"Stop Waiting for Permission to Build" with Brent LaGrange

Hey, it's Flora, and welcome back to another episode of The Human Side of AI from jamout.ai. My guest today is Brent, a doctor of physical therapy from Denver, a lifelong tinkerer, and someone who a few years ago woke up from a coma on his birthday and realized his family had no way to reach anyone. No contacts, no calendar, no plan. That experience sent him down a path of building his own AI-powered solution for end-of-life planning at any stage. He's not a developer, he'll tell you that himself. He's just someone who decided to stop waiting for permission to build. We talk about his personal agent setup, the 90/10 philosophy, training AI on things most therapists don't know how to do, and the new company he's launching. Take a listen. Well, hello BJ, how you doing today?

I'm great.

Awesome. Where are you calling from?

For having me.

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here with you. Where are you calling from?

I live in Denver, Colorado. I've lived here my whole life, born and raised, and mom and dad still live in Evergreen, so.

Oh, awesome. Lucky you.

Yeah. How about for you?

Well, I did live in Denver once, but I grew up in Austin, Texas, and was born in Panama, and now I live here in Panama again.

Okay.

Yeah.

Have you ever been from Austin?

Oh, your wife is from Austin? She must be really cool. Oh yes, I'm not biased at all. Okay, so BJ, you and I connected in the, um, in Club Jam, and I'm curious what brought you there.

You know, the social media basically seems to have a way of putting the right people in front of you, and Jam basically just caught my attention with just the, the networking that she was doing with her audience and, uh, bringing people into a new school community. And, um, it sounded attractive because a lot of the things that I'm going through myself in exploring artificial intelligence and, and bringing, um, I guess, my thoughts to this vast, ever-changing industry as it's speeding up daily, I just wanted to kind of find where I seemed to fit the best. So kind of scoping out different schools, seeing where I needed to land. I just— I definitely found a community that Jamf was developing that sat well with me.

I love that. So bring us back. So, so far we know that you grew up in Denver, uh, but talk us, talk us through your, your journey. Like, what brought you, you know, as a little boy in Denver to where you are now?

Uh, I definitely fall within the age bracket of Gen X and, um, you know, not trusting very many things.

Okay.

But also really enjoying, like, taking things apart and putting things back together, or, you know, the Yeah, you know, this will definitely date some things. You know, the Tim Allen approach of, you know, reconstructing something or making it bigger or better definitely fell within my wheelhouse growing up. I definitely—

In what ways?

You know, I had a go-kart and I found a way to make it go faster. You know, finding, you know, how simple it was just to program a VCR for my parents, you know, where she didn't really understand, like, why does the clock keep going to 12? And, you know, having to reprogram that.

And just, I understand that, I can relate to that.

You know, understanding that, you know, a phone used to hang on the wall and it used to come through a hard wire and now being on a mobile device and, and now, you know, here I am talking to a a monitor basically, and having, you know, the resources and the technology to be able to command something. So it's, it's always been a part of like making it bigger or better or what can I do to challenge, you know, the, the industry that I'm in. That's awesome. You know, I'm a doctor of physical therapy. And— Oh, okay. You know, it seems quite strange to be in that space, but, you know, AI is starting to challenge our own industry. And, you know—

In what ways?

We're starting to see, you know, obviously dictation or notes on patients being kind of transitioned over to using artificial intelligence to record a session that we have with a patient. Or a client. And that's wonderful. Awesome. But then the expectation is we need to work more or see more patients because now we're not doing all the typing of notes, or we used to handwrite them into patients' files. It's now becoming, you know, a challenge for students that leave a DPT program that they're going into an industry that really is failing them. And wow, it just needs to be— go ahead.

You just, you just said a lot, so I kind of want to break it down. So I, you know, what, what I heard was it's not that we're still adjusting to AI. We're, we're basically in this world where it has set these expectations, where we're using it for, for keeping notes, for taking these reports. And with that time, we're supposed to be seeing more patients. Did I hear that right?

That is correct.

Wow. Okay. And then, and then you said something really big. You said these students, they're going into an industry that's failing them. Why?

It's failing them because they've come through school without that guidance, without that information using artificial intelligence. And now You know, we're starting to see insurance companies changing those formats for accepting, you know, AI-qualified dictation or note-taking as a means of communication to update a patient's file.

