The MIT Neurosurgeon who is now unemployed, and Microsoft & John Deere kill their DEI teams

Did you hear about the MIT neurosurgeon who is now unemployed?

No.

Okay. So this guy, he wrote, he actually wrote something that I shared, but I'm just going to share it more on the marketing side to begin. So this guy over here, so Kevin Espritu shared this. This is a beautiful video, an example of authentic era, the authentic era of YouTube we are in right now. The creator didn't try to make it that way, which is why it's working. It breaks nearly all the classic rules of YouTube except the most important one, Making make something people want to watch. So I was an MIT-educated neurosurgeon. Now I'm unemployed. So 48-minute video. You can see he's recording this in the mountains. I think he's just walking. I haven't actually seen the video. I actually saw what he wrote instead. But this video posted six days ago, 5.5 million views. That is insane, right? I think I do want to give a little context to this guy, and then I think we can look at the YouTube for a moment. But he basically said, "Look, as a neurosurgeon." No matter what I did, if I operated on someone, I found the same things over and over. It's basically that people that had a— I actually, I think I have the image saved real quick. Let me pull it up over here. So, I think it's this one. Okay, here we go. So, okay. Over the 9 to 10 years that I was a neurosurgeon, I started to realize that my surgeries were not addressing what was causing people's health problems in their spine. I could do a perfect surgery and some people would get better, some would stay the same, and some would get worse. Some people would even get better before I could operate on them. I started asking patients about everything in their lives, their job, diet, habits, social life, stress levels, and sleep patterns. What I found was that patients who did certain things would get better and patients who wouldn't do these things got worse. Okay, here you go, Neil. Get ready for this. The people who healed well generally had a low salt diet, mostly plant-based. Did things that made them sweat, exercise, being outside, sauna, didn't smoke or drink much, had good social support, slept about eight hours a day, weren't stressed out, or had ways to manage stress. People who did these things would often heal so quickly that I couldn't operate on them. The opposite was also true. Those who didn't follow these practices often had recurring problems even after successful surgeries. In bold over here, this realization became a problem because our medical system isn't set up that way. Or this way, hospitals need to make money and grow economically. If you figure out a way to help patients heal that doesn't include a pill or surgery, well then the hospital and the doctor are in big trouble. You've just worked yourself out of a job. Once I figured this out, it became a huge ethical problem for me. I was doing surgeries that I knew weren't fixing the underlying problem. I was doing a job that I didn't believe in anymore, but it was how I was getting paid. And so he gained forty pounds. He was really sad, angry, frustrated, and without hope. He thought he was stuck. So, what ends up happening is he told his wife that he's going to quit. And after quitting, you know, he just spends a lot of time walking outside, eating well, sleeping well, spending time with his dog, and he started a YouTube channel. So, that led to this video over here. And I think that's really interesting, right? What are your thoughts around this?

Dude, I'm happy he got the views. And it's funny, I really do think our medical system is just so messed up in the United States. And we live in an area in Los Angeles, California, where there's some amazing hospitals. And you know, for Eric and I, you can pick some of the best world-renowned doctors, and you can try to find the ones that actually care about the patients. But I've been to so many hospitals, and you know, so many people have like, yeah, you need surgery, or oh, you need to take this medication. Why? You know, and I've gotten so many people over the years like. When I started having hair loss, I'm bald now, they're just like, oh, take this pill, take that pill. And I would try it out and more hair would retain. And then one day, you know, I met someone at an event and they were breaking down all the medicine I was taking. We were just talking and they're like, you know, it has all these side effects which are bad for you. I'm like, well, I'd rather not have these side effects. I'd rather have no hair. And there were some really bad long-term side effects. Luckily, I wasn't taking the medication too long, so I decided to just go bald. Then I've had a few other times where I've gone to doctors and they're just like, oh, you have acne. I was a younger kid. They're like, you don't need Accutane. Accutane at that time was one of the strongest drugs and I don't think they have it anymore in the United States.

Yeah.

