AI Isn't the Threat to Your Practice. The System Is.
26 Jun 2026 · 13 min
In this episode of the Out of the System podcast, host Matthew Gillogly addresses physicians—especially surgeons—about the looming impact of artificial intelligence on medical practice. He argues that AI itself is not the primary danger; rather, the entrenched healthcare system—characterized by shrinking reimbursements, long hours, non‑compete clauses, and a "modern medical plantation" model—poses the real threat to doctors' autonomy and financial health. Gillogly weaves historical analogies (the transition from horses to automobiles, the rise of the internet) and a scene from the film Primary Colors to illustrate how technological disruption repeatedly reshapes labor markets, creating both risk and opportunity. He shares rapid AI implementation stories, such as a CRM built in 72 hours by his offshore team and clinicians using bots for content creation, to demonstrate that AI can dramatically increase efficiency and profitability when leveraged wisely. The core message is that physicians must cultivate leadership and ingenuity, re‑think their business models, and consider cash‑based, patient‑centred practices to escape the system’s constraints. He offers concrete resources—a free copy of his book Out of the System, a discovery call via MavericksProfitSystem.com, and further podcast episodes—to help doctors transition to independent, profitable practices.
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This is a very, very, very pivotal time in the medical field. And I've been in this space since 2014, at least, if not more. I've had some years where I've gone to 30 conferences. Never, ever have I seen as many people as I have at IOF. There were over 350 attendees where I would tell you the majority of people in the room were looking for a way to leave the big group or the hospital because they can see the writing on the wall. You didn't build your clinic to feel like an employee in your own business. I'm Matthew Gillogly, and on Out of the System hosted by Dr. Talks, we challenge the broken rules holding healthcare entrepreneurs back. Hear from clinic owners, rebels, and builders who are creating bold, profitable, patient-centered practices and doing it their way. Hey everyone. I wanna talk to you about AI, and I wanna talk to you about AI in the medical industry. I was just at an event at IOF in Denver, Colorado, and there was a decent amount of conversation regarding AI. How is it gonna change things? What's the impact that it's gonna have? on business? Is it gonna impact the medical field at all? And I wanna talk to you about what I've learned in 58 years. I wanna start with a story. If you spend any time around me or read my book, you know that I enjoy stories. A while back, there was a movie called Primary Colors, and it starred John Travolta playing, I believe the guy's name was Jack Stanton, and he was a Southern governor running for president of the United States. And it was basically a spoof on Bill Clinton. And he's at this manufacturing plant. Mm-hmm. This factory in New Hampshire, and it's a cold morning. He's got a big heavy coat on and he's talking to a packed room of people that are working in the factory and are on the verge of losing their job. And he tells a great story. I suggest that you look up the link. You just can put in Primary Colors, New Hampshire factory, and the room is just absolutely packed. And I mean, John Travolta's character is as engaging as Bill Clinton was, and he's got the audience laughing and all this. And he's talking about how his mama worked. you know, 2 jobs in order to put food on the table and would come home and be collapsed. And, and he tells this story of, of how the world has changed. And he does this thing where he goes through and he connects to them. And then he tells them, he goes, you can move $1 billion at the push of a button from LA, from New York to Tokyo, all in a second. And labor's going to go where the strongest people are the cheapest. And I got news for you. These jobs ain't coming back. No politician. I'm going to tell you the truth. No politician will say this, but I'm going to tell you the truth. These jobs are not coming back. And in an instant, you can feel the air go out of the room and his handlers are sitting over there and one of them goes, oh, he's lost him. And the guy sitting to the right of him, the main protagonist goes, he's got me. And John Travolta's character continues to tell this story of, you know, we've got to use a different muscle. We've got to use this muscle up here and we got to find different things and different ways for you to work because these jobs aren't coming back. Now, if I sit here and I tell you that these jobs are coming back, that's going to make you feel good. But if the jobs never come back, then you're going to say that I'm a liar. Well, I think of that a lot. When changes come. And, uh, you know, Christine, my partner, she's a little bit younger than I am and she's kind of worried about AI. She's in the acting industry and she's like, AI's taking all the jobs. Everything is ruined. AI's going to destroy the economy. And I think back to when I was her age and the internet was coming out and it was 1995 and we were all worried, oh my God, the internet's going to replace all these jobs. What happened was that we went on a rant. We went on a run where we had some of the lowest unemployment ever in the history of our country. Employment, unemployment