GA 100 | How to Survive with Matt May

You're listening to episode 100 with Matthew May.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey, there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and as I've said, around 99 other times. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week, for listening to the show, and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gembaacademy.com I know this normally sounds a little robotic, and I say the same thing every week, but we truly do appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, this episode is without question, like no other episode that we've ever produced. Now, our guest is Matt May, who we've actually had on the show before, way back in April of 2014. In fact, Matt was actually the first guest we ever had on the show. And on that episode, we talked about all kinds of fun things, and to this day, it's one of my favorites. But today's episode is definitely more intense. Matt and I talk about an experience none of us will escape, and that experience is death. Matt, as you'll hear, died. Now, I don't know how else to say that, and I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but Matt flatlined and died not once, but two times. So Matt walks us through the entire process, including how all of the pain and suffering he was experiencing went away right before his heart stopped beating. Now, we then talked about what Matt has been able to learn from this experience, including some powerful lean thinking lessons. Now, this is definitely a longer episode, so feel free to listen to it in chunks if needed, but I definitely encourage you to listen to the whole thing. And we're also providing a full transcript of the episode for those that like to read, as well as a link to a powerful article Matt published on Medium. Now, all of these links can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 100. That's one. So again, go to gembapodcast.com and look for episode 100. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Matt, well, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

It's going good. I'm above the ground, so it's good.

Well, as you know, I'm super excited to be talking to you because this is episode 100 for Gemba Academy and our podcast, and I Don't even know if you remember this. You were actually our first guest to come onto the podcast back in April of 2014. So, yeah, we did a really short. We did like a welcome episode, which was number one, and then you were episode two, which was really our first real episode. And I have to say that that episode is still one of my all time favorites. And I don't know if you remember what we talked about, but we were talking about keeping the main thing. The main thing and all kinds of awesome stuff. And it really challenged me, honestly, and Kevin and everybody at Gemba Academ to kind of almost rethink many aspects of how we were doing our work at Gemba Academy. And it really impacted us and helped us in a profound way. So, first of all, thank you for that and thanks for being our guest for episode 100.

Yeah, no, thank you. I do remember the conversation. I remember our emails afterwards. And wow. So centennial edition, I guess so. My math. Let me see. So that's 2ish years you've been doing one a week, mostly with time off for holidays.

Yeah, you know, we just kind of cue them up. But there was a few weeks where we doubled up and there was one week, I think, or a week or two where we had some itunes problems, but we've been pretty consistent and done. Done an episode just about every week for two years.

All right, well, fantastic. I'm all yours.

Well, all right, well, so here's the thing. I've been racking my brain talking to Kevin and all my colleagues here at GitHub Academy about how to ask this first question. And truthfully, I'm really struggling. So I do apologize if this sounds a bit, I don't know, abrupt, but I understand, Matt, that you recently died, as in you were dead. So can you maybe walk us through that?

Yeah. So just, just for the audience listening, I am not the walking dead. I'm not a zombie by any means. And the definition of dead or died that you're using is that my heart stopped beating. I had a cardiac arrest. I had a double cardiac arrest, actually. And yeah, my heart stopped beating for several seconds and both times got zapped back to life, as it were. And here I am. It's been about eight weeks since that happened. Walk you through the entire sequence of events?

Well, yeah, and obviously you wrote an article on Medium that we're going to link to in our show notes for sure, and we want everybody to read that, but why don't you? You know, we got Matt here on the podcast, so walk Us through that. What happened?

Okay, well, let's set the scene. The scene is a week before Christmas, you know, a couple months ago, December 19, 2015 to be exact. And at that time of the year a lot of people are sort of winding down for the holidays. If you do a lot of work in the automotive space, most companies almost go completely dark for a couple of weeks the last two weeks of the year. So that's generally a, where you regroup with friends and colleagues. They have extra time sort of trying to avoid the shopping malls and be outside here in Southern California. And that's exactly what I had planned for Saturday morning. A mountain bike ride with three other friends, two of which had not really seen or ridden with regularly for a couple years. And we decided to do one of the favorite trails here in Southern California called Backbone. Not all that far from, from the coast. And you know, Saturday morning it's fairly warm. They said the rain was going to move in around 11am so we wanted to get on the trail around 9. It's about a two hour ride. And we all, you know, grouped together and set about on our ride. And gosh, everything was going swimmingly well. The trail was nice, it was a little moist, the air was fresh, my lungs were clear.

How hard do you ride? Are you like really getting after it?

