How Fasting Affects Your Fertility Journey

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Thank you. It is great to be here, and I am very excited to talk about fertility and all things fasting.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes, I want to. I will let you introduce yourself, but I want to make sure I mention that you have been awarded The Best Naturopathic Medicine Doctor, three times already.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. 

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

A top woman in medicine doctor and joined the Berkeley Hall of Fame as well. We are talking with a true big expert today. Make sure you listen carefully, and hopefully, this will help you change your life or enhance your longevity. But would you tell us a little bit more about yourselves before we start addressing the topic?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Absolutely. By training, I am a Naturopathic Doctor. I am also Board-Certified in what is called a Fellowship for Naturopathic Endocrinology, which is just a fancy way of saying I am a hormone expert. I teach. I am on the board of that. But if I were to do an introduction for myself, it would not be all the accolades. It is more about the people that we serve. I have been in the world of fertility for 13 years. We have helped thousands of women get pregnant after they have tried everything else but could not. 

That is what I do; that is my passion. That is what I am proud of. That is what I am excited about. As of a few years, four years, we are going to go into our fifth year. We have been training practitioners to do fertility the way that we do it because we have had such great, awesome results, and we just want this to be a game changer in the fertility world for women and couples to know that there is something besides IVF; whether they have tried three rounds of it already and have it, it has not worked. Or they are at that point where we have tried for a year. We do not know what else to do. We do not know if we want to go to IVF. We do not know why we would go to IVF. 

We are in that space. Let us expand the perspective of IVF from not just, Hey, you could go and have a baby, but what are all the other impacts on your fertility? Because fertility, to me at least, is a symptom. It is not a disease in the traditional sense. There is nothing wrong with you most of the time.  It is about figuring out why the body is not able to do something that it was designed to do. Humans want to survive on this planet. All of what we do is not so much about how we fix you; it is more about how we take what your body is saying. Take it as an indicator of, Hey, something is off. Something is a little blinking light that is saying there is an underlying reason that the body is not able to do this. Let us just figure out what it is. Once we figure that out, magic happens.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

That is a big theme that we are addressing here at the Fasting and Longevity Summit, where we are doing so many episodes around Diabetes, Cancer, Alzheimer’s, pure longevity, and metabolic syndrome. We are trying the common theme of telling people, Hey, there is a root cause that we need to address in those conditions. It is not about just the economy or the sperm. Let us just put them together and re-inject them. If you are struggling with your fertility today, you may be struggling with a systemic health condition, or maybe you are struggling with something else. Let us go to the root cause and let us help you resolve that, of course, because if you do not do so, you are going to see your only chronologies for diabetes in five years. 

Are you going to go see your cardiologist for blood pressure in 10 years? By the way, maybe you are accelerating your aging, and this is one of the symptoms. Then you have to treat aging. One of the solutions and most common factors in all these lifestyle conditions is fasting. This is how we are linking fasting with longevity. Now the chapter today comes with infertility. I just wanted to situate all of it and explain your words in the grand scheme of the summit. Do you want to tell us? We will learn the secrets that you want to tell us a little bit about. When you get a woman who is struggling with her fertility, how do you approach that? What are the most common underlying causes that you find most frequently? How do you use fasting, and for which woman at what time? What is the protocol to help them with that?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes, absolutely. We have essentially the couple sitting in front of us, and I want to bring it to the couple because it is not just the woman. I think that the fertility world is laden with the idea that it is the woman’s responsibility. Most guys come to us with zero lab tests. Both of them may have some semen analysis if that is the case. They also have issues, and we will connect back to metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome and how they affect the male side of this. But essentially, it is the couple. 

