Mike Ranfone & Dr. Marko Lujic - The Gym of the Future Will Change the Future of Healthcare: RTS's Integration Model

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Nice to be with you today. Yeah, thanks for having us. I know it's been five months in the mix.

Yeah, we've been playing this for a while. This is uh, first of all, I I know you guys have a great backstory. Um, you know, you guys are lifelong friends, and uh obviously you built up a lot of credibility within the industry. And I I want to refer to the person who connected us, and I apologize because I'm blanking right now. Um, but it was a gentleman out of Oregon who has a training center. Sorry, buddy. Uh I'll try to put that in the notes.

But anyway, um we got connected because in my mind too, because I did some consulting work with them and then you talk to him. Yeah. I can't for the life of me remember.

Oh, that's brutal. That's brutal. Anyway, uh he turned me on to you guys because I think I had just recently interviewed someone in in the medical and fitness integration. I think, oh, it was Dr. Ryan Green. I had Dr. Ryan Green on from Monarch. And this model of what you guys are doing, like I was just telling you prior recording. I hope it is the future of where our industry is going. Yes. And I think there uh there's a lot of different ways to skin this cat. And everyone's doing it in unique ways. It takes a specific set of talent, like we talked about. Like you have to have a certain um education, you have to have a aptitude or whatever words I'm looking for. You have to be smart enough in the right areas to make this work, right? And then you also have to be driven enough and a little crazy enough to put out a new model, right? And see how it goes, especially in the medical industry. So um, I'm excited to shed light on what you guys are doing. Hopefully, it inspires other people to maybe follow this path or contact you guys about it. So let's start with this. Um, you guys have known each other forever. Maybe just give me the quick intro, how you guys know each other, um, how RTS down it started, and then we'll take it from there.

Yeah. So long story short, we started going to school together in fifth grade. Awesome. Uh he had been there since pre-K, and that was my first year. And we I like honestly, I think they sat us next to each other, which which everyone, like every teacher was upset about that after that occurrence. But we've been almost inseparable for the last, oh, what is it, 35 years now? So and and you know, obviously we had different journeys after high school and college, but we always stayed in touch. We always saw each other in the summer, and you know, wherever we were, we were always connected. And then fast forward, I had opened a gym back in really nine, and uh he was practicing medicine.

He was in residency, then went to Yep, then became an attending general surgeon, and he was still cranking the gym model.

And then he came in one day and he's like, I gotta take care of myself. And that was when really I'm not gonna speak on his behalf, but he flipped, you know, the his operational headspace from what am I doing to myself versus what am I gonna be doing professionally? And then again, right around COVID, he's like, I don't want to practice medicine this way because I believe there's something else we can do and we can do together. So we really started to think about like what are the the gaps in medicine and fitness and nutrition and accountability. And we wanted to come up with this full spectrum service model that neither of us could do by ourselves. And I think like when you ask about how this we're gonna see how this plays out and how this model might be able to continue, like it starts with the agreement of partnership and what that partnership is founded on. So we were luckily having 30 something years before we made an official business alignment, but I think that's a really important piece that most people will try to skip over because they don't know how important it is to the overall success of both parties.

And I mean, really, the the only thing I want to like congratulate myself on is the recognition of what I didn't want to become. So as you go through residency, it's kind of like I guess as a child with your parents, you don't know what's right and wrong. You have to depend on them to kind of influence you, whether it's a teacher, parent, whatever. So going through residency, I was convinced that the medicine I was practicing was real. Like if you argued with me 10 years ago, I would fight with you all day that the treatment for diabetes is insulin, right? And I would argue with you all day that high blood pressure is treated with Metobroll. And my only answers were pharmaceuticals or surgical intervention. And I remember like catching myself one day trying to almost convince a patient that the right answer was surgery, and then it like punched me in the face. You know, I was like, whoa. And that's where the journey of okay, healthcare doesn't exist. How do we invent it? And the way to do that was take all of the inadequacies, as he said, figure out what it's missing, which the most insane thing I've ever said to myself is I worked in a trained profession where I went to medical school. I took hours and hours and hours of time to become a doctor. And I thought I was delivering healthcare. And actually, I was not delivering anything remotely close to healthcare. Sick care, indeed, what was what that was, but healthcare is what was needed. And that's what we're trying to kind of develop. And that's where our thoughts have been heading ever since we came up with this idea is how do we bring to people something that they're missing, which is health, right? Exercise, nutrition, and a way to aggressively intervene before a disease process happens.