No, yeah, this is, yeah, I'm an avid mountain biker. I probably on my bike when I can swing it 10 to 12 hours a week. I've got a fairly high, what's called VO2 max, which is the volume of oxygen your lungs can pump, if you will. I've got a fairly high hematocrit level, which is the oxygen level in your blood. And while I'm not a professional, I'm way too old for that. I can keep up with guys 15, 20 years younger than me and in super fit shape. So yeah, we ride pretty hard. It's a fairly fun but technical single track that we, that we ride. Single track, meaning there's room for one bike and that's about it. And we go into the canyons and we do some tough technical climbs. Rocks, ruts, roots, jumps, you name it. And we were, we had gone to the turnaround point actually. Two of my friends had to turn around. It was, it was a little too tough for them. The two that hadn't ridden with me for a while, they said, you know what, we're going to turn around, we got stuff to do. I don't know if we're going to be fast enough to hang with you guys. Me and my sort of steadier riding buddy Doug said, fine, see you later. We went on to the turnaround point, stopped, admired the view overlooking Malibu, and headed back. And somewhere in the midpoint of our turnaround, we were on a fairly tough technical climb out of a canyon. And it's a section that most times we can clear without dabbing, which means putting a foot down, stopping walking, anything like that. And Doug was ahead of me, and he was enough ahead of me that he was around a turn and really couldn't see me. So I was lagging a bit because he's faster down the hill. So he beat me down and started up quicker. And gosh, as I started climbing, lo and behold, I couldn't catch my breath on a section that I clear all the time and have virtually no trouble on. So I knew that something was amiss. And because I have in my past an instance like I was experiencing, which is shortness of breath when you shouldn't, I started to get nervous. And I'll take you back to three years ago when I was on a tennis court on a Sunday morning just warming up and same thing, I couldn't catch my breath. Just warming up, just, you know, just an easy warm up. Oh, my gosh, why can't I breathe? Thought I might have had too much coffee, perhaps stayed up too late. Maybe it was heartburn. So I stopped playing tennis back then, caught my breath, started playing again, and same thing happened. And my partner said, my tennis partner said, you know, you actually don't look all that great, to be honest with you. And he and I had actually ridden mountain bikes the day before and played tennis the day before. But he said, maybe we went too hard yesterday, but here's the thing, we were at the country club where I play tennis, and he said, you know, I know this is going to sound kind of crazy and maybe it's over the top, but, you know, the head of cardiology for our local hospital is working out in the gym. I'm going to go run and get him. And the only reason he knew that he was working out in the gym was because he had actually come through the locker room and seen him peek the in to see that he was. His name is Vishva. Dave. Dr. Dave. D, E V was working out. And he said, you know, let me go run and get him. So it was lucky A, that he had come through the locker room, B, that he had spied Dr. Dave, and that we were close enough that he could just run and get him. And so he did. And he came back, Dr. Dave did, and he said he took my pulse and asked me what I was feeling. And I said, well, I can't catch my breath, and it feels like there's an elephant stomping on my chest. No pain, just pressure, like someone was stepping. Just. You were on your back, and someone had all their weight on your chest. And he said, you know, I'd like you to come to the emergency room. And you go, no, really, I'm fine. I'll go home. I'll lay down. I don't think anything's happened. He goes, no, I want you to come to the emergency room. I'm going to call ahead. This was a Sunday morning. I'm going to call ahead and I'm going to open up the catheter lab just in case. And I go, really, seriously, I mean, I just can't catch my breath. And he said, no, I want you to get there as quick as you can. And the quickest way was actually for my wife to come and get me. Luckily, we could get her on the phone Sunday morning. She's usually playing tennis somewhere, doing something, but she was home. She bolted over. I'm only about a mile away from the club, and she drove me about 90 miles an hour to the emergency room. They admitted me right away. They wheeled me in, and they took a look at me, and they said, you're having a heart attack. Because that's what had been listed. Myocardial infarction, which is fancy word for heart attack. I go, I guess so. That's what they're telling me. And the nurse said, you don't look like you should be having a heart attack. You look pretty fit. I go, I am pretty fit. But be that as it may, they hooked me up to an ekg, and sure enough, my heart was not happy. And the doctor came in and my wife was there. And he said, you know, it's not good, but I can fix it. And what he meant was by saying not good was that the artery called the left anterior descending artery is called the widowmaker. It goes right through the center of your heart was 98% blocked from a plaque buildup. And my heart wasn't getting proper blood, which made it hard for me to breathe. They gave me a baby aspirin. They gave me a Nitroglycerin, and about 30 minutes.

Nitroglycerides, sorry.

It's a tablet. It's a little tiny tablet, a little pill that you slip under your tongue, and it's for reduction of chest pain. Folks that have A history of heart disease, carry them with them. You've probably seen on tv, right, where someone's having a heart attack and they reach for their medication. That's what they're reaching for. It's a tiny, tiny pill, and it reduces the pain and relaxes the heart a bit. So they gave that to me. They wheeled me into the cath lab, and 20, 30 minutes later, they had snaked a catheter up through my femoral artery into my heart and implanted two titanium stents, and all was better. Spent a couple of days in intensive care, but all was sort of well and good after that. My heart was pumping. I could actually ride better because there was more oxygen in my blood. I wasn't blocked. And mind you, and interrupt me if I'm speaking too much here. Doing great, mind you. Two years before this, this had happened in 2010. I had visited a nutritionist because I wasn't happy with the shape that I was in, and my tennis partner was getting in better shape. And I asked him what he was doing to get leaner, if you will, and he goes, well, I went to a nutritionist, and he put me on a new eating methodology, if you will. And I had lost probably £20 I had brought. My cholesterol at the time was not good. And as a matter of fact, one of the first things the nutritionist had said to me in taking a quick blood test was, your LDLs are too high. You don't do something about this, you're gonna have a heart attack in a few years. Little did he know that he was speaking the fortunes and the future, But I had brought it in line with nutrition. I had leaned up 20 pounds lighter. My body fat was down to around 7%, and I was pretty physically fit. I was really happy with how I was moving. So when this had happened on the tennis court, I thought, oh, my gosh, what's going on? And. And lo and behold, you can bring your current state of, I don't know, cholesterol efficiency, blood efficiency, if you'll, into line, but it doesn't reverse damage done. In other words, I had plaque buildup in my arteries, and they had put me on medication after they put the stents in. And the protocol for that is a couple of years of blood thinners so that nothing clogs up the stents and some statin to keep the cholesterol low. At the time, I didn't know that beyond two years going off medication could be detrimental. Sort of talked about it with my doctor. We looked at my EKGs, my ECGs, everything looked to be normal. I even had what's called a stress test, where they shoot die through you and they look at your heart under stress, and everything sort of looked great. So by the time that 2014 rolled around, I was drug free, I was feeling good. And then this happened on the mountain bike ride. So I'm out of breath, I'm climbing up, I go, you know, this feels just eerily familiar. So I began walking, hoping that it was just another instance of being out of breath or something would reverse itself, itself. And it didn't. I had to sit down. And as I sat down, it got progressively worse. And a biker came by that I didn't know, and he goes, are you okay? And I said, I'm not sure. If you get to the top, tell my friend I'm not gonna make it. Not meaning I was going to die or anything, but I just wasn't gonna make it to the top anytime. Yeah, anytime soon.

Do you have a cell phone or anything like that?

