Left Of Greg 064 FEAR Part 2

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Alright, Dr. Regan Anderson, thank you so much for coming on and joining us today. It's a pleasure having you. I think it's an important time to have a medical professional on The Human Behavior Podcast, so it's not just coming from the human behaviors perspective of me and Greg myself. So first off, thanks for coming on. Go ahead and kind of jump in and give us a little bit about your medical background and then kind of about the coronavirus and what we need to fear a little bit, I guess. But you know, just for those of you just tuning in to this episode, this will be kind of like the second episode in the piece on fear. So you can always go back and listen to the other one. But we always figure, I like the overarching theme I tell everyone is, you know, don't listen to the influencers; listen to the experts. So we always try to go out and find an expert, maybe, or someone who can relate to it. So why don't you go ahead and kind of introduce yourself a little bit, tell us a little bit about yourself, and then go into our quarantine situation that we're all sitting in right now.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. It's a privilege and an honor. So I'm a doctor. I'm an osteopathic physician. I'm a board-certified dermatologist and a Mohs surgeon. So a Mohs surgeon, we cut out big cancers off of people's faces and then do facial reconstructive surgery so that people don't see a huge, gnarly scar. So that's what I do now. I used to be in the United States Navy as the First Reconnaissance Battalion surgeon, and I did two tours in Iraq with those gentlemen. Very interesting experience, lots of life lessons learned with that. I think Brian and I share a common background with recon.

Yeah, yeah, we discussed that. I was over in the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion for a while. At the same time you were in Fallujah, I was just west of you over in Ramadi, so not far from you at all. So I know what you went through and what you did, and I thank you for that, sir.

Yeah, likewise, thank you for yours. I also have a Master of Public Health and a Master of Theology as well. So when I was in the military, I obviously did vastly different things than I'm doing now. But the perspective of a physician and the parasitology and all of the different types of medicine I did in the military, I think, is very relevant to the coronavirus. The coronavirus is a virus, obviously, of kind of the corona family, which describes how it looks under a microscope. We've had other coronaviruses in the past, like SARS and MERS. This coronavirus is a new type that causes, or can cause I should say, really bad respiratory complications. So your lungs just don't work, and you're on ventilators.

Now, just like everything else, there's a whole range of what's going to happen if you get this infection based off of your genetics and based off of your individual health. So just like I don't want the flu, I want no part of the flu, I also want no part of the coronavirus. I think the coronavirus, at the end of the day, is going to be slightly more deadly than the flu is. But I think that for the vast majority of people who are healthy, the coronavirus is going to be very similar to what they've experienced with the flu. And those who are not healthy with other diseases, they're going to suffer much worse than they would from the flu.

So to put it in perspective, right now, as we're reporting this on March 26th, there have been a little over 22,000 deaths in America from the flu this year. There have not even been a thousand deaths from the coronavirus right now in America. And so I'm not saying that we should minimize the importance of the coronavirus. We need to respect it, just like we need to respect the flu. And I think those deaths from coronavirus will increase, hopefully not as much as Italy has faced, but I think they will increase. But what people need to do is they need to be smart, they need to practice social distancing. You see these things of spring breakers out there partying and doing all this stuff. They're not immune. Yes, they have less of a chance of lining up in the ICU or dying than an 80-year-old, but we still have reports of this age group suffering from this.

Yeah, no, so that's a, I think, a great kind of, "Hey, here's the lowdown and dirty of why it is or why it's important, what it really is, what it'll kind of do to us, and who's going to be affected by it." So I just want to hit real quick before you go any further, is that, so you know, in terms of how dangerous it is, we kind of do these comparisons to the flu, which is, you know, good and bad. Meaning, good, I understand the flu. I've had a flu before. I understand the numbers and how many people get the flu and how people die. But the way it's different is, and I think this kind of gets into what everyone's scared about or what seems to be all the hype about, is how this is now a lot easier to transmit than the flu, correct? Or it's actually a lot more contagious?

And with that, again, the vast majority of people who get this are going to have flu-like symptoms. Some people have just barely any symptoms, and some people have flu-like symptoms, and some people wind up in the hospital in an ICU and potentially die. The interesting thing about fear, Brian, is that we like to take nuggets of truth, and we like to extrapolate those nuggets of truth into things that feed our emotional homes where we live normally. And we like to use these little nuggets of truth to justify what our core gives. So in other words, people are going to listen to this, and they're going to be appropriately concerned for their health. But will it make them stop smoking? Will it make them do things that they know that they can do to increase their chances of not having a bad case of the coronavirus if they get it? Or are they just going to fearmonger?

