https://www.listennotes.com/e/0ca9ff68140f4c6fa2add288967dbe86

Welcome to Executing the Vision podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hunter, president of Emerge Labs. On the podcast, we'll get to know the person behind the vision, their successes, their challenges, and their plans for the future. If you're interested in becoming a guest or know someone who might be a good fit, stick around to the end and we'll discuss how to apply. Now, enjoy the show. All right, everybody. Well, welcome to another episode of Executing Division. I'm your host, Brad Hunter, and today we're talking to Matt Se. And Matt is with Med Evolve. So. Hi, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Brad. It's good to meet you and thanks for having me on your show.

Well, let's start out. I always like to begin things with just getting to know you. What are, what was life like for you? Like, you know, just start kind of what life was like growing up and, you know, run through all of that first.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Born in Chicago, I'm an identical twin. Yes, we still look alike. Yes, we still compete with each other. Moved out to San Francisco when we were pretty young, like 2. My dad took a job out there and so grew up in the Bay Area. You know, growing up in our household was extremely competitive. You know, when you have somebody that looks just like you, plays the same sports, is in the same school, you know, we started competing at an early, early age. I think there's a lot of pluses to my and minuses of that. Right. It, it created a lot of anxiety, you know, and a lot of kind of intensity in the house. But at the end of the day, it also created some mental toughness too, and resolve to do best you can with the hope of succeeding or whatever you're trying. So great family life, staying on. Mom, you know, I always joke, it's like never had to worry about, you know, what meal was going to be made. She was very regimented with that. You know, Mondays and Wednesdays, yeah, we're, you know, hot cereal. Tuesdays and Thursdays was the eggnog that. And it's not the Christmas eggnog. It was the World War II generation. Wheat germ, raw egg, like, didn't taste very well. And Wednesday she gave us a, threw us a bone or Fridays threw us a bone with some pancakes. So very regimented there. Dad traveled a lot internationally, so it wasn't there as much, but it was a good, you know, upbringing. Lots of friends, went to a good high school, played a lot of sports through high school, went on to play sports in college. Ended up a three time all American, focused In track and field, throwing the discus, the shot, putting the hammer. So it was good to kind of, you know, break away from my twin in that sense, you know, and continue on with, with athletics and, and then of course academics. Then we kind of is interesting. You know, you graduate college unless you know you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer and that's what you studied, right. We don't really know what we're going to do. So I was like, hey, here I am, you know, top of my game, you know, in a fraternity, All American. Now I'm like, what do I do for a living? So I got into management consulting. That was my first job. I went into a bunch of guys from Anderson Consulting had formed a boutique healthcare strategy consulting firm. And we're hiring young under, young undergrads, right, to go out and really work on their projects and help clients. So I found myself flying Monday through Thursday heading out to large academic medical centers, trying to create change financially within the healthcare space. And that really started my career on, on the healthcare financial side. I went on to PricewaterhouseCoopers, then Delight and Tish and then eventually started my own company in 2007 and from 2007 to 2012 when I exited, sold it to a public company. I probably learned the most that I've learned in my life, although I didn't realize at the time is what it takes to be successful when everything's going against you. And I think sports helped me along the way with that. I think athletics, especially in college, how you recover from injury. I was an individual athlete so I had to learn how to control my mind. So I didn't.

Now was your brother playing sports as well? He did.

He grew up playing the same sports as I did. What was nice is we quickly became opposites with the exception of basketball. Basketball, we were power forwards, right. The tall, they call us the twin towers because six foot big, big kids. But then I, I in football I was the quarterback, he was a tight end. In baseball I was a pitcher, shortstop, he was a first baseman. So it was nice is that we could play the same sport but not compete directly with each other. And then in college he went on and he, he actually joined the ski team at UCLA and, and that was a great experience for him is, is being able to compete on the mountains.

So where was the ut. What, where would they ski at Mammoth. Okay. Mammoth was there.

Okay. Yeah, about four hour drive, you know.

Right. We got a place up there. We've had a place there for like.

Oh really?

Yeah, yeah. A lot of time there. Yeah, we're going there next weekend again.

Are you really? Oh, I'm jealous. I'm jealous for sure. Yeah. Yeah, we're, we're big skiers in, in our family. Grew up skiing Tahoe. You know, I hung out with Johnny Mosley a lot. He was the same kind of ages as our group. Yeah. You know, watching Glenn Plake and Hat Trip and all those, those great skiers jumping Palisades. And I guess it's. You can't call it squat anymore. Right. You got to call it Palisades. So it's a fun, fun, but, you know. Okay. But what I, what I found again, kind of going back to, to my career and I'm sure we'll get more into it, is, is, you know, I left Deloitte when I was just about to turn 30 because I was. Became obsessed with the idea that you could build software that would sit on top of these antiquated systems that were being used to build insurance companies. Right? It was. And that was kind of my first, first venture. So I left, didn't really have a ton of money in the bank, had no capital behind me and moved from. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, and I moved back to, to San Diego and. And that's where I started Interpoint. And the recession happened. Right. I didn't know that was coming, but by 2008. Right. Markets were falling apart, real estate was falling apart. Capitalization was not even an option for a small company. Right. So. So I had zero access to capital. I had a couple of clients and I had to figure out. And I had payroll, Right. So I had to figure out quickly, what am I going to give up or am I going to keep chasing that horizon line and being as creative as I can to stay afloat until better times came around. So definitely not an easy time in my life, but taught me really what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And when I talk with people now, whether it's at shows or it's podcasts or it's just one on one about, hey, I want to start a company, I ask a lot of questions about your intestinal fortitude. You know what?