We look at them, and we say, Okay, what are the main things that could be happening for you guys that are unique to you, and how are we going to address them in a step-by-step method? It is not like, we give you every supplement under the sun because a lot of people do that. But let us create a strategy that I just talked to a couple of yesterday. I looked at all of her labs. She had so many nutrient deficiencies and stuff that she was nutrient deficient in. I was. It just looks like your gut is not functioning well, and if we give you all the supplements without fixing your gut, you are going to walk out of this with the same issues that you still have. But if we can fix your gut, we are going to have a different outcome. The outcome is going to be that you absorb the nutrients from the food that you eat. It is taking a step back and saying, Okay, some things are going to be out of whack. Our job is to figure out what those things are from the perspective of the deepest layers that are affecting fertility. 

I think gut health is a big one. I think most of us would agree that our gut is impacted by so many things. For me, we look a lot at the microbiome—the gut microbiome—but also at the cutting edge of the vaginal microbiome and all of the connections of the vaginal microbiome and how that impacts fertility, very directly. It starts with, the microbiome through our whole system, it starts in our mouth. Talk to some of the world’s experts on nitric oxide production and how that is happening in the mouth with the bacteria. If we are breathing through our mouth instead of the nose, then the microbiome in the mouth changes. Now we are no longer producing nitric oxide, which then affects the vaginal microbiome. Just all the interconnections, this is acting out. I think one of the main things is how.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Does sleep apnea be one that can impact them?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

This can be one of the impacts that could impact the vaginal microbiome and lead to infertility in that sense? 

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. Exactly. Sleep apnea is a little bit tougher. But the easy solution, I will just tell everyone, is mouth-tapping. Just a small piece of tape over your mouth before you go to sleep helps force breath through the nose instead of the mouth. It is fascinating. It relaxes the jaw. all the people that you wake up with jaw pain. This used to be me. Two weeks ago, I had the idea that I would just wake up. Oh, it is so tight there. It is because my muscular structure in the mouth was trying to hold my mouth closed. But the tape just helps relax it so that I do not have to do all the work while I am trying to sleep. Game changer. 

That alone changes how stressed I feel through the night. I get a better night’s sleep. There are all of these underlying factors, but the best is that now we are producing more nitric oxide, which helps support blood flow and circulation to the rest of our body, specifically the uterus or testes for men. Then it helps support a healthy microbiome. You can breathe through your nose and still have a microbiome imbalance in the vaginal tract. But this is a good way to start fixing it. We start with the simplest things. I love it when simple things are free and take no effort. for those tapes over your mouth, you are done. I love it because it is such the smallest lifestyle shift, but it is going to have an impact on so many other things down the line. 

The second is the gut microbiome, which we were just talking about. The microbiome is our interface, the gut microbiome, specifically the interface between the outer and inner worlds. If that interface is impacted or it is not optimal, it has got the wrong microbes. It is geared towards not-so-great microbes versus the ones that are going to help absorb nutrients, help produce the right hormones, and produce neurotransmitters; all of that is going to lead to imbalances in hormones and fertility. Starting again with the lowest-hanging fruit, which is the foundation. 

Then the vaginal microbiome is a little trickier. What we have been seeing this year is that we have tested every single person that we worked with on the vaginal microbiome. What we found is that the majority of those women did not have any symptoms. What we used to do was say, Do you have a lot of UTIs? Have you had vaginal infections? Have you had yeast infections? This year, what we learned is that a lot of women have no symptoms but extremely high numbers of what we are calling anti-fertility microbes in the vaginal tract, which are then impacting egg quality through local inflammation and implantation and pregnancy outcomes. If we can test it, then we know, Hey, these are the microbes that are just not great and are negatively affecting fertility. Let us get rid of them. Let us repopulate with the good stuff and none of it takes long.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Do you have cases where, if you resolve that piece only, then will they be back, fertile, and able to get pregnant?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