I was at a Costco a couple of weeks ago, and I looked behind me, and the lady had a bunch of toilet paper and a bunch of alcohol and a bag of Doritos. I mean, seriously. We know that if you smoke and you get the coronavirus, you have a much higher risk of dying from it. In fact, in Wuhan, and the numbers are going to be very fluid for the next year or two until we have actual what it looks like, you have an 8% to 10% chance of dying if you smoke. Now, in Wuhan, where this all started, we think it's most of the elderly population that smokes. So you've got elderly and smokers, and now you've got an 8% to 10% death rate. How many smokers are listening to this and are worried and have stocked up on toilet paper but are not willing to put down the cigarette?

We know that obesity leads to cardiovascular disease, heart disease, all that stuff, high blood pressure. And we know that death rates from that go way up. Well, how many people listening to this are going to say, "Wow, I've always needed to lose 20 pounds. I'm going to use this time so that I don't have to be unnecessarily fearful, and I can do something about it. And I'm going to lose 10 pounds over the next two weeks by eating well and exercising." How many people are going to do that? Or are people going to just sit there and say, "Oh, I can't do anything about it. Get me the Cheetos, get me the processed foods!"

We know from our grandparents, right, fruits and veggies, that's what you had to eat. They did a study last year; it was brilliant. They did a study that if you consume four or more ultra-processed foods a day—that's your cereals, that's your sports drinks, that's your sodas, that's your crackers, all of it—if you consume four or more a day, you have an increased risk of dying from all causes of 62%. 62%! And if you look at the standard American diet, what we consume all day long from hot dogs to whatever frozen pizzas is ultra-processed. For every one serving more of ultra-processed, now we're up to five, your chance goes up 18% of dying from all causes. So we've got the obese smoker who's consuming nothing but ultra-processed foods, like the Doritos and all that other stuff.

Brian, you and I, we have a common background of facing fear in the eye and what can we do to mitigate it and move forward, right?

Right.

And Greg, you as well, with your background. So we understand that you have to know the enemy and you have to know what they're capable of, and then you have to know yourself well enough to fight that. Or you can just go back to your emotional home and say, "I've always been fearful, I've always been paranoid, I've always been whatever," and the nugget of truth in the coronavirus that it is dangerous, and it is, but that won't spur people to actually do anything to mitigate that risk, right?

Yeah, that's a, that's a great kind of way of framing it and looking at it. Right? And because, you know, I look at it two kind of similar in a number of aspects. You know, everything from performance. People are now going, "Hey, what do I do?" I'm even just like workout apps and social groups I'm in where people are like, "Hey, we can't go to the gym, what's going on?" And then you guys get upset. These are, we have all these goals that they want to do, and they've been working really hard, and gym going for it. Now it's like, "Hey, yeah, that's all going to be crushed. I'm going to lose all this." And it's, "Well, what can we do now? Focus on something else that you don't typically do and get really good at that and go back."

But there's a number of things that kind of I want to unpack in there. One of it, when you talk about fear and nuggets of truth, I mean, obviously, that's a, you know, that's a lot of the issues that we see. You know, you say, "Hey, I go back to my emotional home." And that's kind of what we brought up when we first started discussing this is that, you know, Greg even said, "Well, think about it, it's toilet paper. Why would someone stock up on toilet paper? Are you suddenly going to be using the bathroom a lot more? Or actually, if you're staying home from work, maybe a little bit." But I don't know what would, what would this come from? And Greg brought up a great point. He said, "Well, think about it, you know, when you're literally when you're going to the bathroom, you're in a comfortable place, that's in your home. Some people take their time, they sit on the toilet, read a book, look at their phone." If that gets taken away from you, all of a sudden that's a, it's a very personal thing, right? You feel very comfortable because you're very vulnerable in that spot. So why wouldn't you then go, "Oh, hey, I can make sure I can still do that," because I take comfort in that. And that's just kind of one example of how this, how this works when people overreact to this fear.