Right.

How obsessed are you willing to be at achieving that, knowing that you might fail? Because if you're not obsessed with it, meaning that you're going to leave everything on the field for it, don't even bother starting.

Yeah. Now talk to me about that transition into software. Right. Because I assume you, you know, obviously you're doing consulting and things have this idea that, hey, it seems like this, there could be a software product here. I know nothing about software. You know, talk to me about kind of that process, you know, just, just mentally of the decision of like, well, whatever, I see the opportunity, I'm going to figure it out and kind of what that really looked like.

Yeah, well, the nice thing about starting out on the advisory side is that we spent our days and nights focused on redesigning people in process. Right. And so it all comes down to process. Most issues that you see in businesses, definitely in healthcare, is it's either a people issue or it's a process issue. And a lot of times the people and the process is not aligned with technology that's already been purchased. So you have a misuse of technology. And so here I am spending hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to run analytics for large health systems on why their length of stay is going up, why their AR is going up, why their cash is going down. And I start asking questions that I can't answer without bringing data into Access or Excel and having to do pivot tables one time view. And I was like, this, this can't be right. I mean, how am I supposed to. I'm just gonna. I'm wasting all this education and time doing this menial work. Could we build a. And this was right around the time where you started talking about hearing about big data, big data analytics and how it's being used in other verticals to be more efficient. And so it was the right timing. So I had actually one of my brother's best friends who he was on the ski team with James, was out in San Diego and had been doing some of this type of work in non healthcare. And so I started talking to him, I said, hey, let me explain healthcare to you. You're a programmer. Is this something you think you could do? And he's like, seems pretty straightforward. So, you know, that's how we started. You have the functional subject matter expert visionary, and you have the guy to actually do the work kind of partner. Our board meetings were hilarious because they were out on surfboards. We'd go surfing, talk strategy while we were out in between sets. So that's really what it was. I've never, I'm not a developer, I don't know anything about coding. But what I found is that, is that there's people out there. All that. You have to take that knowledge and expertise and you have to apply it to principles that will work in healthcare. Now here's the tricky part. In healthcare, back when I Started Interpoint, margins were not a problem, right. Payers still played paid pretty well. Patients didn't owe a ton of money. Supply and labor costs were reasonable. Right? So now, fast Forward now to 2024. What's happened? Right? The acceleration of supply and labor costs to deliver care has gone like this. The reimbursements from the insurance companies continues to do this, including Medicare, Medicaid. Right. And the other outliers, half the bill is now owed by the patient who may or may not be able to pay it. So it's a complete battlefield now. So the software that I incubated back then is now, and that's what I've done here at Metal is I've rebuilt my company, basically software and I've now applied it to the today's market. So now it's, now it's actually relatable. It's like you have doctor practices going out of business, you have hospitals closing their doors because there's no margin, right? No margin, no mission, nothing. Right. And yet my software that we've designed measures all of the waste that goes into collecting on claims for services that were already provided and identifying where people are touching things. And when you understand where people are getting involved, you can start to look at the why. Now it's back to your question, right? That's the people in the process now, why did it take 19 touches and seven different people to get a 300 balance paid?

Right.

And so, so it's still a very consultative approach that I take with Metavol. The difference is now is that the market conditions are right for what we were doing. Whereas 18 years ago, when I had started, you know, Interpoint, it was like a nice to have, right? So we still grew, we sold a lot of software, we had a good exit, but the market was still doing okay. But things changed in the last 24 months, especially with inflation and now.

So who is your customer now? What's your ideal customer?

So we, we sell mainly into the surgical specialty space. So it's your physician groups, you know, decent sized physician groups who want to maintain independence. They want, they don't want to sell to the hospital. Some may not want to sell to private equity yet. Right. We're also selling a lot to the billing companies. Right. There's a lot of outsourcing companies both here in the US and abroad. Right. That need software to be able to free up people. The, the game now is creating capacity in your teams, right? You create capacity in your teams that allows you to one, either remove the bottom weight, right? The People that aren't performing and that's a direct margin improvement or as you scale and grow your business, you don't have to hire like you did before. So if those are really our big, big focuses, ambulatory surgery centers is a big focus. And now we're slowly starting to get into the hospital space. My whole background, believe it or not, was selling this stuff into the hospital space. But when I came on board to Med evolve in 2017 to kind of relook at how we turned this company around, they had just been selling mainly to the, the ambulatory market, right? The, the surgical specialty space. And that's just what they knew. So.

And now does it involve a lot of customization then? If you're selling into a lot of these different specialty things, it doesn't matter. Like they can all kind of use though.