That is a good question.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

It is part of a syndrome.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

That is why I feel that is a good question. Yes, there are. The reason I know this is because I have women who have done everything else. We had to address the hormones and address every part of the imbalances that we could address. Still, I am thinking of one person in particular. Still, she went on to have an implantation failure. She had come to me with four failed IVF cycles and two pregnancies that had ended at a loss, and the doctors were saying, You have an immune system, autoimmune infertility, so your immune system is going haywire. We had to address all of these things.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Then I just had the leaky gut that was triggering all this.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes, absolutely. We had addressed it. She was doing amazingly well, and I was, okay, go do your IVF cycle. if she came back a few weeks later and said it did not work, and that is when I was, How is that possible? We did everything. Then I was,  The only thing that we have not touched for you is the vaginal microbiome. The reason was exactly this: We were not testing everyone; we were just testing people who had symptoms. I said, Let us just test your vaginal microbiome and see. She had high levels of Gardnerella, which has lots of data on how it causes bacterial vaginosis. But in the presence of Gardnerella, implantation becomes very difficult. I was, okay, well, and she was. I have two weeks before my next IVF cycle. 

They are going to do another transfer in two weeks. I said, Okay, that is not a lot of time here, but let us try it. We gave her the antimicrobial that was going to address that specific microbe for five days. Then we did a ten-day repopulation plan with the pro-fertility microbe, which is lactobacillus crispatus, and just hit it hard. She went in for her next transfer, and it worked, and she had a healthy baby after that. Yes, there it is very plausible that doing the whole microbiome from mouth to vaginal if we do all of it, would that alone work? Possibly. If that was the problem.   If we test someone and this happened yesterday, if we test someone and all of the microbes in there are pro- or neutral-fertility, then that is not the issue. Then we have to look at other things.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Maybe there is another number three, four, and five.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes, and you asked what the other causes that we see a lot of. Toxins are a big one. Of course, I feel the growth of toxins in our environment all around us is pretty extensive, and our bodies are not able to handle it and keep up with all of it. That is a big one. and then metabolic dysfunction and underlying hormone dysfunction. What we see are hormonal imbalances. But what is happening under the surface is blood sugar dysregulation, and just not being, we called it the thyroid, the pancreas, the liver—a whole conglomeration of things that just are not functioning optimally are okay. 

You may even get tests that say you are fine and normal, but they are not functioning as well as they should. Fertility is the abundance of optimal. It is not functioning normally or fine. That is going to be enough to get pregnant. For some people, that is enough. But for a lot of the people that we see, the body is asking for this level of optimization before they go and try to get pregnant.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

It is fantastic. These reasons that you mentioned are beyond the traditional ones, the PCOS, and the other traditional ones that a typical physician or allopathic medicine would address first.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes, I agree.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

I think we have a unique subset of people that we work with. Yes, we see a lot of PCOS, we see a lot of endometriosis, but if I were to say the majority of our practice is unexplained infertility or unexplained pregnancy loss, and it is unexplained, that is exciting because it is unexplained. Let us figure it out. That is what I love to do. I feel we are in a unique place to see all the people who just cannot figure out why. With PCOS and Endometriosis, they already oftentimes know why. Endometriosis is funny because I feel there are a lot of people that get put in unexplained situations, but they have endometriosis. But PCOS, most of the time, they know by the time they come to us. 

The reason they come to us is that the Western medicine paradigm is that if you do not lose this amount of weight if you are not in this specific category of BMI, we can do IVF on you. That is all they get told. The women go away, and they are like, Well, what do I do? Should I lose weight? Who do I work with? A lot of weight-loss programs will not. They may support weight loss, and that may get them in the door with IVF. But if weight loss throws off your hormones, is it serving you? My answer to that is, No. Not, if you are losing weight but your hormones are going out of whack, you are getting more nutrient deficient, and your quality is going down, then it does not serve your end goal, which is: how do I get pregnant?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

