How Doctors Build Influence Without Becoming Influencers

In the corporate wellness programs, what we found, again, after doing that for a decade, is the corporations that would put in real lasting wellness programs, the CEO always ran triathlons every single time.

Really?

Every single time, yeah. And so what we found—

I have mad respect for those people. I couldn't, I hate running. I'll swim, I'll bike, can't fucking stand running.

The lesson from that was, It had to come— the program had to come from the top. It had to come from the very top. And whenever we would try to put in a corporate wellness program at a company where it was not the CEO was the champion, it wouldn't work. It would last, you know, it would always be superficial and it would last maybe a year.

It'd be like the bald guy selling hair restoration.

Right. Yeah. It would always last a year. And, you know, even if the, like, the VP of HR was super gung-ho about it, if it wasn't supported by the CEO, it wouldn't last.

You didn't build your clinic to feel like an employee in your own business. I'm Matthew Colobley, 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. So, Brad, have you ever done a podcast before?

Funny enough, I haven't. That's so funny. That's—

how is that possible? And for those of you who don't know, we're here with Brett Gregory of Dr. Talks. You basically help people do podcasts. I do. And when's the last time you were on one?

No, funny enough, like, I can't remember.

Come on.

So I used to host a talk radio show, live talk radio for 4 years, and we would do 3 interviews an hour. I would interview CEOs of publicly traded companies here in San Diego. And I, you know, I did hundreds of interviews over 4 years as the host.

Yeah.

But not as the guest.

But that was all radio. So like, they're not— were they in the studio?

We had a studio in our office, so I owned a financial advisory firm. I was a 401.

Of course you did. Like, you have the look of that, like, hey, gimme your money.

Great. Yeah. So we did, you know, employee benefits, corporate wellness programs. We would interview CEOs of publicly traded companies and small companies here in San Diego. And that was our, that was how I built a, you know, a really nice employee benefits practice.

That's a brilliant way to go about. I've always thought that that was a brilliant way.

Yeah.

To build a bit. I know a couple guys that have done that, or gals, gals. People, I should say, that have done that. They're like, they host media.

Right.

Oddly enough, that's kind of what I do. Kind of, I use this to build business, but yeah.

That's exactly what you do.

Right.

And that is a great strategy. So I kind of stumbled on that strategy of that, you know, ultimately now is helping doctors grow their businesses with podcasts, but that originally started with a live talk radio show. And I was interviewing these CEOs of publicly traded companies. And here in San Diego, and some of them would end up becoming customers. And I realized, wow, this is a great marketing strategy, just totally by accident. And we ended up doing that for 4 years and growing a really nice practice. I had this, uh, employee benefits practice for a decade from 1996 to 2006. And, uh, and did you sell it? I sold it.

I sold it. Nice time to sell.

Yeah, it, it was a nice time to sell. Wow. So I'll, I'll tell you the story. So, Yeah.

So, okay. So you sold that in 2006.

Sold that in 2006.

And that's where the Costa Rica part of it kicks in.

Right. So how that happened was in 2006, sadly, my 33-year-old brother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. And so I had—

How old were you at the time?

I was 2 years younger. I was 30.

Wow. What a kick in the balls.

Oh yeah. No, it was—

You guys were close?

Oh, definitely. Yeah. Close family. I mean, that changed the course of my life. I was, you know, owning this employee benefits company, everything was great. And then had this complete tragedy for our family. I, and, you know, he was diagnosed with stage 4 non-small cell carcinoma in 2006. He was given 9 months to live and he passed away almost 9 months later in my father's arms.

Oh, and can you imagine anything worse as a parent?

No, I couldn't.

I mean, I mean, I have kids.

I have 2 kids now.

I've got 3. I can't imagine.

No, I could. I mean, no. And, and I watched it, I lived it, I saw it, you know? So that, that changed the trajectory of my life. I real, you know, I thought, okay, am I gonna be in this? I was kind of in a soul-sucking career in insurance and financial services.

It's a grind.

It, yeah.

And it's, and it's not really fulfilling and it's not really loyal. Yeah.

I mean, and I did my best for to make it that, but I was like, do I want to do this for another 30 years? And I said no. So after, Brother passed away. I sold the company. I had a couple million bucks. I moved to Costa Rica. Were you married at the time? I was not. I was single.

30 years old, single, couple million bucks living in Costa Rica.

Right. Moved to Costa Rica.

What could go wrong?

Right. I, I, I bought 165-acre property to start an eco-friendly wellness community so that I could help anybody who wanted to change their lifestyle habits and heal from within so that no one would have to go through what my family went through, watching a loved one, you know, suffer and ultimately succumb to their illness. So it was gonna be all about helping people change their lifestyle. Now, mind you, I have no medical experience. I have no, you never, no real estate experience. No real estate experience.

No international business experience.

That's for sure.

I'm sure Costa Rica was easy to do business with.

It, it, Couldn't have been harder. So, so the good news is you'd rather deal with regulations in Southern California than the good news is come up to Costa Rica. I sold the business at a great time, 2006.

Mm-hmm.

That was, you know, when everything was going really well. The bad news is I purchased this property right before the 2008 global financial crisis. So I bought this $3 million property with $2 million down. I had exactly 12 months to come up with another million dollars. And global financial crisis hit. And so I thought at that time I was living in Costa Rica. Now it's coming into 2009. At that point, I had met my future wife and everything was going to hell in the financial world. I thought I was gonna lose absolutely everything that I'd worked so hard for. I thought, you know, buying this property to help people, my brother's legacy was gonna You know, I was gonna lose that and be ruined. And what I noticed living in Costa Rica, I thought, okay, I have to figure out how to get customers and now, and they have to be cash-paying customers, high-end cash-paying customers. And there's a global financial crisis going on. What am I gonna do? I noticed that Facebook at 2009 hit 200 million users. And I—

I'm sorry, I'm just laughing. 2009, 200 million users. Go ahead. Yeah, I remember those days.

Yeah. And I said, okay, I've got to be able to find some customers here on this Facebook thing. Let's figure this out.

It was really the wild, wild west of Facebook too. They'd let you run anything back then.

Absolutely.

They just wanted to make payroll.

Absolutely. So I started taking online marketing courses. I started—

Who'd you learn from?

Eben Pagan.

Oh God, love Eben.

Yes. Yeah, he was my, you know, I consider him a friend. He was one of my marketing mentors. And yeah, I mean, I took every course he had, and then I took all of his friends' courses. I'd never built a website before, so I started building websites. I learned about landing pages. I learned about lead magnets and headlines and conversions. And so I, I built this website, costaricawellness.com. I built a couple Facebook pages, one called Costa Rica that hit half a million, we got half a million likes.

Wow.

And then I got, I created another one called Costa Rica Wellness. We had 1.3 million likes.

Wow.

So I had, you know, over 2 million Facebook likes and I would post on Facebook. And so this was when every single post had to go viral because you couldn't run ads on Facebook.

Yeah, I remember that.

This was before you—

It was all about communities and likes and how can you make it viral?

Right, so every post, I was trying to figure out how can I make this post go viral today and how can I make this post go viral? And we got— we— it worked. We got, you know, over 2 million followers. So I would drive traffic from my Facebook page to costaricawellness.com. I learned about lead magnets. I learned about give away your best stuff for free.

Yep.

So I had this lead magnet.

Eben was really the guy who kind of pioneered that.

He was the guy. Yeah.

I mean, I remember when— I remember when he came out This was 2008 or '09, I think.

Yeah.

And he gave away his $6,000 course and I was like, what the hell is he doing?

Yeah. I mean, he, he did hundreds of millions of dollars of online sales.

Yeah.

And so that's who I was learning from and figured out how to give away my, I, I had this real estate report that I created and I actually paid a service $45,000 to create this real estate report for us. And I gave that away for free. And I built a very small email list, 2,500 people. I'm driving traffic from Facebook to my website. They filled out the form, they got the free, the free list, and I called every single one of 'em. I made everybody put their phone number in. I called 2,500 people and I got 20 people to book a flight from Europe, Canada, and the United States to come down to Costa Rica. And look at our property. So I did 20 tours, you know.

Did you have it built? Was it built out? Like, what did you have?