It's a revenue cycle. I tell people, do you bill insurance and, or patients for services you render? Yes, but then you need it. See, this comes down to touches. So like when I'm out speak, I got to speak at a big healthcare show this week and I'll start with the audience with this story. You know, I went and got my meniscus cleaned up back in November, and before the anesthesiologist knocked me out, I said, do you know how much you're going to get paid from Blue Cross for what you're about to do? And he said, I don't know. And I said, about 1200 bucks. Not bad for a 25 minute procedure, right? I said, who's your next patient? And he's like, well, I think it's a Medicare case. I said, you know what you're going to get from them? He's like, I don't know. I said, probably 700 bucks. Okay, you're going to last. And then I said, do you know how many touches and people it's going to take from your administrative team to get both of those cases paid for? And he said, no. I said, do you think you should know that as a business owner? So I went on, you know, and then they knocked me out because he didn't want to hear me anymore. But, but I like to apply. Henry Ford figured this out in the early 1900s, right? He figured out how to drive production and margin by putting everything in the order it's supposed to be in. But healthcare can't seem to get there. Healthcare is an industry where the drug companies, the supply companies are making billions of a quarter in profit margin. Same with your insurance companies, right? But the reimbursements keep going down. So think about what other industry would, would allow that and so what happens? The provider stuck with it. So this is an industry, by the way, that impacts you and me and all of our families and all of our friends. Everyone has to consume healthcare at some point and if we keep going in this trajectory, there won't be a healthcare in the future. It's not going to look anything like this. Right. And that's scary to me.

Yeah, yeah. It certainly seems to me the direction we are headed on that front is disaster.

Disaster is already here, but it's getting worse. You come. I live in Del Mar. Right. It's a beach town north of San Diego. Good luck getting. If you don't have great commercial managed care insurance and you don't have a decent net worth to pay for your, your due balance, good luck getting a major surgical procedure done by a top doctor. You won't.

Right.

Of course. I mean these doctors are not seeing Medicare anymore. They're not. They've never seen medi Cal. Right. So now you have. Now you have. So what's happening now is that those patients, a lot of those people are now starting to go to emergency rooms now. My twin brother became an ER doctor. So that's irony. Right. I'm here trying to save healthcare and he's trying to help people. So it's kind of a sorts. And he says it, I mean he's, he says, he goes, I have more uninsured or low level of care of acuity patients coming into my ER because they can't get seen by a regular provider. So they're using the ER and they have no ability to pay. So who gets stuck with the bad debt? The hospital does. Yeah, it's so obvious to me, you know, and, but yet this industry and the lobbyists, it's like they're not there. You know, they're not there. They just think that, you know, somehow somebody's going to solve the problem. There's no alignment between the provider, the consumer and the payer and the, and the supplies supplier companies. Right. There's just no alignment between those four saying, hey, everyone's got to make money for us to keep serving people.

And now I came across last year, a friend is involved in the space, the dental. I don't even know what you call it where you. The little mouthpiece to sleep at night.

Right, Right.

So if you have sleep apnea, your options are you have that big huge machine or you get this kind of little mouthpiece that. And apparently that space would be A ripe. Have you ever spoken with anybody in that space at all?

No, we've had, we've crossed a little bit into dental. You know, the challenge with dental is that they're a smarter industry in that they, they do collect everything up front. So like when I go see my dentist, I'm paying 100 of what's owed up front and then it's the insurance company that's writing me the check.

So that thing now it's, it's fallen into medical. So it's no longer. It is, yeah. So what's happening in that space is in general you have all these dentists. Yes. That are very used to dealing with an easy, straightforward system. Now all of a sudden they're getting into this medical device thing. And so you can imagine the Billings.

Arkansas keep going up on that one.

Yeah, yeah. So it's in general, I think it's one of those things where, you know, it's a very profitable business to be in and they're super busy and everything, but all of a sudden they look up and they broke because they don't know how to manage, you know, the, the billing and everything like that.

Right.

They, them, their office, their whole staff is used to dental, which apparently is very straightforward.

And it is. Right. And that's the thing we also have to realize too is that our society has changed. Especially post Covid where I feel like if you look at Maslov Hier hierarchy of needs, self actualization is pretty much disappeared from the majority of people. Meaning is that I just kind of show up at work, I just kind of do my thing, probably working remotely. So you. So in healthcare too. So now you have another thing. If the people that are trying to drive performance in healthcare, a lot of them just aren't motivated. And so how do you, how do you change that? How do you get to a Ritz Carlton Disney model where people love what they do, they brag to their friends about the work they do. And that's something here at Metavolt we're really trying to. Since we have now structured data around performance and effectiveness of people, we're trying to tie in rewards to get people more excited about performance. Because that's another thing that. And it's not just a healthcare problem. It's, it's anywhere problem is that people are just used to now, you know, I don't have to work as hard and I'm still going to make the same amount of money. I can stay under the radar and with unemployment so low, I can always just leave and go to the next place down the street if you don't like it. So there's, there's that piece. The cultural side has been a huge.

Yeah, and I saw that on your website. That's interesting because to me, I mean, I've said this for a long time. To me, the healthcare industry is the worst service industry by a long shot. The amount of money that you're paying as a consumer to, you know, for healthcare and the amount, the type of service you see receive in return is the most inverse relationship of anything I can imagine. You know, I mean, it's wild as to just how do that, the general way it's structured and I saw that on your, on your site. So talk to me a little bit more about that piece of things.

