The $100 Heart Scan Brad Gerstner Says Could Save Your Life

Okay, we are here at the All-In Summit, at an amazing trailer that Brad Gerstner brought. You bought this how long ago?

About a year ago.

Okay, so, Brad, tell us what we're standing in front of.

Yeah, so we're— we're standing in front of a mobile calcium CT scanner. So most of, uh, you know, the folks who followed us on both the All-In pod, the BG2 pod, etc., know that one of the moonshots I'm working on is we have 800,000 people die in this country every year from heart disease.

It's the number 1 killer in the world. If we turn the calcium CT scan into the mammogram for the heart, we will save 50,000 lives a year. That's like ending a Ukraine war every year in the United States.

It will save the government $20 billion in care for people. But most importantly, we're losing our most important friends— brothers, dads— at the prime of their life in something that's totally preventable. So this has a calcium CT scanner in it.

We've had hundreds of people coming through here. We found scores over the last 2 days that most definitely have saved people's lives. It costs $100 and it takes 15 minutes. So I lost my father too early, and my good friend here, Rob Goldberg— I want it— I want you to hear from him.

But this is what— this is the type of moonshot that we need to have. We're working with Washington. We want to get this covered by insurance so that we get 40 million people to take the scan. Mammograms, which are super important in this country, we have 40 million a year.

CAT scans, which is the number 1 killer, we have 1 million a year. We need to have 40 million CAT scans in this country every year. But Rob, we're going to do a tag team pod here.

Do you?

Yeah, yeah. You are a key inspiration. Your family was a key inspiration for me in wanting to do this, along with Jason Chang and the rest of the besties. Talk a little bit about, you know, how— how this touched your family.

Thank you. Uh, Brad, thank you. And thank you and Jason for doing this and— and for you just showcasing it. It's, it's, uh, my unfortunate, you know, connection to this is that my brother and I and a number of our friends were on vacation for a friend's 50th birthday— another bestie, Phil Deutsch— and we— in the afternoon we saw him.

We were all hanging out by the pool, and then at 6 o'clock, 6:30, couldn't find him. My sister-in-law and I started looking for him, and we unfortunately found him in the gym of the house, collapsed. And I— my adrenaline was going so fast I couldn't tell if it was his heartbeat or mine.

So I just started doing CPR and— and, uh, we unfortunately brought him to the hospital, and he'd been dead for— for hours because he had undiagnosed heart disease. And these are folks— so my sister-in-law is Sheryl Sandberg. She wrote a book called Option B about his death and about grieving.

And, you know, top medical concierge doctors. He had actually passed— so this is a really important point— so my brother had passed a running EKG 5 months before he dropped dead from heart disease, from undiagnosed heart disease. Unfortunately, EKGs have a 4%— 4% either false positive or false negative— where he had actually done so much cardio that it taught his heart to overcome the heart disease.

And so it was pumping harder and harder and harder, and then eventually, when we were in Mexico, it just stopped. He died of ventricular arrhythmia. There were reports of— because we found him near— I gave the report— we found him next to the treadmill.

He did not fall off the treadmill and die. He died of heart disease. And thankfully, due to Sheryl, due to Chamath, due to some other folks, we got him back. We were able to do a full autopsy and found his heart disease.

But it's truly tragic, and it's— it was completely unnecessary. He was 47. My niece and nephew were 7 and 10. They're growing up without a biological father. They have a great stepfather now. But it's just complete— as Brad just said, we are losing people in the prime of their lives who have no need to— to die for something that is completely preventable and screenable.

And Dave was such a legend, so loved, the inspiration in many ways for All-In and the bestie group. I mean, Chamath would say he was the original, you know, who got everybody together.

He might have argued a few points with everyone on stage, but yes.

To— to get together for poker. And so, like, what better, more fitting way to honor Dave, but also to take this and say, like, we can do something. We can be biased to action. We don't have to sit here as though we can do nothing.

We have agency. Why aren't we doing 40 million CAT scans a year? Why don't Americans know about this? Why are they all tracking their cholesterol and doing EKGs and thinking—

Right.

You know, doing stress tests and thinking they're totally fine? Right? Like, we've served people up some stuff that's just not accurate. And so this tells you dispositively, yes or no, do you have calcium in your arteries, which is a precursor, your predisposition to build black plaque, and you don't have a heart attack if you don't have plaque.