No, there's nothing. So I, I put in—

So it was like 165 acres.

165 acres, whitewater ocean views across the street from a hospital and in Costa Rica. And so it's by the beach. And then, you know, the intention was to build a wellness community. That's why I had selected that property. And so I would help I would show the property to these 20 people. Most of them were doctors and really 7 people purchased lots from me. They were about 5 acres apiece. So I carved out 7 lots and we sold 'em for a total of $1.4 million in under 12 months. And I was able to pay off the seller and save the property and save the business. Wow.

Wow.

And it happened to be doctors who purchased from us, who bought these lots.

You still have this today?

I still own it today.

Do you really?

I do.

Wow.

Yes, costaricawellness.com.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, how developed is it?

So we put in, I put in the road, the water, the electricity, and then we ran outta money. My original intention was I was gonna, I was planning on raising $30 million and building this whole eco-friendly wellness community. after the 2008, 2009, that just wasn't in the cards anymore. So we put in the road, the water, electricity, and then just hit stop and said, all right, I gotta, I'm now outta money. At least I own the property.

Yeah.

I'm now gonna move back to the United States. And I got in, at this point now I'm married, I have a, a son now, and now it's, I, I gotta get to work. I gotta, I gotta make some money now.

Those kids are expensive.

Those kids are expensive. Yes.

Yes. It's amazing how much those little things cost. So I moved back.

Wait till they go to, wait till they go to college. Yes. Oh, you know, I've won in college now.

Yeah. So now you know the drill.

Yes, yes, yes.

It goes up exponentially.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't stop.

Right.

It's like arbitrage.

It's like fucking arbitrage in the wrong direction.

So now 2010, moving back to San Diego, and I start a marketing agency because I learned a lot about Facebook marketing. I might have been one of the first people in the world to do $1 million in sales to customers they met on Facebook. In 2009, it's possible. Wow! It's possible. That's pretty probably one of the first, if not you know right around.

I mean, for people that don't know, like I remember, I remember when Facebook started letting you pay for ads. That was like that was so controversial. It was like oh yeah, it was like let's give up half of Gaza. Like I mean, it was like it was that controversial, right? Like like big. You're having arguments about this. Like it's they can do whatever they want.

It's their business.

You don't want to give money, right?

Yeah. So. Yeah, so I started started out really as a Facebook marketing agency, and I started creating my own. I created 22 information products, created, and then started doing marketing for other people. Started out with Facebook marketing in that, and what I found very quickly was that people who kept coming to ask for my help were doctors and people in the health and wellness business because it was a You know, wellness real estate venture. And so then I realized, okay, I'm I'm just gonna specialize in helping doctors. And my dad's a doctor.

I love doctors.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I have a What kind of doctor?

Endocrinologist.

Really?

Yeah, he was head of diabetes internal medicine for Kaiser for forty years.

Holy cow!

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. So anyway, so you know the Yeah, you know the The avatar. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and I have a soft spot for doctors. My my brother ended up getting his PhD in molecular biology, and ironically, he was doing cancer research at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla. That you know he ultimately succumbed to cancer. But see, so he was also a doctor, but a PhD. But I have a soft spot for doctors.

Yeah, no shit.

I loved helping doctors. Yeah, and so that's where we we specialized in, and I did this for a decade, helping doctors grow their practice, and whether you know. A lot of the doctors that come to us want to create online recurring revenue. So a lot of them were creating their own information products, whether they were writing books or selling supplements or just finding other ways to make money. That's what we would help them do. We would help them create funnels and do all sorts of different types of marketing. We ended up helping doctors do over $23 million in sales.

Wow.

In 10 years. Wow.

That's pretty impressive.

But the pattern that I saw consistently was the highest return on investment. The best marketing that we would do consistently over and over again were podcasts and summits, and they would beat Facebook ads and funnels and all the stuff that— all the marketing stuff that we would do, even SEO. They would beat all of that.

And these are doctors marketing directly to consumers?

Correct. Yeah, directly to patients. And so, you know, whether it's a doctors specializing in cancer or diabetes or thyroid or whatever, longevity, we would put on a summit on that topic and a virtual summit. So a summit is similar to a podcast, but kind of in a compressed timeframe. So there's usually one host who prerecords, you know, 20 to 40 interviews with 20 to 40 other doctors on a particular subject like longevity or cancer or diabetes.

Right.

And then we launch the summit as a free, education tool for the audience, and we market the summit with affiliate marketing, but our affiliates are all doctors.

Okay, so you get like, you're going to have a topic of like longevity. You'll bring in, let's say, our good friend Kent Holtorp. Yeah, he would be the main person.

He's part of our peptides and bioregulators summit that we're putting on right now.

Okay. And then there'll be a bunch of other doctors talking about it.

Yeah. So there's usually a main host, right? Sometimes it's a host and a co-host. And then they prerecord 40 interviews, 20 to 40 interviews on this particular subject. So let's take the Peptides and Bioregulators Summit that we're producing right now. It happens to be— it's going to launch on Tuesday. And so we have 2 hosts, Natalie Nidum and Dr. Holtorf's team member Michael, who have prerecorded 40 interviews or 30 interviews with other doctors. And the doctors who are on are going to talk about peptides from 20—

Right.

to 30 different angles.

Right.

So it's, if you want to learn about peptides, this is the place to go. The summits are free to register, they're free to attend, but only for a week. And then after that, people have to pay for to have access. But because they're free to register and free to attend, and the people who are invited are on the email list of all of the attendees, we usually have like, you know, the small ones will have 15,000 to 25,000 attendees. The big ones—

Really? Oh yeah.

The big ones will have 45,000, 55,000, 65,000.

Okay, so what— but what's the benefit for the— I'm assuming those are from all over the United States, maybe internationally as well?

It's probably 80% US, 10% Canada, and then smattering all over.

Okay, but what's the benefit to the doctors then?

So the doctors get free visibility. It's by being on the summit as a speaker, you're going to get in front of 25,000 people interested in bioregulators and peptides.

And are the doctors paying anything for that?

No, it's free.

They get, they get, they get to be on because of— okay, got it.

It's free. Their cost of entry is they have to send 2 emails to their email list. Okay, that's it. And so, and normally on our summits, so, uh, over the past 5 and a half years, we've done over 90 summits on a lot of different topics, and we've had Usually the, the speakers have at least 10,000 people on their email list. And so there's a lot of doctors who we help work their way up to that. Like we help them build a 10,000-person email list so they can get on these summits for free. And, and the host gets a copy of the email list. That's where the money is.

Yeah.

The host should be able to turn that email list into 7 figures a year At a minimum. Of revenue.

Yeah, correct.

Exactly. And so whatever you're selling, if it's patient care, if it's for cancer or diabetes or peptides or whatever, you should be able to make a million bucks a year off of that email list. And we've had doctors make, you know, considerably more than that.

Yeah, I would bet. I would bet, because I would imagine the ones that are hosting— and I know the ones that host, and some of them, some are mutual clients, some are not— but they're smart business people. Yeah, right. Like they're— oh yeah, they're not— yeah, you know, they're not the usual doc going, right, hey, I'm leaving the hospital.

Yeah, there's, there's a, you know, an incentive.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Why is it that a podcast is so powerful? Why is media— why was radio so powerful? What— yeah, what is it about that?

Great question. What— so there's a lot of reasons, actually. There's, you know, one is it does depend on what you're selling and who your, who your customers are, who your patients are who you're trying to attract. So in, you know, in, in, when I hosted the radio show, we were on a radio station here in San Diego, KCO AM 1000. And there was a, it said they were, had a listenership. They called it an Arbitron rating and it had a listenership of 55,000 listeners. I don't know if anybody listened. It could have been just my mom. I don't know.

You know, that sounds like, sounds like I did a, I was a co-host of a golf show in southern New Jersey on the local cable access station.

Yeah.

And we would run it on like Sunday nights live. And I'm like, is anybody watching? Yeah.

And, you know, occasionally people would call in, so we knew, okay, somebody's listening. But how many? I have absolutely no idea. Nor did it matter because my interest was developing the relationship with the person that I was interviewing. Again, CEOs of companies in San Diego. And because we had the time together on the interview, it built our relationship.

Mm-hmm.