Yeah, I mean it comes down to the recognition, reward, retain. Right? So the cost of staff turnover is extremely high for any industry, but in particular in healthcare, these are hourly wage people, right? So if you look at the cost in healthcare, 30, about 28% of the costs in healthcare is administrative waste. And what that means is that's people like I was talking about earlier who are touching things, not resolving things. It's all of the time spent not moving the ball down the field or trying to move it down, but not effectively, right? So again, Henry Ford wouldn't have done that. He's like, Brad does this job, Seafeld does this job. And as you do, I have QA on both of you guys and you do your jobs, right. We maximize production, we generate the margin. Right. And our quality product too. So he actually also created the first kind of increase the wages, right. He increased the amount of money, said it set an eight hour workday. So he did some other things that went into play. I feel like this industry in particular is administrated by people who have a lot of complex life issues. I'd say I've been as for 24 years. We actually have our own RCM or our billing services within medall. We have a whole team of people that bill for providers that don't want to do it. So we see this firsthand. There's a lot of complexity in their home lives, right? They bring that to work. There's a lot of lack of motivation. And it's not that these are bad people, it's just I think that the companies need to be better at making sure they understand why they do what they do. Right. And there's a difference between the what I do versus why I do it. Like if I'm billing insurance, do I realize that if you build this correctly and this gets paid, you drive margin for that client, which serves community better. Like, do you understand if you don't and you're being lazy and you're just touching things with no, no anticipation of getting an outcome, you hurt that community. So I think like, what we're trying to do with data now, structured data, is we're trying to show each of these individuals, you know, where they fit and why they do what they do. The other big thing I realized I had to redesign our whole RCM company a few years ago was I re recruited the team. So I took our 75 people and I said, you know, here are people that bill insurance here, posting payments. Here are people that are calling insurance companies to find out why the denial happened. And I started asking basic questions like, do you like this job? I found that a lot of these people were in the wrong job. They got hired to do this, but they really wanted to do that. So when I looked at willingness and capability, they were willing to do a great job, but they just weren't capable because of either a training issue or they're. So I start moving people into the right order and we start looking to process, all of a sudden, all of a sudden they become happier. Right. And so, and so the person that was being forced to be on a phone getting yelled out by patients wants to be a transactional person that can just heads down, post payments all day long. Right. I think this is a bigger thing for just our world to understand is that if your people at all levels of the organization don't understand why they're doing what they're doing, and we as leaders don't ask those questions. Do you like what you do? Do you feel like you're in the right role? Is there somewhere else you feel you could be valuable? We miss that opportunity to create alignment within the companies. I think that drives a lot of the dissatisfaction in these companies and it drives the turnover. Right. Ritz Carlton and Disney figured this out. They figured out if they put all of their investment in the internal service quality, which was what, what the employee experience was all about, downstream impact was the external service value, which is our customer experience. So now you imagine you're like the worst customer service in health care. And I'm not going to disagree with you on that. But what if you had a highly motivated engage, I love what I do culture in a health care provider's office. Do you think that customer experience would be better? Of course it would be right. I have more natural revenue and profitability. Of course you would. Right. So you've got the. A hotel company and a theme park company figures this out decades ago, but we're still not there. Right? And part of the reason we're not there in healthcare is that these systems that have been used for decades to bill insurance, they were never set up to look at the effectiveness of people. So our software is what we do. We sit our software on top of these legacy systems. So now I can actually see, not just Brad for Brad, but I can see how effective you are at resolving what you're asked to do. And as a means to now have that data, you're motivated because you know that one, we're watching, two, you're proud of the work you do, and three, now I can tie in a reward system to that. So that's been a big push for us as an industry is that the data that comes out of these legacy systems in healthcare is not enough. It's not enough to look at the people side. And if we don't fix the people side, then the mistakes keep happening and the margins keep getting crushed. And while the macroeconomic conditions keep driving right, supply chain labor is still going to go up, reimbursements are still going to go down, drugs and clinicians are still going to be more expensive. So guess what, we're already under pressure without doing anything wrong. So if you have people still doing things wrong, I want to try to sell the company now because you're not going to be relevant in five years. And we hear that from some of our own clients. Like, I'm afraid I'm not going to be open in five years. I'm like, well, at the rate you're going, you may not be open in three years. So let's make a change. Let's, let's work together and create change. And it starts with people and process, right. And then we look at the technology and how it's being used and how.

Do you, how do you meet most new clients?