That is fantastic. To hit the core topic, can you help us understand how you use fasting what your profile is at each stage, and how you do it?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes, fasting is fascinating because there are so many benefits, and research has shown that in general, most types of fasting will reverse your biological age. Your chronological age is not going to change, but your biological age can change. There is a cool company in the fertility space that is doing testing on epigenetic markers to show ovarian age. Essentially, it is biological age specific to the ovaries. It is a fertility world. Most of the women that we are working with are not worried about how young I look or what I look like. They are into anti-aging because they are maybe 37 or 38, and they are not ready to have a child. What am I doing? What am I going to do? Because at 35, fertility drops off a cliff, supposedly, and by 40, you are screwed. They are in that space of, what can I do that is going to anti-age me, that is going to support me to have a family that I want at the pace that I want without the judgment of doctors saying, Well, you should have come in when you were 35, so that test plus, what we have seen in that test is that,  the company is called Clockwize, and they have done studies that show anti-aging, specifically ovarian aging, can be reversed through fasting and the specific type of fasting that they were using in their study. It is a very small-scale study. I think it could probably go bigger, but they are doing it with ProLon, which is essentially a five-day protocol for fasting and the specs. We just tell people to follow the guidelines.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I was not even aware of it.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. 

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

That is fantastic. We are getting a lot of surprises here. The things you get that are getting so many surprises. We are very fortunate with the ProLon because fasting works. You said the magic word fasting is reversing biological age. We never had a machine to test even autophagy and reverse it in humans. In the reversal of the cell age, the National Institute of Health just deployed eight machines in the nation, and ProLon was the first product to be tested at the University of Texas, San Antonio. It is showing a huge spike in autophagy and rejuvenation from day three to day eight. This is exactly what Professor Longo, the founder and is behind ProLon’s view. This is why ProLon is five days; day one and day two intermittent fasting will regularly reverse your age. 

You have got to stress them a little bit on the cells on day three so that they rejuvenate and then they go younger. That is the biggest forte and the biggest challenge. A lot of people say, Well, five days of fasting and nutrition, is it challenging for me or not? They sometimes find it difficult to do the first and second cycles before they become metabolically flexible. Then they go, and it becomes easy. But I am pleased to hear what you are saying. We have seen it. Yes, we just saw it last week. We just got the results last week. The first time to see autophagy in cell rejuvenation with an intervention. That is for those listening to us today, that won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. But in humans, there was no product proven to do that. Then we have that proof.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. What I love about it is the ease of it. Again, for the average person, that is. I am overwhelmed by all of these things that I could do and by the simplicity of following this five-day protocol. That is going to help us get your age-reversal system in action. That is not, Hey, this is going to sustain you. Go back to living the lifestyle that you were living; none of that. We use it as a reset. If you do this and then follow our plan, you are going to need to sustain some dietary lifestyle changes over some time to continue those benefits. But ProLon is a nice way to hit the reset button, and it helps reverse aging just a little bit to get that metabolic process and flexibility going so that it can be sustained with the lifestyle changes that we make.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Maybe it is impacting metabolism as well. The foundation of why they have PCOS, the foundation of why they have the general metabolic profile, and getting it helps reduce all the stress on the metabolism.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. Exactly. What is fascinating is that we mentioned this earlier with the couple. The guy that has pre-diabetes. The number of times I have seen guys who are diabetic and have never been diagnosed or even tested because they do not have the symptoms. But we test everyone because we know that this is happening. Blood sugar dysregulation in men has been connected to recurrent pregnancy loss in women. Now you have a whole population of women who are told that it is normal to have pregnancy losses; one, two, three. If after three pregnancy losses, women are being tested for genetics; they are being tested for autoimmune conditions. I have phospholipid syndrome, but I am never the male part of this conversation. 

It was about 10 years ago that I kept seeing these recurrent pregnancy loss cases, and I was, Well, I feel something is happening with the guys. We just created a profile that said, Let us just test a bunch of very low-hanging fruit. What I kept seeing was high homocysteine levels and high blood sugar or high hemoglobin A1C in all of these guys, and I had no proof for it. I was like, Well, we are going to fix this. Then, of course, we had to work on the females as well, and they would get pregnant and stay pregnant. It was fascinating. If something here is working.

