The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #82 Featuring Sean Fetcho! The co-founder of Versea Health and MESCREEN! The World's FIRST AND ONLY at home Mitochondrial Efficiency Test!!
17 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the significance of mitochondrial health?
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Check the description below to save $90 with my special discount. Take control over your health today with Apollo Neuro. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Gemelli podcast. So one of the beautiful things about what I do is I get to meet so many different people, and oftentimes it's unexpectedly, which is how I got to meet my guest today.
And it's it's kind of wild because I had heard about what he does or at least the company that he has founded. And I never knew or was able to put two and two together. But I like I said, I'm very blessed to be able to get to meet so many amazing people. And my friend today is at the top of my list for what he does.
And after talking to him, then especially, I'm going to talk a little bit about his prior background. But I think some of you are probably already going to know when I mentioned the company that he's at right now. So earlier years, which I did not know, I found pretty cool because you never told me is that you were part of the launch team for Red Bull USA.
and co-founder in a revolutionary packaging company that actually sustains the shelf life of perishables, all while killing off any foodborne pathogens while in transit.
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Chapter 2: How does Western medicine influence health practices?
But right now, what he is known for is being the co-founder and CEO of VersaHealth, which are the creators of MeScreen, which is one of my very, very strong fascinations and studies right now when it comes to what it tests for. So I can't wait to talk about all of this and get people understanding and knowing because I think you and I both know how important mitochondrial health is.
And that's why you do what you do. So without further ado, my friends, Sean Fetcho.
Thanks, man. Appreciate that. We're going to make mitochondrial conversation fun. I love it. Because death by science sometimes can confuse a lot of people. So I'm going to do my best to break this down into layman's terms for, for the masses.
I'm looking forward to it. And we're going to get into so many different things that I'm excited about that we were talking about off camera, because there's a lot of things that I think that need to be brought to light that do go on out there that people need to be aware of. And it happens in all aspects of life, but it's really anytime an industry starts to pop and, This is going to happen.
Yeah. It's always got the best intentions, things that go on and, you know, biohacking and health. There's a lot of ways to take advantage of people. Yeah. And before we get into the me screen and the testing, let's touch on that a little bit because that'll kind of draw into why what you do is so special and how you guys have taken the time to make it right. Sure.
Yeah. Look, I come from 20 years in the Western medicine space, right? So anything from cancer and oncology to cardiovascular, pain management, urology, pulmonology, infectious disease, right? I've done all of that throughout my career. And, you know, there's a lot of validity in Western medicine. And I think, you know, it gets a bad rap
Currently, because of the payers and the commercial payers owning the system. I mean, I always start off with saying, you know, when I do a talk to a bunch of really intelligent people in the room and almost always I ask the same question. I say, what do you think UnitedHealthcare did in revenue last year, 2024? What do you think? Give me a number.
My guess would be, I would say probably 10 figures.
Yeah. Try 425 billion in revenue. That was close. Okay. Not close enough. All UnitedHealthcare's entities. And they have thousands of downline entities. What's UnitedHealthcare? That is one of the largest commercial insurance payers in the United States, right? So your healthcare insurance. Right.
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Chapter 3: What are Sean Fetcho's five free hacks for better health?
I agree. When people try to ask me, what does biohacking mean? I simply try to tell them it's very simple. It's not this big drawn-out polarizing thing. It's really, honestly, you taking accountability of yourself and your own health and figuring out what's best for you. That's really in a nutshell all it is.
Now you can, which I want to talk to you about is all of these different $50 million machines and this type of product that you need with this one and this one and it turns into $700. That's what people think it is because it's become that on the surface. But it's what we're going to get into too about your five free hacks.
I've got some topics coming out called biohacking on a budget and it's kind of similar to what you're You know, same thing.
People get caught up in the whole, like it's a lot of marketing and there's a lot of costs behind biohacking. Four years ago, I had no idea what the hell that phrase even meant. And I honestly thought when someone first said it to me, I thought these were like hackers in like the digital, like coding world. I'm like a biohacker. Are they like... I don't understand. I didn't link that to health.
I actually think it's a bad phrase to use or biohacking sounds negative. I agree. You're not hacking your health. You're listening. You're listening and being preventative and proactive and precise in your health based on the physicality of what's going on with you, the mental state of where you are, and the spiritual state of where you are. That's not biohacking, right?
So for me, I struggle with that. I think wellness and longevity, and I think those are great phrases to use. The biohacking movement to me is a little strange, right?
I don't like saying, like if I'm talking to you or you're giving me advice and you call it a hack, It's not a hack. It's a method of taking care of yourself. That's right. You know what I mean? Like calling it a hack almost makes you sound like a hack. Intrusive. Yeah. You're breaking a law. Yeah. Something negative. Or it's just like something off the wall, ignorant or something.