They're like, it causes depression and all this kind of stuff. They're just like, what are you eating? What are you doing here? They try to work with you to figure out What's causing some of these underlying issues. And my acne eventually went away, but, you know, that doctor didn't heal it fully. But through the changes I made that were non-medication related, around maybe 80% of it went away, and another 10-15% of it went away through some light medication that wasn't as strong. Another 5% was just naturally there that eventually went away over time as I got older. But I do believe our system is really messed up where a lot of these doctors just are about, all right, let me get you in and out the door and prescribe you anything. You know, like for example, I get eye styes and the doctor I go to will make $300, $400 every time I go in there, inject me with something and it gets rid of my styes. He doesn't want to keep doing that. It's not even about the money or even getting me back in the office. He's like, Neil, I need you to try these things like compresses. You know, let's change this with your diet. Let's change this with your cleansing routine, eyes. And he's just like, some people just naturally get them no matter what you do. And I've tried everything like eye scrubs, eye washes, you know, compresses, like you name it. But like the guy genuinely cares and doesn't want to see me and charge me money and just keep injecting something in my eye to get rid of them. More so, he's trying to figure out the root cause. He's like, look, a lot of people just get them and they don't know what's causing it. And he's like, I think you're one of them. I've tried everything, even taking fish oil, which supposedly helps prevent it. I don't eat fish, but hence the fish oil. And it's really hard to find the good doctors that try to find the underlying cause. And I think the same goes with business. A lot of people are like, oh, you got this problem? Let's just hire more people. Hire— you got the wrong people. But why isn't it working? Why aren't the people working? Why aren't you solving it? Does hiring more people and just doubling the size of your team actually fix it? Right? Oh, you need to spend more on marketing. Do you actually need to spend more on marketing? Do you need to get creative? Why isn't the marketing working? How is it that some competitors who have 1/10 the money are doing well and getting traction, but you're not? And I think just in general, in professions, people need to start figuring out the underlying cause or the issue versus just going to the default response.

So I think what we can learn from this MIT-educated neurosurgeon that's now unemployed is The business takeaway here is that show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And so Charlie Munger likes to say this, or he liked to say it, he's, you know, rest in peace. But if you're a hospital, if you're a doctor or you are in a hospital system, your incentive is to try to continue to milk it, right? Like you're trying to make money off the patients at the end of the day, right? And that is the incentive. The original incentive was, or the original mission is to save people, right? And ideally prevent things. But if you can get people coming back in over and over, it's— and I'm not necessarily blaming, it's just how incentives are set up. This is what eventually happened, right? This is why this guy's so disenchanted and why he got to— why he's in the mountains right now and kind of doing his own thing. Again, if he realized over time, he started to see patterns with the people that didn't really need to continue to be operated, they kind of just fixed themselves. ideally healthy whole foods, right? You know, low sodium, right? Sleeping a lot, having a good social support system, exercising, sweating, which all seem like duh statements. I think every human being almost knows. And he's like, dude, if they just did that, then they kind of heal themselves. And, but if they didn't do it, no matter what I did, I couldn't help them. And so, he realized that like for him ethically didn't work. But I think for most people, a lot of people, and I wouldn't say I'm infallible to this, nor do I think Neil's infallible to this. It's just like, dude, if it's working in terms of making money, continue, right? But he was just like, no, Enough, right? And so this is why this video, I believe, has done so well. Look, it actually has 7.4 million views now. And the first comment actually says, at 70 years old, I can confidently affirm that this is not a midlife crisis. This is your awakening. This is— there's so much more ahead of you. Embrace it, right? So you have someone that's approaching the end of their life saying like, no, this is real. This is you living your truth and you speaking up. And I think because this is so authentic, Yeah. And because this speaks against what we know, I think this video did well. And by the way, he has 193K subscribers now. So congrats to him.

Yeah. And I think that's the key. The reason this video did well is authenticity. What does extremely well in marketing is authenticity. It's also why on social media you see the videos filmed with these kinds of phones, like I'm holding up and people are just taking out their iPhone and recording versus something that's highly edited. Can do extremely well because it's authentic, it's real, it's more relatable versus something that's highly edited and looks just too professional.

Dude, let's just see how quickly he grew.

In subscribers?

Yeah. July 13th, 40,000, 50,000 or so. And then now July 16th, 181,000.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy how fast.

I think he came from nowhere. I think he had zero like a couple of weeks ago. So yeah, good for him. Yeah, I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency. And we'll see you inside. So did you see yesterday Microsoft, they killed their DEI team? John Deere killed their DEI team. And I'm going to share my screen over here. And we've been saying this for—

I think Google's been going away from it for a while, right? They killed it as well a while ago.