Because one of my points was, you know, I bet this year in 2020, how many people are going to die of the coronavirus? Well, we're not sure yet, we're definitely not. That number is still going up. I don't know what that's going to be at the end of the year, but I bet more people will die of heart disease or suicide this year than from the coronavirus. So it's, we've got this weird way of looking at different threats to us and our existence and our life, and it's hard if we can't see it and understand it to really do anything about that. I think that's where a lot of the fear comes with this virus, especially that it's easily transmitted. There's a lot of information out there that sounds really scary. And I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can at least see myself getting fatter in the mirror and go, "I have to do something about this." But when you can't see it, I mean, how does that play into what you've seen in the overreaction?

Absolutely, it's the boogeyman phenomenon. Our imaginations are often worse than reality in almost every aspect of life. I mean, there's a few, and you and Greg and I have experienced some of those few, where your imagination can't be worse than reality. But for most things, it is. And so it is the perfect storm of a nugget of truth, and then you exploit that to live where you want to live.

So 9/11 is a great example, right? Horrible day. But how we responded to 9/11 tells everything. I'll tell you a quick story. I was in medical school, and I was finishing out my last year of medical school, and I was interviewing for the first year out of medical school called internship. So I was in Seattle, 9/11 happened, and it was a horrific day. I called my detailer, the person who's responsible for saying where I go. He didn't really have a big role in medical school or in training afterwards; it mostly comes after that. But I called him and I said, "Look, you can take me out of medical school, you can do absolutely anything you want with me, whatever my country needs, you tell me, and I will be there." And he called me back later that day. He said, "Regan, out of the hundreds of people in the scholarship for the military medicine, you were the only one who called out of hundreds who left a message of whatever my country needs. Everybody else called with, 'You will not pull me out of school! I don't care what happens, I don't care!'"

And so he called me up and said, "Thank you for that." So I was concerned. But who I am as a person is I try to help, I try to be part of positive change. So I was fearful. I was with my godson at the time, and I could see this little kid, six years old, just crying while the Twin Towers were falling. It was a crazy time. But my emotional home was, "I'm here to help." Other people's emotional homes on that day were either fear-based or paranoia-based or anger. Wherever you go in a time of "crisis," wherever you want to go naturally, that is who you are, or a better way of saying it, what you've become accustomed to. And you will find any and every excuse and beauty in every situation in life to go there. You could be having the best day possible, but if your emotional home is anger, you're going to be angry. You're going to find something to be mad about. If your emotional home is joy, then you're going to find something to be joyful about 9/11. But you're near your family, that they're safe, that you live in America. So these times right now, it's nuggets of truth, right? But the nuggets of truth, we will make our reality what you focus on grows. Now in Iraq, we have some realities of things being shot at us and thrown at us and lobbed at us, and whatever at us. And those type of situations I think are a little bit different, but I think they're still instructive as to where we live. Did that answer?

Yeah, no, it did. And you brought in the deploying in Iraq and seeing, you know, being on the battlefield, and especially in your position where, you know, you're just, you're there to treat guys and to medically treat people who have been out on the battlefield. And I almost think those jobs sometimes are worse in terms of what they do to you mentally and some of the things you have to go through. Because I always say, like, yeah, I've watched several of my friends, watched several Marines die. I've been in horrible, horrific situations. But I was out there with a gun, taking it to the enemy. So in a way, I didn't just have to deal with that, right? I actually could go out there and be like, "Well, I'm going to go get some. I'm going to," you know, I mean, "I'm in the fight." So it's a, it's a different perspective.

And you keep using this term "emotional home," which I'm probably going to just steal from you and sorry.

You can steal it from me. I stole it from Tony Robbins. I don't know where he stole it from.

Exactly. And he stole it from someone else, and that person stole it from someone else, and it's been around for 3,000 years. Probably the Greeks were probably teaching it back in the day. But that's a great point for coping mechanisms and understanding how to deal with this uncertainty, right? So we were actually out not long ago in Virginia teaching a course on our human behavior courses that we teach. And so, but it was now all of a sudden, things were increasing, and chaos. People were going, "Well, I don't know, are we going to lock down?" So it was that whole, "Are they going to shut down air travel? All of a sudden, we have to keep this social distance." It's kind of when it just started.

So, but you know, Greg and I, same thing, being that he was law enforcement for a long time, military as well, deployed with the military even after that. Same with me. It was just, we're just like, "Okay, well, let's just keep going and then see what happens." You know, I've got a, our car rental was from National. So I'm going to assume that meant it's National. In fact, we'll actually take that and we'll drive. And we had one guy there who flew in from St. Louis. So we're like, "We'll drop him off in St. Louis, we'll continue to Colorado for Greg, and then I'll finish the trip in San Diego, and I'll torch the car and report it stolen and I'll be good." Like it was immediate, just like, "Okay, we have several backup plans. Like, what do we need to do?"