And I was able to call on them afterwards. In fact, what I would do, this was back when we would burn CDs. So we would take a recording of the show, burn a CD, and I would hand deliver it to their office about a week after the show. And then they would give us a tour of their, office, a tour of their facilities. So I would get the, the CEO or president of the company giving us a tour. And some of these were big companies. I interviewed the president of Qualcomm. I mean, some of these were big companies and 1 outta 10 would become a customer, but a customer was, you know, worth $25,000, $50,000 a year.

Yeah. But I mean, it's the cheapest marketing you can ever do.

Cheapest. It was cheapest, best marketing that we could ever do. And again, I, I didn't even know that going in. That wasn't even my intention.

What was your intention?

I just thought it would be— well, I thought it would be a great way to meet people that, that could potentially, like, refer us business. I thought it was more— I considered it networking at the time. I didn't realize it was like super networking and it actually got us customers. It was super acquisition, super networking, gave us that. You know, I never could have been a employee benefits salesperson and called and gotten in front of the president of Qualcomm?

Never.

Never.

You probably would have never sold your company for $3 million or whatever.

Never.

And you might have sold it for $30 grand, right?

Never would have happened. And but the, the radio show and today it's podcasts, it gives you— I call it like the super networking business card. It allows you to get in front of people that you couldn't get in front of otherwise. And that can create massive opportunity, whether the person you're interviewing becomes a patient, a client, a customer, or if it's maybe interviewing other doctor influencers. There's a lot of doctors who have very big podcasts that are now on Doctor Talks that we connect those doctors together. So, we have a lot of doctors who started a podcast, and within their first year, they're interviewing biggest names, the Mark Hyman's, the, the, the biggest names out there, because they have a podcast and because they kind of follow our systematic process of how do you build your podcast. And the, the fastest way to do that, by the way, is interview other doctors who have podcasts. Yes. And you do— we call them interview swaps. And so we've created this network of 1,700 functional medicine doctors. We're the world's largest network of functional medicine doctors. And so we, we've we bring everybody together.

You know, the— I, I didn't understand the power of media. Like I said, this was, um, we were— I was in southern New Jersey living outside of Atlantic City working at Marriott Seaview Golf Resort. I was an assistant golf professional. We had a director of instruction there by the name of Dennis Clark, and Dennis was just a really great guy, great instructor, knew a lot about just weird trivia, everything about golf. And he created a They're like, hey, let's do a golf show. And the worst name ever was called Let's Talk Golf.

Nice.

Actually, it was on Wednesday nights, not Sunday nights. It was on Wednesday nights at like 7 PM in southern New Jersey. And I would be the sometimes co-host.

Nice.

The amazing thing to me is my then wife and I would go out to dinner and people would come up to the table and go, I just love your show.

Yeah.

I'm like, wait, what?

Right.

You're Matt, right? I'm like, Matt Giugli, right? I'm like, yeah, that's close enough.

Close enough is good enough.

Close enough for government work, right? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, I listen, I watch the show all the time.

Yeah, I remember.

I like you better than that Mike guy that's on sometimes. Can you be on more? Like other people, I like Mike better. I'm like, what are you kidding me? Like, just out for dinner. It's the most fascinating thing in the world.

I remember the first time that happened to me when I was out. Yeah, I was out at dinner or something like that. And somebody walking by recognized my voice.

Yes, I've had that too.

From the radio show. They're like, wait, do you host a radio show? I was like, Wow, yeah, how did you know? Like, I recognize your voice. It's like, wow, that is amazing. I did not see that coming.

Uh, the same thing when I owned the erectile dysfunction clinic. So I did all the video, I did all the voiceovers, right? And I would be out to dinner with, again, then same wife, was the wife from Southern New Jersey. And I remember we're sitting at a table like this having dinner, and there's a couple next to us over here, and he— she looks up and she goes, it's you. And I'm like, I'm like, uh, okay. And she's like 70s, mid-70s, kind of got like the— not orange hair, but, you know, kind of the bad dye job. And he's over there, he goes— she goes, honey, it's him. And he looks and he goes— and he hears it, goes, it is you. And I'm like, who is me? And they go, you saved our marriage. She came over, she gave me a big hug. She goes, we have sex all the time now.

That's fantastic.

I'm like, awesome. You got video?

Yeah.

So, so that's my wife.

That's great.

My then wife was kind of like, oh my God, I can't believe you're doing this.

But it's—

it is one of the most powerful things in the world. I, I am fascinated by podcasting.

Yeah.

I'm fascinated by how one can control their own bit of media and make them— the 2 things that fascinate me: have a book, have a podcast. Yep. What are your like? What do you see over? Like, how do you? I mean, I know you see the power of it, but why do you think it is? Why do you think people?

Yeah, I think they're so fascinated. Well, the the connection, the long-form content stories, I think are really valuable and important. And whether you know most people think podcasting to be successful in a podcast, you have to have a million. Downloads or listeners or followers. You do not. You do not. I— and, you know, some of the most successful doctors who have podcasts have extremely— a small but perfect listening audience. And, you know, if you— depending on what you do and, and who you're— you know, a lot of doctors help other doctors, help other doctors grow their practice, or help other doctors with particular procedures and make money off of that. And they can sell a course or a program for $6,000. And they might, you know, let's say you can get 100 customers from your podcast. Your podcast maybe only has 200 listeners, right? That works great because people have the opportunity to listen to this long-form content and get really deep into the subject and build a connection with the host. Yeah. Build a connection with the interviewee. There's also something that's interesting about the interviewee is there will be a lot of people who might follow the guest. And if the— if you have trust with the guest, if as somebody in the audience, that trust gets conveyed to the host.

Yeah.

And trust transfer is incredibly valuable.

Oh, God. It's— I mean, we— so we've been, you know, we're in the middle— the time I'm recording this or we're recording this, we're getting ready to relaunch, rebrand the podcast. So we have the original podcast, the Practice Profit System. We have 100+ episodes. They're all short form. It's mostly me talking. Yeah, like maybe 90% of it. We haven't put a new episode out in over a year.

That's about to change.

Yeah, that's going to change big time. It's amazing to me how many downloads we still get. Yeah, every single Like, I was looking at the numbers the other day because we were talking to somebody about advertising on it, and they're like, well, how many downloads are you getting? And I looked at the numbers and I'm like, we're still getting like 800 to 1,000 downloads, and I don't promote it, right? I mean, it's the most fascinating thing in the world.

And it's probably your perfect customer who's listening. It's probably exactly who you need to be.

Oh, we have people that come up to the booth and be like, I've been listening to your podcast for 6 months. I'm like, who are you?

Right?

I'm like, how did you find out about it? Oh, a friend of a friend forwarded it to me and thought I'd like it, and I'm ready to— I'm ready to work with you.

Yeah. Huh? Yeah. When I would have— I would do webinars. I did maybe 300 webinars. I would do 3 webinars a week. I actually did that for years and years and years. But they would all live on my website and on Facebook as well. And I remember people would come up to me and say, I've been watching your webinars for years. I've been watching your content for years. I remember the first time that happened, I was like, Wow, that's amazing. And and they're now they're your perfect customer.

You ever get in somebody's car? They started up, and your voice is on their on their because they've been listening to your training.

That only happened once.

Yeah, I've had that happen a couple of times.

I'm like, like wow.

Yeah. And I'm such a stream of consciousness teacher. Like I'll have people come up to me at events going, "Hey, you did an audio like five years ago," and in that you said blah blah blah blah blah. Like what did you mean by that? I have to look at them go like, "I have no idea." Like you don't understand. Like I don't.

Yeah.

My prep is here. It's not like these things are scripted.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, with podcasts, there's a lot of ways for doctors to monetize podcasts. So it's not—

Yeah. So how would you? Because I think a lot of doctors, when I talk to people about one of our main ways that we tell people to grow their practice is to create content because, you know, you can do something once and you can use it 3, 4, 5 different ways, right? Podcast, video, right? You know, turn it into articles.

Exactly.