Okay. And have you in your own experience seen that be like hallucinated or the information gets notated incorrectly? Have you seen that yet?

Yes. And, you know, those are— again, as these systems develop, we're seeing the changes unfold in front of us where it's just getting better and faster. I'm a little bit more on the sports-minded side of rehabilitation and using the central nervous system. And, you know, my process right now is trying to educate artificial intelligence about modalities or treatments that I personally provide that, you know, most therapists are, are not able to integrate these two things together. What that means is that you've got, let's say somebody has their shoulder or even simpler, a knee replacement, and the quality of life drastically changes. And you have these milestones of getting back to, let's say, just walking again. And those milestones are, you know, established from insurance companies. Doctors have, you know, a means of tracking a patient's progress. And now AI is getting involved where we need to be able to educate these students on these new tools about checking ranges of motion, being able to value, evaluate the strength of somebody's muscle system, and all the while trying to help reduce, you know, the symptoms that go along with a post-surgical procedure.

And— So you went from putting together VCRs to putting together body parts.

Yes, I did. Okay.

And then I hear so often, you know, and in fact, my, my last podcast guest, she'll, she'll be on this Friday, which by the time this comes out will be the Friday before. And she, her big thing was like, if you're not learning from AI and you're just having it create for you like you are, you're, you're kind of like failing, right? I'm putting words in her mouth. But what I'm hearing you say is like, I'm teaching my AI.

Yes, I feel the, the need, you know, again, programming or helping AI, uh, with a better understanding. You know, take for example these robots that are coming out. I watched a really great, um, feature this morning on YouTube about, you know, how fast NVIDIA is coming up with, um, robotics and what kind of jobs these pieces of equipment are going to be doing. And one, it's exciting, and also it's scary. You know, people are afraid of losing their jobs to something that can be done by a robot, manually by a robot. Well, wow. A lot of the delay that's happening right now is because of improper movement patterns. And, you know, they're trying to teach these robotics how to move more effectively. And I think the challenge is that there isn't enough context there in these robots to be able to understand, like, if something is misplaced or something, you know, like your drink tips over, you know, what do you do in those emergency types of situations?

These human experiences.

Right, and that's come through trial and error. And, you know, as fast as AI is accelerating, there really isn't the time or the landscape kind of woven into that learning experience. People are just kind of hoping that real-world data is gonna show up. And so a lot of this training is, in my opinion, important to help smooth out some of those bumps in the road that these robotics are going to have. So I feel like in order for not only students to understand that there's better tools available to them to treat a patient, that data can also be learned and passed on so that these robots can do a better job of these manual tasks.

And what is some of the important mission?

What's that?

I said just what an important mission that is.

Yeah, and that's why for me training AI is, is where I have found my passion in this whole space because— oh cool— it's just, uh, it's something where I, I see kind of the gap, if you will, and I'm trying to fill a gap that I'm passionate about. And I love that there's, there's a bit of context there where you know, there's so many shiny objects that come at us with AI. Yeah, there's a, a service that gets updated or there's a new release and everybody's like, all of a sudden they shift and they go to that next shiny object and they try to learn everything about it and then they forget about something else. And we're asking for basically more time for us to be a part of our community, our, our humanity. Well, and I'm sorry, continue. We're not getting the, the opportunity to, to do that because we're, we're constantly sucked into the next shiny object and we try to learn everything about it. And so I, I really like, uh, kind of the concept of just finding that, if you want to call it a North Star for yourself, and being able to focus on that and let AI do what it's doing. And I think that was kind of my introduction to, you know, the Jamf community is, you know, the things that I'm doing right now is I'm basically, I've created what I would consider like my personal agent. Okay, that is going to learn everything about me as a person and all the jobs that I've had and all the experiences that I've had and keeping those personal, you know, personal bits of information safeguarded. But that one agent then becomes kind of like the decision maker of what these tools that are available to us go and, and resource, because OpenAI is going to have its developments and its progress, and Claude is going to have its progress, and, and you've got Grok and you've got Gemini, you've got all these tools that are out there. And I find that the question always keeps coming back of like, where, you know, what's the best one? What tools should I use? Yeah. And for me personally, I'm using all of them through my one agent. And there, that decision maker is now going out and saying, okay, who's got the best idea? Who's got the best tool? And I'm going to use that one right now because that solves this problem that Brent has.

