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Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. Today, I have the privilege of hosting Paul Sorbo, he is the director of sales at Wavi Medical, where they’re helping the world to think better. They’re doing brain performance assessments with a very unique approach. And in this interview, I have an extraordinary conversation with him learning more about how they’re making a difference in brain health. And so with that intro, I am so privileged to have you here on the podcast. Paul, thanks for joining me.

Paul Sorbo:
Thank you. I appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. So we previously had another member of your team, Erin, from Wavi. If you guys haven’t had a chance to listen to that podcast, go to the website, go to WaviMed and you’ll see our chat with Erin. But today we’ve got Paul on the podcast and he’s going to dive a bit deeper into the topic of brain health and what we’re doing to do more and to do better within that field. So before we do that, though, Paul, why don’t you go ahead and tell us what exactly inspires your work in health care?

Paul Sorbo:
Well, it’s a broad question for me. I think for me, it was always I had a fascination with the human body, whether it was from the performance aspect. I’m an ex bodybuilder. And so I always had this huge fascination in trying to manipulate the human body to be the best that it could all the way through my undergrad and then getting into med school, I had a huge fascination in the genome and epigenetics and solving things like Duchenne muscular dystrophy with genomic editing and CRISPR CAS9 gene regulation. And all of a sudden I started thinking about this. And, you know, genetics, you’re just as familiar with epigenetics and proteomics. And when you really get into that, you start looking at medicine as a whole and realizing that we are not controlling what we can and that I want to continue to strive to make people the best version of themselves that they can be and continue to drive the education behind that specifically in now with Wavi of the brain performance sector.

Paul Sorbo:
Yeah, that’s pretty cool, man. So you did like weight training professionally or what’s the story there?

Paul Sorbo:
Never professionally. I had a whole bunch of friends that were professional bodybuilders. Still to this day, I had a fascination with muscle for lack of a better term, probably an unhealthy fascination for being honest. I like to call bodybuilders the first biomarkers when peptides are just now coming out and getting into the mainstream medical community. Plus, bodybuilders have been using peptides for 20 years and not in a nearly regulated fashion, obviously very underground, bro-science for lack of a better term. But yeah, I mean, I’m five foot nine. I was all the way up to about two hundred and fifty-four pounds, less than 10 percent body fat, which was not healthy, by the way. I couldn’t tie my shoes and realize that. I think that’s a good topic of conversation about health, though. You know, people I think genuinely believe that external appearance can actually reflect internal health. And that is so far from true because externally I looked extremely healthy right. I ate what I thought were the right things. I had low body fat. I had an astronomical amount of muscle mass from my frame. But internally, when I started looking at my labs, my panels, my lipid panels, my cholesterol levels, my ratios, my intracellular calcium levels, all of a sudden I’m like, well, I am the furthest thing from health.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. You know, it’s a good call and we’ve got to measure to understand where we’re at. And that’s a lot of what you guys are doing with Wavi around the brain. So talk to us a little bit about the business and some insights about how you guys are helping health care leaders do their job from brain assessment.

Paul Sorbo:
Yeah, I think the key there to what Wavi has done, hey let me start by saying Wavi doesn’t do anything new. What we do is we make information significantly more accessible. So measuring the brain has been really underdone because it’s never been A, accessible, B, it’s never been affordable. And those are the two things that David Oakley and David Jaffe really set out to change. EEG and evoked potentials or ERP have been around for 60, 70 years. The problem with both of those is ERP specifically was really only used in brain death situations to measure long hospital procedures and process-expensive. And B, people are familiar with EEG from epilepsy studies and these really terrible torture base EEG saline caps, which are just awful and they’re expensive and they’re not quick. So when you talk about measuring the brain, you know, are you going to send a client or a patient to go get a yearly MRI? No, but are you going to go send a client to get a yearly scan or anything else out there? EEG? No, you’re not going to do it because it’s going to cost them. I don’t know that many people that have five to ten thousand dollars to throw away every year. Just.

Saul Marquez:
Nobody. I mean, very few.