So for us, I found as a smaller company, privately owned, right. We don't have a, we're not private equity or vc, so we have to kind of, you know, we make our own decisions. But it also, we can get lean at times is a lot of it is on, on the, the speaking side. So I speak at lots and lots of healthcare conferences, more as a subject matter expertise expert each year and of course have the sales team there have a booth. Right. And so people can come and listen to me with one of our clients usually talking about a case study and Then they can start getting as interesting. I was fascinated by what you talked about. How do you guys do it? Right? So that's the biggest piece. And then, you know, I have tried my hardest over the years to find a way to hire good salespeople and failed at that. No offense if some of your folks listening. My wife's an outside sales rep for iheartmedia. She crushes it, but she's a hustler. Right. And. And I. What I. Again, Brad, this goes back, I'm telling you, and I used to think it was generational, but I don't think it is anymore. I think that this is people who are working to sort of work, but they're not really passionate and willing to do everything it takes to try to be successful. And, and so it's been hard to find people that are capable of doing that. And so, you know, we're. We're looking more at B2B strategy now. Is that how do I really sell through other. Other companies, teams and, and otherwise there. But selling direct in healthcare is very hard, right? You sell. You're selling a sophisticated idea to an unsophisticated buyer in an unsophisticated industry. And when I say unsophisticated, I don't mean that these people are dumb. Some might be, but it's like there's too many craziness going on in their lives, right? And I mean, look at the turnover in every industry. I mean, the turnover at the C suite in healthcare has been comical. The last two years. We will get a deal on the, on the hook in our pipeline, and then 30 days later, that CFO is gone. You know, private equity firm kicks out the CEO. So there's this revolving door of. And by the way, the PE firms are, in my opinion, sometimes the dumbest guys in the room because they're sitting here buying these healthcare assets and they don't even know what they're buying. And then they start looking at a management team saying, you're the problem, when it's actually their technology, this problem. It's the tech, and then it's the fact you can't hold people accountable that's a problem. So. So, I mean, they're not off the hook either, right? They've been buying practices left and right for the last three or four years at crazy multiples. So I don't feel bad for any of the PE firms that we're working with or talking with. You're like, I don't know. All my healthcare purchases, they're dying on the vine. What's happening? And I'm like, I told you so.

Yeah, I've heard that in different industries as well, people that have been involved in that, you know, I'm like, so, how's it going? They're like, it's wild. They don't know what they're doing at all.

They don't know. Right. It's big money, right. I got all this money, I gotta go spend it. I just raised more money from this new fund, and I'm gonna go start buying dental practices or I'm going to start buying. And they don't know what they're even buying. They can't even answer the basics. Breath cycle metrics. That would say, good deal, bad deal.

Right.

I don't want to pipeline like that. So it gets. It. It gets crazy. You know, I think, you know, just to shift focus a little bit because I. I know you have a big listener group. Is that. The other part of my life is I started a free mobile app community for people suffering from physical and. Or emotional behavioral addiction. So I got sober. Coming up on seven years this fall.

Congrats.

Yeah. You know, and when I checked out of my recovery center, which I would consider as kind of a market leader in the space, I was asked, you know, a couple of questions and given a name. And they said, you know, here's a gentleman in San Diego. He went through our program. You should call him and connect with him. And I said, well, is he sober? And she said, I hope so. And I said, well, what does he do for a living? Does he have hobbies? Because he surf. Could I go surf with him? Is he, you know, entrepreneur? And she's like, wow, those would be great questions, but I don't know. So I sat there and I thought, this is my entrepreneurial brain, right? So I'm getting out of treatment. And I'm like, how can I go on to a match dot com, go cars dot com, whatever dot com, and put in attributes of what I'm looking at and then get a list of things. But I can't. Where's the recovery.com? where's the ability for me to go find entrepreneur business executives who are coaches, who have kids, who've been separated in their marriage, who are in the healthcare industry, who'd love to surf, love to ski? Like, where's that? They're out there. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's what prompted me to. To start this. This, this vision is people are. You have listeners right now who are suffering or they know right off the top of their head. Other people who are suffering. And it's not just physical addiction anymore. It's not just, I'm an alcoholic or I'm a drug addict, right? People are addicted to porn, sex, behavior, workaholics, right? Fitness. Then get into the emotional addictions. I'm addicted to not being good enough. I'm addicted to anxiety, I'm addicted to, etc. Etc. Which the emotions drive maladaptive behaviors which sometimes manifest in behavioral addictions or physical. Right. I just want to escape from feeling. So I became an alcoholic during that period of time from about 2007 to 2012. So the stresses of running my startup when there was no money, and I'm like, how am I going to make this work? I turned to alcohol and, and. And before I realized what was happening, I had become pathologic, right? It was now. It was now my thing, like, I don't want to feel anxiety, so I'll just have a drink, you know? And it took me years to figure that out, right. I ended up separated from my wife and my two beautiful boys, right? Jax was 4 months old, Duke was 4. You know, not, not, not, not. Luke was. Yeah, he was about 4. And still not enough pain in my life, right? There weren't enough consequences. And so Fast forward to January 18th, when I got out in January treatment, right? Within nine months, the family's back together, and we have the most amazing open and honest relationship within what happened to dad, why it happened, warning signs and all that. So it's. My story is a good one, but for every good story, there's thousands and thousands of bad ones. And that's why I wanted my LifeLink to be an option for people who wanted to have a softer way of entering the world of recovery without feeling obligated to walk into an AA meeting or something like that. Because it's intimidating, right? It's very intimidating when you're at the bottom and you're like, I need help, but I don't even know where to go. And I'm embarrassed to say so. And so this has been a huge part of my life. We have tens of thousands of people. It's free to use. I will never charge for it. I pay for it myself. That's kind of my. My gift back to this community. And I think once I'm done with metavolve and the revenue cycle chaos, which I hope is soon, then I want to put the balance of my life into that effort, because I see that. Archer, you have two. Two kids. You have an eight, nine year old. Yeah. Think of what they're already exposed to as forms of addictive behaviors. Right. Could be an iPad, screen time. Could be addicted to immediate gratification. Right. You know, I can press this button and food comes to me. Right. We have so many more things that are going to create opportunities to want to distance ourselves from feeling. Right. And so you think of like how important the communities like this are going to be. And I love the stories. I mean, I had a 70 year old guy, longtime alcoholic, who ended up getting sober, went back to grad school and now he's, he's a, has a master's in what he always wanted. I had a, a band guy, Jason, here locally. His wife saw me on the news, I go on the news a lot to talk about this here locally in San Diego. She said, I think you need this app. He's having a, he's at his bottom of all bottoms, lots of health complications. He's now four and a half years sober, put his whole life back together, occupational therapist. So I love the stories of success. I get bummed out but motivated on the stories that aren't successful because those are the ones that we still hear about. You know, if there's a hundred people that say, statistically I'm ready to get sober, Brad, one of those will make it five years. Five will make it one year. And if I were to say to those five or one, have you transformed your life? Are you building an extraordinary life? Things that you never thought were possible because addiction took you away from it. It's probably a fraction of one. Right. So how do we change that?