Yeah, yeah, we carry cell phones. But where we were a, there's not a lot of coverage. I think both of us had maybe one bar of coverage. And the only reason we really take it is to, you know, if something goes wrong or we get separated. When we go alone, we probably listen to music through our phones, but we don't really look at our phones. They're in our backpacks. They're not really handy. So that's why I said, tell my friend I'm not coming up. I think those were the exact words. I'm not coming up. Not gonna make it. And I don't know if he didn't get the word or what, but I pulled out my phone because I was getting worse. I was getting chilled. I could feel that I was sort of going into shock, visibly shaking.

What does that feel like, your hair on your arms standing up or what?

It feels like you can't get warm no matter what you do. And I had a couple layers on it. Just. You're sort of out of control.

It's sweating and stuff.

Yeah, well, I was sweating because I was riding and it was fairly warm. It was probably 72, 74. Not like you're in the chilly waters of the Arctic, but that's what it feels like.

Was the sun hitting you or were you undercover?

I was sort of undercover under a bit of a canopy. I was leaning up against the trail, sort of the bank of the trail so that I was leaning back. I put my bike down, and, gosh darn it, it just kept getting worse. The pressure in my chest kept getting worse. And finally I pulled out my phone and I texted my friend Doug saying, not coming. And he texted me back. Our texts probably crossed in the ether. He said, are you coming? And I said, no. And he texted me back right away, are you okay? And I said, no. And he beat a path down to me.

How hard was it to type no? I mean, seriously, because you had to concentrate.

Yeah. You know, it was. You're sort of gasping for breath, and everything is hard and labored. Zipping open your backpack is hard. Just all your movement is hard. And what you'd really rather do is just lie back and go to sleep.

And then you die if you do that, right? Pretty much.

Well, you could, I guess. I think back in 2012, the doctor actually did say, it's a good thing I went into the ER because had I gone home to lay down, I might not have woken up. So he beat a path down to me, and that's when the real fun began. So lucky point number one was that a. I had decided to ride with a friend or friends. I wasn't alone. Lucky point number two for me was that we had enough cell phone coverage that we could text each other. So he came back down to me and he said, well, you don't look good. I've never seen you. I've never seen anyone so white. It's like he could. The way he described it is. It's like I can look through you, you're so white.

And you're a tan dude, right?

I'm a tan dude. I'm pretty tan dude. I'm out in the sun a lot. And I was. And when I say sort of visibly shaking, it's not like the little shakes. It's like you're kind of, you know, violently rocking back and forth. And you're. There's probably several inches. If, you know, if you look at your hands, they're shaking two or three inches either way. And I gave him my phone and I said, Call Dr. Dave. And he was like, dave? How do you spell Dave? Dave? D, A, V, E. No. And I could barely make out, you know, D, E, V. And he's going through my phone and my contacts. He goes, I don't see it. I don't find it. Oh, there it is. And luckily, I had his cell phone number. Keep in mind, again, this is Saturday morning. Most doctors are doing something they love to do because be it golf, tennis, what have you, but I've always had his cell phone number because after my incident in 2012, we had become social colleagues, if you will, acquaintances. We'd see each other at functions all the time. I would regularly see him on a professional basis. So I had a cell number, and he called that cell phone number. Luckily, Dr. Dave picked up, and luckily he had cell phone coverage because he was out on a hike with friends. So he was out in the mountains here in Southern California. The coverage is spotty. And he answered the phone, he says, hello, Matt. I could actually hear him say that. And Doug said, this isn't Matt. This is his friend Doug. And Matt doesn't look good, and we need to know what to do. And through Dr. Dave, Doug asked me what's going on? And I said, I'm having a heart attack. I knew I was having a heart attack at that point. And Dr. Dave from there said, okay, I'm going to go to the hospital. If you can get him to the hospital, I will meet you there. Same thing that had happened three years earlier. So that's when Doug sort of sprung into action, I guess.

How old is Doug? Your age?

No, he's probably. I think he's just. I'm 56. He's, I think, 49, 48, something like that. Bit younger.

Pretty. Pretty fit, obviously.

Very fit guy. Very strong writer. We've been writing together for well over a decade, and, you know, we're friends as well as riding partners. So he got on the. He dialed 911 again. Lucky we had coverage and said, you know, explained who he was, explained the situation, said, we need help. We need a rescue team as soon as possible. We need to get him to the hospital. He's having a heart attack. And they stayed on the line with him as he sort of directed traffic. Now, keep in mind, we're in a tough area to see. We're covered by foliage. We are in a canyon. We're on a very technical, single uphill track that hikers actually have a tough time with. As a matter of fact, a group of about six hikers had come by, and they had stopped, and they had decided that they were going to stick around because they saw that Doug was on the phone with 911. And one of them gave me a little cup of tea to try and keep me warm. One of them gave me one of those camping blankets, you know, that you fold up the foil blankets and wrapped it around me. It wasn't really helping, but it was good. So I had a group around me. At this point, I was feeling really bad. It's like, man, I bummed everyone's morning out.

One question. How far up were you, like, bicycling wise? How many minutes had you rode to get to where you were?