There's something that you guys probably felt like, and you're either fully aware of it or maybe you're aware of it now, is that you know, fitness is such a strong and movement and strength, all these things are such a critical part of overall health that everything was so disconnected. Like I remember when I had my gym, I wanted to partner with medical practitioners or um, you know, people who could do blood work, or physical therapists, or whatever, or nutritionists. But it was like the information never flowed back and forth, right? You're still kind of guessing. You were referred out, but there was no direct connection. You wouldn't, no one would communicate back about how things are going. There was no strategic plan, right? It was all tactical in different departments. And I think that's where a lot of people felt that. And that's where you guys probably felt it too. It's like, well, why don't we need to get this all under one roof and all under one service offering so we can track this individually to make sure that this person's moving in the right direction, right?

Exactly.

So maybe like when you guys uh I I find the best way to describe this is just walk me through what is the the member or client experience. Like if I am, if I walk into your doors and like, hey, I'm interested, like how does that whole process unfold?

So the initial entry could either be through the gym end of it or the medical. So it depends on what you're seeking. All roads will lead to a merger of those two. But if you're coming and you say to yourself, okay, I just want to learn how to work out better and exercise purely a musculoskeletal experience. That's one entry. The next entry is like, well, I'm aging and I'm I need maybe this new style of medicine. You might not know exactly what it is, so you're kind of inquiring. And in that same area are the people that are fine-tuned and are seeking my care because they already know this version of medicine exists. Those two kind of buckets end up in the same. So medical gym. And then as you come in, the experience starts with a consult, which is a full discovery session. So 30 to 45 minutes sit down where things like energy, sleep, nutrition, exercise, libido, colonoscopies, cancer, family histories, medicines, allergies, all of the discovery information we need to know from a medical perspective is taken in. On the gym end of it, there's a meeting sit-down with a full physical evaluation. So both of those afford you a screening technique from the provider, us, to make sure that you're a good fit for us, and from a consumer to make sure that we're really what you want. Because we're not looking to like sit back on the couch and watch our health pass by. So we need active engagement. Once they get past that, I'll have Mike explain the training end of it, how they would matriculate, but then through the medical end of it, it's a big set of labs with a huge biomarker conglomerate of information. You use that, and then the most crucial piece is a DEXA scan, D-E-X-A. And it's a bone density, muscle mass, fat mass, low energy x-ray. And it allows us to look at body comp, which then is used in conjunction with the lab data we have, overlapped with the subjective material of how the human actually feels and what their goal is. We put that together and then we develop a plan. That plan could mean anything. I don't really know. It's individualized. So a 40-year-old male and a 40-year-old male standing next to each other, two separate, completely different approaches. So it's all based off the biometric data and the DEXA. But once that happens, we provide everybody with their hormone replacement if needed, their metabolic replacements if they're needed. A full customized line of supplementation with anything as I sell it and envision it. If you walked in a vitamin shop and had to decide what to take, this is everything in a box because that decision is way too insane to make for the average person, which is why people come in here with bags of vitamins doubling and tripling up or negatively reinforcing other things because that world alone is very scary. So we consolidate that. And then you're on it every three months labs, every six months DEXA. We do a VO2 max test yearly. We're doing a we do a resting metabolic rate assessment yearly so we can determine caloric needs and changes over time. We do a wavy brain scan, which is a metabolic health of the brain, which over time we follow. I just had somebody completely reverse his distracted type personality, now to a more focused. And then it's concierge medical service. So the true fact of the concierge medical service has nothing to do with calling me and you need an antibiotic. The real concierge medical service available out in the world, aside from what is sold to you as an antibiotic doctor, is for that the conversation we have continuum, every meeting, the random texts, the personality traits we expose over time with conversation actually allow me to take care of the patient with proper care. So that's the medical end of it. And then obviously, I completely buy into and am a full proponent of the exercise. So all of my clients are then given the opportunity, which hopefully they take because it's given for a reason, to then also matriculate into the exercise end of things, and he can explain kind of that entry point.