I don't know if they killed it, but Microsoft is pretty hardcore. Check this out. So Microsoft cuts DEI team. Leader emails staff claiming it is no longer business critical. That quote is everything there, right? If it benefits the business, they're going to keep doing it. If it doesn't benefit the business and the political climate's also changing around this stuff, then there's no need for it anymore, right? And so, and by the way, just so everyone knows here, those of you that can't see us, Neil is Indian. I'm Chinese, right? And we employ people of all genders, all preferences. And so, but the main thing for us at the end of the day is the mission of the company. That's first and foremost. I think what we got mixed up with in the last couple years is some people started to put DEI first and foremost and they started to conform to pressure around them. And now we're seeing more and more companies kind of about-face here. So I think we're going to see that 41% number continue to drop. We're not saying it's not important, but it is not the number one priority. And by the way, let me tell you this, Neil. I've been interviewing some people recently for talent roles and I've been asking them, I was like, so tell me about your stance on DEI and where do you think it should be prioritized with the mission, vision, values, everything? Some people tell me it should be number one, right? And in that case, like, that's fine, but it's just not the right fit for us. So I think, you know, that's just my take on this stuff. So you're muted.

Yeah. And Google cut DEI spending. They didn't eliminate the department. But when you look at DEI in general, yeah, a lot of businesses You know, when I look at some of these organizations, I don't see them— like, I know a lot of the leaders and people who are hiring, I don't see them as saying, hey, we don't want to hire people from different genders or ethnicities or races or anything like that. They want the best people for the job, and then they go out and they hopefully can find, you know, a mix of everything because people can provide different viewpoints depending on your views in life.

All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Yeah, ultimately what we care about when we hire, and I'm speaking for you also, Neil, you can tell me if I'm wrong, is we care about your content of your character and we care if you can do the job or not. The other thing is the other stuff is secondary. I think we got, you know, as a whole, a lot of companies got confused in the last couple years and they prioritize other things that are maybe immutable, right? But at the end of the day, I don't care what race you are, what gender preference you have, or what sexual preference you have. There's good people across the board. And, you know, that's a very, that's a completely different story than, you know, prioritizing on the color of someone's skin or their sexual preference.

Yeah, and funny enough, we have people in our organization who are leaders that would fall under DEI.

Totally.

We didn't hire them because of DEI. We hired them because they're amazing. Like, you know, one of our leaders in Utah is a person of color who I know really well. He's amazing at what he does. I don't look at the color of his skin. I'm like, this guy's a badass. And excuse my language, but I was like, This guy just gets stuff done. He does great work. He cares about the culture, the company, the customers. He's smart. He keeps learning more. He's doing well as an entrepreneur with his side hustle. He does a lot in real estate. I was like, good for you, right? And I was picking his brain about real estate like a year ago when we met up in Utah. But nonetheless, it's like we have a lot of people that meet the— that would be considered under DEI, and we didn't intentionally hire them because of DEI. We hired them because they're amazing at what they do. And a lot of them have continually gotten raises and promotions because they're amazing at what they do. And I never looked at someone being like, you're this color of your skin, you should get a raise for it. I don't look at the color of the skin. I'm like, you're just amazing at what you do and you should be promoted. And, you know, a lot of these people who'd be considered DEI within our organization have done exceptionally well, gotten raises, promoted many times, just because they're amazing at what they do. Yeah. And they're smart, they're caring, they're good people. Right? No one in the organization cares about sexual preference or color of skin. We just care if you're good people and you're good at what you do. And you can find people in all categories for that. You just have to look.

Can you get the job done? Do you have good character? And that's all it is at the end of the day. I mean, the guy I build stuff with right now, he's gay. That is never a problem with me. Am I uncomfortable? Absolutely not, right? I love him. I love the quality of it. I love the quality of his work. I'll tell you that much, right? So look, you know, that's that's what it is. And by the way, we're out of time for this one. Sorry, guys. We had some technical difficulties. This one's going to be a little shorter. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Also go to marketing school dot io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's the community that Neil and I have to help agency owners grow faster. And you know, one more caveat I would add: Don't join the group unless you're at six figures or above. We're seeing that as a trend. It's not really a group for people that are under six figures. So that is it for today. We'll see you later, and goodbye.