Oh, we had ridden probably about an hour, hour and 40 minutes. We were 20 minutes from the car and we were just seconds, a couple of minutes from a fire road saddle, which is the stopping point, which is where Doug had gone up to wait for me. So there's a large, wide fire road that's used for fires, emergency access to these canyons. That's where he was waiting for me and that's where he back down from, just a couple of minutes from that. Okay, so the hikers were there, I was there, Doug was there. And he's on the phone with them and he's directing traffic. You know, here's where we are, here's where you need to go. He said, there's, you know, there's a fire road off Latigo Canyon. You gotta get there. We knew that they could access that fire road from a main road, a paved road called Latigo Canyon. But they didn't quite understand that because he looked over across the canyon to the turnaround point that we had reached several minutes earlier, half an hour earlier, and could see them up on that ridge saying, you're on the wrong ridge. He saw a truck, the yellow search and rescue paramedic truck. You're on the wrong ridge. Are you sending a helicopter? Yes, we're sending a helicopter. They're in route. And we couldn't hear them at that point. And I was getting worse by the second. And at this point, Doug was kind of screaming at them to get their asses in gear. Where's the helicopter? Where's the helicopter? It had been probably eight to 10 minutes and finally we heard them. Finally we heard the helicopter coming. And one of the hikers said, you know, they're not going to be able to see us. I'm going to go up to that ridge and see if I can signal to them. And the only thing he really had to signal was a mirror. These guys were actually well equipped. We weren't as bikers. We, you know, we carry some water, some snacks, and that's about it. These hikers had, had blankets and tea and, you know, signaling devices. That device happened to be a mirror. So he got up on that, that saddle, that fire road saddle. And again, keep in mind, it was supposed to be a rainy, cloudy day. Luckily the sun was still out, so a mirror would work. So that's sort of, you know, lucky point, whatever. But he Got up there and was able to catch the eye of the helicopter pilot, which is good because their regular search pattern, they have, you know, they work in concentric circles, and they have an established protocol for how you search an area where you're not. Not certain, you know, you can find someone you don't have visibility on. On that subject, by the time the one of the paramedics got down to me saying, you know, it's a good thing that guy signaled us, because A, we wouldn't have known exactly where to land, and B, we wouldn't have found you for another 15 minutes. So the helicopter lands on that fire road. I saw the helicopter. I didn't see it land, but I did hear it. I did see it. And it was one of the big ones. It was. It wasn't your typical, like, lifeguard kind of helicopter. This was a big Blackhawk.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. It wasn't actually black, but it was the Blackhawk size. Right. It had the typical, you know, yellow and blue search and rescue on it. But it was a big helicopter. And they had three guys. A pilot and a paramedic and another guy that was navigator slash paramedic. And, you know, in a few seconds, the medic had come down to me from the. From that saddle. So now we had about seven guys. There was me, the hikers, my friend Doug. Doug's still on the phone with 911 and finally hangs up with them and turns to me and says, do you want me to call your wife? And I said, yeah, you can call her now. He had asked me several times before, and I said no. I didn't want to bother her. I didn't want to. I didn't want to call her until she had a course of action, you know, a place that I knew that I was going to probably in all likelihood be somewhere that she could be. Otherwise, she would just worry and it wouldn't be good. She was down in Beverly Hills. It was Christmas shopping time. He called her. Same kind of thing, you know. She answered the phone and said, hi, honey. And he goes, no, this isn't honey. This is Doug. You know, Matt's in a bad way. And he had her on the phone, and she, you know, she told Doug, you gotta get him to Los Robles. Doug had said, he's in contact with Dr. Dave. And she said, good. She's calm, you know, I couldn't really, you know, I could. She's been through this before. So I couldn't tell how calm she was. But she definitely stopped. Stopped. She turned around and started heading back to neck of the woods that we live in. But she said, you've got to get him to Los Robles. And to Dr. Dave, he said, I will. Now, the paramedic had strapped me up to some sort of EKG machine, something electronic. And the first thing I said to him, he introduced himself and I said, hey. He says, are you Matt? And I go, yep. Introduced himself and I said, I'm having a heart attack, man. You got an aspirin and you got a nitroglycerin? And he said, yeah, I got all that. Let me hook you up first. So he hooked me up several electrodes to my arms, under my shirt. And I had started to feel a little bit better for whatever reason. And I looked around and I said to everyone, you know, as he started monitoring me, you know, I think I need to pass out. Even though I had started feeling better, in other words, the pain had gone away a little bit. I felt woozy. And so I said, you know, I think I'm just going to lay back here. I think I need to pass out. And that's the last thing I remember until I started hearing voices. And as I started hearing voices, I had been in a state. I guess it's not the last thing I remember. What I remember is feeling really good after I said I had to pass out.

What do you mean good?

It just felt like all the pain.

Physically good?

Yeah, just like, oh, wow, that feels good. I'm really glad I laid back down. I'm going to take a nap. This feels great. It felt just. Everything was peaceful and calm and pain free. And that's probably the last thing I remember before I started hearing voices. And it's kind of like when you come out of a REM sleep. You're sort of foggy and you're not really quite sure if you're having a dream or you're still asleep or you're actually awake. You've probably had, you know, that happen in. In some way where you're not fully conscious. But I started hearing people scream at me. I'm like, God, I was kind of pissed that people were screaming at me. I was trying to take a nap. You know, it's like, matt, can you hear us? Matt? Matt, Matt, can you hear us? And I came to and, you know, I looked around, I go, what happened? I passed out and goes. And my friend Dog just looked at me and he goes, no, dude, you died. Wow.

Wow. I just have the hair on my arms is standing straight up right now, man.

Oh my gosh that was his words. It was like, no, dude, you died. You flatlined. I go, seriously? He goes, yeah. And what had happened was. And he didn't tell me this till later when I was at the hospital, but I guess I had flatlined right when I got hooked up to that ekg. And I guess when I did, I guess there was a way to shock me through that thing. Because what he told me later when he came to visit me in the hospital was that the paramedic had taken a big knife and had just sliced through my undershirt and my riding shirt and zapped me back.

Zapped you? Like, boom. Like you bounced off the ground.