Yeah, so uh everything would be running in parallel, right? And one of the big things, if you thought about if you go to a PCP every year once a year, you get about 12 minutes with that person, right? So we already know what's that it's frustrating. Yeah, it's crazy. So you think about hey, a lot of things can happen in a year, and what are you actually accomplishing in 12 minutes? Not a lot. So when we try to design this, it's like, well, we know touch points are important, we know building relationship capital is important, we know that making sure that the feedback loops and the communication cycles are important. So how do we actually support all these efforts going on? Because clearly you can't have unless you have boohoo money to see your doctor every two days, you know? So how does our role as health coaches really allow Marco do his thing, his team to make sure that the medical side is preserved, us to support with good effort and communication. So that's where the training comes into play. So now we're having someone fill out their tracking sheet every day through an app, whether that be uh weight, steps, sleep, stress, resting heart rate, so on and so forth. So we capture daily metrics. They'll see their health coach at least two to four times a week in the gym setting with a customized program based on what all the information we just talked about. So are we working on your mobility of your hips? Are we working on your cardiac output? Are we working on your absolute strength? Which then again goes back to maybe bone density that we found on your DEXA and your RMR that we found, you know, through those diagnostics. So all this is meant to be like how many times can we get or see the same thing through different vantage points, but influence it in the direction that we want to go? Not in a year, not in a decade, but every couple weeks we have improvement. We know exactly what needle is being moved. And again, if you just spent one session with Marco for one hour, you're getting four X the time that you would get with your doctor per year. Now you multiply that through a three-month cadence, you you're already ahead of the game. So disease prevention, as Marco alluded to earlier, is a real is a reality for us.

The hard the hardest concept, not to tangentialize, but I think the hardest concept to re-educate humans in the modern era is that healthcare used to just well, sick care would wait until something broke to fix it. So the the concept to the consumer is well, I'm okay until something breaks. But being okay till something breaks, I mean you went from something being perfect to broken. There's a that's a continuum, that's a gray zone. So then I'm trying to re-educate people that unless you pay attention to the fact that that's a gray zone, it's not a black and white thing between perfect health and broken, we can then optimize the gray zone. So the minute something leans towards a potential break, we immediately reverse that. So reversing aging isn't like, okay, you're 80 and now you become 20. Reversing aging is actually just slowing the kinetic energy or momentum of the over the hill, now you've reached your potential and now you're on the downslope, reversing that so that you don't continue to age and deteriorate. You stay the same and potentially improve. That's the hardest concept to approach the people. But the thing we like to do here is your musculoskeletal system, if it is not in accordance with your metabolic health and your actual health care in terms of chemical composition, aging speeds up exponentially.

Awesome. I want to pull, I want to pull the thread on a couple things there. What do you guys language is important? When people walk in, what are you guys selling? Are you selling longevity? Are you selling health optimization, performance optimization? What what what are some of the language that you guys find resonates with the people walking in?

I think the term age management, I don't really love it. I don't know the right thing. It's almost like health management, but people don't appreciate the fact that health management is a thing yet. So I've come up with more of a descriptive term. I think it's like it's metabolic wellness, right? So it's metabolic health. And if we can start to expose to people that metabolism is like the executive branch of your body, right? If you do not have the executive branch under control, the rest of your checks and balances don't really matter because the executive branch is always asking for stuff, right? And aging is a process that your brain is asking and the body can't deliver, the brain gets irritated and things start to break down because then the brain loses interest in the body, right? And that's how the aging process happens. So once we can make your metabolic health back into alignment with what the brain's asking, that process becomes significantly better. You know, it's a hard language because the world as it is now does not even know what health is. So the word age management and things like that make it seem like I'm gonna reverse your age when really just what I'm doing is trying to not let you continue to deteriorate.

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Age management, I guess. Well, I mean, there's a couple things that because this is when we were trying to figure out how do we market this thing, because it is very differentiated. It is a little new, especially in the area that we are that has very is very set in traditional medicine. Like we came up with this idea, it should be maybe I I don't like the idea of preventative, but proactive healthcare. From proactive healthcare, we came up with this tagline, aggressively healthy. And people are like, Well, what's that? And I said, Well, the Latin form of aggressive literally means to move towards. Right? So, like, it's almost the opposite of do not be passive, do not be a spectator in your own pursuit of health. Because you know if you're not actively doing something, it is going away. You are losing it, right? So we would just want people to kind of adopt the mindset that health is something you have to earn, it's something that you should play a long-term game on, and we're gonna be here to be your guides of getting what you want out of your health, right? And we use a lot of analogies, uh, you know, especially parallels to the like wealth management. And we we we kind of talk about like if you were 18 and had amassed 10 million dollars, and at 18 you're handed 10 million dollars, and then at 45, your wealth manager comes in and goes, Hey dude, you're bankrupt. You'd be like, Well, why didn't you tell me that 20 something years ago? Right. But at 18, you're one of the healthiest at the healthiest time of your life, but at 45, all of a sudden you have none. Right? So, what's the inherent problem here?