Okay, and so if I'm somebody listening to this, and this is something that sounds appealing to me, like what is the process? So there's an app, my LifeLink app. I download the app and then what? I'm setting up a profile.

Yep. You can be as anonymous as you want to be. We have people that log in as a guest initially or you can be open and you know, so like when I set up profile, I'm Matt Seifeld, I list, we allow, if they want to, to list attributes about themselves. Right. We have traumas, right. You know, sexual assault, domestic violence. We have, you know, incarceration. Right. So, so as, as the user starts to enter attributes about themselves, we start to match you with potential people who can relate to you. So if you're a war veteran who's killed people, who's an alcoholic, been incarcerated, living on the streets, you're probably not going to get it. I can't relate to that. Person. But I have people who fit that profile who figured out a way to recover, who can help you. That's the whole premise of this, is that you hear about precision medicine and cancer. Right. I'm going to sequence your genome, Brad, and then I'm going to tell you based on the cancer. These are the formularies, over the counter and drug formularies that I think are the best combinations to treat your genotype in the cancer. Well, where's precision recovery? Because it's the same thing. I walk into an Amy and I'm like, madam alcoholic. I got half the room in there who's like, okay, I can relate to him. And then I say, oh, well, I also had an issue with pain meds and, you know, this is what I do for a living. And all of a sudden the room gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So how do we, how do we, how do we get beyond that? Right. Precision recovery is about finding people you can relate to first before it is beyond the addiction. Right. Me just being an alcoholic doesn't solve. But, but if there are people in my zip code and there are, and I actually have people in my network that, that are on my. Let my lifelink who needed to get help, who are now put their families back together and everything, how do you find those people? I'm. I was conversing with somebody in New Zealand the other day. There's no borders to recovery, right. We're all trying to do the same things. Our lives are not good. Right.

And is there. So go on here, set up your profile. You get linked with people that would seem to be in similar situations. Now, is there kind of a, you don't want to say, like a coach, mentor side of things, you know, is there because you have the people that are new to it that are reaching out and then you also have the people that I assume have been there are more experienced, are kind of being the mentors. So is that an element too where you kind of find yourself on either side of that?

Yeah, we. And we do that through groups, right. So we have groups that are very specific, that are moderated by long time, you know, trusted users. So my brother, for example, my twin who's in recovery, he's a addiction, you know, ER physician. So he runs a men's emotional sobriety meeting. Right. So he actually, through the app, they meet once a week, right. There are men get on the phone and, you know, they're talking about stuff, right. And there's a chat within the group. So there's a lot of Resources to get you connected with people and moderators who can help get you acquainted. The other big thing is I'm big on tracking things, so I'm a big fitness like Oura Ring, Garmin Watch. I'm obsessed with looking at all of the biometrics that I possibly can get on. What I found with recovery is you have to. You have to go beyond some narrative. So if you think of like a lot of these apps in recovery are more designed like a Facebook. Right. Where it's just people kind of throwing up unstructured paragraphs of nothingness. Right. I didn't want. So when you log into my app and you want to actually track something, it's structured, right? So I'm going to go in and set my morning intentions. I'm going to share my story today because I knew I was talking with you. I'm going to exercise today before I got a coach Little League. I'm going to serve others today because I got to coach little league. So I go in and set intentions in the morning and then I check those things off in the app during the day. What that does is it reinforces to me what I'm doing and it shows the community how active I am at getting better. So it's an accountability engine. Now, if you still want to write something about the action, you know, had a great little league game today or didn't go the way I wanted to. I had to process some anger and stress. You can still write that, but. But it's not free format. Again, I'm a data guy. You can tell that already. What I do then with this data is I start to put data models together to look at correlations and patterns. So I start looking at things like, okay, women who have had domestic violence and or sexual assault tend to be driven to these types of behavioral or physical addictions that tend to get better when they're engaged with these people. So there's a whole data science aspect to why we capture the data and obviously keep it private use is try to feed it back in. Now when I think of the future of this business, this is where I want to spend. Balance of my life is getting into it right now. It's a passion project. I don't have a lot of time at all invest, you know, to go with it. But here in the next five years, that's my intent to do it. And it's been a great way to keep me accountable. I've had a lot of tough stuff happen to me in the last seven years that would have Easily allowed me to go pick up a drink.

Yeah.