Correct.

And so, um, to me, this is, um, you know, we have— we started the Center for Heart Attack Prevention, and we have 3 missions with that. One is awareness. It's doing this,right? It's bringing a trailer so that more people talk about it, more people know about it.

And I can tell you, while the scores are anonymous, we had scores from people who took their exam yesterday that they are definitely in danger zone,right? And so these people—

That's amazing.

Here's the great thing. Here's the great thing. A high score is not a death sentence, because you can do something about it. Heart attacks are almost totally preventable,right? It's not like brain cancer that we don't have a lot of treatment for.

We can do everything with statins, with ezetimibes, etc. We can lower your ApoB, we can lower your LDLs, and we can get you on a path to heart health. And so, number 1 is just awareness. Number 2 is making this more accessible to people.

So we need to have changes in Washington that make this standard of care in the country. Cholesterol as a standard of care is ludicrous,right? We are way past this.

How did we— how did we get to that? Why is cholesterol— how did cholesterol become the key marker? And, like, where did we go so wrong?

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's so interesting. If Bill Gurley was here, okay, and he is here somewhere, but Bill Gurley would hear— was here, he'd say, "Regulatory capture." So 50 years ago, um, you know, heart health became a really national issue.

I believe it was Eisenhower who had a heart attack in the Oval Office. There was a race in Silicon Valley to see who could solve heart health. One path that people went down was to invent the stent. The other one was the calcium CT scanner.

Who do you think won the law— lobby in Washington? The stent lobby won, okay? So they said, "Don't worry, cholesterol is good enough to track. That's what we already do. And if you have a heart condition, we'll solve it with a stent."

Wrong. Wrong answer, okay? So here we are, many, many years later. My father died too early from heart disease. So I hijacked a session, the Science Corner on the All-In podcast, in 2022 is when I first started talking about this.

And over the course of the last 3 to 4 years, we've made amazing progress. Once I started talking about it, people went out and got their CACs, and I started getting hundreds and then thousands of letters from my, you know, dear friends to total strangers saying, "You saved my life.

I found that I had—" I gave it for free at my investor day at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road. And famous CEOs in Silicon Valley found 98% blockage and had 3 stents put in within 3 weeks of having the CAC done.

So this is— only costs $100. We've got a live audience here, so I'm talking to them. This only costs $100.

It only costs $100.

It only costs $100. It's not invasive. It can be done in 10 minutes. And the fact that people don't know about this, it's the highest ROI in healthcare, not only to the country, but to each of us and to our friends.

So in our group, it's non-negotiable.

Right.

Everybody, you know, has to get this. And so I appreciate your, you know, interest in this. But I would finally just say, finish up on this. I say to my kids all the time, and this really inspired the Trump accounts as well.

Right.

We can sit around, you know, at some— the All-In Summit, and we can talk about the problems. But we also— what do we do in Silicon Valley so well? We start movements.

Do you?

We start companies. We do things. We have agency. We have a bias to action. And now we have a connection to Washington, DC. So you can bring these pillars of policy together, along with pillars of action together, and re-education that we do through podcasts and other things to help people help themselves.

And so I'm— I'm— I'm really thrilled— thrilled you were here today.

I just want— I want to thank Brad for having me. But— but more importantly, and much more importantly, what Brad and Jason are doing, and Brad overall, whether it's Trump accounts, whether it's this, Brad is the epitome of putting act— words to action, thoughts to action, and passion to action.

And I just— I love having you out in the world doing more of what you're doing. And— and, um, it's amazing. I mean, I— my brother would love this, obviously, were he here. But— but what you continue to do, and you're doing it to help others.

You really— I mean, you're— you're— you have a day job, and it's a pretty important day job. And you're doing that one pretty well too. But— but to— to spend the time to go out and do this is amazing.

And I just want to thank you and call you out for— and— and the Trump accounts as well. Like, just helping people, helping future generations with health and with— with wealth. This is amazing.

You're— you're amazing. You know, if you ask— I— so I went to the heads of preventative cardiology at Stanford, at Harvard, at Columbia, and they would start giving me their, you know, their corporate speak.

Yeah.

And I said, "I don't want to hear the corporate speak. What do you do for yourself, your friends, and your family?" And I would just push them on this. "What do you do?" And every single one of them said, at 30 or 35, "I have them all take a CAC.