was below 4%. We used to joke that we, when running businesses, that we wish that unemployment was 8% because it made it a little easier to hire people. You see, they said the same thing that when horses got replaced by automobiles. There's a story in Heinz Ketchup that in this huge factory, they had 250 people that would sit there and peel tomatoes and another 250 that would cut up the tomatoes in order for them to be made into ketchup. And when electricity came in and they put electricity in the factory, a lot of people quit because they didn't want to be around it because it was unstable. But yet unemployment Those people went somewhere else and got jobs. You see, there's always going to be jobs and there's always going to be opportunity. So what has this got to do with the medical field and your industry? Well, a lot of doctors think that wrongly, that their job is safe from AI. I got news for you. Nothing is safe from AI. In the last, literally in the last 72 hours, my team in the Philippines has designed an entire new CRM. It's how we send out emails, how we manage our client base. Think of it as a massive database. It's kind of like an EMR, but For non-medical practice and businesses. In 72 hours, they've created a CRM that will save us about $1,200 a month. People that have no coding experience have created this. I'm watching friends of mine with zero coding experience building 15, 20, and 25 bots to run their company. Now, to the uneducated, to those that haven't been through the wars and been through the battles, they would look at that going, oh my God, all those jobs. Well, you know how easy it is to code? I can code in Claude. I have zero coding experience. I don't know how to code anything. I just ask Claude how to do it. Okay. You see, whether it's horses to cars or the internet to, you know, from, from analog to the internet, what has to happen is that regardless of what happens, you still have to have leadership, leadership and ingenuity. It's a must because you're going to have to constantly adapt. Now, the interesting thing is that our clients, many of our clients that are learning this from us. What they've done is they're like, hey, I've created an entire social media management tool, creating pictures and images for us to use in AI. I'm creating content. I'm creating videos. I'm getting my podcast out. I'm getting things done. I'm writing a book in 4 months that used to take 12. There are things that are going on with AI that you can leverage your business at an incredibly high level. And what it's doing is it's creating way more speed, which allows you to make more money, which allows you to make be more profitable. And in a way, what happens is those jobs, that money then allows you to hire somebody to clean your house more often or cut your yard more often, or put that extension on the house or put a pool in your backyard or buy a new car. You see, all of those things create energy. But the real fact of the matter, the real issue for a doctor, specifically surgeons, is do you know that they can peel the shell off a raw egg, an uncooked egg, and still leave the membrane in place so that the egg doesn't explode? Do you know that they can rebuild a pool table using robots and AI? Do you know that they're already looking and trying to figure out, and they're getting really close, on how to do ACL reconstructive surgery with a robot or how to do hip replacement with a robot? Think about all the things that you do, and you may think, I can never replace that. I heard the same thing about the internet. I heard the same thing about the internet in 1995. It'll never replace travel agents. People are going to want to talk to a real live human being. Then came Travelocity and it destroyed the industry. Now you might think, what about all those horri— what about those poor travel agents? I'm sure they found something else to do. My mom was one of them. Her business continued to go. But you, you realize that evolution never stops. Business evolution never stops. And so the question that you want to have is, do you want to, which side of it do you want to be on? Now, if you barely have enough time to get home because you're absolutely exhausted and barely have enough time to hug your partner, your husband, your wife, and to kiss your kids on the forehead, and you think, Matt, I don't have any time extra to learn AI. That's fine. I'm not asking you to learn AI. I am asking you to rethink your leadership. I I'm asking you to rethink your ingenuity. You see, the system is designed very specifically, very specifically to make sure that you don't leave it. And one of the ways they do that is they work you to the bone for 14 and 16 hours a day, 6, 7 days a week. In my latest book, Out of the System, I talk about the modern medical plantation and how the whole point is if you didn't teach the slaves how to read and write and you kept them working, they never had time to dream of a better life. By the way, it's in the, it's in the book, The Rule for Despots, the same way. Make sure that people have just enough, but they always think that the bottom could fall out so that they never stop working for you. This is a very, very, very pivotal time in the medical field. And I've been in this space since 2014. So 12 years and never ever at any of the conferences I've ever been at. And we attend on average, we've been attending 10 a year for the last 5 years, at least, if not more. I've had some years where I've gone