I think about this community right here on my phone, you know, and I think about all these people that I'm gonna let down beyond just my kids and my wife. Right. Is that, you know, I'm not willing to, to let down a community of warriors, you know, who are out there fighting every day to live their best lives and transform their lives. And so it's, it's a huge gap, you know, and honestly, I'll tie this back. I know I'm kind of all over the place, but let me tie this back to the human condition. Right. Getting sober and building extraordinary life is, is to me the epitome of self actualization. Becoming so sound that you don't think about what just happened and I don't think about what might happen right now. I'm just with you, Brad. I'm not. I have a thousand stressors, by the way, that I could let in my brain right now that would distract me from this conversation. But I'm training myself, not perfect at it, to let that go. Right. I teach this in sports, baseball in particular. Like you just struck out and you're crying about that. Why, why are you crying? That's just what happened. If you, if you are upset about that, you just now have impacted your next at bat. How you play in the field, if you're a pitcher and you hit a kid or you walk a kid and you get upset about it. So I, I use what I'm learning now in recovery and emotional sobriety to apply to every young person. I have the opportunity to coach and I do a lot of service work as a part of my life. I coach travel, baseball, youth baseball rec, I coach high school track. Any opportunity I have to give back to this community, I do. Not because of ego. Because what I found is, is that by giving back and being selfless, I'm able to build self esteem. And if I can impact one kid, to take something from this to become more of a callous mind, Understand that in life you control actions, not outcomes, and start to apply those principles to helping others. Then we start to heal as a society. There's too many people focused on me. I live in a zip code where it's almost all me. It's amazing to me, like I was driving around and looking at these cars that people are buying, these military grade $400,000 cars. And I'm thinking to myself, it's probably his fifth part. And I'm thinking, how do I pay for the. My LifeLink gap for another month on my own. It's crazy to me, the amount of selfishness in our world. It's about me, Brad. It's me. How many likes on my video? How many, you know, views on this? How many? What do you mean you didn't do this? It's all about me. If we could get a little bit of people, just. Could you give me like a little bit of time to give back? Just do something. Parents I get into, I have parents that show up to these sporting games and they start getting upset with the coaches and I'm like, you know that this is volunteer. I'm on the board. Literally, I spent a thousand hours between January and July, June to make this successful. And you're upset about and you're sitting in the stands, isn't it? But it's crazy, right? So when you think people in revenue cycle or healthcare, they have problems, they're. We just lost a representative the other day because of emotional problems she can't get over, so she quit. And I'm in my mind, I'm like, well, geez, I wonder what that was. Could we have helped you? Would you have been on my lifelink to talk with other women like this about things? So this is.

How are you getting the word on LifeLink? I mean, you know, for sure this is an awesome idea. And for sure more needed now than ever. I, I think that anybody that came across that would probably have that same reaction.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard because there's a lot of behavioral health companies that have started and failed, digital health companies that try to play in these spaces, but it's kind of similar to the. Most of those companies get started by people focused on how to commercialize an asset and sell it for a lot of money.

Right.

People who've been in recovery or had to battle 15 years of addiction. Right. I've been to hell and back, literally. Right. So when I started this, I don't have a single idea around commercialization. It's just not even something that entertained my mind. If anything, I'll probably turn it into a not for profit, but it's, it's. I think the challenge is there's so many digital options out there trying to treat the symptom, not the disease. And this is what I've finally learned. I'll give credit to my bro, Dr. Andrew, because he's the one who's invested so much of his life now on this emotional sobriety piece is that, is that he was an alcoholic because he never allowed himself to understand the emotional States that were happening to him, that drove him to want to disconnect through alcohol and think about the right. Sticks and stones may bake my bones. Right? We learned that as a kid. But think about that for a second. I told my sons, I said, you know, the only person that can make you feel bad is you. And a couple years ago, they were like, I know, David. Now they get it. I'm like, you're upset because somebody said something to you. Why would you let words that are not truth impact your. You right here, right now? You're letting them in. This is about mental toughness too, right? By the way, I'm not perfect at all at this. I still have to practice this every day. But why would you let something from the outside impact how you feel on the inside? Right? And, and I think that this is important because so much of society lives in the past and the future that doesn't exist. Let me think about thoughts right now. My thoughts are not real. Your thoughts are not real. You're just thoughts.

Right?

Right. Real estate moment right now. Your flag in the background, your smile. Genuine conversation about what we're doing in this world. That's what's real. So let's stay in present moment as much as we can, and you start to heal as a, as a society community. I wish more people talked like that. You know, the guys out there like David Goggins and some of these other ones who get, you know, too intense, all that. He's not. He's right. Goggins is right. Like, when you think of. Yeah, he's hardcore and he does things, but if you listen to how he talks about the callous mind, right? He's, he's, he's absolutely nails it. And look at all the people who have kind of followed that. That stature is, is. How do we, how do we live in present moment and not allow. Allow the outside world to impact the decisions and choices on how we behave? You know, somebody beeps at you, okay? You can get angry and resentful and flick them off. But all, all that happened was someone beat YouTube. That's it.

Yeah.