But a lot of it, when you get to these situations where now this isn't like the wars that we've been fighting for the last 20 years, when it's only a small percentage of the population that are carrying that load. This is everyone now. Now everyone's involved, meaning every citizen in the U.S. and of the world now has to do their part. And I think a lot of people aren't really used to that. So that kind of plays into it, that now on a national scale. You know, it's funny that I even have, you see people posting on social media stuff like, "Hey, your grandparents were asked to go fight a war. You're asked to stay home. I think you can handle this." But part of me is like, "Hey man, not just your grandparents, that's like your older brothers and sisters and parents and your family. There's a current generation, and there's war still being fought." Like, "Hey, we have the ability," and to go back to your response on 9/11, is no different. It's like, "Well, what can I do to help? What can I do to either get involved or help the situation?" If you're telling me helping the situation is let me stay at home, that sounds, it sounds pretty easy. Really, people are telling me to get up out of the house. You're telling me to stay home. But that goes into your life experience and the type of person you are, like your person of service. Same thing, when 9/11 happened, I was actually, I was in college as a freshman in college. And the first one, my old man finally got a hold of me, said, "Hey, hang on, don't go enlist yet, please. I want you to try and finish school." I didn't listen to him. But no, it was the same thing because he, they knew right away. It was like, "Alright, well, I'm going to get in on this fight." So to me, this COVID-19 coronavirus situation is no different.

I don't know, Greg, what do you know? It's great, Doc. First of all, thanks. I would ask all our listeners and readers and viewers, do me a favor. You want to read more about Jason Bourne, look up Regan B. Anderson. Yeah, spend a day just bouncing around inside of his head. We're honored to have you here. You've done such a tremendous amount of stuff. And Brian, I want to go back to a comment that both you and the doctor were batting back and forth. Let's discuss the toilet paper.

We need control. Our lives need control. And anything, chaos, out of order, anything that tends to make us feel as though we're out of that control means that we're going to viciously fight to grab that control back, okay? Because that's the way we are. That's the way primitive nature is. That's the way our brains are set up, and our electrochemical neurotransmitters foment this into a fear of the unknown. What's going to happen next? So sometimes predictive analysis can get goofy, and that's what we have to address here, too, and this is one of the benchmarks of fear.

I'll give you an example of that. I can control buying toilet paper. I can control that. And if you say I can only have two, I'll take two of those, but I'm going to get some water, too. And then I can put them somewhere in my house where I can see them. I can pick them up out of my truck and carrying them up the stairs and put them in my pantry. That to me mimics the same transmitters that controlled us because I can't control the virus, which I can't see, and because it's alive, I can't kill it. So what I'm going to do, though, is I'm going to go out and I'm going to buy a gun to prepare for looting.

What happens is that we create this reality that doesn't exist. And I'll give you an example in Colorado. So, you know, come out to Colorado before Rob Manners West and the ranch. Brian and I still had to do law enforcement gigs to pay the light bill. And one of the things that we saw every year in the winter was people coming from the East Coast and West Coast to Colorado and dying engaging in risky behavior. One selfie from the rock face to petting the mountain lion. Dude, these are all dead right there situations. And the one that made me wonder was they get a rental sled, and on the panel just below it, there's a button for two-wheel drive, four-wheel drive. Most people have no idea. They assume that all-wheel drive is the same. And so they overdrive the rental sled, and then now they can't stop, and they pile in, and then there's death on the highway. And we would show up, and we would be going, "This is horrible," and separating the bodies out.

It was always the same thing. You get increased confidence when you're driving a vehicle, and specifically when it's a rental sled, I won't even go there. And each time that you pass a car in the snow and the ice, you get more bold. And you go, "Hey, look what I just learned! I'm really good at this!" And so the speed increases a little bit, and guess what? You didn't die. And so now you're engaging, you remember the Marine motorcyclists, you both know this from the Marines and the Navy. You had a kid that would buy a motorcycle after his last combat experience and go out there and, man, he's just pushing the limit and he's tacking that out all the time. Why? Because we have to feel some element of fear to be in control of something in our life. And so people say, "I know I'm bouncing around, but it's the same basic behavior. I do those behaviors because I need to feel something, and when I'm scared, I don't like that feeling. So I'm going to mimic a behavior."