to 30 conferences. Never ever have I seen as many people as I have at IOF. There were over 350 attendees where I would tell you the majority of people in the room were looking for a way to leave the big group or the hospital because they can see the writing on the wall. And the telltale signs are everywhere. The telltale signs are that they take your RVUs and they cut 'em in half. I heard stories of people that their pay got cut 40% in their last contract negotiation. I've heard as high as 60%. I've heard people say, and I'm trapped because of a do— a A non-compete. I'm not giving you legal advice. I will tell you that we've, we have quite a few clients that have navigated their way out of their non-compete because at the end of the day, you have to decide which muscle you're going to exercise. Are you going to exercise the muscle of the one where you're like, well, that's just the way it is. There's nothing I can do about it. Or you can exercise the muscle of leadership and ingenuity. Leadership and ingenuity is what got you to this place as a doctor. Heck, you know that if you set your mind to something, you can learn it. You can master it. You've done it with the human body and you've done it with medicine. AI is a lesson. It's just history repeating itself. And in 10 years, it's going to be something other than AI. And in 10 years after that, it'll be something else. And there's always going to be something on the horizon because things never stay the way that they are. To wish for the golden days when you used to get whatever, $500 for an ultrasound or whatever, when you used to make $1,000 for this or $5,000 for that, those days are gone. They're never coming back. We're never, ever, ever going to see an increase in your reimbursement rates. Because I'm telling you the truth, just like John Travolta's character in Primary Colors told that group of factory workers they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that everything is going to be all right. We're going to save your jobs. You're not going to have to worry about it. We're going to fight for you. We're going to bring those jobs back here. John Travolta's character told the truth, much like Bill Clinton did. He told the truth in those moments, and he told them the jobs ain't coming back. AI is not going to stop. You can't stop it. There's nowhere for it to go except for up. It's going to be here. It's going to change things, and it already is changing things. Drastically in a very positive way. We're able to do things in 1/10 the amount of time and 1/10 the amount of cost. And it's really good. It's really, really good. And it's going to get even better. Again, you don't need to learn AI. You just need to learn the lessons from AI. In medicine, it's not going to get any better. The hospital is not magically one day going to increase your RVU percentage. They're not going to magically start to pay you more. Your debt is not going to magically disappear. Your hours aren't magically going to get better unless you have leadership. And you take your future into your own hands. That future is for you to create a cash-based practice. We've helped over 400 doctors do that. We've helped doctors across the globe do this. Canada, Australia, the United States, hopefully England, because we're talking to someone in England who wants to do this as well. Leadership and ingenuity. That's what you need at all times. And if you're not sure how to get it, if you're not sure where to get it, then I'm going to give you a couple of resources. One, listen to this podcast. There's some great long episodes in here where we interview in-depth other doctors. We're gonna get ready to start interviewing some more in the next couple of weeks. We've got a stacked schedule in July. Here's the other thing. Get a copy of my book. You'll see it right back there, Out of the System. All you have to do is go to Mavericks, M-A-V-R-I-X, mavericksprofitsystem.com/thebook, mavericksprofitsystem.com/thebook. M-A-V-R-I-X, and Profit and System are singular. Forward slash the book. You'll get it, a free book. All we ask is you to pay $7.95 for shipping and handling. That's it. And we'll ship it right out to you. Heck, I'll even autograph it for you. Okay? The book will change your life in a very positive way because in this time, every day that you wait is another day that you're on the modern medical plantation. And you may think that white coat is really cool, but really it's just dust-covered overalls. It's all it is. And until you actually make the leap, until you decide to take your future into your hands, and it's not as Risky as you think, and it's not as hard as you think, provided you have a mentor. And I would love for our team to be yours. So there you go. Check out the video clip from Primary Colors. It's really good. And I look forward to meeting you at one of the upcoming events. Okay? And I look forward to seeing you at one of the events coming up. So come over, say hello, shake my hand, say hello to Christine, say hello to my team. We'd love to help you and introduce you to people that we've helped. Okay? I'm Matthew Gillogly, and I'm the Chief Maverick, and I'd love to bring you into our world. Have a great day. If this episode got you thinking differently, hit follow and share it with someone stuck in the system. Please leave a review. It helps us grow. Want more? Visit MavericksProfitSystem.com to schedule your free discovery call and explore how far your business can go.