And I don't know if that was, like, with paddles or through that machine, because he said, well, it wasn't really paddles. But he did it another way. So anyway, my heart had been in defibrillation. I had flatlined. It had stopped beating. And through the electric shock, he brought me back, and I guess I was out. I don't know, 10, 12 seconds maybe. They weren't really sure, but it happened fairly quickly. So it wasn't like, you know, he had asked anyone if they knew cpr. One of the hikers did, but they didn't actually need to perform it on me because I came back, and that's when, you know, so that was lucky. Meantime, Doug's still on the phone with my wife, and he said, okay, I'm gonna hang up now because we gotta get him to the helicopter. And she goes, ok, tell him I'm going to the hospital. And Doug told me that. So it took six guys to carry me up that trail on a flat board and load me into the helicopter. And I remember being jostled around, and I was sort of in and out of full consciousness at that point. It was a technical trail. I know one guy fell back into the bushes because I saw him do that. And I was. Felt really bad that people were potentially getting injured. But they loaded me into the helicopter, and that's when Doug called my wife back and said, okay, they actually want to take him to ucla, which was protocol. It was the closest hospital. That's what the, you know, the search and rescue protocol is. And she said, no, you got to get him to Los Robles Hospital, which is the local hospital where Dr. Dave was waiting for me. Me. And that's a good thing, because had I gone to ucla, in all likelihood, I might not have made it because I would have gone through regular ER procedures. I would have probably not been taken into the catheter lab. Again, the catheter labs usually are not open on the weekends. You have to call people to come in. So they didn't have that advance notice that that would be what I would need. Dr. Dave had sort of assumed that I would need new, you know, some sort of angioplasty or angio, you know, stents, angiogram, blowing the arteries out, what have you. So he was ready for it. And he had gotten his staff together. And she said, no. She said, no, you got to get them to Los Robles or he will, will die. And, you know, all, all credit to Doug. He shouted at the pilot, you got to get him lost. Robots, can you do that? And actually shout out to the medic who shouted to the pilot? And they all looked around at each other and goes, yeah, we can do that. So that was, that was, you know, lucky point thing. They broke protocol.

Okay.

So it's about a five minute helicopter ride to that particular hospital. And, you know, all the time that I was in there, there was a different guy that was taking care of me on the helicopter than the guy that was, had taken care of me on the, on the trail. Two different guys. But this guy, he just said, stay with me, stay with me. Look me in the eyes. Look me in the eyes.

How were you feeling right then, Matt? Were you feeling safe? Were you feeling secure?

No. But I'll tell you, I wasn't panicking. I was not thinking about the past. I wasn't thinking about my family. I wasn't thinking about the future. It was completely in the moment. And maybe we can talk about that later, the whole notion of being mindful. But I attribute being in the moment to a couple of things. One, having been in this position in some way before, not in as dire circumstances, but being trained in being mindful, which is being in the moment. And I'm not talking about the Zen quiet, your mind kind of mindfulness where you meditate, but the sort of western brand where you are actively in the present and looking at everything sort of around you.

Were you thinking about staying alive or just.

Nope, it wasn't anything like that. It was going through because that wouldn't be mindful. That would be. And people are probably going to react to that. It goes, what do you mean by saying, what do you mean that's not being mindful? When you think about staying alive, you're really thinking about the future. You're not thinking about the present. The present is how do I act in this moment? How do I stay awake? So I'm not thinking about staying alive. I'm staying awake because that was. Which is a difference, right? It's not. I don't have any control over whether I'm alive or not. But what I do have control over is listening to the medic saying, stay awake, don't close your eyes, don't go to sleep. You know, that kind of.

Yeah, I got you, I got you.

And you know, that's a new.

Are you cold still?

Yeah, still cold, still in pain. But I was strapped in into the helicopter. The helicopter door was open, it was noisy. They had put stuff on my ears because of the noise. You know, the headphones that you wear when you're on a helicopter. And he was speaking to me through those headphones and I was. I know I barely remember a lot of this, but I do remember looking him in the eyes. And so we. And I do remember the helicopter going down, but there was a bit of a hiccup because this was a big full size Black Hawk helicopter. It was too big to land on the regional hospital's little helipad. They were designed for normal circumstances, not outlying circumstances. So when the hospital had been designed, it was designed for 90% of the helicopter landings. So it was too big and too heavy to land on the helipad. So they had to find another place to land. And I didn't know this at the time, I was told afterwards, but they landed in the parking lot. It was a Saturday. Luckily there was space to land. So as you're getting my story here, this is sort of lucky point number 10, right? I mean, all these sort of things have been really lucky to this point. A, that we had cell phone coverage, you know, B, that we could get Dr. Dave on the phone. C, that the helicopter could find me because a hiker happened to have a mirror, a mirror, and it was still sunny out. And, you know, there were enough people to carry me up to the helicopter because quite frankly, one, you know, two people could not have done it. Doug, and one other guy could not have done it. They would have had to figure out how to airlift me up off the trail, which had probably taken, you know, more minutes, you know, you know, I could come back to life through a shock, you know, that they would take me to this hospital, the doctor was waiting, blah, blah, blah. All these lucky sequence of events that were occurring, they were able to land in the, the parking lot. But the bad news there is that when you don't land on the, on the helipad, the ER team that has advanced notice of you Coming in isn't prepared to take you into the er. So how do I get from the helicopter to the ER in the parking lot? Well, there happened to be an ambulance driving by. Lucky for me that that ambulance was empty. So they loaded me into that and they had to do a bit of four wheeling from, from the parking lot over, over the grounds to. To get to the emergency entrance.

Do you remember that, like feeling the pump?

I remember, yeah, I remember. I remember them loading me out. I remember them loading me in. I remember there being people around and I guess as I came into the ER and they told me this after, I guess I flatlined again. And this time though, Dr. Dave was there to bring me back. And I swear I don't remember that. I swear I was conscious the entire time, but I guess I wasn't. And I was sort of in that dream phase through the procedure. And the procedure was not unlike at all what I gone through three years earlier. They basically had to snake up through my artery again, femoral artery, into my heart, blow out the 100% blocked artery, and I had thrown a blood clot right before my preexisting stents, so there was no blood flowing whatsoever to my heart. On that side of the heart, I was being kept alive by one, and I forget the name of it, smaller artery. But if you were to look, for those of you listening and take a look at that Medium article, I posted the before and after, and you'll sort of see a noticeable lack of blood in the before and what it's supposed to look like after another stent was put in. He put in two stents, one for good measure in another artery just in case. So I had to put in. And lo and behold, I made it through a double cardiac arrest. So that's the gory detail of how all that came to be. And it's just a bunch of gosh darn luck that all of those, you know, events happen the way they did.