If they have a non-zero score, I get them on a statin. I get their LDLs below 40," which is way below the national standards. The green zone in cholesterol, I think, is between 80 and 120.

Right.

So we would go get our cholesterol test. It would say that we're in the green zone. I was in the green zone at 100. You feel good. You talk to your general practitioner. They're saying, "You don't need a CAC.

You're good. You're in the green zone. You run marathons. You do whatever. You're Dave. You're in incre— you know, incredible health." Wrong.

Right.

Take control over your own heart health,right? It's the number 1 killer in this country for a reason, because we're complacent about it.

Right.

If we're not complacent and we turn it into the mammogram for the heart, we're going to have a transformation in heart— you know, in— in heart attack prevention in this country. And we're on a mission to see that through.

So I have to ask, because with many new health protocols or treatments and, you know, just testing in general, people get afraid of it. Like.

Yeah.

People might be afraid to know the results. They might be afraid to do it in general. So how do you help break down those barriers, and how does this get brought into standard of care for doctors?

Yeah. No, it— it's— it's a terrific question. So, you know, I find that increasingly, because people have Oura Rings on, they have Apple Watches on,right, we're breaking down the barriers to health data. People now want health data. Of course, there are those people who say, "I don't want to have the information."

I always say to people, "Data is power." If you get information and you can't do anything about it, that's a real bummer. This you can totally do anything about,right? If you have 98% blockage, you get stents. If you don't have serious blockage, then you can get on a statin to reduce your LDLs, reduce your ApoB.

So because there is that power to do something about it, I find that many, many people want to do it. You know, we have our tech over here who came all the way from Florida. He's also got 4 kids who each got their Trump account.

We hooked them all up with $100 in their Trump accounts yesterday. But this guy, you know, knows what I'm saying, that when people come here and they are empowered with that information, they can now take action, they can now do something about it.

But yes, that's part of our mission. We have to explain to the country, "There is nothing unsafe. This is effective for mass screening." I met with Dr. Oz now several times. I've talked to many leaders on Capitol Hill.

I've talked to many people in the White House about it. I think by the end of this year— knock wood somewhere— but I think by the end of this year, you know, that CAC scans for diagnostic purposes, I think it will be approved and covered by Medicaid and Medicare.

If that happens, then that's how it becomes a standard of care. Because doctors ultimately treat standard of care based upon what's covered by insurance.

I was just going to add that, you know, people are afraid of the results and afraid of resisting. It's like, "Why do you wear a seatbelt? Why do you eat anything healthy? Why do you have greens? Why do you exercise at all?"

If you're trying to preserve your life, this is literally one of the few tests that is literally the alternative is death.

Yeah.

It's not just, "Oh, I'm going to live, you know, 3 months longer when I'm 90." This is literally— you could drop dead if you get a negative result. And if you get a negative result, you can still fix it.

So it's take the test and hopefully.

Right.

Survive.

I'm doing— so a lot of people have asked me. I could go— we could go through all the common questions.

Yeah.

One of the number 1s I get is this, "Should I take the calcium CT scan or should I take the angiogram?" So the calcium CT scan, you're in and out of the tube in about 2 minutes. It's not invasive at all.

The angiogram, they put dye in your bloodstream so that they can see more specifically the level of stenosis in your arteries. They can see the soft plaques, etc. That costs well over $2,000, and it's a little bit invasive.

So it's not really needed for mass screening. What I— what I would recommend to people, and again, I'm not a doctor, and some people who are doctors think I have no business talking about this, but I'm an analyst.

I can read all the information. And by the way, I think we've been misled by the medical community about not doing this.

Correct.

So my— my answer is, take the CAC if you're over 35. I mean, obviously, if you have any family history or high cholesterol, then— then it's a must, must, must do. But I would do it as a preventative measure anyway.

If you have a non-zero score, so which demonstrates you have a propensity to gather plaque, then I would say take the angiogram. The angiogram then gives you a lot more information about soft plaques and the level of blockage, if any, in your arteries.

Get a baseline. Now we have great AIs, like Clearly and other services that can sit on top of this. They're radiologists, AI radiologists that give really refined readings. But— so I did the Science Corner 3 years ago. I'm going back in on Friday, and I have almost no plaque, almost no stenosis, but I'm going back in on Friday.