How'd you do that?

It's taken a little bit of time to kind of map it out in my— I just used a whiteboard and from that whiteboard I started with Claude and Anthropic and their platform because I found it to be— I guess to be really honest, I chose it and I'm like, I'm just going to stick with it.

Yeah, fair.

And build it this way. And through that discussion and making sure that those safety guardrails are established upfront, I've been able to have this ongoing discussion with Claude to develop this integration with all these tools. And when people talk about API or the connection between those tools, I look at them as keys to doors. And as long as I've provided a set of keys to my employee, which happens to be my agent, then those connections are established and I don't have to have like this big expensive plan where I'm spending a lot of money on one service. I've decided to have kind of like the run-of-the-mill plan, you know, it's like $20 here and $20 there and it adds up to basically, you know, a massive tool that I would just be sucked into and figuring out in that one space. So I like the, the networking that my one agent has with all of those keys that I've administered as, okay, I can keep that safeguard up because if something goes awry, let's say in one of those platforms, all I have to do is take back the key, turn it off.

So, so if someone listening to this is like, yeah, yeah, I want to do that, what would you— I mean, is this something that you can do for others? Is that something you're interested in?

Or how— my goal is to do this for myself. And then to share that with others. And that's my big plan, is to be able to provide that to a community and be able to allow folks to follow those instructions and set that up for themselves. Because I think it's a way to stop that shiny object, you know, path. It takes away from, you know, getting sucked into something and losing all this time trying to learn a software or, you know, understand a platform or what the latest updates are or how to communicate with it and just let them fight it out. Basically, they're going to do it anyway. And as long as I just have those keys and basic plans, for me, that just made the most sense because now I can pick and choose all these services and incorporate them. What that has empowered me is, is taking like a new business that I'm starting and be able to implement those multi-agents all working for my one agent. And that one agent then gives me the report back of how well they're doing. Are they staying on task? Are they, you know, running into problems? Wow. Because they are, they're gonna fight it out, like I said, on their own. And whoever has the best shiny object, I don't have to worry about finding it or learning it. I just empowered my one agent with all the keys and I'm like, you go figure it out. Yeah.

I don't know. I, I love that because you're like spending all this time in theory learning something that could be obsolete or completely new tomorrow. Right? Exactly. So, So, okay, you are one of those people that just has more time in their day, I think. And I talked to a few of those on here. You said you're starting a new business, so tell us a little bit about that.

This is a— this is something, well, that came up personally for me and my household and my family. So in August of this year, it'll be 7 years where on my birthday in December, I had a medical emergency. Oh my goodness. I ended up in the emergency ICU. And like I said, this was on my birthday. And I really didn't know what happened. But I ended up in a coma. I was administered a— what they call an intubation. I was put on a ventilator. And this was not something where I was in some kind of car accident or anything. It just all of a sudden came about. And after a good deal of time, I woke up from this and my entire life had changed.

Yeah.

So at that time, AI was kind of picking up in the, in the space, and I was in a hospital bed. And I found myself very lucky. And my family made it very clear in a very polite way. They're like, hey, we had a hard time accessing your calendar, getting your contacts, letting people know— your clients, your patients— what had happened. Like, I had not gone through the steps that I needed to to plan for any unforeseen circumstances like death. And I found really quickly that I really didn't know where to start. A lot of services that are out there, they have kind of like kits. They put all this paperwork together and they just hand it to you and they're like, here, good luck. And I wanted to simplify that. And so my wife and I and one other, she's a speech therapist. My wife and I are both doctors of physical therapy. We decided that it would be best to help people glide through kind of these end-of-life stages.

Wow.