People don't know how to manage their health. And the and the amazing thing to me is if you look at any other industry, especially in technical stuff like or movement things like planes, cars, buses. If you manage the human body, I mean, if you manage those like we manage the human body, you'd have a really bad problem. Imagine if you never Ever checked any gauge or anything on an airplane and you just flew it until something broke. Like, there's no way that industry would continue to exist. Yet the medical industry does that every single day to humans. The only preventative care we have currently built in, that's it, is vaccination, right? That's the only approach. In the pediatric world, that is the only advice really given. So at the end of the day, like we're just flying around waiting for our engine to explode. And from 30,000 feet, look what happens. Chronic illness is going up. Most adults are on multiple medications. We are getting more unhealthy. Now, they're going to throw a blanket on it, not to completely confuse the conversation, with obesity being the distraction of the aesthetic. Now they fire a GLP one out to the general population, misused. I don't mind GLP ones, but if you misuse them, now you've made all the actors on your stage uniformly thin. So nobody can blame you for obesity anymore. All right, we wiped that off. Well, now the chronicity of disease that was previously attributable to obesity will have to find another reason, but it's not obesity. So now you've bought yourself another 20 years of kind of garbage medical care. And that's really the trend of what they've been doing. Statins were one of the first. Antibiotics have always been the proof in the pudding to make people think they're healthy. Prednisone was the biggest one. Steroids like tricked everybody into thinking you're treating illness because you just don't let the actual illness happen. So there's all these things happening, but none of it has really been health care driven. And that's our goal. Value, put a little bit of effort into really the fact that when you're born, you don't have a quote unquote right to health. You're actually born with a right to die, but you have to focus on trying to maintain your musculoskeletal health and metabolic activity so that you don't die sooner than if you didn't do that. And that's kind of how we would phrase it. So the terms used in the marketing of it, definitely Northeast is difficult, but metabolic medium, metabolic whispering, it's it's really a metabolic health thing, which as a doctor, if you do not recognize that he is just as important as me, we got a really big misunderstanding. And that's also what we are trying to educate the world about.

Yeah. It's it's a challenge, right? And I've been saying that this whole industry needs a rebrand. We just don't have the right name yet. You know, like wellness, meh, don't not my don't like it, right? A little soft, I think, in my term. But like I know, I'll give him credit for Halo, uh, which is I think health, active lifestyle, and outdoors is what he's trying to pitch as like a you know, a kind of a an overarching category, vitality that just seems a little too gimmicky to me. But it like something. And here's the thing is like if we can talk about metabolic, and it makes total sense for all three of us on this conversation, right? Most consumers don't know what metabolic health is, right? They don't know. And so like that's where you're right. It's like you have to start the educational process over again. That takes time, that takes a lot of energy when maybe there's like one or two words that most people will be like, I get it, right? Um, I don't know what that is yet. And maybe we'll come up with it in the next 20 to 30 minutes, or maybe we don't, or maybe someone else does, or maybe you guys will along the road.

But it is purely like you said, it's an education issue. You know, like if you ask the average adult, do they know what a protein carbon fat is? It's a discussion that needs a lot of education to be improving, right? Because the back and forth on that could be wildly different. Yeah. Person to person.

Yeah. Who's walking in? Who are you guys working with? Is it like the type A overachiever burning themselves out? Is it the uh, you know, midlife crisis, I'm overweight, sick, not feeling well? Is it yeah, who who are you guys seeing for the most part?

Well, so what we what we started or how we started was obviously if I had this gym for a long time and I said, let's use this as a chance to beta test what we think. And our hypothesis was at the time that people who are already doing the hard stuff, you know, they're coming to the gym, they're counting their calories, they're taking advice, they're taking their life seriously or their health seriously by showing up and doing the hard stuff. Let's see if they're interested in getting an amplifier on their behaviors because we know the root cause will track back to their lifestyle and behaviors. So let's not try to convince the person that's 80 pounds overweight right now that they have to do all these other things. So that was the way that we can kind of test who our real avatar is. And sure enough, people that are fit, taking an aggressive approach to their lifestyle, are really interested in this stuff. Our avatar at the time was, let's say, 35 to 45, probably parents, roughly two kids, male and female, that maybe had a sporting background or at least a competitive edge. And they're like, oh, you know what? I'm treating myself like a pro athlete, even though I'm an accountant, and I want to make sure that I can show up for my employees, my spouse, my kids the best possible way. So this was a no-brainer to them. Now, fast forward a couple of years when we've gone more public facing and done some more external marketing, we're getting a little bit more of a mixed bag, but the people who do really well are the people that say yes to everything because they they aren't the ones saying that, no, I just want the shot. I just want the blood. They want everything. So again, it kind of comes back to that avatar of someone who's willing to invest in themselves, willing to do the work, and are coming from a headspace of like, I know this is important because you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, I want to have this reservoir of health that I can pull from for my grandkids.