Paul Sorbo:
I know people who do it yearly. And I’m like, oh, that’s excessive. But when you really look at that, the problem is that by not doing that on a regular. This is we don’t have a whole bunch of data on the brain. It’s not like we’re able to just go in with a stethoscope and listen to the way that our heart is. We haven’t been able to do that with the brain. And so really, the only point in which measurement is happening is when there’s already a problem, whether there’s already issues of cognitive decline, whether there’s already been a TBI, a stroke, whether there are already behavioral issues. And so we don’t really know what these baseline normative we’re supposed to be or how someone’s progressing. Their cognitive side is progressing as they age. And that’s really the foundation of Wavi, is providing a simple, fast and affordable assessment that we can establish a baseline and then compare subsequent scans to see how someone is progressing, whether this is as they’re aging, whether it’s the recovery of something like a traumatic brain injury, whether it’s pre or post-stroke, whether it’s pre or post-concussion, whether it’s all of this research is happening. And that’s really what we want to provide is this really simple, fast, and affordable test. It’s a four minute test was set up. It’s less than 10 minutes where we can really start quantifying and providing some objective brain measurements.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. And, you know, I think it’s great. And you mentioned by the time that you’re getting a brain test, it’s already too late. It’s being reactive. And how many of us actually know our baseline? And I think it’s very few. I don’t know. And I actually met you guys, and I was there, you know, it’s like you did and I’m like, I got to do it. And now that I’m with you today, Paul, I’m like, OK. And I’m literally right now on your website and I’m clicking on Find Wavi Near You and I’m thinking I better get this done. So, like, how much does it cost, and does insurance cover it? All the basics. Talk to me about that.

Paul Sorbo:
Yeah, really simple. So A, the cost is really going to be depending on the practitioner we provide the raw materials to the practice at an extremely affordable price. Typically we see a healthy range of a practitioner, let’s say anywhere from one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars is the charge. As far as insurance reimbursement, we are FDA cleared class 2 medical device for EEG you know. When it gets into that insurance side of things, it really is going to depend on the practitioner and how they’re doing. The CPT codes, I don’t actually tell our full FDA approval comes in hopefully later this year. I, unfortunately, can’t really speak on the specifics of that.

Saul Marquez:
Sure.

Paul Sorbo:
But there are ways that we have practitioners that are having insurance cover it.

Saul Marquez:
Cool. That’s great. And so what are the benefits of knowing your baselines? And tell us a little bit more about that.

Saul Marquez:
Oh, I mean, here’s the reality of it. I think you said it perfectly at the beginning of the episode. It just you really don’t know until you measure. And that’s the key, right? We have to have an objective measurement now. Objectives are not everything. There has to be the subjective side of things to measurements as well and really putting that quantification and the qualification behind it. But the reality of it is I like to give an example of two different individuals. Let’s take Sally Joe and let’s take Susie. Sally Joe comes in. She’s what we think is a healthy individual. She’s 35 years old. She’s got two kids. And we start progressing and we get our baseline measurement and we’re able to measure her every single year. And for some reason at 47 we see her 300 voltage or her cognitive decline start to urge.

Paul Sorbo:
We see a little bit of voltage drop and that’s not represented by cognitive decline. But what we know about cognitive decline is that the voltage in the speed significantly drops in those cognitive decline diseases. So we are able to look at her and we’re able to have a conversation with her one on one saying, hey, what changed this year or last two years? You know, what’s your cardiovascular health like? How are you sleeping? What’s your nutrition look like? Are you still exercising? All of these preventative measurements are really easy to do, but we’ve never been able to quantify them. We’re able to change some things, get her cardiovascular health where it needs to be. Look at her sleep and her nutrition back on board. Comes in six months later. That P three hundred voltage or that processing power that her brain has is right back to where we expected it to take.

Paul Sorbo:
Sally, on the other hand, or Susie, I believe Susie sitting there and she goes in every five years, gets an appointment. She goes, Yeah, I feel great. That’s great. I still feel great. You know, she’s 55, 60. All of a sudden she’s like, I really feel like I’m forgetting my keys. And then things progressed slower. And they progress. We start seeing the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Well, the reality of the fact is that didn’t start when she was sixty years old, started twenty years before that with simple lifestyle things. And we never have that measurement to be able to say, hey, what’s going on? And if we would have just tracked that from year over year over year, what could we have changed? And that’s the power in having an objective measurement is hopefully we can catch things before they become a problem. We talk about things like concussion research. Right now, the best we have is physical reaction time. Well, that’s not the case. We did a six-year with the Division One NCAA program and what we know is that one hundred percent of players, there’s a 40 percent drop in P three hundred voltage physical reaction time after a contested event. Now, the sad part about that is about 40 percent of players are going back to play too early. Before that voltage had fully returned back to its baseline level. How much more can we do to help protect these players with the right program there. Strokes? What is the effect of this stroke? How do we have the brain to actually get it back to its functionality? What are the areas that have been impacted? So by providing this really simple fast assessment that has amazing information into it, we’re giving the people away and practitioners a way to really understand the brain and realize that things like neuroplasticity are real. We can change the brain. And this is tangible information that you can do something about.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s really fascinating work. And I think about why this type of test isn’t part of your annual checkup.