It was not until 2018, and 2019 that studies were coming out that high blood sugar levels in men or pre-diabetic or diabetic state in men were connected to their partners having recurrent pregnancy loss. It still has not been picked up in mainstream culture. But for us, it is great because I am—yes, I am not crazy. I did not say this for 10 years. It is fun because we are living in a time where we have more proof that the stuff that we are doing works. For these guys that may have some metabolic disorder, they cannot have abdominal obesity, they cannot lose weight, and they have blood sugar dysregulation. Probiotics are a great way to address that piece in the mail. Again, hit the reset button.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Do you give it to the couple? Do you ask them to do it together?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. Doing it together is so much fun.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

That is a big thing. 

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Because if you are doing it by yourself, you say, Yes, I am doing this thing. But when both of them are in it, it creates a stronger bond for each other. They have more love for each other. They are saying, We are doing this for our future child. It just amplifies everything because of the emotional connection that they have to remember.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I remember one time I was speaking on the stage in L.A. and a middle-aged female, came to me hugged me, and said, ProLon saved our wedding. Our marriage, I am sorry. I saved their marriage, and it was, I did not understand then. Maybe this is one of your patients; that is going in. It seems you are seeing the last resort. The patients come after going through their doctors. They may see you as their last resort. What testing do you do for somebody coming to your clinic? What fasting and practical interventions?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

There is a lot. Our fertility process is called restorative fertility. It is a four-step process. Reveal, remove, rebalance, and receive. The reveal phase essentially is testing, and it is the male and female fertility panels, which are hormones, plus DHEA sulfate testosterone, which are also hormones but do not get tested as often, especially in women. Then we are doing the whole gamut of what I call basic biomarkers: liver enzymes, blood sugar, hemoglobin A1C, white blood cells, and red blood cells. The way that we are interpreting those is slightly different. A bigger bucket of tests, even on the most basic level, is helpful to get information that we would not otherwise have. 

No one is testing homocysteine yet. Homocysteine has a direct correlation with epigenetics. How well are SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms? If we have some SNPs, for example, I always give MTHFR because people in the fertility world know what that is. If you have an MTHFR mutation, you are probably not methylating very well. It affects the chain of conversion from folic acid to folate to five methyl tetrahedral folate, which is an activated form of folic acid. But for that person, 40% of the population has this defect in the US. The outcome of that is if you have this defect, you have higher levels of homocysteine. If that pathway is not functioning well. 

Homocysteine is the perfect functional test of how well these methyl pathways are working in your body. Because there is a correlation, at least we know, to sperm quality. I assume there is a correlation to egg quality, but because we cannot test egg quality, we do not know for sure. But if we know that homocysteine is high, then there is a little bit of work we can do to fix one of two things. We could lower the homocysteine by supporting methyl pathways, or we could go and test epigenetics and figure out what else, and other SNPs you have that are affecting methylation. 

We usually decide on a case-by-case basis, but those kinds of biomarkers just help us have a clue of how well these different things are functioning in the body and whether are there any red flags, things that are blaring us in the face that are saying, Hey, you are just not doing this very well. We should figure out how to make this better. We should figure out how to make this a little bit more functional. Those are the basics. Semen analysis, if the guys do not have a semen analysis, is also basic. 

Then, on the female side, we have three tests that are probably not basic. As I have mentioned, we have been testing the vaginal microbiome on everyone. We just give them this kit because it gives us so much information. I want to make sure that we do not do all of this only to have implantation not happen at the vaginal microbiome level. That is easy. Then we have a new functional nutrient assay for the ladies because there is no way to assess egg quality. We can look at the nutrients and say, Hey, what level of oxidation or oxidative stress do you have? Which antioxidants are going to support your body with the oxidative needs that it has? What nutrient deficiencies do you have? All of that will serve to support egg quality in the future. 