Yeah, it's I would think I may fall in that category. It's funny because I was just I'm gonna turn 50 this year. And to me, like my time went by so fast, right? And uh so I started doing the math, right? And I'm like, okay, so I know all these things I love to do, right? I love to ski. Like I love, I'm I'm I'm super active. And I'm like, okay, I if I live to my dad's age, I'll be 85. That means I got 35 years. I probably got 20 really good ones, maybe 15 exceptional ones. Like if I could push to 65 and still do all the things I love at the level I'm doing them. And then it's a very sobering experience, right? And I think that's like someone like that comes into play, like, well, I I I work really hard to keep it, and now I'm starting to sign maybe like little signs of of the inevitable losing it. And I don't know, this is my own like self-therapy talk with you guys right now, but it's like that that's very real for a lot of people. And I think that's kind of like a core service. A lot of these um similar but you know different uh offerings that I see across um the industry being popping up, it's like really kind of like that 45 to 65 age group, right? Where they're starting to see a little bit of decline, like the the inevitable um your mortality starts to become very evident to you, right? Uh and I think that's a good, you know, an interesting marketing angle as well. Go ahead.

I think another interesting thing that you said is you said, I'm gonna live maybe another X amount of years, 15 good ones, right? Think about how beaten up as humans we have to be to assume that you're willing to go the next 30 years with a guarantee that only 15 of them are gonna be good. So imagine a health insurance company collects a premium from you, you use your deductible, and they've been doing that for the past 70 years of your life, and you turn 70, and now you're at the 15 years that suck. What exactly, in terms of the investment in that health insurance company that you gave them, are going to allow your last 15 years to be good? Because if you tell me when I'm born, here, Marcos, sign a $30,000 a year over the next 90-year contract. But listen, 15 of those years, you're gonna be fucked. You're gonna be in a wheelchair wearing a diaper, drooling, you're gonna be gagging, you're gonna be in and out of hospitals. Is it worth every dollar of investment? And that's what we're sold. Yeah. Right? That is exactly what you get for what you pay for health insurance. You get nothing but a lousy end of 15 years, right? Our goal is not that. So, Eric, when you leave here and you go and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna live another 30 years. You're gonna live 30 years as if you were taking care of your dog, right? Your dog is gonna live the perfect life. And the minute that dog can't go outside, use its own body weight to poop or pee or walk up and down the stairs, quality goes to garbage and his life might end because quality was so poor. Imagine if your quality up to 90, 95, 100 was so good, and then it was a quote unquote terminal event, but quality is really the big focus. And that's really what we're selling. So sorry to get into that, but it really sparked a thought in my head because like we're literally willing to trade money for an end of life that's like not gonna be good. And we know it's coming.

Yeah. Well, don't apologize. I think it's an excellent point. And I think that's something, especially um, you know, for those in my age group or have gone through this age, you start to see the decline in your parents. And it's very if they're around, right? And I have, right? I saw my father pass away, and same thing as like last three, four years were brutal, right? Um, and then it all kind of snowballed. My mom's 87, she's just got all kinds of health issues. But you just you accept that as normal and um inevitable, but it doesn't really have to be.

Sorry. Sorry, go, go, go. You hit the nail right on the head where it's like we have normalized sickness. Yeah. Right. And we're and as a culture, we're really bad at even discussing death, right? Like, when was the last time you talked about death unless a death had occurred? But we're so ill prepared to handle what that means, that end of life stage, and we just chalk it up to like, oh, when my mom hit 70, she was a mess for five years and then she went away. So we're just expecting these terrible things to happen and relinquishing control. And this is probably why we both loathe the term longevity, because it's basically selling you like foreverness, right? And medicine's already doing longevity. Medicine keeps you alive for a lot longer. Yeah, there's just have no concern about the quality that you're getting. Quantity is the easy solution. Equality is non-existent in that, right? So, and again, I think it's just like if you ever were a procrastinator in school, you're like, oh, I gotta write that paper. It's doing three weeks, and you just keep waiting, keep waiting, keep waiting. And then you write it in the final night. It's like, what are you waiting for to live the life that you want on your terms, the way you saw it in your head 25, 35 years ago? So longevity to me is just like procrastination at the nth degree. And we don't sell that. You want to ski? Ski until you're 85, dude. Let's try to make it happen, you know? And then we have the support system, we have the knowledge, we have the data to make informed decisions about how you should live so that you can get that.