Webinar, any— however you want to do it, right? It can be consumable. But most of the doctors are like, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to do all of that. So how do you, how do you talk to these doctors who are traditionally analytical people that, like, how do you deal with that kind of roadblock with them of saying—

Sure. It's totally natural for Particularly doctors to not want to self-aggrandize. I don't want to be an influencer. You know, I just want to help people. First thing I tell them is, you know, the more influence you have, the more people you can help. I think that's important for them to hear and know and realize. Another thing is the reason part of the solution of Doctor Talks, I created Doctor Talks Connect, where the doctors can get together and interview one another, 'cause that is by far the easiest way to create content. So I remember 5 years ago, when I was just getting started with Doctor Talks, I put out a call to all of our doctors. I said, hey, create a signature talk. Like, so create a webinar, PowerPoint, create your signature talk, and I'll put it out on our platform. We get 11 million patient web visitors. I'll put it out on our platform. And it was like crickets. Nobody was turning anything in. And I said, why? Why is this?

They have no idea what the talk is.

Well, it's mostly because they— it was going to take them a long time and a lot of work to create this signature talk. And then I thought, well, what if we have another doctor interview these doctors? And so I can take the exact same doctor, the exact same topic, and in 5 minutes, they'll be ready to give that signature talk because it's an interview style. Because they're able to— they have all that information. We have all this information. information in our heads. And in, you know, in, in these podcast interviews, you're really just getting interviewed about your area of expertise. And that's what— you know this stuff off the top of your head. You do not need any special amount.

You don't have any notes in front of you right now.

There's no need, right? Because it's just what I already know. Same thing with the doctors. And it's fine if you want to brush up on a little something, but otherwise, like, No more than 5 minutes, right? Because you're talking about what you do every single day. And, you know, whether it's— whether you're a thyroid specialist or you do cancer or diabetes or longevity, you're— that's, that's your area of expertise. And by doing these interviews and creating this content, you can attract the kind of patients and customers and clients that you're looking for.

Is it really about the consumption on the patient, the prospective patient end, or is it Or is it more powerful just to have the podcast and say, I have one?

That's great. I think it really just depends on the goal of the, the host and the podcast. So it can be all of those things. So some, some, you know, what happens almost every time when I talk to doctors, always talking to hundreds of doctors, and I say, what's your goal for your podcast? And it's invariable. The first question is, well, I just want to get this information out there. And what they really mean is I want to educate the public on what I know, how I can help them.

Mm-hmm.

And then I say, okay, that's wonderful. What's— what else will it do for you? Like, well, oh, I guess it can grow my network of doctors because I can interview other doctors.

Yep.

And it'll grow my referral network. And it's great. You know, what else can it do for you? Well, I could also create content that I— so I don't have to answer the same question over and over and over again, and I can put that content on my website. Absolutely. What else can it do for you? Well, I guess it could help me with, new patient acquisition. Absolutely. It could probably help me get those high-end cash-paying clients that I'm looking for. You know, we always encourage if, if the goal is new patient acquisition, one great strategy is, hey, let's interview referral sources, patient referral sources. So there's a lot of podcasts where the only guests are Patient referral sources. Patient referral sources can come from a lot of different places. So some doctors will interview other practitioners, other healthcare, functional medicine healthcare practitioners, who refer them patients. Sometimes they get a lot of patients from a yoga instructor. Sometimes they get a lot of patients from their existing patients.

Yep, absolutely.

Sometimes they get a lot of patients from a gym or an aesthetics, you know, studio down the street. And that can actually be a fantastic podcast. So whether you're trying to, you know, attract new clients and patients locally, there's a great strategy for that by, you know, interviewing local referral sources. If your strategy is to— if you have national, you know, some people who have like health coaching businesses or, you know, cash pay businesses where they can work nationally, you can interview doctors all over the place. And by interviewing other doctors, you have a chance to get in front of their patients. And it's, you know, it's, you can supercharge that if they have their own podcast and you can do interview swaps.

So I've done a couple, as we've relaunched, I've done some interviews with people where we've done home and homes, right?

Home and homes.

Home and homes. You come on my podcast.

Oh yeah, yeah. We call 'em interview swaps.

Yeah, okay. I think mine's better, but that's okay.

Whatever.

We'll let that slide. So it's been amazing. We've had— I've done a couple of those and it's just so fascinating to me how we get leads off of that. Just—

Yeah.

I mean, I've done probably 5 of them in the last 5 months and theirs, theirs are out, right? Ours are not yet. And it's just to me, it's like the bar has been lowered. It's so easy today to be able to take a webinar, turn that into a book, or take a webinar and do a couple of different webinars and create those first things on a podcast. What, what most people don't realize, and this is what I did, is my first 100+ episodes were just me talking.

Yeah.

Now I understand I've got a different gift than mo— than most. Some people can't do that.

Yeah, that, that is hard for sure.

But it's, it really is. It's amazing to me.

Yeah. On that note, you know, a lot of people think podcasts or even like a YouTube channel, well, aren't I just going to be talking by myself? And I tell people again, that's hard. That is hard to do. There are some people who can do it. Great. If you can, fantastic. But the interviews are very, very easy, whether you're the guest or the host. And so like our system on Doctor Talks now, what we've done is, you know, I noticed Doctors by default, usually on their very first interview, they might spend an hour or 2 or 3 preparing for their interview. And I say, that's, that's awesome.

That's great.

Fantastic. Not sustainable. But here's another way to do it. Let's let your guests fill out a speaker form and they say, here's my, my signature talk. Here's my talk title. Here's the 10 questions I want you to ask me. And they fill out that form. They do it electronically with a click and Then they schedule on the doctor's host calendar with another click. And then the host can spend 5 minutes before the episode, you know, reading, like, let's take a look at their, let's look at their profile, look at their website, read the headline, read the questions, and I'm prepared.

Yep.

And I'm now fully prepared. And so, you know, all of our doctors who have been doing it for, Hosting their podcast for over 200 episodes or 100 episodes. They've been doing it for two years. That's how they do their podcast. They don't spend more than five minutes in preparation, and we we put all that information in a tight format to make it that easy. So it should be that easy.

Yeah, the the thing that has impressed me being a client of yours is how detailed everything is.

Oh, awesome!

And I would expect nothing less from you. Well, we've known each other what five years, six years, right?

Right.

But mostly from being at events and just kind of trade shows. Yeah, and there's not a lot of people like you and I in the in the medical industry.

Right.

I'm curious about your viewpoint on a couple of things as it relates to the medical industry. Why do you think the medical industry is in such disarray here in the States?

I mean, there's so many factors from laws, insurance, you know, having been in the insurance industry.

Yeah, you have a very unique perspective.

Yeah. Your dad's Dad's a doctor.

Doctor.

So seeing that— Brother had a PhD. Mm-hmm.

Right?

And then being in the insurance business, employee benefits business for a decade, I remember one of the, one of our differentiators when I was in the employee benefits business is we would do corporate wellness programs. And our whole goal was to help the companies save money on insurance. It never worked. It never worked. It never worked because the insurance companies— it doesn't matter if you have, like, the best risk profile, like the lowest risk, meaning the highest profit for the insurance company. They're not giving you a discount.

They don't have to.

They don't have to. And there's nothing you can do to get it.

There's no motivation for them.

Yeah. So we, you know—

They really don't save money. They actually lose it to do this model.

Yeah, it's not— managed care, it's managed price.

Right.

Yeah. And so anyway, that system is, you know, you can't beat it. You can't fight it. You can't win. And, you know, that plus all of the laws and all of the— I always felt that the doctors are just squeezed by every direction.

Everyone makes money on their license except for them.

Except for the doctors who are And so that's why, you know, I started Doctor Talks with, with 2 missions. The first one is I want to help a billion people suffering from chronic illness and disease get the information they need directly from the source.

Yep.

The flip side to that same coin is we're democratizing the creator economy for doctors. So we're helping doctors make money off of your content and your knowledge, your information, so that you can share it. And we want you to just get paid directly. Nobody's got their hand in your pocket. That's the idea. That's the goal. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I— and if people that listen to this on a regular basis, I talk about this in just about every show. I am stunned. I'm flabbergasted at how doctors have been fucked.

Oh, like it's forever. Every way.

In chapter 3 of my book that's coming out in February, I start the chapter with talking about sharecropping.

Tell me, what does that mean?

