Episode 573: Dr. Jonathan Schoeff: Peptides and the Marketing Behind Modern Longevity - Part 1

**Dr. Jonathan Schoeff** (0:01)
Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

**Jen Cohen** (0:06)
Welcome to Habits and Hustle, where I sit down with the world's biggest thinkers, entrepreneurs, top experts to uncover the habits and strategies that actually move the needle in your health and happiness, and of course, success. Today, I'm sitting down with Dr. Jonathan Schoeff. He's a surgeon and longevity expert who is actually still practicing medicine, which already makes him different from a lot of the experts you see online. He's not here to sell you some magic stack, potion, or scare you into a protocol, or even pretend that every trend on Instagram is backed by real science. He has spent more than two decades in medicine, working as a surgeon and helping people understand what actually drives long-term health. In this episode, we get into the wild world of online health experts, the peptide hype, GLP-1s, muscles, skincare myths, and why so much of what gets packaged as longevity is really just great marketing with a lab coat filter. This conversation will make you question who you are taking advice from, what evidence actually means, and why the boring basics like building muscle, improving metabolic health, and staying consistent are still the things that move the needle. So guys, buckle up. This is going to be a great episode if you're into anything, health, wellness, fitness, and of course, just overall just great conversation. Enjoy.
All right, you guys, welcome to another episode of Habits and Hustle. And we have a very special guest today.
I should also say that I know I've said this 10 times before we even started to roll, but this is Saturday. So this guy has to be really great for me to actually be doing a podcast on Saturday. His name is Dr. Jonathan Schoeff, and he is a surgeon and a longevity expert, but a real expert, not just one who plays one on social media, which we're going to get into in a second, and he could not do the podcast during the week because he's actually a working doctor.

**Dr. Jonathan Schoeff** (2:12)
The darn jobs get in the way of all the fun.

**Jen Cohen** (2:17)
Exactly. Because I say all the time when I do this podcast that I have doctors who come on, and I'm like, oh, are you practicing still? And majority of them are like, no, I don't practice anymore.
So basically, they've all just shifted or morphed into like media doctors, which I never really like. It's interesting. Have you not seen that at all?

**Dr. Jonathan Schoeff** (2:40)
No, I have. And I think it's being new to social media, I was completely naive to that. So there are all these narratives that exist around the pseudo doctors, the docfluencers, all these things that for the best, I had no concept of. But when I first got on social media, you get blasted with these, you are this type statements.

**Jen Cohen** (3:06)
Yeah.

**Dr. Jonathan Schoeff** (3:06)
I'm like, no, I'm actually not. I'm just a guy from Ohio.
And people will, that's the interesting thing about social media is they want to just box you in as quick as possible. You're one of those guys. You're a keto guy, you're a carnivore guy, you're a fasting guy, you're a muscle guy, you're a protein guy. And in reality, I look at that and I go, no, I'm just a doctor.

**Jen Cohen** (3:32)
Right.

**Dr. Jonathan Schoeff** (3:32)
And then we talked about that. Now, unfortunately, the word doctor, I think is totally abused. And it's done in a, I mean, let's face it, it's done in a manipulative way.

**Jen Cohen** (3:43)
Well, 100 percent. Like I said to you earlier, these doctors, a lot of them are chiropractors, and then they're giving a lot of advice on a lot of things that maybe they weren't trained for. So to me, that's what I kind of am, I try to be a little discerning, so because I think there is so much noise on Instagram, which is why when I saw you and I followed you and I reached out to you is because I saw that you were legitimately a real doctor, who actually practices and has patients and does the thing. And by the way, you have a big following for someone who's barely even on social media, but that was just recently, I would imagine.

**Dr. Jonathan Schoeff** (4:25)
Yeah, we started this whole, I called it the great social media project. So back in May of last year, I had no logins or anything. And the reality for me, what I do in the longevity space is, I have clients come in every day and they would ask these questions. And a lot of them were just totally off the wall, some were legitimate, but they say, I follow so-and-so and this is what so-and-so said, what should I do about that? And after a while ago, it probably behooves me to get into this whole social media thing. It started with really wanting to connect with my clients in the local areas.