Yeah.

And I think a huge actually, I just maybe in these 20, 30 minutes we could think about like longevity medicine is actually what's happening right now. It is the use of pharmaceuticals only to provide a lengthened amount of time. Quality completely misconstrued, even when the known risk factor is going to make your quality more poor. So I would say we're gonna be the opposite of longevity. We'll be more of like a quality-driven, quality-driven health care. However, we can get into the opposite of longevity in terms of the here and now.

What's the epitome of longevity care right now? It's called life support. Life support. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That that nothing is more definitively accurate for longevity than life support. Yeah, nail means what? Nailed it. You're alive, you're breathing.

I think the other hard part is, and we've talked about this before, and Eric, you might agree or disagree, but I think once you gain control over your health, right? So, like once you go through this and you know the problems, that's a lot of responsibility. Like right now, if I die of a heart attack, somebody at my funeral should eulogize me like, that motherfucker fucked up, right? He thought he was doing all right. He had a heart attack. Like, don't say, oh, a heart attack killed him or he died in the hospital of a heart attack. No. His entire life leading up to the time he had to go to the hospital to have an intervention for a heart attack, is what killed him. It had nothing to do with the heart attack. And until we stop trying to place a sticker of blame on everything outside of our control, we're always going to have an overwhelmingly depressing experience because you don't enjoy the results of shit you haven't done in terms of the process. So you can't embrace that. And then you don't take blame for anything that went wrong. So that gives you no value in terms of control over your life. So you just hand it to some insurance company who goes and compartmentalizes a group of doctors that are in network, forces you to use them, and like that's what you're paying to get good health quality. I mean, I don't know. The whole thing's busted. Uh if you can tell, I don't agree with it. But we're trying to fix that.

It's a mindset that's pervasive too. And uh this may offend some people, but it's like a victimhood uh thing where it's like, I you know, I I've heard people close to me, things happen to them, they're like, I can't believe this is happening to me. Like, is it happening to you or are you an active participant in what's going on right now? And I think that's like something like it's a small tweak, but got people to realize like no one's gonna advocate for your own health. That's gotta be nobody. You gotta do it.

And honestly, they're gonna do the opposite. The world is constantly trying to kill you. Like the environment is a constant attack, and it's up to you to defend. Now, is that pessimistic? No, it is what it is. Like, you gotta protect your skin, you gotta protect your eyes, you gotta protect your body, and part of that is protecting your metabolism and physical structure, which back to the original statement, as a physician, if you don't have the humility to realize that like the musculoskeletal system is more than just a locomotive type machine, it actually is providing with health benefit, then you can realize that actual health care is found in this in this environment, not in the brick walls of a hospital.

Yeah. You know, I had uh Rob Wolf on recently, and we were talking about longevity as a category, and he he stated it really well. And uh he's another guy who doesn't mind pulling punches, or he doesn't pull punches that we're we're kind of majoring in the minors. So people are talking about peptides, hormone replacements, all that stuff. But meanwhile, what are the fundamental pieces that move the most? It's exercise and movement, right? It's nutrition, it's lifestyle, it's sleep, right? It's all these things, stress management, if you can. Like that's that's 95% of that. But we get really enamored with the fancy stuff, right? The new cool things that that come out. And that's, you know, me, but I feel like I have the bases covered for the most part.

I have people constantly, it just happened recently, actually. Somebody came in, we started talking, and he was like, All right, well, what like is there any like peptides or what type of thing am I gonna do? And I was like, You don't deserve that yet. He's like, What do you mean? I was like, no, no, there's no way. I was like, you need to prove to me that you actually are gonna even go to the gym. He's like, I am, but now I can tell through the labs he's not. He finally admitted. But your graduation into the minors, you need to, like you said, you need to major in the majors. Like you need to make sure you're eating, sleeping, moving, all of these things. But the easy thing to do is to distract people that do not want accountability to go just buy a medicine. I mean, there is a new medicine coming out to help menopausal symptoms. Like we have it, it's already existing, but it's another red, you know, red dressed lady that everyone's gonna be distracted by. So, yeah, I think redefining healthcare, redefining our targets and majoring in the majors is like a huge deal.

With the time we have left, you guys, I want to get into because I think this is valuable for the industry. Like the business model you guys have put forward here. Is it a membership? Is it all a carte? Like maybe give us a range of costs for people, like, you know, Dr. Ryan Green was on here and he talked about like they have $1,500 a month flat. It's everything, right? Except for the, you know, if you're gonna get injections or vitamins, that's all extra. So how how are you guys putting all the pieces together here from a member perspective? And are they called members or are they called clients? Are they called patients? Like what do you guys call?