I don't like it either, but I understand terms and slang and everything, but I don't, I agree with you. I thought it was some sort of computer thing. Yeah.
Really? My prediction is, And I'll get into the whole Western versus Eastern or health and wellness. Yeah. Because like I said, I think there's a home for Western medicine. I just think that shouldn't be the first home we go into. I agree. And I think that's a last resort if everything else fails. But when you look at biohacking, right, this movement,
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Chapter 4: How does the MESCREEN test work?
There's some amazing movements and there's some amazing innovations going into it, but there's a lot of bullshit. And how do you sift through the bullshit? The number one thing that I hear from biohackers or health and wellness people is they say, I feel lost. I don't know what to do. I'm so marketed to, everyone has their own opinion. You got to do this, this, and this.
And my response to that is I have five free hacks for you that don't cost you anything. But also every single person, 8.2 billion people on this planet are different. Your biochemistry is different than this person, than this person, than me. We all are different. Who's to say there's one universal thing that everybody should use?
And that is why we created what we did with our mitochondrial assessment, because we're looking at the biochemistry of you, everything about you, and what is going on down at the cellular level. And so people don't realize the level of mitochondria in your body and in this world. I know. Everything is mitochondria. Everybody has it from plants to all species to humans.
And so how do we assess down at that level, giving root cause data and root understanding of what is actually going on down at the cellular level?
So, and I think you'll agree with that. There's like a set protocol or general rules or guidelines, but that never necessarily means each person will fall into it.
You know, I didn't mean to stop you there, but this is a really important thing that most people don't know. Most prescription drugs, and especially some of the rare disease or oncolytics that are approved, are down to 30 or 40% success rate and they're still approved. People don't realize that.
So pharmaceutical can be FDA approved and it may only work on half the people or maybe 40% of the people. So what about the other 50%, right? Everyone handles intake of anything differently. And so I could eat whatever I want.
all day long 24 hours a day and this is the weight that you're going to get out of me it's the same weight i've been since i was 18 years old i don't change right but other person could eat the way i eat and they're going to be 1700 pounds right and so so you have to understand what what your metabolism is what how your body oxygenates how you are mentally how you are physically how you are spiritually and look at all these things and find the right recipe that works for you totally
And see, this is what's happened too. So I'm a little jaded because I started getting into like the supplement industry in 2010. And my whole premise was I want to get out of this mess, you know, that I got myself into. Tim Ferriss, man, he killed it back then.
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Chapter 5: What role does sleep play in mitochondrial efficiency?
Every non-communicable chronic disease on the planet has some sort of tie to mitochondria as a core feature, whether it's a dysfunction or a deficiency within your mitochondria. Non-communicable chronic disease is just a fancy way of saying things like diabetes.
cancer, heart disease, inflammation, neurodegeneration, whether it's Alzheimer's and Parkinson's or ALS or Frederick's atoxia, all of these things are tied to mitochondria. Okay. So that is a big, big element of this thing. Another mito fact, as I call them, is that you inherit your mitochondria directly from your mother. Your mitochondrial DNA comes directly from your mother. Okay.
It's a very interesting way to look at this. You have 103 proteins alone just in your mitochondria, okay? So these things are the backbone of everything. Every chronic disease is tied to it. Your aging is directly tied to your mitochondria. So as we get grayer, we're balding. Our hormones are changing. Maybe we're getting bellies. Women are going through menopause.
All these things that are taking place are stemming from mitochondrial change. Your cells are dying every day. And mitochondria determine whether that cell is going to live or die. They are the quarterback. They're the Tom Brady on the field.
When you look at the level of complexity of these things, you look at how they're tied to everything in anti-aging longevity, everything chronic disease, and everything on peak performance. If you're Novak Djokovic, if you are an NFL player, NHL player, a footballer, a rugby player, everything on your outlay of energy is predicated on your mitochondria, okay?
It's energy in the body, so your performance is directly tied to it. But what most people forget is that it's not about the energy all the time. It's not about if you can perform. It's about recovery. And people are overhacking themselves.
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Chapter 6: How can breathing techniques improve health?
They're overdoing it. They're oversupplementing. They're overtraining. They're overworking their body and they can't recover. And recovery is a bigger part of the pie that people forget to talk about. And so mitochondria to me is everything. And I've come to be a sponge around it.
And it's cool to see what we were building starting in 2019 to come to fruition now where the whole world is talking about it all the time. Really cool.
It's one of those things.
Chapter 7: What is the impact of hydration on overall wellness?