And provide them with a digital platform for them to answer questions, see where they're at right now, you know, plan for that unforeseen thing, but also be adaptable to those that are in kind of like an emergency situation. Like, I really need to come up with, you know, my 5 wishes. I need to have something that's in place for my family where they can get passwords and they can, you know, contact people and let other people know what's going on. In those, you know, certain circumstances. And so it was asset planning, it's, it's kind of end-of-life planning. And so this new business, uh, really digitizes or, or kind of makes a service for those folks that are younger that may not be thinking about it. Newlyweds, you know, I've, I've spoken to people of all demographics and all age brackets, and people are at different stages, they're at different places. And when you bring up death, a lot of people get really kind of creeped out. But yeah, I think I'm— it's realistic because, you know, bringing this up to my parents, I'm like, hey, do you guys have your assets planned for, like, if something happens to you? And they're like, oh yeah, we just wrote it down on a napkin, you know. And I was like, wait a minute, that's not gonna work in the You know, it might end up in probate on the footsteps of a courthouse, you know, like that just leaves us nothing. Yeah. You know, if something happens to you, you know, what are those next steps? And they hadn't planned it out. So it becomes alarming when you consider that there's places that people are at in their lives. And that's one thing that they don't plan for. Yet, there's so much planning that goes on for like deliveries and birthing, you know, the, the leading up. And my wife and I are proud to be grandparents. And that'll be— she'll be scheduled to, to be born kind of the late July this year. So we're really excited about this, this new addition to our family.

But congrats, major congrats.

Even my wife's daughter, is not prepared. And so, you know, you have these kind of discussions for newlyweds and you have discussions for your parents, even young adults. Everybody's at a different place. And so teaching AI to come up with a platform of services has been really engaging for us. I love— so that's been a big part of it is like letting my agent know like, hey, this is my history. I had a medical emergency. Here was all my medical complications. Here was all the things that I went through. And these are the steps that we took to get ready if anything else should happen. And it's been very empowering, to say the least, to be ready for something. And that's off our plates. We just don't have to think about it anymore.

Yeah, because it's not, it's not an if.

That's right. It's not.

So, so how do other people, you know, if someone's listening to this, how do other people access this, this tool?

We're going to have a, a release. We're going to let people know about this when we get completed, but it's going to start off just as a checklist, you know, a digital asset that they can download themselves. It introduces them to our company called Glidewell. And Glidewell's purpose is to help others navigate this end-of-life timeframe at any stage of their life. We just— we want to be there for them when they're ready. And we also want to be there if things change.

Yeah.

So if somebody, you know, if their lives change, if things happen not according to plan, AI is fast enough now that it can adapt to that and say, hey, yeah, we can make that suggestion. So our goal is to not store anybody's personal information, but we want to have an engage with AI at the beginning. And if there's an accelerated service that's needed, they can get in touch with us one-on-one. So we've gone the extra step right now is becoming what's considered a death doula.

Yeah, somebody that does—

Concierge. Yeah, it's kind of a— you can schedule an appointment, you can work with us. And so we'll be opening up that website for people to make those appointments if they want to. But more importantly, through social media channels, we're going to have Glidewell be our new business that is going to be driven by AI, I would say 90% of the way.

Right.

And that last 10% will be there in person. We still want that.

So talk to me a little bit. Yeah, I want to, I want to hear more about this 90/10 philosophy of yours.

You know, I can't take credit for coming up with it. I have to give credit where credit is due. Okay. The gentleman that came, that brought, put this in my ear, his name is Dallas, and he in the community and school even is referred to as the AI surfer.

Ooh.

And, you know, I really vibed with him. I connected with him because even though I grew up in Colorado, I still had a lot of visits to my grandparents who lived in California, who also had a house in Maui, Hawaii.

Kof.

And I would go surfing quite a lot. And Dallas really likes to surf and skateboard. And that was part of my background and growing up and I just, again, being back in that hospital bed and seeing AI that I didn't want to watch television, I wanted to learn something. And so this was a way for me to recover in the hospital. It was a way to be engaged. And, you know, he introduced this idea about letting AI do 90% of the work and having like 10% left over for that human involvement. Yeah. And the goal obviously is to generate more time and ability for you to connect with your family, to connect with your friends, to get out and be in a community with humanity and to step away from these things. And so he's really been an integral part in my learning experience about how to work with AI. And they're in Arizona. They have an office. I think he built a skateboard ramp inside, you know, and it's themed with, you know, surfboards and it's very vibrant and, and he's just a very approachable person. And I really appreciate how he has brought his community up to speed with his philosophy about this 90/10 and having what's considered a thought partner or what I'm referring to as my, you know, my agent that works for me. Yeah, there's a reason that he didn't want to go down this road of trying to learn everything, but he ended up getting caught up with it because it was so exciting. And there was a quote that came up in one of our recent meetings where he stated that AI had given him ADHD. Okay. You know, there was just too many things happening in front of him. It's like, I've never been diagnosed with ADHD, but I think AI has done that to me.

