can meaningfully prevent the evolution of prediabetes and other syndromes. So those are two I'm a big fan of for me personally.

56:26Thank you so much for being here.

56:27Andrew Ross Sorkin:This is great. I appreciate it. Thank you.

56:32excellent there's a lot to dig through with this and a lot of really big stories

56:36Andrew Ross Sorkin:just embedded in all the things that he's talking about if if these things happen and it's so interesting to see a guy in the space he's trying to disrupt it but clearly by the way not a friend of the drug companies because they have the ip and he's saying look i don't like a lot of the right and so it's it's fascinating to see what's happening having said that i think there's an argument around, I think, by doing the compounding thing, even though I think there was a lot of drug companies that hated them doing it, it forced the issue. There's still, by the way, so many companies that are compounding now.

57:06Andrew Ross Sorkin:Well, that's one of the reasons they ultimately brought down the price and also wanted to make it more available. But you have all these different competing interests at play. And the idea that he thinks you could get the price down to$40 or$50 and the only reason that it's not, he would say, is because there's not enough competition in the space right now, I think is pretty interesting. Yeah, but there are also the drug companies who spent billions of dollars on the drug discovery. This is the IP. This is how we recoup those investments. This is the fundamental IP question around drugs and how we should.

57:38Will you continue to see that sort of innovation if there is no protection of the patents?

57:42Andrew Ross Sorkin:That is the ultimate question with all of this stuff. You made it. That is a special supersized Squawk pod for today, this Tuesday. Thanks for listening. Tell your AI persona to listen to. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern. Get the best of our TV show right into your ears when you follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow.

58:11Alex Sherman:We are clear. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much. www.swabmarketupdate.com slash marketupdatepodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.