Paul Sorbo:
You and me both. I’m wondering that every day. That’s my goal.

Saul Marquez:
I mean, if it’s that crucial and it takes that little time, why not just include it as part of that mix? And I guess the next question for you, Paul, is, is that happening? Are primary care physicians are starting to incorporate brain health into their own lives?

Paul Sorbo:
We’re starting to and I think that a big issue and that is just the education behind it. You have to think a lot of this information hasn’t been accessible. When I talk to a doc about P300 or anyone, in particular, I want to talk to you about your heart rate. You’re like, I know my heart rate, doctor. I say, hey, how’s your cholesterol, and what’s your blood count like? If you’re semi-educated in this industry? You’ve heard all those terms. When I say what’s P300, most people are like, dude, what are you talking about?

Saul Marquez:
Is that the latest routine?

Paul Sorbo:
Yeah, exactly. So the problem is that even in medical school it’s covered, but like a chapter and it has to change the education system behind this and make people realize that this is no questions asked, something that we can be doing. And it is really valuable information. And so it’s a healthy balance of being able to get our tech to where it needed to be, but also the education platform behind it to make sure that we are educating properly without obviously getting troubled by the FDA and those types of things to really make this mainstream and have people not be afraid of this information because you do have a little bit of a stigma on the back end where people are like, I don’t want to know Right. because we’ve been cultured to believe that we can’t do anything about it. If you talk about genetics, your genes are your genes, you’re going to develop Alzheimer’s, develop dementia, you’re at risk for cardiovascular infarction, whatever you want to say. Your genes or genes are such a small part of it. Right. your epigenetics, the proteomics, how those proteins, all of that is so important. And what we’re finding and what lobby I believe is really providing is showing us that we can make a change in the brain, especially. It’s not just you are going to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s or you have we can really change that landscape.

Saul Marquez:
I love it. Yeah. And it’s important for us to take charge. And so how would you say you guys are different than what’s available today?

Paul Sorbo:
I think it’s don’t get me wrong, there are some really amazing things out there today, but there’s really nobody out there specializing in our price bracket. Yeah. And with the accessibility of what we provide, you know. The fact that we use our own cap that you can set up in four minutes when I could have a high schooler do a brain scan, I can have a middle schooler to get Right. if I teach you properly. The learning curve is so easy and it’s really actionable data. And I think that’s what’s so important. Right. I was at a dinner last night with an amazing friend of mine and very involved in the Tony Robbins platinum circle and really trying to help move health care in the right direction. And we’re talking about blood panels. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a lot of blood panels out of my life. I also was on testosterone for years, so I always have my levels checked and I get it. And my doctor would either say, oh, you’re within the range or you’re out of range.

Paul Sorbo:
But what does all that mean? And if I get sent home my printout no means an uneducated or average consumer for lack of a better term. I’m going to throw that in my top drawer and say, hey, here’s my medical records. Right. No part of that does I feel like I own accountability for. And that’s what we really wanted to change with. Wavi was when we get a printout, it’s simple information. How strong is your battery? How fast is that signal happening or how fast were you processing information? And here’s some behavioral markers that are similar. And by the way, all of these are changeable. And I think that that’s really what sets us apart is really making this something that people can not only grasp but also not be afraid of.

Saul Marquez:
So once people take the test, are you able to see here are some action items that you could do to improve.