Right. So it's, it's definitely applicable in life. And, and so that's where it's. So getting the word out with my life thing's been a lot of just word of mouth. You know, again, I don't have a bunch of money investing. I'm not sending out ads, you know, at some point, obviously, once it's, you know, moving along, we'll probably do more of it. But for now, it's, it's like, just do the best I can. I go on the news as often as I can and you know, probably could get better at social. But I think if you have listeners or even friends or anybody that needs to find some community, they should download the app, Google or itunes and check it out again. You can be as anonymous as you want to be. You can be as engaged as you want to be. And it's, it's a very close group of people. I know so many people, first and last name. I know about their family, their histories. Right. Once they start getting comfortable in the community, people open up. Yeah, yeah. With people you can relate to than trying to open up in an AA meeting or an N. A meeting or anything like that where you're like, I don't know anybody. I'm just hoping somebody relates to me and comes up after the meeting and talks to me. Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, as, you know, as you're speaking of this and everything, certainly it's just, there's no shortage of people that just come to mind like, God, what a great resource. What a great resource, you know, of understanding the struggle they've been going through and the options that, that they've kind of taken or had word. This just. Yeah, seems like an awesome. Seems like an amazing thing you're on to here and would love to do everything I can to help.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it.

Get the word out there. And yeah. My wife works in the space of. She's a performance and relationship coach, so she works one on one typically with fairly high end clients. But you know, I mean, basically the stuff you're talking about. Right. But people are paying her an absorbing amount of money to work one on one with her to, to be able to work through those things and. Yeah, yeah. And to have, you know, another resource because I think, you know, because to me it's twofold. Right. It's you, you need that. It's helpful to be able to have that one on one coach, mentor, but you also need that community.

I tell everyone, you know, it's you, you have to have a community of people you can relate to. Right. It's a tribe. We call it the tribe. Right. And, and we have many tribes within the tribe, you know, and I think that that's where you start to have really constructive conversations. And, and we've had it honestly over all the years and all the people using. I can only think on maybe three or four times where there's been any sort of an issue with the community, you know, Somebody that joined it for the wrong reasons. You know, it's been a really good tight knit group and you know, and, and I'm sure your wife sees that every day, whether she's meeting with a high end, high powered executive or I'm talking to a nine year old little leaguer.

Right.

It's the same foundational thinking is how do we get the brain to not take away from, from our experience in life? Because this thing, when used right, can do amazing things, but when used wrong can take you down pathways that, that you don't want to be. And, and escaping from feeling is becoming a more and more prevalent case. You know, and I think that people are moving in the wrong direction with that. And it doesn't have to be a physical or even a behavioral addiction to take you there. You know, I think when, when obsession becomes normal, that's addiction. So we have to re, kind of redefine it that way.

Yeah. Okay. So you have given an incredible amount of vice overall here.

I gave you a lot. Hopefully there's some snippets.

Yeah. Well, what would be, what would be your, you know, your piece of advice, your piece of life advice that you would give the audience?

Yeah, I think that there's two things that I like to talk about, and I'll give my dad credit for this is, is one is you control actions, not outcomes in life. And I think a lot of times we get focused on the outcome. You know, I want to be a pro ball player, I want to be a CEO, I want to sell a company. And that's just an outcome that we want to have. Right. What's going to determine your likelihood of achieving that outcome is the actions you take and that the obsession that you take to give yourself the best chance at achieving that outcome, knowing that you still may never get there. It's like chasing the horizon line. You may never, you'll never reach the horizon line. But if you keep charging, imagine how many great experiences you're going to have along the way and what you're going to learn about yourself. So if you want to lose weight, you want to run a marathon, learn a foreign language, start a company, my question back to you is those are outcomes you do not control. But now what actions are you willing to put into place and how obsessed are you going to be with those actions to give yourself the best shot at winning, knowing that you still might not win. Right? Yeah. That's the biggest thing is, is that, and then, and then really back to, you know, we kind of talked about, you Know the emotional sobriety or the callous mind. And that's obviously a term Goggins came up with. But is, is the try to live in, in this moment here, right? We can create anxiety out of what happened to us. We can please be a victim. There's too much victim in this society now. It's like, well, Brad, it's Brad's fault, it's not mine. Right. Don't play victim. Don't, don't, don't blame others. Live in present moment and focus on what you're able to do. Right. Is, is that if we could get people in this world to be more selfless and stop playing victim like they are, this world will evolve quickly into something better. I truly believe it. But I'm seeing too much selfless selfishness and too much victim nowadays in all areas of my life, in communities and in the things that I do. And that scares me more than anything. Yeah.

Well, hey, it has been an awesome conversation once again. We'll post the links and everything here. My life link. I'm going to look it up as soon as we're done here.

Yeah, there's not a bunch of resources investing for people to do is, you know, download the app. But, but it's a, it's a passion project. I've had a great time, you know, talking about it. Obviously you can see it. It's helped transform my life and there's a lot more things we're going to be doing with. In fact, I'm actually getting on the call with the, the company that, that is the kind of underbelly of the app minutes to talk about some of the new enhancements they're putting into the next release. So I'm excited to. This was perfect to team me up for my next meeting today. Awesome.

Well, congrats. Thank you again, Brad.

Thanks so much. I had a great time on, on your podcast and I hope your listeners, if somebody wants to reach out to me directly, they can hit me up on LinkedIn. You know, look me up. Matt Seifeld. I feel like that's the easiest, easiest, but happy to help anyway, so thank you.

All right, thank you, Matt.

Take care.

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