It's a term that gets thrown around that a lot of people don't understand. You made it very easy right there to understand. And it doesn't have to be difficult at all. I mean, the science is pretty damn cool behind it. And when I started to work with Timeline, that's when I realized, OK, this is the key to everything. And that's when I went to go study it. I studied it at Harvard.
I became a cellular health coach. Like this is my life. Yeah. This was what drew me to you when I met you. I was like, okay, there's a reason that he fell into my lap here because this is all I want to do. And, and it's when you understand what it controls, like you just said, and then you realize, okay, I need to address this. I want my mitochondrial health to be better.
My main target, because like you said, in essence, well, that's controlling our aging. That's controlling our quality of life. And I love that you brought up that people are over supplementing because it's like overtraining. You can overtrain and go backwards and have such a strong detriment. I mean, I coached this for 15 years. Same with what you said over supplementing.
You see guys, I've done this. I don't know if you have, but taking 40 and 50 supplements a day because you start thinking, well, this does this and this does this and this does this. In reality, that's unnecessary and can be a detriment. Now, I want to ask you, in your view, what are some of the best methods for keeping healthy mitochondria as we age? Is it a supplement? Is it with exercise?
Is it sleep-driven? What are some of your... It's a great question.
It depends how you score. Okay. So what's interesting around mitochondrial health is you could actually be healthy or you could look healthy. You could be physically fit. You could be a top athlete and you might have a shitty mitochondrial score. You could be a top biohacker. You could be a major influencer that's doing all these things and have a shitty mitochondrial score.
There's a lot of things that come into play on how your cellular health is. And that goes back to this whole mind, body, spirit. Depending on how you score, every single human on the planet, there's roughly 8.2 billion of us on the planet. We all fall within one of 17 profiles of our mitochondrial health, okay?
This technology, I just want to preface this with everyone because this is super important to understand. We come from the Western medicine space. All of the co-founders, our doctor team, our PhD team, our MD team, we all live and breathe in the Western medicine space. This was born out of research done with NASA, the famous NASA twin study back in 2015.
Anyone listening, you can Google NASA twin study, space NASA. And you will find a very interesting white paper. And what they did is they shot the Kelly brothers. There's one sound below at base and one up in space for a year, identical twins to understand different aspects of overall health and wellness and aging and what happens. when in space.
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Chapter 8: How does one assess and improve their mitochondrial function?
So those are the two co-founders with myself and Steve. on our team. And so we started funding out of UC San Diego, the research and assessment of mitochondria and trying to figure out how to bring this as a commercially viable product. The only way, as I mentioned, was that muscle tissue biopsy.
Then we went into plasma, which was part of the NASA twin study, but still expensive to assess plasma and the processing of it and the accuracy. It's a little inconsistent. We did a new technology and cracked the code back in 2022 utilizing adoptive transfer, which means we look at a baseline cell assay and we run a serum separation card to take your blood. Super simple.
You can do it in the privacy of your own home. Takes three minutes or you can do it in a clinical setting. That blood dries. We spin that down through our sets of equipment that are like $650,000 a piece in our lab. It's insane. And so we run that processing and we run that analysis to understand what's going on with you and the 11 core functions of your mitochondria.
Things like reactive oxygen species, your glycolysis, your mito network, right? All of these things have a massive impact on your day-to-day life. For me to tell you what you need, we'd have to do the test, right? Because that's the whole point, is it hones in on where you need improvement and optimization and maybe some areas where you're doing really well.
And from that, we take anything that's in the peer-reviewed PubMed indexed world. So in the scientific community, peer-reviewed means it's been submitted and published in very... you know, well-respected journals, things like American Journal of American Journal. So JAMA, Journal of American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, JCO.
So all these well-established peer-reviewed journals. So anything that's indexed on diet, nutrition, and supplementation. So we can't give you, hey, go do a stem cell. Hey, go do red light therapy. Hey, go do magnetic therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, or take this peptide.
The clinician can give you that advice, but there's just not enough in the scientific literature yet, I think there will be, around when to take those and for what reason within your mitochondrial health. And so we are looking specifically at what's scientifically proven on diet, nutrition, and supplementation. The algorithm gives you those recommendations.
The provider that you are doing the test with, whether it's one of our providers or if it's in a clinical setting, They can then springboard from that data set on you, coupled alongside a genetic test, maybe some metabolic blood work, maybe gut health, maybe, you know, metals and toxins, whatever you're testing, let that clinician aggregate all that together and make the best assessment on you.
And that's where this whole thing ultimately goes. It's the data that they take in on you across all of these parameters are going to give you more of a personalized approach as to what you actually need in tracking. So think of us like a bullshit detector. It's the simplest way to explain what we do. Is what you're doing in your life working? That's it.
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