And this is the final point on this, as I take umbrage because the doctor gave the full profile of being overweight, mis-eating poor food. Doc, I got to tell you, Brian and I are teaching at Benning. And so I tell Shelley, "I think I'm having a heart attack," because we're going, we're not sleeping, we're doing all this other stuff, and I think I'm in great physical and mental shape. And so I go to a sports medicine doctor in Atlanta, this is back when I had money, and the sports medicine doctor comes out after conducting every test known to man and looks at me and goes, "Okay, you keep eating like you do, you keep doing the stress that you're doing right now, you keep smoking like you do, you'll be dead in a year." So that person said, "I need these eight medicines, I need this, I need that, and I need all the other stuff." I looked at our CEO and I said, "That's not going to happen." So I've been dropping weight since then, I've been eating right since. I know it doesn't look like it, but remember the camera adds 60 pounds. Brian holds me to task when we're out anywhere. It's always the salad and the fish and the unprocessed stuff. In class, we have to eat the elderberries and drink clean water, and it's that crazy. But the idea is that I then said, "Okay, I need to take control back in my life." So, Doc, what you're bringing us is, you're bringing us a sane, sober, rational light of day. Look you in the clear eye, without the jaundiced, yellow journalistic crap that we have to deal with. And you're saying, "Hey, it's a disease, and there were previous coronaviruses. This will probably mutate because I assume a disease is going to want to survive. So maybe it'll mutate a little to survive a little longer. But there's going to be something next we're not sure what that is, right, Doc, but I am assuming there's something down the pipe that we haven't forecasted yet." Right?

Absolutely. I mean, I'm 100% sure that the coronavirus has mutated in some way, shape or form from Wuhan, and it will continue to mutate. Now, whether those mutations help it live or help it to die is unclear. You know, we don't know. But you and I are mutating all the time as well, right? So I want to ask you guys, so maybe Brian, when you were deployed, was it harder on you or harder on your family when you were deployed? And when you're back from deployment, was it harder on you or harder on your family when you were back?

That's a great question. When I was deployed, it's always harder on my family and people back at home. And then when I'm back from deployment, it's horribly hard on me, and they love it. And that's, I mean, that's a great, great example of it. A number of reasons for that, too. You know, when you're on that deployment and you're out, especially when it's a chaotic time, and you're in there doing your job and your fight, that's what you signed on, that's what you signed up to do, it's what you want to do. But you're in such an environment where nothing else matters but your survival from one day to the next and accomplishing your mission. So it's almost this, you have this incredible freedom where you are not bound to, like, I don't have to stay in touch with anyone, I don't have to uphold social norms, I don't have to do anything but just these few things every day. It's incredibly simple. It's a violent world, it's dangerous, but there's this unbelievable freeing experience about that, that all the daily crap that people worry about, it just goes away because of necessity.

Now, the opposite is your family back at home. It's just there, every news article, watching TV, they're freaking out. They're going to, you know, that brought my old man to church every day, which is insane. You know what I mean? Like, it just going back to, we were reaching out to anyone you can for support and love, and lashing out at people. I mean, it's a chaotic, tumultuous time for those folks at home, and you're just living this free-range lifestyle when you're deployed. I don't know, that's kind of was my experience, anyway.

Absolutely, 100%. I think that's a fairly common experience. And Greg, how do you think that deployment kind of mentality plays into the coronavirus right now with us staying home? How do you think that, and the control and everything we just spoke about?

Yeah, and I think that you touched on a huge point right there. And we always tell our readers and reviewers to do your homework. And what you did is you just proposed a question where I would say, "Pause for a minute your tape right now and think of what your answer at home would be, and then press play to see what's going on." My thing is that now you've taken an additional level of control away from folks, and you've put them in a situation where some things are going to be even more uncomfortable. And then now you're worried about the finances, and now you're seeing your family face-to-face at times that you were actually at the Starbucks or flirting around the water cooler or sharing a joke or something. All of those experiences that you've never planned on or hadn't done very much, and now it's day after day, and now you don't see the end. You don't see the light at the end of the tunnel because it's nebulous. A virus controls time. You don't control the time of the virus. So I think if that's what you're going for, Doc, I can feel that a lot of people would feel helpless during that period.