Paul Sorbo:
So we don’t actually provide the action items, that’s really where we have our practices that we work with, whether it’s biohacking, Clarinex, cardiologist’s, preventive health practitioners, you name it, That’s really where they come in. They’re all the steps. You know, we’re pretty much non-discriminatory when it comes to those types of things. But what we do provide is we provide the measurement to be able to validate all of those things. Now, there are simple life tips and tricks that all of us can say, hey, we all know that these things improve your brain or in your lifestyle, your nutrition, while if you eat a Twinkie a day versus not a Twinkie a day, what happens?

Paul Sorbo:
Those Twinkies’s. If you sleep two hours and you’re not hitting REM sleep versus your sleep properly and really optimize sleep. Exercise versus non exercise. Stress levels. Common knowledge tells us a lot about this, but there’s also a lot of things that our practitioners are finding red light therapy beds, Pentz, cardiologists that are really showing the effects of normalizing cardiovascular health and the effects on the brain, even diet, nutrition, things like BRESSAN Protocol. And we’re able to quantify all of these changes, which is really quite fascinating.

Saul Marquez:
That’s so interesting. These are all the proactive things that we’re talking about. And then the topic of concussions comes up and it comes up often in sports and in accidents too. How does this apply and are you guys working in that vertical?

Paul Sorbo:
You know, we really want to avoid that because of the speculation in there. And not only that but the liability that comes with a concussion. The reality the fact is, is it ever safe to go play football or is it ever safe to play rugby? Is it ever safe to go snowboarding? No, no. Throwing yourself off a 90-foot jumps, doing aerials in the air is never a safe activity. Right. And one of our sponsored athletes is Jake Pates, Olympic snowboarder. And so when you really look at this, you know, what’s out there right now is things like the impact test. And but there’s just not a whole bunch of information around concussions. What is a concussion? Well, if anyone tells you they know exactly what a concussion is, I have news for you there. Like nobody really knows what a concussion is. We think that we know what symptoms of a concussion are. But it’s like trying to identify an animal by looking at a single strand of hair or trying to identify an elephant versus a different animal based on their skin. We can say, oh, it has tusks or oh, it’s got four legs or oh, it has a tail or at all it has two eyes. Right. all of these make up the elephant. But to describe the elephant or an animal versus an animal is the whole picture.

But we don’t really understand the whole picture of a concussion. And to be quite frank, it can actually vary based on circumstanced person, the inflammatory response, the cascading effects. So really, the most accurate description that I’ve ever heard is really basically a for lack of a better term. It’s a metabolic crisis of the cerebral cortex. And so I used an analogy the other day, if you think about your brain like a house, right. And this is the motherboard of your house, basically, it’s your brain. And we can kind of think of that like your electrical box. So your electrical box controls all of the light switches. It controls all of the power. It controls the speed at which all of this happens right in our house. If you go into your electrical box, you start hitting it with a hammer or a battery with a hammer repeatedly. What’s going to happen? What you’re probably going to lower the voltage at which that’s going to be able to happen. You have to change the speed at which any of these signals are happening, but you’ve lowered the power that it has to put out. That’s what happens during a concussion, is that battery no longer has as much energy to donate towards any given signal.

Paul Sorbo:
And this can vary. This can be five percent, 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, 60 percent, 90 percent. It depends on how severe the event is. Now, in the past, concussive research has really been around, oh, two weeks. Don’t expose yourself to screen time. Sleep with your head propped up. Trust me, I know I’ve had probably 15 concussions, multiple severe ones. I’ve been through this whole wringer. But as athletes, your concussions aren’t real. They’re kind of real. But let’s get you back to play. That’s a big problem. We see these problems like CTE starting to show up and not even start. They are here. And the reason is we’re not letting the brain heal. And that’s just the reality of it. So with YV, what we’re able to do is we’re able to take it one step further. We’re not the full solution. We still need sideline protocols. We still need a return to play protocol. So we still need specialists. We still need education. But as far as the concussive research, I talked about that concussive study that we did, the reality, in fact. One hundred percent of these people incident, we saw a drop in voltage, and if we can quantify that and we can at least show the person, well, you may be feeling better, but you still haven’t returned to that baseline voltage.