So the modern medical plantation. So when the Civil War ended in the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the war and people— Union Army comes in, comes into the plantations and they tell all the slaves, you're free. What did they do? They stayed. Okay. So the owners come back and they're like, well, I can't pay you, but I can give you 40 acres and I'll, I'll put you up in business. So, you know, you can have the house, you can You can have a house to live in, buy your feed from the company store, buy your plows, buy your mules, buy your food. And at the end of the year, you pick the cotton. At the end of the year, we'll divvy up what's left. You know, I'll deduct what you've given me. Well, guess what? They always lost money.

Right.

So they were— it was another form of slavery. But the meanwhile, the owner, landowner, was selling the utensils at twice the markup. And they were saying the price of cotton was lower than it actually was. And they were And that's what's happening to the doctors. It wasn't— in the book, I tell the story about this sharecropper that he didn't get free until he got educated. And when he learned how to read and write and keep his own math, and then he went to the owner and said, you're wrong, I made $42.

Right.

And I think of that in terms of the doctor today. You know, they're purposely kept in the dark.

Totally.

Right? They have zero— I mean, one, no nutrition education. In medical schools until the changes that have happened in the last couple of months, and they get zero business classes.

Right.

It's— I think it's purposely designed to keep them on the plantation.

Yeah. Amazing. Isn't it?

It's disgusting.

Yeah. Yeah. So I— yeah, I wanted to help the doctors again from their knowledge, help themselves and be able to, again, you know, make money and make a profit.

How important is it for the health of the country?

I think it's critical. And yeah, I mean, that's— well, I mean, all of the— I believe that the doctors are the corner of healthcare in the world.

Yes.

And I think, again, getting the information directly from the doctor directly to the patient, client, or customer is what's critical. And there's just— there's way too much Intermediary noise that is blocking that. And that's, you know, that's again why I'm trying to get people— I'm trying to amplify the voices of the doctors so that they can get heard more. They can get their information directly to the patients because in the managed care world or the managed price world, that's where they've only, you know, they've got 15 minutes to see a patient, but it's really only 7. And, you know, what can you get done in 7 minutes? Yeah, you can't.

During high school, you can have sex.

That's about it.

Right. Maybe like 3 and a half.

Right, right. But you can't, you know, you can't deliver the care. And so when they have a chance to actually spend time with the patient, when— and they want to spend the time with the patient, they want to help them with their lifestyle changes, they want to help them with, you know, their nutrition advice and find the root cause and make those actual changes. And that happens. I find that that can happen when they can spend the time to do that, when they can get their voices. And you can amplify that with technology today through podcasts. And I'll tell you about our AI tool and how we're doing that as well.

Yeah, we'll dip into that in a second. What does your dad think about all this? Do you, do you talk to him much about this? I mean, how long has he been retired?

You said he's been retired for about 10 years. Okay. Yeah, no, I mean, he thinks it's fantastic. He loves that Mm-hmm. I'm helping doctors and helping doctors get connected directly to the patients. And again, you know, this all started when, you know, after losing my brother, I realized that while I was spending time in Costa Rica, every time I would go to Costa Rica, I would get healthier. I would lose weight, I would feel better. And I looked at, well, why is this? As because my lifestyle changes. And, you know, living in my corporate grind world, drinking too much coffee, drinking too much alcohol, just eating too much crap, not getting a workout in, you know, all the, all the lifestyle stuff that, you know, would cause me to go to the doctor. Like, that's where if we can have the doctor connected directly to the patient and consumer, they can help motivate the patient and consumer to make those changes that they really need to make and deliver the care that they really need.

How badly do the patients want this? When you're doing these, like, what do you hear from the patients when you do these?

Well, I don't have a lot of connection to the patient. I was going to say, do they make comments or post reviews? Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, on our summits and podcasts, I see a lot of reviews. The title is, you saved my life, and the you is the doctor, not—

Right. I understand.

Yes.

No, tangentially.

Yeah, right, right, right.

I was going to give you saving their life if you wanted it.

Thank you.

Like, I mean, that's, I'm that, I'm that kind of guy.

I'll pass that along to the host.

Okay, good.

The doctors that we help. But yeah, so I see that a lot where we see the reviews of like, you know, Dr. So-and-so, thank you for, thank you for hosting this podcast. Thank you for hosting the summit and, and being a part of this. I learned so much and I'm, you know, I made these, these tangible changes to my lifestyle. I, you know, I'm, I'm now getting off of my medication. I'm now, you know, reversing my symptoms and my diseases. And that's all You know, from the knowledge of the doctor. And I, you know, I'm just glad that we were able to amplify that a little bit and that the doctor can get a benefit out of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is the thing that fascinates me. So when we talk with doctors, it's interesting. We, you know, we go through these runs, right? We're like, we're at an event, we get a bunch of leads, we do a bunch of conversations. And it's the most— the most consistent thing we hear is that my patients won't pay. Right? And the thing that I always have to explain to the doctors is, you know how pissed off you are with American healthcare?

Yeah.

I want you to multiply that by at least 5. That's how pissed off the patient is.

Oh yeah.

The doctor's looking at it from their myopic viewpoint of like, nobody understands me. The patient is looking at it from the standpoint of nobody understands me.

Right.

And it's fascinating when, When the light bulb goes on for people, I don't care if it's patients and doctors, I don't care, like the light bulb that went on with you with Facebook, right, in 2009. When that light bulb goes on and you can see that people are like, oh, wait a second, I don't have to suffer the way I've been suffering. I actually can have control. It's a really powerful feeling.

Oh, it's huge.

Like, I mean, I know you don't have interaction with the patients. What's the interaction like with the doctors when they start to really feel like their voice is being heard for the first time?

I mean, it's incredibly empowering. Yeah. And, uh, and, and that's a virtuous cycle. So, you know, not only is it empowering, it can lead to, you know, more, more opportunities. It leads to more connections with other empowered doctors, other doctors who have become influencers because their voices been carried out and amplified. It can turn into endorsements and honorariums. It can— so it can turn into more money. It can turn into helping more patients and, you know, really helping them make their, make their mark and get paid and get rewarded for all of that work and knowledge and effort and helping more people than they have, than they've ever been able to help before.

Yeah.

Super empowering.

How would you fix American healthcare? Oh God.

I'm serious.

I mean, look, you and I have interesting—

I am not qualified to fix American healthcare.

You and I have like a very unique perspective, right? Like we're both entrepreneurs. We see constraints, we see opportunities, right? We wouldn't be in this field if we didn't see that. And you probably have more knowledge about being a doctor than I do, given the fact that you heard medical terms growing up, like from your father. But how would you fix American healthcare today?

Well, I was listening to something recently about, in Japan how healthy and not overweight Japanese children are.

Amazing, isn't it?

It seems like that's because from a very early age, they employ nutritionists at the schools. The schools, they don't have hyper-processed foods. They don't have sweets.

They don't let them buy sodas with their lunch money?

Don't let them buy sodas or pizza or anything like that. And, and they pay this nutritionist well. So it's a real job. And they have to have, you know, it's like 3 years of extra nutrition education. And so it starts early, you know, it starts really from the beginning. And, you know, again, like, how do you fix American healthcare? Well, that's, that's a big loaded question.

So what would be 3 things that you would put in place? What would 3— what would— if you had— if you only had 3 things that you could fix in American healthcare, how would— what would you do?

Yeah, sure. I guess, you know, I think changing the incentive structure for nutrition. So like right now, you know, the lowest cost per calorie is all hyperprocessed foods. So the hyperprocessed foods, and a lot of them are subsidized in many different ways, wouldn't it be great if we could subsidize whole foods?

Absolutely.

Plant-based whole foods and, you know, all the other things that are gonna be healthy for us to consume. And similarly, then the incentive structure for the doctors to keep people well. Now, this is not the doctor's fault, of course, but it was— if, if, uh, you know, we could change the system where the doctors could be paid to keep people well, because that's what they want to do anyway, I mean, that would be amazing. So I really think the changing the incentive structure and, you know, getting the insurance companies out of the way and cutting them out instead of cutting the doctors out, because—

How do you cut the insurance companies out?

I mean, well, When we were in—

look, I understand this is all hypothetical. I know you're not running for political office, right?