Then the third test is a cycle map of urinary hormone metabolites. That gives us the specific hormone piece of, yes, we know the basic hormones on a day three lab tests, but what is this doing through the whole cycle? Where is there a point where you have more estrogen and progesterone when it should be reversed? If that is the case, it is an anti-fertility signal. If there is more estrogen in your luteal phase than there is progesterone, your body is saying, Sorry. It is not a time for babymaking. Because we have a whole lot of estrogen floating around. We should have some, but we should not have so much. 

Being able to assess for and know some of the hormone imbalances underlying all of this helps us put things in perspective. Then there are so many more functional tests that we could do. It just becomes a cost issue. How much more can people do? What is important—heavy metal tests or mold testing? Mold has become such a big issue that we are seeing it again and again. We see gut microbiome or gut health in general. There are a lot of other tests that we could do in the future. We do not give them to everyone.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Are you seeing an increase in mild autoimmune syndrome happening in a lot of and even younger women today?

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Yes. There are a lot of women that have antibodies to their thyroid, and if we never test the full thyroid panel, if we are only doing TSH, and a lot of their tests look normal. But they still have antibodies, and a lot of them have either chemical pregnancy, implantation failure, or recurrent pregnancy loss. That makes us wonder, What is the connection? Why do you have to keep having this struggle with staying pregnant? The answer is sometimes the autoimmune issue, and then autoimmune goes back to the gut. We need to do more gut testing. 

But that autoimmune piece is fascinating because, again, there are studies on how antibodies to the thyroid lead to recurrent pregnancy loss, yet it is not a thing that doctors test for and it is not a thing that they know what to do. If TSA is normal and they have antibodies, what do we do? We cannot give her a T4 because her TSA is normal. It is not going to do anything. Then they are stuck with, Well, we do not know what to do with antibodies, so goodbye. Good luck with that. Those are all the women who are not getting good care just because we do not have it. There is no conventional framework or paradigm to support these women and heal what is happening.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

We are seeing this a lot today where you have a little bit of a suboptimal function in this organ and a suboptimal function in the aggregate and metabolic. It is a matter of resetting, sub-aggregation of all of them together, that is, some of them for one cause, some for a general systemic one, and in many cases or other cases for different causes. This is why the standard clinical practice says you are normal here, but is subnormal to all of them. When you are subnormal on all of them, again going back to fertility and pregnancy, you are not at your optimal, and this is where the body does not want to undertake a new big endeavor to grow another body within it and says, Believe me, it is difficult for us to be fertile. 

This is where functional medicine and integrative medicine come in to say, Okay, let me look at the root cause of all of them. Is it the gut, or is it metabolic? Is that inflammatory? Is it the toxins? Is it the stress? Sometimes, as, you stated even about even the mouth? That was a new  information for me today. But all of it together, when you optimize sometimes each 10, 20, 30%, the body says, Okay, I went above water, and then I am ready and flourishing again. I am on a positive cycle rather than a vicious cycle, and I have all the stresses. The cells are not responding well to all these aggregate stresses together. 

I wanted to simplify it so that people listening to us today who do not have exposure to what we are talking about understand it a little bit differently; Allopathic medicine had to put lines, are you diabetic or not? They had to define it as just one of the side effects of saying. But if your blood sugar is 99 or 101 or 119 and 121 or 139 and 141 that took that less than 2% change in medicine, say you are diabetic or not, but, in practice, this is the same syndrome, and this is what we are trying to shed light on and try to help people think about it in this way. 

I want to thank you very much for your time today. This has been a great discussion, shedding light on women’s health and men’s health and how fast they can help both, but also how they can help the cycle of life. That is part of longevity, his part of a fulfilling life. I want to thank you for the work that you do. 

I just met you today, and it is a big surprise to learn that you use ProLon Fasting. I want to catch up with you about the biological clock a little bit because I have heard a lot of stories about ProLon babies, in which women struggle to get a baby but not understanding that even the ovaries are reversing their biological age is a big thing for us. I will follow up with you on it, but I want to thank you very much for your time today.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Thank you so much for having me, Joseph. This is awesome.