So, so after you, after that, then you. I obviously stayed in a hospital for.

A bit and yeah, you know, against my will, but I did, you know, I felt good enough, you know, as I came out, they sort of laughed at me and I. And I. Because I asked right away, and I guess I was still slightly drugged because they drug you a little bit, but they don't put you fully out for an angioplasty. I said, how long do I need to stay in the hospital because Christmas is coming. But I ended up staying in. So I went in on Saturday, got out Tuesday Morning. So they kept me monitored, they kept me, gave me all kinds of medications. The hospital, boy, that's a whole different story. If the hospital stay had been anything like the events leading up to the hospital stay, it would have been wonderful. And as our friend Mark Rapin has written about, boy, you know, hospitals and their procedures leave a lot to be desired when it comes to operational efficiency and effectiveness. But I guess over the course of the night, I had a little bit of defibrillation again. So they. Which I didn't feel, just sort of felt like a fluttering, fluttering of my heart, I guess, but I guess my heart was in enough shock that night that it was slightly troubled, which troubled them. Nothing bad happened, but I had probably 50% of efficiency at that time. And efficiency of a heart is an ejection fraction, is what they call it an ef, which measures how well your left ventricle pumps blood to the rest of your body. And a normal ef, a normal ejection fraction, it's a fraction of the amount of blood pumped through and kept in the ventricle. So you want to pump out like 60 and keep, you know, 35, 40 in your. In your heart. I was down around 25, so I had definitely damaged my heart. Now, when you damage a heart, when you have a cardiac arrest, depending on the severity of it, a couple of things happen. Your heart muscle cells can get stunned or they can get permanently damaged if you are out for too long a period of time. I've been out 90 seconds, which is about the maximum your heart can stop beating before brain death occurs, before you're sort of beyond coming back from the dead, so to speak, then you get permanent damage and your entire lifestyle, if you survive, is changed dramatically from that point. So I was down around a 25, and I knew that my ejection fraction following my previous one was around a 50. This was doubly as bad. I'm like, oh, my God, will I come back from this? So I was sort of getting depressed about that. Luckily, 24 hours later, it was up around 45, which meant to me that I had stunned my heart, not necessarily permanently damaged, a month after. And they measure these through an ecg, which is an ultrasound, not unlike, you know, you look at a fetus developer developing child in the womb. It was fairly normal. So I got really lucky that way. And to this day, at this day, I went on a bike ride yesterday. I played tennis the day before. So I'm back to semi normal. I'm not riding quite as hard because I Don't want to strain my heart too much. And they've got me on medications that artificially keep my heart relaxed and my heartbeat down below normal. So I'm not able to ride as hard, which is probably a good thing, but it won't be long before I can. But those are the facts. That's the sequence of events. So, yeah, I died and lived love times. And that's how I wrote that story. And I wrote it in those words just because one of my favorite movies of all time, time, is to Live and Die in la. So I just sort of reversed the words and told the story and, you know, had a couple of conclusions and epiphanies, if you will, or semi epiphanies, none of which are really epiphanies, you know, because the question that I got a lot from friends, from family, immediately afterwards, are you going to change anything? Do you, you know, does this, this, does this brush with death change anything for you? And my pat answer is, no, not a damn thing.

Why is that?

Oh, well, you know, I don't know if I have anything profound to add to that, but I guess I've made good choices.

Yeah.

You know, I think, you know, I think people that go through stuff like this reflect, do a little bit of what the Japanese call hansei. Yeah. And you know, gosh, have I made the right choices? Am I doing what I want to do with my life? If I made the right life choices, professional choices, oh, my gosh, if I could, you know, what if I die tomorrow, would I have regrets? And I guess I don't, which is, you know, good news. So that's sort of the number one question people have is, gosh, are you going to do anything different? And on any given day, I'm more vigilant than I was. But at one point in the day, I'll feel like, gosh, nothing can. Certainly I'm not going to go doing something I love, playing tennis or mountain biking. If I'm going to go, it'll probably be doing something I hate, which is probably good news. And the second thing is, gosh, it's not so bad to die.

Well, one of the questions that I have for you, Matt, is in the article, the Medium article, you mentioned that you don't fear death or you no longer fear death. I don't know if you did before, but you don't fear death. Now, you said, I'm curious, if you don't fear death, what do you fear? Anything.

Well, I mean, I fear death. I guess I still fear unknown. But One of the unknowns isn't death, if that makes sense. I think the thing that scares people about dying is that they don't know what it feels like. But there are a lot of things that are unknown to us. What the future holds, what tomorrow is going to bring. There are actually probably worse things than, than what I experienced from a pain standpoint, from an emotional standpoint. Seeing others hurt, losing others I think is far more traumatic, would be far more traumatic for me than my own passing. But I don't fear the actual physical act if in fact it's anything like I experience physically. And I don't know if people know this or not, but the brain is a pretty miraculous device and it kicks into high gear when your heart stops. And the way it kicks into high gear is to flood your body with a neurotransmitter, not unlike adrenaline, but what it does. DMT is what it's called. It is, it's dmt. It's a whole big long name. I have it in the Medium article. It's actually a hallucinogenic drug. You can actually.

So it's kind of like an oxytocin dopamine style kind of thing.

Exactly, yeah. And it's what helps induce dreams and a dreamlike state. But here's the thing. If a drop of that neurotransmitter is what induces a dream and you know, in a dream time stands still, it's certainly not the way that we experience it when we're fully conscious, it suspends time. But if a drop of that is what causes a dream and all that you feel in a dream and how vivid that dream is, your brain dumps a river of it when your heart stops. I mean, a full on river. And so you are, it's like you're overdosing on this and so that's why you feel so good. Good.

So that's what we were experiencing as you were laying there and you said, I'm gonna sleep or I'm gonna pass out.