I'm having another angiogram just so I can biohack myself and share. I— I shared on Twitter a picture of my heart,right, through Clearly, so that everybody could see exactly my— my level of stenosis. I will reshare that again after my angiogram on Friday.

That's awesome.

Because there's nothing to be afraid of. The data is power. And I know, because of all the messages that we've received, we've saved hundreds and hundreds of lives. You save 1 life. It's enough. But the fact of the matter is, if we can get this done at scale in the country, the mammogram for the heart will save 50,000 lives a year.

Incredible.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it. And where are they— where can you find the trailer next? Where's the next?

Oh, so that's a— it's a great question. So we bought this trailer because I was frustrated with all my friends in Silicon Valley saying, "Where do I get one of these?"

Yeah.

And so I rented a trailer for my investor day at the Rosewood, and that was too much of a hassle. So I said, "Let's just buy one of these." And then we had this idea that we could take it to companies around Silicon Valley, and we could do a buy one, give one.

So we could get Mark Benioff in Salesforce to give it to all of his employees for free, and then he would pay twice as much. So instead of paying $100, he would pay $200. And then we could go give free CAC scans in East Palo Alto and other neighborhoods where they couldn't afford it or they were afraid of it or whatever.

And so now we have lots of companies in Silicon Valley. I don't want to dox any of the companies that are doing it, but I would say major companies in Silicon Valley are doing this, that are doing the buy one, give one.

We did it with the NFL when the Super Bowl came to San Francisco.

Oh, yeah.

So we're moving it all around, slowly but surely. I have, you know, a tentative agreement to take it to Capitol Hill and to give it to members of Congress.

They definitely need it.

I know. By the way— by the way— so I started— I— I probably now am responsible for 40 or 50 members of the House and the Senate having taken the CAC scan. And I can tell you that they are a target-rich population, you know.

And so, again, what happens is people are dismissive of it until they find something or their family finds something, and then they become very devoted because they know that this is a lifesaver.

Amazing. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much.

Yeah, that's allright.

It's great to learn more about this. Really appreciate it.

Allright. Great. Thank you.

I'll follow you.

Okay. Great.

Allright. We're going to go inside the CAC scan. Well, maybe he will.

Okay.

Here, you stand over here.

Okay.

EvoScan.

Yeah, it's great.

So I've spent a long time.

Yeah. Right,right,right.

And by the way— by the way— by the way— so, so Molly, we're— we're in here. You said you did a pre-Nuvo scan, as I did. Pre-Nuvos take a long time, a lot of banging, etc. Remind us, how long are you in the tube here for the calcium CT scan?

Yeah. For the cardiac scan, you're in here for maybe around 5 to 10 minutes, tops.

Right. In the trailer or on the bed?

In the trailer.

So how long are you on the bed for a calcium?

On the bed for 5 minutes.

5 minutes. So this is in and out, no noise. You get your results very quickly, etc. Like I said, you know, and we can— we can come in here. I mean.

Allright.

You know, this is pretty standard equipment. Siemens CACs, you know, calcium CT scanners have been around for a long time, proven technology. We're now deep into generations of this technology. There are newer ones even than this one. But the reality is, you know, you can run in and out of this.

How many— how many of these can we do a day?

So yesterday, in about a 9-hour window, we did 33.

Yes.

So that was 33 lives.

Exactly. So— and, you know, the results yesterday, would you say we haven't shared them yet, so anonymously, but it looked like a distribution of the population writ large?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have men, women, old, young.

Yes. And some who have higher scores and some who have lower scores, like a distribution of scores.

Yes, a wide distribution.

Right.

Some were severe and some were none.

Right. And so, you know, with a— with a calcium CT, you know, zero means that you don't have any calcified plaque. Now, that doesn't mean you have no plaque,right? Because this does not read soft plaques. But what— what it does do is, when you get soft plaque, it calcifies.

So it's a good indicator.

Yeah.

As to whether or not you are, you know, part of the population that are gathering plaque. So, like, you know, some people criticize me and they say, "Oh, my gosh, you're telling people they're 100% safe." No. In life, you are never 100% safe.

But you get 90-plus percent of the way home,right, by doing a CAC scan, and it's something that everybody can do. And so, as you heard, yesterday we had some people who took it. I'm sure they had no idea they had severe scores.

And so we'll share that information through a cardiologist. So the way this works is, we give them their CAC scan. He shares the scores with cardiologists who will then call the patients, and they will work through whatever they need to work through.