When, when we were in the employee benefits business, it was called self-insurance. So, you know, what we would do in for companies and, you know, small companies could not do this. They had to be a large enough size, like at least 500 employees, where we could start to do self-insurance. So instead of having a fully insured plan, they would have a partially self-funded plan. So, you know, if you right now, if they have a fully insured plan, you go into the hospital, 100% of it's covered, or they might have some out-of-pocket expenses. In a partial self-insurance, it's not 100% covered.

Right.

It's like 80% covered. And they have something called stopgap insurance. But so, so you don't have a problem if you have these big claims, like a million-dollar claim, that's still protected. It's the— no, lots of, lots of like small to medium claims that, that get you.

Yep.

And so what do you do about those? Well, then you can put in preventative wellness programs and financially incentivize employees to eat right, exercise.

And does that work?

It didn't. No, it didn't.

So how do you get that to work? Because, well, I mean, like, I stopped, you know, I got up early this morning, drove down from L.A. I had a very, like, I had like, you know, just a little bit to eat before I left. So I wanted to get something to eat and I just stopped at the mini mart.

Yeah.

Hoping I can find something.

Yeah. It's like there's maybe an apple.

Even the frickin' peanuts, you look at it. Right. Yeah.

Peanuts or an apple or a banana.

But you look at the ingredients in the back of the peanut bag, like salt and, you know, seed oil on it to make it look shiny.

Right.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's a massive uphill battle for people. How do you, how do you incentivize a patient? I mean, most patients don't— most citizens don't even know, right, how bad everything is that they're putting into their system.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, again, you know, I really think education, hopefully starting at an early age, at an early age, makes the biggest difference. Yeah. In the, in the corporate wellness programs, what we found, again, after doing that for a decade, is the corporations that would put in Real lasting wellness programs, the CEO always ran triathlons every single time.

Really?

Every single time. Yeah. And so what we found—

I have mad respect for those people. I couldn't.

Yeah.

I hate running. I'll swim, I'll bike. Can't fucking stand running.

But it— so, and, and the, you know, the lesson from that was it had to come— the, the program had to come from the top. It had to come from the very top. And whenever we would try to put in a, a corporate wellness program, at a company where it was not the CEO was the champion, it wouldn't work. It would last, you know, it would always be superficial and it would last maybe—

It'd be like the bald guy selling hair restoration, right?

Yeah, it would always last a year. And, you know, even if the, like, the VP of HR was super gung-ho about it, if it wasn't supported by the CEO, it wouldn't last. But when it was, then actually it made an impact. We saw people would actually make changes and, you know, So again, it really unfortunately wasn't realistic for the vast majority of companies, but that select few where they really championed it, they took it seriously, they pushed it in it being lifestyle changes for the employees. So they would actually subsidize healthy food. They would bring in healthy lunches, a salad bar. They would have like fitness challenges every month, you know, reward people. We were And I think we weren't allowed to do this, but what we tried to do is to give people who would exercise and eat right a lower premium. So allow them to save money on their health insurance.

Interesting. Would it work?

Well, there was laws against it. Like, you could—

Seriously?

Well, because it could, you could legitimately unfairly penalize a person you know, a sick employee who couldn't participate. And it was very complicated.

Define sick.

Well, there was—

Right.

There was a lot of—

Self-induced?

There was a lot of challenges with that. But, you know, again, that goes back to the incentive structure. The incentive structure of the system isn't to keep people well, it's to keep people sick.

Well, the insurance companies too make— they own 11 different companies or 9 different companies. I mean, they own the pharmacy benefit managers, which is crazy. They make more money on that, on the annuity of the statins and the diabetes medication than they do in the health insurance. premiums.

Oh yeah.

But what I think, I think the average American is just not the average. I would say the educated American is just starting to begin to understand what the pharmacy benefit manager is, right? How that has been completely corrupted.

Right. It's horrible.

It's, it's, I mean, they own now the health insurance companies, the venture capitalists, you know, went and bought a bunch of clinics and things like that. Well, they are like, oh, we can negotiate better rates with the health insurance companies. They lowered their rates and slowed their payment time that a bunch of groups now have gone bankrupt or leave. And so who's buying them? The health insurance companies. They're going to own the whole goddamn thing when it's all said and done.

I'm sure. I mean, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And, you know, like, I— of all the doctors that I ever grew up with knowing, they want— they all know to, you know, prescribe lifestyle changes. But the patients, you know, only 2% of them would actually make real long-lasting change in their lifestyle. And again, that's because of the system. The doctors couldn't spend the time really educating people and motivating people to make those changes, and they would just take the pill instead. So that's not the doctor's fault. The doctors tried hard. They were just, you know, it was just a losing battle.

Yeah.

And so now, I think when doctors can take their own control, they can own their own practice, they can set their own pricing, and they can educate their people, they could spend more time, that's when they can make a bigger difference in their audience.

I was listening to a podcast, I can't remember which one, and they were talking about, they were getting a bill passed in Texas. So they just passed a really reformative bill in Texas with regards to healthcare. I don't know all the particulars, but basically, they were really close to getting it through. And then all of a sudden, like, all the lobbyists descended upon Austin for all the food interests and pharmaceutical interests and health insurance, all the interests to like— this thing was going to fly under the radar and get passed. And they're like, oh, we got to stop this.

You got to squash it.

And so they're in committee and they said the American Heart Association is fighting this bill that will improve the quality of the food at the nutrition level, get rid of sodas on state welfare, like all these things. And they said they send this representative of the American Heart Association, and he goes, the guy's like 70 pounds overweight. Yeah, it's totally inflamed, right? And he's like, the guy's got to be type 2 diabetic. And he's sitting there going, oh, we gotta— I mean, you know, there's no problem with the health in America. Like, we're doing great. And he's I'm like, he goes, if that wasn't like the thing where you just were like, what is wrong with our system? He goes, I don't— he goes, I wish I had like— he goes, I wish I could find— I'm sure I can find the recording. But he goes, I wish the American people could see this. Here's this guy who's clearly not healthy, right? He's like, I was expecting him to pull out like a pack of cigarettes and fire one up, you know, and have a— and eat like a, you know, eat a donut or something like that, right?

Right.

But yeah, the healthcare— healthcare in America, the thing that blows my mind is We spend almost 3x more than the other country.

Oh, more than that, right?

And we have the 50th worst outcome.

Oh, yeah.

And yet we're trying to make changes and people are fighting it.

Yeah.

I mean, doesn't that blow your mind?

Yeah, well, the system is for sure fighting it, absolutely, and that's why I'm fighting for the doctors and want them to be the winners here.

How does it make you feel like when you see a doctor like get free? Yeah, no, mentally, emotionally.

Yeah. When, when I talk to the doctors and they see the feedback from their podcast or their summit, you know, on online reviews saying, oh, you saved my life and that's amazing. And then they can start to build their business up and they can get free from the, you know, the current system that they're in, the grind. That's when it feels amazing, when they're, they're gonna be able to achieve that freedom and help more people and make more money. That's, that's what I— What's the best thing you've heard from one of your doctors?

What do they say to you?

Oh gosh, I'll, I'll have to think about that.

The one where you went home to the wife and you're like, baby, you won't believe what I just heard, what I was told today.

I can't think of one specific, but I know that, you know, that happens consistently where the doctors are, you know, we look at the reviews weekly from our summits and our podcast hosts. And, you know, weekly we see those patients' testimonials and success stories, and the doctors get that feedback and they go, oh yeah, that's why I do this. Yeah. Yeah.

I think the best I was at dinner with a client of mine and his wife, and she reached across the table. She grabbed my hand and she goes, thank you for giving me my— giving me my husband back.

Oh, nice.

He said, we're empty nesters. She goes, we've been together, whatever, 30-plus years.

Right?

And she goes, I never thought I'd get him back because he was an orthopedic surgeon. Yeah. And he was always gone, right? Working 14, 16 hours a day. She goes, we actually have time to, like, Watch a movie together.

Yeah.

And he doesn't fall asleep.

Yeah.

You're welcome. I'm glad it's working out.

That's great.

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, to me, American healthcare is, is, uh, is a train wreck.

Unfortunately, it is.