Yeah. And. And it's. And I just remember feeling really good and calm and peaceful and oh my God, I'm pain free and wow, I'm like floating and woohoo.

Wow.

And this is why the drug's illegal because you know, I could, I could easily see getting anyone. Even if, yeah, even if you're not a, even if you're not, you know, drug user. Boy, that feels unbelievable. So I don't fear that now. That's when your heart stops on sort of its own accord. I can't vouch for other ways of going. But from that perspective, that limited perspective, I guess I don't fear death and I don't fear death. The actual physical act, emotional act, spiritual act, I guess of going through that again if I had to, I knew I could. Excuse me, but that's what I mean by I don't fear death as I know it, as I felt it. So that's all I mean, I don't mean to be.

Yeah, no, I got you. I gotcha. So obviously Gembe Academy's audience is a bunch of lean thinkers and hopefully there's some other folks listening to this who don't know anything about Lean. If you don't know about lean, go to gemba academy.com or mattmay.com you can learn about Lean, but from a lean thinking perspective and I guess really just people in general perspective. What do you think we can all learn from your brush with death?

Well, I think there are a couple things. The most straight line application that I can draw is this. Be very careful of vanity metrics. Now what do I mean by that? By all outward views and even semi internal views of my physical state, I was a specimen of health. I had low body fat, I had normal cholesterol, I was as fit as a 35 year old on the tennis court. As a matter of fact, my tennis partner is 32. So by all vanity metrics, I don't look 56, I don't act 56. I am in physically and I'm not bragging here. This is just, this is if you were to measure. Yeah, it's just the facts, right? But those vanity metrics are just that, they don't tell you what is actually going on. It doesn't say to you that yeah, you could have normal cholesterol but your body happens to throw plaque and your body tends to calcify for whatever reason. And you need to be a little bit more vigilant and look at the internal metrics far more seriously than you do. It had been a year and a half since I had a nuclear stress test and an ecg. In that time my body had calcified in the arteries, more to the point that a piece broke through and blood clotted around it. And you know, it doesn't explain why someone with a, you know, 300 cholesterol level who eats donuts and sausage all day doesn't get a bit of plaque. It doesn't explain why someone with low body fat and normal cholesterol does. So you have to really take a look at the things that keep your machine, whether that machine is your heart or your brain, you gotta really focus on the things that are true indicators and not just trailing indicators, but leading indicators of the health of that particular organization or organism.

So tie that back to a business. Describe a vanity metric that you see people, people a business bragging about, if you will.

Oh, gosh, without naming any names, no companies. Yeah, I've got a, you know, your company has company, XYZ has. Oh, I don't know, let's look at the automotive industry has a top line growth of xyz and it's so great that it hides all the things that are potentially going wrong underneath. I think Detroit suffered this in the last half of the last century. Their growth in revenue was so great that it hid the underlying things that actually put them out of business.

Many of them were growing and they didn't.

Black was growing. It was growing in terms of, of benefits, union benefits, salaries, those kinds of things that eventually were among the kinds of things that would constitute plaque. Let's say it's a web company, an online site, and the way that we view our performance is, wow, we've got 20 million unique visitors each month. Okay, big deal. That doesn't tell you how long they stay on a site, what they do on your site, how they buy anything from you, do they buy anything from you. What percentage of those 20 million are lipids in your bloodstream, so to speak, clogging it up and preventing the metrics that really do keep you going, which are maybe it's click throughs, buys, whatever. So that's what I mean by vanity metrics. It's an easy thing to fall into.

Well, and it's comfortable. People want to feel like they're being successful and so they may trick themselves and that they are being successful. But deep right before you go to sleep and you close your eyes, you realize you're not. And so cortisol starts flooding your body and it's this vicious cycle, right?

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I guess that's the. If I had to make a straight line application to the lean world. The other is, I hope your partner Kevin's gonna kill me for this, but he, he's in the midst of putting a book out on lean leadership. And one of the things that you'll find in Lean Leaders is this notion of mindfulness. And whether that's the Asian variety, the Eastern variety of being present through meditation, which is simply a tool, or the Western variety my friend Ellen Langer writes about in her book Mindfulness, where it's the notion of making sure that you don't get locked into one perspective, perspective, staying present. I think it has a lot to do with survival and beyond survival, the ability to flourish. So in my case, in my personal case, I didn't just survive. I'm able to flourish. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that. And this ties back to do I have any regrets? I'm really much more of a. A being in the moment, being in the present kind of guy. I am one of the worst planners you will ever meet on the face of the earth. I detest planning. I'm a bad planner, yet I'm a strategist. And my brand of strategy is about making choices. I learned that from a mentor, and I think I went through this with your audience in the Play to Win Canvas webinar that we did. But strategy really is about making the right choices. And those choices constantly change. And the reason they change is because the assumptions that we make every day are constantly changing, and they may or may not be true. So what must be true today for me to be successful and flourish isn't what must be true tomorrow. But I got to constantly move, monitor my assumptions in the what must be truths to stay in the moment and make the choices and change directions all the time. I think a lot of times organizations get locked into this notion of, my gosh, we've got a plan and we got to stick to it. Well, no, you don't. You really don't. That plan is only as good as the assumptions that underlie it. And in my particular physical case, I assumed that because I was able to ride a bike great. I was able to keep up with guys on a tennis court much younger than me, and I had a nice low body fat and a good diet, I was able to survive and flourish. Nothing could be further than the truth. My assumptions were that those were the indicators of a truly healthy organism, and that's not the case. So I think those two things are perhaps, I don't know, very beneficial, very applicable between a human body as a functioning organism and organizational health.

Well, Matt, we've been going for about an hour, and, man, this has been a fantastic episode. I cannot wait to release this, but My Life Last, I guess. Official request right here on the podcast, not to put any pressure on you, but this is your second appearance. I need you to make a third appearance on the show here in the next month or so because I want to talk about the book that you have coming out. I believe in May 2016 called Winning the Brain, Fixing the 7 Fatal Flaws of Thinking. So I want to dedicate an entire episode to that. But for right now, what I need is a little teaser. Give me a little elevator pitch on what the book's about.