Well, technically we are two different businesses because the state of Connecticut says that a non-medical provider, which is me, cannot own or operate or influence the decision making of the medical facility, right? So, which is fine. I mean, it can happen on the insurance side and uh at the macro level, but it can't happen at the micro level. I get it. But for the most part, we are two different businesses that we just kind of share a lot of resources and assets. So you do not have to come to the gym as and and see Dr. Lujik. You can go to the healthcare side of things and not use the gym. The ideal scenario is that you're leveraging both systems that run parallel and give you synergy. And we can't afford this is all elected, right? So people make that informed decision based on what we present to them, based on like their lifestyle. And when we have a lot of clients that are remote that might not be able to use the gym the way that a local person could. So we do have that separation of church and state, so to speak. Got it. It is a membership-based model where we we want to make sure that you are committed, but we're not necessarily selling memberships, what we're trying to sell as a result. That result should be generated by you with what your desires are, your wants are, and then with us giving you that objective data, that objective information, saying this makes it a lot more reasonable if we look at it this way with this timeline, and let's try to get there with all the resources that we may have.

Got it.

Got it. Cool.

And our price point is a little under that for, but for pretty much a thousand dollars a month, you would get full medical therapy, labs every three months, DEXA scan every six, VO2 Max, wavy brand scan, RMR. You would also get all of your bioidentical hormone replacement and all medicine from this office delivered right to your front door. We do all of our phlebotomy mobile, right at your front door, or a lab core suite somewhere, which there's thousands all over if you're remote, but otherwise 100% in Connecticut, we do mobile phlebotomy door to door. A supplementation, which is amazing. I came up, like I said before, with a proprietary blend. All ingredients are known, but it's everything you would need from a vitamin shop in one bottle. So you don't have to go looking. You would get full training, four one-on-ones a year to learn how to train. I do not think it is emphasized enough that if you go to a gym and randomly go move things, yes, that can end up resulting in something bad. So do not ruin it for the rest of us by telling people I worked out too much and got hurt. It's because you didn't know what you were doing. So they do four one-on-ones weekly check-ins with loom calls so that you have up-to-date training. Weekly check-ins for nutrition with either weekly, monthly, or however the nutrition is going to go. We have a registered dietitian fully involved in all of our nutritional supplementation in terms of all the training and exercise, and you get a team. You get a bunch of people. I watch for the for a brief second. So outside of my office, I watch my people exercise. So if you come and tell me I exercise, I know if you did. I see how you move. I may not even come down and say, oh, that person's leg is hurt, but next time they walk up here, I'm like, oh no, this is like you're limping. That's really medicine. So what are you paying $1,000 a month for here? You're paying $1,000 a month for somebody to be the gatekeeper of your health. And we will protect you like your family. Now, I do want to say something. This is also potentially going to be offensive to some people. When people come in here, they always say to me, You're not a good salesman. You didn't try to sell me on stuff. And I always tell them, I'm not trying to sell you on your health. I'm not because at the end of the day, the sad reality, but it is the truth. If me or that person leaves this office and dies and we weren't very good friends, neither of our lives change at all. So if you do not have interest in your health, which is why I left hospital medicine more so than I have interest in your health, then we're not going to be able to work together. I think Mike's on the same line with exercise. We will give you every ounce of effort we can, but we need reciprocation.

Awesome. What's the vision here, guys? Like, let's put uh we're in 2026, let's put five years in there. Yeah. Let's say 2031.

Or you want to know the real sit-down, discuss your vision? So 2031.

Yeah, we're all we're all having uh uh a beer somewhere, and the guys are like, we crushed it. Do we crush it? So what what would have what would that look like?

So uh if you went to our website, the first thing that pops up is kind of our mission statement, which is the the gym of the future will change the future of healthcare.

Yeah, it's really good.

I like it. By any means necessary, like that is the goal. And anything other than doing that is a failure for us, as lofty as that may seem. So it's now the discussion because we're getting a lot of opportunities that we didn't think were going to be possible this fast, is how do we do that at scale? You know, a lot of people have inquired, both on the gym side as well as the medical side, is like, I want to do that. And they're like, and I don't know how. And it's like, okay, two years ago we didn't know how to do it either, but we're we're really kind of putting together the the infrastructure that would make sense to be able to distribute this style for people to to kind of leverage of their own on their own. So I I think it would make sense. Like one facility can only do so much. So either we make more facilities. Like us, based on how many people we have at our disposal, or we use the industry's top people who are interested in this that we can then educate so the distribution becomes exponential compared to us just trying to do it all. And we are not territorial on this. Like we love sharing, we love people who are motivated to look at this and really invest in their with their labor and their money and their time to try to figure out how to do this. So that's like probably our next real project is taking on people as almost uh an affiliate for lack of a better term. Yeah, or license.