So what are your thoughts on what's going on in Washington and what they're trying to do from either, uh, uh, fixing FDA or Kennedy or HHS? What are some of your thoughts? What are your observations on some of that?

I don't spend a lot of time looking at that. I mean, again, mostly it's really just focused on what can our doctors do for their, for their patients, clients, and, you know, consumers that they're helping. So I'm not, not so much in the—

Don't pay a lot of attention.

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to that particular space. It's really—

You're a pretty single-minded guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a good thing.

It's a good thing. Yeah. How's AI gonna change all of this?

Oh my gosh. So I just read a stat yesterday that healthcare is pushing AI 7 times faster. They're implementing AI 7 times faster than other industries on average. So I think AI is going to, I think it's gonna change everything. I think it's gonna, uh, I think for, for the better.

Like, wait, and when you say everything, gimme an example of that.

Like, well, So I think the biggest thing that I've heard recently is a radiologist plus AI, and this is not AI replacing a radiologist, it's a radiologist plus AI, was able to achieve like something like 98 or 99% accuracy in like not a 10th of its time, 50th of the time.

Really?

Yeah. Because the, again, it's not, Replacing the radiologist, it's enhancing the radiologist. So instead of a radiologist looking at X-ray after X-ray after X-ray, the AI does the first initial scan, and that accuracy is something like 80 to 90%. And then it gives— but the— it's that, it's that last percent, it's that last 10% that, that's where the human has all the value and creates all the value. And so it's the doctor being able to identify that last 10% that is creating all the value there.

Okay.

And so the doctor will be able to accurately go over, you know, 10 times the number of charts that they would have otherwise. And there's so many, you know, think about all the administration in healthcare that can be automated. you know, done much faster and more accurately by AI. I mean, just from dictating notes to, you know, having it dictate notes and recommend outcomes and let the doctor just, you know, click a button and select the particular, you know, whether whatever they're going to be recommending to the patient. That's amazing. What we're doing. So I've spent the last 18 months building our AI tool. for Doctor Talks. And so specifically for doctors that do podcasts and interviews, whether you're a guest or a host. And what we did is we've got 7,500 doctor-to-doctor interviews right now on Doctor Talks. So we've—

That's amazing.

We've taken all the transcripts, and we built an AI agent that reads all the transcripts and allows the patients to now ask questions of the interviews. And so they can ask questions of. So if you're a doctor and you're interviewing somebody on cancer or diabetes or longevity, whether you're a guest or a host, so we can now read the transcripts. AI reads the transcripts. We have a connection with ChatGPT and allows.

Love chat.

Yeah, I love it. It's amazing. And it allows greatest therapist ever. Yes, it is.

It's a great therapist.

It is. We allow it to allow the the patient and the audience to ask. Questions of the interview. And what it does is it'll, it'll pull up like, hey, here's, here's 4 or 5 questions that you might want to ask that you might find interesting from this interview. 90% of the people who use this tool select one of those questions, but you can also just type in your own question. So let's say it's an interview on cancer, breast cancer. You can type in your question about breast cancer or select from the dropdown. And what it does is it'll read the whole transcript, interact with ChatGPT, it'll It'll answer the question in plain English with ChatGPT, and then it'll also connect to the video and timestamp the video where that context of the question would get answered. And so, you just, with one click, you can go right to the section of the video. So, let's say your interview, podcast interview, is 47 minutes long. It might have the perfect title and the great piece of information for the patient or audience or consumer who wants to listen to that that podcast, but they look and they see it's, oh, it's 47 minutes long. I'm not going to push play right now. I'll watch it later. And later never comes. They never watch it. But now that same person with our Dr. Talks AI tool can click and get instant gratification, whether it's this 47-minute video. At 27 minutes and 12 seconds, that's where your question gets answered.

Here it is, yeah.

So what they do is they get instant gratification. It gives them the exact little bit, clip that they need to see instantly. And so we've actually tested this with 2 cohorts of 150 customers each. And what we found was the engagement rose by 10x. They would watch 10 times more of the doctor's podcasts and content than without that tool, because they would get that instant gratification. And then what would they do? They would watch the rest of the video or watch more videos and then click and ask more questions. So now when we have a doctor who hosts a podcast, they might have 50 or 100 videos on Doctor Talks. Now people can ask questions of all of their content. So the AI tool can say, just Dr. Smith. It's the context of just Dr. Smith. It's not the 1,700 doctors on Doctor Talks.

Right.

It's just Dr. Smith and it's just your content. So whatever you talk about is what's gonna be in the AI tool. And if somebody asks off-the-wall question, it will just say there's no context for that question. And so now that we've been, we've had this, it took me 18 months to build this, cost me a quarter million bucks. I've got a whole team.

So this wasn't you like on Saturday in your underwear watching like F1 racing?

I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag. So this is—

I was gonna give you a lot of kudos and credit. Wow, that's pretty freaking impressive, bro. Smart dude.

I have a team of 30 employees and I've got a whole software development team who are building all these tools. And so what they've—

what they—

the doctors have said, hey, this chat widget, this is amazing, I want it on my website. Because a lot of— because of demand, I said, okay, I'll build it. And now we're— next month we're about to release Our AI SaaS product for doctors, and so what it's going to do is doctors will be able to put it on their website. So just think of like a little chatbot, little chat widget. Yep. It'll read all the content on your website. So all of your blog posts, all of your content. If you have video content, podcasts, you can upload your your videos. It'll read. It'll create the transcripts, read the transcripts, and it'll let your patients, clients, and customers ask. Questions of your content on your website. And again, the result of what we've seen so far is the patient will spend 10 times more time on your website as a result of this tool. Well, what does that do for you? It results in more money, more revenue, more, more patients signing up, whether it's signing up for that free consult, that $97 consult, or whether it's buying their, your supplements or Signing up for the big, you know, the big pricey service that you offer. So it should dramatically increase sales.

Well, the interesting thing is we know that the patients stalk the doctor. Yeah, we know this for a fact because there are— the one thing that does work from paid advertising is driving people to a webinar. That is one of the models that actually works. But paid ads on Facebook or Google, not all that great. Those are the lowest life form of customers. What we do know is that we can, when we talk to them, when the doctors talk to their patients, they'll be like, yeah, doc, I've been following your stuff for like 6 months. This is interesting because if they're creating the content and they're doing what you're discussing, creating podcasts, then using that multiple different ways, we have video going today. Then that patient in private can search and get that know, like, and trust level even higher with that doctor before they walk in.

Right.

I mean, this is a really powerful tool if the doctor is doing their work.

Right, right. Yeah, it's huge. And so that's again with the Doctor Talks, my idea for the system, whether you want to be a guest or a host, you get to create a lot of content. You can then put that content on your website. And now with AI, it can really help the patient client or customer get the very specific answer that they're looking for.

Yeah.

And that's what's going to convert them, you know, from a browser to a patient, client, or customer.

Right.

That's what's going to make the revenue.

Yeah, it's— I mean, the leveraging— I find AI one of the— to be one of the most fascinating tools.

It's incredible.

I mean, we— with a lot of the changes that I've made in my life over the last year from a personal standpoint and a business structure, it literally has acted like a therapist.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, you know, I'll take transcripts from like meditation practices or journeys that we've been on, pump that in. It gives us— because you don't— it's a 4-hour session, you don't remember, you know, it's hard to remember everything. You'll get this outline and then it will help develop like journal prompts and ways for you to then start to implement that. Like, yeah, the changes that I have made and my team have made In their personal stuff, you couldn't get that done in 10 years of talk therapy.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, what—

and if you think about the speed with which a patient can get— learn about you, different modalities, different protocols. Yes. It compresses the whole learning time.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I mean, and for the doctors listening out there, what But, you know, if you have team members, well, like one of the things we've done is we financially incentivize our team members to use AI to help them with their jobs.

Really?

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Really? Tell me about that.

Oh yeah. Yeah. So yeah, again, we've got 30 employees. All we do is produce these podcasts, summits, and shows. And there's a tremendous amount of manual labor in producing, you know, I bet.

Yeah. I mean, all this, I know you've got, you've got 13 episodes you guys are editing for me right now. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm assuming you're using AI somehow, some way.