But.

So how often should you be doing this, and how often or how long does it take for a meaningful buildup to accrue?

Yeah. I mean, listen, it just depends. Age has a huge, you know, thing to do with it. So a 30-year-old is less likely to have plaque buildup, but if they do have plaque, it's a lot more telling because that means they're gathering plaque early.

A 50 or a 60-year-old is much more likely to have plaque. But we can tell by the— by the quantity of plaque, is it a problem or not. But the reality is, a lot of Americans, we just know it's the number 1 killer in America, okay?

So it's not like we're trying to create, you know, scare tactics, you know, for something that— that doesn't exist. This kills 800,000 people a year,right? It dwarfs the number of people who die every year from— we were just talking about, you know, breast cancer, which is devastating.

But I think we have about 40,000 people a year die of breast cancer, 800,000 people die of heart health, and yet we have 40 times as many mammograms as we have calcium CTs. So I'm all— I think breast cancer set, you know, and mammograms, they— they invented the playbook for preventative medicine.

And I would like to copy that playbook for heart health. If we do the same thing, we're going to save a lot of lives. It's very, very preventable.

Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Sand Siddixon actually brought up longitudinal data. And so, to your point, one scan is great. Having some more in the future, 3 to 5 years down the road, depending on your score, depending on your genetic outlook, and depending on your lab values.

For instance, my— the pastor at my church, his father, his labs looked great. However, he had a massive, massive heart attack, completely unknown, and he never had one of these done. So going just simply based on labs isn't enough, but having that longitudinal data that's based on genetics, labs, is critical.

It's very important.

Well, I feel like the thing to overemphasize is you cannot rely on cholesterol data or.

Correct.

Traditional data alone. Because I brought this up to so many people. I've told my dad about this so many times. I'm like, "Dad," like, because I'm like a health nut, I'm like, "Dad, you have to get the calcium scan.

You have to get the calcium scan." And he's like, "Oh, my labs are fine. Like, I'm good. I just went to the doctor. I did a full workup." I'm like, "It's totally different."

Yes.

Like, you've got to get this done.

Yes.

So I guess to overemphasize that, like, what did we miss with cholesterol and traditional health analysis?

Yeah. I— I mean, I have a great tweet on this that shows kind of, you know, the red, green, yellow of cholesterol. It turns out that half of the people who have heart attacks every year have cholesterol in the normal zone.

Wow.

Half of the people who have heart attacks every year have cholesterol in the normal zone. So the fact of the matter is, it's related to. So if you have a non-zero score, that means I have a predisposition to gather plaque.

Then cholesterol becomes very important because that is the agent that carries the plaque to my arteries. So if I have— if I have plaque, I want to get my LDLs below 40. Remember, I think I told you the standard zone is 80 to 110 or 120.

And so getting it below 40 is new information. Not a lot of cardiologists 5 or 10 years ago were saying this. And frankly, we didn't have the mechanisms to get it below 40. But if you talk to the heads of preventative cardiology today at Stanford, at Harvard, at Columbia, that's exactly what they would tell you to do.

So I'm not saying that, you know, all doctors are involved in a grand conspiracy by, you know, by— by telling us to track our cholesterol. What I'm telling you is, the evidence on the street, that 800,000 people a year are dying of this, tells you that that's not enough.

If it was enough, then we wouldn't have all these people dying, okay? So do this as well. Even if you don't have insurance, this costs $100 out of pocket, okay? Give up some Starbucks. Give up— do what you need to do.

You know, have a— go talk to your friends. Get the $100 so that you can get this done. It's far worse, you know, to have a dad, you know, lose a dad or lose a mom and— and, and, you know, you look back at that and see how preventable that was.

You know, I've said it's a dumb way to die. Heart attacks are a dumb way to die. And, you know, I just think because they're preventable and you can do this. Now, that I asked the head of preventative cardiology at Stanford, "If everybody does this, you know, are we going to eliminate all heart attacks?"

And he said, "Of course not. But you'll eliminate 80 to 90 percent of them,"right? 80 to 90 percent of the number 1 killer just by doing simple scans. So thank you for bringing attention to it. I really appreciate it, Molly.

Happy to. Incredible work. Keep it up, honestly. Between this and the Trump accounts, we can't.

Let's go.

We can't talk about it enough.

Moonshots.

Real moonshots. Thank you.