And really our mantra, and I mean I say this all the time like if when I do die, there's a huge amount of practicing people in this version of healthcare, that would make me happy if I can influence people to go into this. The second thing is it, and I think it's a good way to live life, I've kind of adopted this. At the end of the day, it's really not about the dollar, it's about if you can make everybody around you healthier mentally and physically, no matter what amount of money you have, you're gonna be in a pretty good place. Like if you're a homeless guy living in the middle of, you know, a beautifully manicured neighborhood, and like you're the person in the neighborhood that doesn't have a big house, but you get all the amenities of the big houses, what does it really matter? So, like the greed of me, you, us, no. It's we gotta get everybody thinking about health. And I am convinced, and this is my 2 a.m. like Looney Tunes thought, he gave you the reality of it. This is the Looney Tunes. We go after things like religion and we go after things like mystery and all these other things that try to ease our brain to bring us happiness. I am convinced that if you got behind health and everybody was experiencing really, really sound musculoskeletal health with metabolic wellness, and your brain was getting what it wanted because you were giving it to it, not an external source of whatever that might be, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, anything. You will be in a place where I don't think people will be greedy anymore. Because once you're healthy and you value yourself, you don't really desire what other people have. And that's what ruins a lot of things in modern society for me.

Yeah. Well, well, well said. A last question for you guys what's a a challenge that you're facing that we can help you with as an industry? Yeah, you know, if you want people to reach out to you, um what would you like them to tell to reach out about?

Well, well, part of it, like, you know, if you're on social media, you you understand like the prevalence of people wanting to sell shit, right? Like it's it's uh probably the best platform for grifting and influencing and all that stuff. Yeah. But we can look at it and be like, we can poo-poo on it and say, screw that guy selling peptides. But the fact is they wouldn't be doing that unless there was actual demand behind that. All I ask is that we expect more from the industry and we expect more from adjacent industries in a collaborative approach. Because one of the reasons why this is so unique is because of the siloed nature of the business of medicine and the business of fitness and those appropriate industries. So I think it would really just help and benefit everyone to say, man, how can we do this together? Right? Like, and just get rid of the the territorialism that exists amongst in every profession. So it's not just us, but if we're really going to move the needle on this thing in a in a meaningful way, we have to be more open-minded and and willing to know that we're not good at some things and really good at other things, and that's okay because there's another professional that's really good at that thing that would love to work beside you.

And if you don't collaborate like this, honestly, doing this alone would suck. I would not be satisfied. No, I mean that. No, no, I think clearly in terms of satisfaction, like you don't really want to die alone, and I don't know why people really want to work alone. I don't really know why people want to make a ton of money alone. Like, if you have a trillion dollars and you live by yourself in the middle of nowhere, like, is that a lot of fun? No, I'd rather live in an apartment building with all my friends if I made $20 an hour, but everybody's having a good time every night. You know what I mean? Barbecue and hanging out. That's happiness to me. So I think collaborating and work like doctors' gyms, we are in the middle of Hamden, Connecticut. Every so often a gym or somebody will reach out. But the bigger thing is I think they're scared that we're gonna like try to steal their business. We don't want your business, right? I don't want all your clients. I just want you to know that you can offer your clients a way to make what you're giving them even better.

Awesome, you guys. Well, we'll leave it there. Uh if people want to get a hold of you or if you want to send them somewhere where do you want them to go?

Website's the easiest, rcsct.com. I mean, we're all over Instagram, so you can follow either one of us.

His name, Michael Ranfone, on Instagram. Mine is Lugic L-U-J-I-C underscore RTS Health M D, but we're a loud presence on social media. If you follow us, it's really what we think. That's really us. It's the same as if you're talking to us. Um, but otherwise, DMs email, you can email RTS Health at RTSC T.com.

Right on. Well, you guys, thank you so much. I uh I look forward to tracking what you guys are doing. I think it's really interesting. And uh I think a lot of people are gonna follow suit. It may take a minute, right? But I do think this is gonna happen eventually. Um, I just think kind of kind of has to. So thank you so much for joining me, ladies and gentlemen, micro and phone and Dr. Marco Lucchit.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.