Wow.

That I'm hyperactive. I'm always thinking about it. It's always spinning in my head. I try to go to sleep and I wake up. You know, it was just all involved. And he's like, I got to step back. I got to remove myself from this situation and refocus my entire community because that's what was happening. Everybody was trying to learn the latest thing and we couldn't keep up because it was happening so fast.

I mean, no one can.

You go to sleep and you wake up in the morning and there's a post about who released the latest thing.

Oh yeah.

And by midday you're getting another notice that says some other company did the same thing. And then by— Totally. —you're getting the afternoon report.

I mean, by the time we finish this podcast, technology will—

absolutely, it's outdated. It's so—

something you said to me, um, you know, in our, in our messages going back and forth before this, you said, I very clearly, you said, I'm not a developer, I'm an entrepreneur who decided to stop waiting for permission on— for— let me try that again. I, I'm an entrepreneur who decided to stop waiting for permission on or for someone else to build this. You know, as we're, as we're wrapping up, talk to me a little bit about that mindset. And, and, and I want you to speak to the listener who's also looking for that permission.

I think it goes back to what I said earlier about having kind of that North Star and having we'll say the courage to decide that you're going to stick with one service and work with that service. So if you're a Google person, great, stick with it. It's, it's tough to filter out so many of the nice shiny objects, but you know that everybody or all of these services are going to be doing that for you eventually. They're all on different timelines and they're going in the same direction, so they're all going to happen. And so when you have something like that North Star, when you've, when you've picked something and you're like, okay, this is the one thing that I am passionate about, just know that there are services that are going to be there to help you build it. And that to me is, is what I hope your listeners can take away from this, is that no, I'm not a developer. I know that I've spent a great deal of money on somebody to build a website for me, for my other businesses, you know, especially in the physical therapy space. And it cost thousands and thousands of dollars and it took time and there was you know, glitches. And now it's, it's solved. You just talk to it, or you just talk to it, you just type it out, and it doesn't have to be the perfect prompt anymore. And I think that's another takeaway, is that the more real that you are, that in itself builds something that you would be proud of as your North Star, as something that you're looking forward to using. And I think that's where we each get to decide. You know, there's plenty of services that are jumping on board and trying to sell you things, but I've learned more by filtering out a lot of those subjects and just sticking with one and knowing that they're all going to fight for my attention anyway. So I might as well just let AI decide for me. I love that. And I love that. And, and go build it, whatever you want. Cool, cool.

Well, I'm so excited to keep following. I mean, I feel like you and I could sit here and talk for a couple more hours on all the other things you're doing that we didn't even touch on. Um, but if people want to, you know, follow your, your journey and, um, Glidewell and just where you are, you know, what's the best way to find Is that, is that LinkedIn or where's the best way to follow your journey here?

I think with the Jam Community, just because I, you know, really want to find, you know, again, I'm a part of the AI Surfer and I really appreciate Dallas and everything that they're doing. I find that it's important for me just to kind of spread my wings a little bit and be in these other communities to help people. 'Cause I've been a caregiver. That's what I'm doing. You know, that's what I'm passionate about. And I think the best way would be like direct messaging through the JAN community and reaching out because to me, that's my way of making it still personal. Yeah. And being able to hear what people are looking for or needing, but I would like to at some point, you know, make a community post and just let people know a little bit more about me and how to get in touch with me either through the website, if they're wanting to look at Glidewell a little bit more for themselves, or, you know, if they're wanting to develop kind of their North Star and establishing that 90/10 principle in their own lives.

Well, I am so excited to help foster those relationships, so at least start facilitating them when I share this podcast within the community. So keep an eye out for that next Friday. And, Ren, thank you again so much. I know your time is precious, so thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing you on our next call. Thank you. Take care. You too. Bye-bye. Bye.