Paul Sorbo:
And there’s a great story about this. Jake Pates, when he was competing in the US Open for snowboarding. Irungu as Bell And he goes, I just don’t feel like he actually had his walk with him to scan them the next day because you have to wait twenty-four hours due to the adrenaline response Right. because we have a natural Band-Aid in our body, which is this amazing thing called adrenaline, but it also can inhibitor or change the inflammatory response. And his voltage was pretty substantially suppressed. I mean four or five remarkable and then three weeks later he’s like, I’m still really not feeling great scans again. His voltage is actually suppressed even more. And so that two-week window of. Oh, yeah, you’re good after two weeks. Well, that wasn’t the case with him right now. We scanned them again after that. And all of a sudden his brain is fully functioning back above his baseline level. But it was really him putting in the work, the Right. sleep, the right foods, the right to be able to do that. And also having that objective measurement to say, hey, I should not go out and get my Bellbrook right now makes sense.

Saul Marquez:
Oh, yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And, you know, these prescriptive ways of assessing are not enough for anybody working in the space. Or maybe you’re an athlete or somebody that you love, son or daughter is doing it. Something to consider. So are these kits available to anyone or do they have to be purchased by medical professionals?

Paul Sorbo:
So we have a couple of different business lines. We have a performance research and a medical. The performance line is really available to a lot of individuals, but it is still a medical device. At its core is where it was developed. It’s a very sensitive device and it’s there is a price point. There’s a threshold. I don’t think the threshold needs to be in every home for parents to give them a kit. But I truly believe that every athletic program should be able to offer something like this off-campus, you name it. We really should be able to offer this because it’s not expensive enough. It should be the barrier by any stretch.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. Now, that’s a good call. And so as you think about the things that are most exciting for you guys, what would you say is the main one?

Paul Sorbo:
That’s a really hard question, actually. There’s a lot that I get excited about every day. You know, to me, it’s the long term vision that David and David really have with Wavi. The whole back inside of lobbyist day. They have Olympics and large data scales that have been used in medicine before, but not on the level that I believe that Wavi has the ability to contribute to and the whole idea behind it is basically cluster mapping and creating archetypes. So based on you coming in or me going in or Erin going in or just going in or any one of these people based on your archetype, these are the treatments that you will respond to best. Now, this could be for a TBI, this could be for PTSD. This could be for cognitive decline. This could be for pain. And by having these data sets with our A.I. interface, what we’re able to do is create these things and create markers that may have never existed. You create things for a marker for something like PTSD, which right now is fully one hundred percent, unfortunately subjective. Not that there aren’t some objective markers, but we really don’t know what PTSD looks like because it can be so state-driven. Or even concussions. What excites me every day is the potential behind this device and what I think it can do for medicine. And I know everyone says that, but I mean, I really do believe that it is a really amazing step into getting people to understand their personal health care journey, understanding that they do have the ability to take action and actually validate what’s happening.

Saul Marquez:
Well, it’s definitely exciting. And after our talk today, I’ll definitely be taking this. I’ll report back to you, Paul, in my baseline.

Paul Sorbo:
You got it. I want to go over it with you.

Saul Marquez:
I already have three locations to choose from and right here in Chicago. So if you are wondering how you could do it, find Wavi near you on their website. It’s WaviMed.com. Now’s the time to check out your line. And Paul, this is fun. This was just a great conversation, a reminder to all of us of the importance of brain health. Leave us with the closing thought, Paul, in the best place for the listeners to get in touch with you.

Paul Sorbo:
Best place that you can get in touch with me is going to be even more social, which is @PJSorbo or Paul Sorbo on Facebook and find me on Google a number of podcasts or interviews out there, or WaviMed.com for any more information on lobby or directed to myself or anyone there. But to me and my personal mission is just to help, you know, for a closing thought, you have the ability to be your own best advocate in your personal health care journey. And the more that we continue to get our education out there and as a whole collective and let’s call it the informed patient, the more we can continue to shift medicine towards the preventative aspect, it’s up to all of us, all of the individual listeners, all the individual patients, all the individual athletes to really take this and educate ourselves and understand that we can change. And we have the ability to. And there there are some amazing devices out there. There are amazing practitioners. And information has never been more accessible than now. So it’s really up to all of us as a whole to help create change.

Saul Marquez:
Love it. Great closing thought, Paul, and certainly excited to continue engaging with you guys and folks truly recommend what they’re doing there. WaviMed.com if you check them out.

Paul Sorbo:
Paul, thanks again for spending time with us. This has been really you really appreciate it. Love your platform and just an honor.

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