Well, yeah, as much as we can. And where there, there's so many parts of our process that we've found that we've been able to improve with AI. And so I incentivize my team members to say, hey, we'll pay you, you'll get a bonus. And I don't care, I'll pay, I'll pay you a bonus every single week if you're always finding ways to make your job more efficient with AI, better, more accurate, faster, more efficient, better outcomes, better results. And we absolutely have become more efficient and more profitable as a result of empowering our employees to embrace AI.

How do you incentivize them? How do you—

So initially it's just like, And, and, you know, we have a lot of people all around the world, so whether they're in Philippines or whatever, initially it's like, hey, if you do anything with AI, I'm gonna give you a $50 bonus. And we—

That's a lot of money to somebody in the Philippines.

Yeah, yeah, it can. Yeah, it, it can be. And they can, they can earn that consistently and regularly. If you can do something with AI that can save us thousands of dollars, I might give you a $1,000 bonus. And what I've discovered is that our employees have become a lot more proactive They've become, it seems smarter. It seems like, you know, certainly more efficient, better at their jobs, you know, more proactive. And the stuff that they're coming to me with has been blowing my mind. I mean, people who are—

Can you give an example?

Yeah. So people who aren't programmers, I mean, so we've got spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets and very complicated, you know, with 7,500 episodes. And so we found one of our, one of our podcast managers who is not a programmer at all. She's a podcast manager. Asked ChatGPT, hey, how do I get, you know, every time we publish a podcast, we need to go out and get the link for iTunes and, you know, uh, uh, uh, Spotify and all the different locations. We've gotta do this. You know, hundreds of times a week. So it's multiple times a day and it creates a lot of effort. So she goes and asks ChatGPT, how do I create an automation for this? And ChatGPT just went and said, here's how you do it.

Wow.

And here's the steps. And, and there's, there's tools inside of the spreadsheet that can allow you to link other programs and create these automations and systems for you. She didn't program anything. She copied and pasted exactly what ChatGPT told her to do. And now, I mean, it saves 15 hours a week.

Wow.

Just that one thing.

Wow.

The levels, though, are of like, we're rebuilding the entire website. And this is a website that's a legacy site that's, you know, been 5 years. We've got—

You don't want to break a bunch of stuff.

100,000 pages. There's 80,000 customers. I mean, there's— this is complex. And so to rebuild it is You know, should have taken a year and a half, probably cost $180,000.

By the time you get it done, it's gonna be outdated. Got it.

By the time you get it done, it's gonna be outdated. So our team is able to rebuild it. So there's 2 tools that we're using. One's called v0. It's a company called Vercel and v0, and it's an AI tool that will design and build your website. And so now we can take an 18-month, $200,000 project Compress it down to 6 months and do it for maybe $60 grand.

Wouldn't you hate to own a graphic design company today? Well, yeah, you know, and a website design company. I was talking to somebody the other day, like, yeah, I'm starting a website design company. I'm like, what are you doing?

Why? Yeah.

And so, you know, we rebuilt our site in the span of like 2 months.

Yeah.

And, and so, yeah, it wasn't even— it took 2 months because, like, you know, the guy had other work to do for some other clients. Yeah, I had him like 10 hours a week or something. Yeah.

And there was, there was other Companies and contractors that we used to pay for our UI/UX, our, you know, user experience, user design, which that's the highest value way to design your website is to make sure it's usable and people will click and purchase and so on. And it's an expensive, slow process. Well, it used to be. Now it's a much, much faster process. And so we can create design that the AI designs the page. We give it our color palette, we give it our fonts, we give it our, you know, here's our, here's our graphics package. You only have to create that once and give it to it once. And then it knows, okay, your design is gonna look like this. So I just, I just asked them the other day, hey, I need a new page that connects our hosts and guests automatically with AI. They're like, okay, gotcha. You know, it's designed in a day. We tweak it a few things. It's launched in, in days.

Yeah.

Where that same activity would've taken in like 4 weeks.

I will routinely— we have like ideas of like what we're going to be teaching in our weekly calls and things like that, or when we do our masterminds. Um, I routinely give it, here's a rough outline of what, what I want, here's the topic I want, I want, you know, here, you know, upload this document or whatever, and keep it in the theme of Mavericks and our manifesto and all this. And it'll give me in the span of minutes Maybe if I play with it a little bit, maybe 20 minutes, 85 to 90% of what— and I'm like, okay, I just need to make some changes, put this in different language a little bit or move this here and there. It's the most fascinating thing. My content production has gotten so much better. My speaking has gotten so much better because I can take, hey, I'm getting, we're getting these sets of questions in the site on a regular basis about these topics. Tell, like, what's going on? Like, basically what's going on here?

Right? Right.

I mean, it's kicked out 45-minute presentations for me, talking points.

It's amazing.

Like five minutes before I go on.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Okay, well, and then the clients are like, "That was amazing." Yeah. I'm like, thanks. Because I can, like you, I can go off the cuff, right? Like I've been doing this long enough. Like I've done this ten years. I've been in marketing and entrepreneurship for twenty-five.

Yeah.

Like I can, you know, you can wake me up from a dead sleep. Hey, coma! Hey, you're on stage in two minutes.

I'm like, great.

What do you?

What do you want? Yeah. What do they want? Hand me a coffee. So I got this.

Yeah, I got this. It's not a problem. All right, so how do people find out about you? How do they get signed up with Dr. Talks? Let's talk a little bit about that.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, so drtalks.com, that's D-R-T-A-L-K-S.com/connect. And that's where you can sign up, whether you, it doesn't matter if you've never been on a podcast before or if you're aspiring to be a host or a guest, you can sign up as a guest for free. It's free for doctors to guest on our Dr. Talks podcast. If you, so if you sign up there, you'll create a profile and we'll match you with other doctor hosts.

Okay.

And so you can get interviewed and you'll fill out, remember when you're gonna get interviewed, you'll fill out the topic and the questions. So it's really easy. You're gonna know exactly what the questions are that you're gonna be asked and on that interview, it's really a conversation between 2 doctors. if there's any fear or hesitation, just try it. Just go for it, because it's gonna be way easier than you think, and the feedback that I consistently get from the doctors, whether they're guesting or hosting, is, that was way more fun than I thought it would be. Way more fun than I thought it would be.

It's a lot of fun.

It's a lot of fun, and you should end up getting some traffic leads and sales, and growing your visibility, growing your brand, Which, you know, that's what I want for you. I want the ability for you to be able to make money off of your knowledge, your information, your content, help more people get paid for it.

Beautiful.

Yeah, drtalks.com/connect.

Great, and then if they want to find out about something more advanced where you help, like what you're doing with me and some of the other doc— a lot of your other doctors of producing the show and all of that, they can sign up for an additional conversation.

Yeah, they can sign up for a call with me I think that's on the same page, and we can— we'll put that in the show notes.

Great. Beautiful. Yeah. Do you know anybody that can put that in the show notes? For those of you that don't know, Brett does the production of this. So I had to drive 2 hours to come see him because I was in LA.

That was very kind of you.

Again, I'm gonna hold that against you.

You do realize that, right? I unfortunately realize that.

Yeah, it's not— it's not like I'm, you know, it's not like I'm connected or anything, right? Beautiful, all right, and you're gonna be at A4M, right?

I'm gonna be at A4M. So I started going to A4M in 2009. So I've been going for a long time.

Is that when they had 500 people versus 5,000?

Right, right, 7,000 now, I think. And so Doctor Talks hosts a big party at A4M. I think we had 200 doctors there last time. So if you're gonna be attending—

Don't show up late. I showed up late one year.

Yeah, don't show up late.

Yeah, 'cause there was no food and no booze left.

You'll miss it. But yeah, we'd love to have you at our party. We'd love to have any of the audience at our party, and it will introduce you to all of the other influencers, speakers, guests, hosts, and it's a great, great way to network and meet all the other doctors.

And I'll be there doing interviews.

That's great.

I've got like 2 or 3 of them booked already.

Fantastic.

Yeah, why not, man? I mean, everybody's gotta be there, so.

Fantastic.

There you go. Well, Bret, thanks for the time, brother.

My pleasure.

Thank you. Appreciate you.

And thank you for everything you do.

All right.

Thank you.

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