Okay, well, first of all, I think that if I had to come up with perhaps a reason for my survival, it's like a lot of folks say to me is, well, obviously your work here isn't done. And I get that a lot. And I don't think my work is done. And part of it has to do with this little book. It is the culmination of 10 years of me giving a couple of thought exercises to people, over 100,000 people, in seminars and speeches and workshops over the course of the last 10 years, starting in 2005 when I was still at the University of Toyota. And we designed and began teaching a little three hour class called Principled Problem Solving. And we gave a little icebreaker, excuse me, icebreaker to start off that session. And after we had done this a couple of times, we started noticing that people were doing the same things and trying to solve this little thought challenge. And it wasn't one of those thought challenges that psychologists like to use, like Daniel Kahneman does, where these little logic things, this was a real world business problem that we had used to construct a little icebreaker to catch people doing some of the things we thought they might do in problem solving, like leap to a solution, like not try and find the cause of the problem in the first place, just sort of to warm them up. And gosh, as we started doing this, we started noticing a couple things. One, that given the time, we gave people like 10 minutes to solve the problem in teams. A, they couldn't solve it. B, they started doing the same kinds of things, group after group after group. And those patterns began to not only just be repetitive, but categorized. We could visibly and visually observe behaviors that were repetitive. When I left Toyota in 2006 and took my show on the road, I always used some version of these thought challenges to introduce lean thinking, to introduce design thinking, to introduce Toyota production system, just to get people in the mode of thinking and, and being mindful that their brains are doing something unbeknownst to them that's getting in the way of their ability to solve the problem. Fast forward to 10 years later and over 100,000 people. I now have a body of evidence that is just indisputable, unquestionable, that these patterns are real. And so the seven fatal flaws, and there's no magic to the number, just happens to be the these visible things that people do in solving problems. These are the fatal flaws that prevent us from finding what I call the elegant solution. And we've talked about that in the past, which is the one that achieves the maximum effect with the minimum means. So Winning the Brain Game is my very first universally applicable book. It's a very short read. I draw on psychology and neuroscience to blend with with my field experience. And the fixes are seven super curated methods approaches to declawing these seven fatal flaws. And I know them to work. Some of them are developed by me, some of them are simply implemented by me. But I call on some of the best thinkers who have mentored me in my thinking over the last decade. And this tiny book, Winning the Brain Game I think is the kind of book that you want to carry around with you and refer to over and over and over again. Because it isn't just a bunch of theory, it's about practice. It isn't just a bunch of. This guy says so based on some observations. No, there are experts, there are scientists, world renowned weighing in on this and here are things that we know actually work to turn the situation around. And the brain game itself refers to the interplay between the brain and the mind. And the brain is the hardware, it's the biological part in your head. The mind is the software. And if we know anything about the two, they are distinctly different. The mind is about consciousness and we know from neuroscience now what we we didn't know perhaps 10 years or 15 years ago, which is the way you think can change the way your brain is wired. It's called neuroplasticity. And the science is deep on this. I've written about it before, but this is the first time where I've really focused on winning that brain game.

So where do I can I just give you my address now or do I email it to you for Mike? I can't wait to read it.

You will definitely have an advanced copy.

Cannot wait. Well, your previous work has impacted me dramatically. Elegant solutions definitely my favorite. And I know Kevin Shibumi strategy changed his life, literally saved his life as a story he's told me. So your work has definitely moved a lot of people. So I can't wait for this one to come out.

Oh, I hope you like it.

Yeah. So hey, are you consulting and taking on new clients and that kind of business these days?

Yeah, it's kind of fun. I actually have started working with Toyota again. It's been a While, but I've been working with the, perhaps you've heard of it, the, the new Toyota Mirai.

Yeah.

Which is their fuel cell car. There are only about 50 owners, only here in California. And what we, what I'm working with Toyota, Toyota marketing folks and their ad agency, Saatchi and Sachin is designing the owner experience of the Mirai. There are a lot of things surrounding owning a fuel cell that we're trying to develop and make that experience just overwhelmingly positive. So that's kind of cool. And the interesting thing is, and I'll tell a sort of out of tale school, you know, Toyota, the marketing folks, the marketing guys have really never done lean. They've never really done rapid prototyping. Certainly the ad agency guys have never done rapid prototyping. But we just had a two day session last week where I took them through two days of sort of lean startup, kinds of rapid iteration and rapid prototyping. We bought some of that, brought some of the users in to give feedback and boy, eyes were opened, had four different ideas going to be changed, going to be reiterated. But boy, you know, kudos to Toyota for wanting to do that on the marketing side, which is, you know, all about big budgets and you know, big buzz and big programs and doesn't really much matter if they work or not, but so that's kind of fun. So the answer, the short answer is yes and you know, the longer answer is Toyota is one of them. So it's kind of fun.

Very cool. Well, I've mentioned this off the show, but I want to officially on the show just kind of conclude by saying that I sure am glad that you pulled through Matt because the world is definitely a better place with Matt May running around. So glad everything's okay with you.

Well, thank you. Yeah, it is. And you know, with any more luck, I'll be around for a lot longer and I'll be, I'll be careful to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So what's the best way for people to connect with you, Matt?

Oh, gosh, I mean you can find just about everything out on me just@matthewemay.com from there you can get to anywhere, whether it's, you know, whether It's Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, you name it.

Yeah, and we'll link to everything in the show notes. So that's gembapodcast.com just look for episode 100. It's easy to remember and we'll get everything for you. So Matt, thank you. Hopefully I can get out to California sometime in the near future and we can sit down and enjoy a beer or something like that. I don't know. Are you drinking beer again and all that?

Well, they say you're supposed to drink a little glass of red wine every night, so that's what I'm doing.

Let's do that.

All right, Sounds good, Ron. Thank you. Bye.

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