What do you think, right? Yeah, it's kind of exactly what Greg was saying is that, you know, if you don't, now you're in that period where, like you said, you have to deal with a whole bunch of stuff you haven't dealt with before, and you have no control over your life. And you're sitting around, like you said, family, and all day long now, where you all used to get breaks from each other. You know, the kids, like my little seven-year-old, she used to go to school all day long. He's a very active person, and you realize just how active she is now that she's home. (I'm going to need NyQuil in the house, Brian.) Oh yeah. But my wife and I at least are used, she mostly works from home. When I'm not traveling, I work from home. So we're used to that everyday, so we're okay with that.

But there are times where people, if you haven't done that before, you know, you add in the uncertainty. If you're not working, that's huge. A lot of our work is now up in the air, got slid to the right, because we're like, "Well, we do in-person training, we can't go anywhere." There are some things we can do online, but it's not for the price that we charge where we go places. And so that's a huge deal. So if people are facing that, man, that's a lot of uncertainty. But you know, I always look at this is, these are times, you know, you look at the hardest times in your life as the greatest now, looking back, right? Like, "Man, that's when I overcame whatever the obstacle was, or whatever the fear was, that the situation was, and I was successful." Like, these are the times that make people, that make countries. This is what the U.S. is known for is not for cowering away. It's for, during times of struggle, we overcome. And we always have, especially here in the United States. We've defeated every, every threat to our nation so far. So why would that suddenly change? But yeah, I mean, from everyone's perspective at home, that's incredibly difficult and stressful to not have that control over your life.

I completely agree. The interesting point is, I think the one thing that holds most of us back, the one thing that makes us hold on to fear, is certainty of an outcome. Right? So if we, and it's kind of counterintuitive, because if we're certain that an outcome is going to deliver us a certain set of parameters, so you're overweight, you smoke, and you're a stress bomb, then you're going to die in a year, Greg, right? So, but there's some comfort in that, right? You go to work after having a bad family relationship or something's off in your family, you can separate yourself from it. You can have your own persona, you can live your own reality until you come home. Well, now you're stuck at home. Right. We control our own destinies, and I think that's what makes most people most afraid. Because if you actually are in control of your destiny, now I'm not talking about the freak accident where a meteor falls from the sky and obliterates you, okay? There's some things that happen that are against your control. But the vast majority of who we are, who we become, what we do, is completely within our control. And I think that is the basis of all fear.

And when something like the coronavirus comes into play, we can now point at it and use it as the scapegoat for us not taking control where we know we can achieve a higher potential. Absolutely. We're afraid of the abilities that we've been given, we're afraid of our intelligence, our physical stamina, our whatever. And when we actually stop and look at it and say, "You know what? I'm capable of almost anything. Maybe I can't leap from my porch and fly like Superman." But for the vast majority of things, we are in control. And I think that is the basis of all fear.

For me, in Iraq, the hardest thing that I dealt with in Iraq, and it's delusions of grandeur and all that, the hardest thing I dealt with was I couldn't make the insanity stop. I couldn't make the pain and suffering stop. I couldn't control it. I controlled when somebody was bleeding out in front of me, right? And I was very good at trauma. By the grace of God, if somebody came to me alive, they left alive. But that's too late. And it's the same system in America right now. By the time people come to the doctor, all it is is disease care. "Take these eight pills and go on your way." Right? It's too late because the entire medical system is set up on treating diseases and death. I spent less than one week in medical school learning about how to keep my mind, body, and spirit healthy. It's incredible. It resulted, when I got to Iraq, I lost my faith. I went to seminary beforehand, before medical school. I lost my faith in Iraq, and I've been trying really hard to rebuild it ever since. But it's too late.

It's not too late for anybody listening to this program. And for people who are not willing to start eating well and exercising and taking care of their mind, body, and spirit, you have to ask yourself, "What are you afraid of?" Because we know all that stuff is crap. You know, it hurts us, it hinders us. It doesn't let us live up to our potential. We don't feel good, we don't look good, we don't do anything good. So what is the emotional disease? What is the basis of your fear that has convinced you that you are not worth living up to your potential? And we find these little nuggets of truth in the coronavirus. And again, I'm not trying to downplay the coronavirus. We respect it. You have to treat it appropriately. Do not turn it into the scapegoat of allowing you to not live up to your potential. Exactly.

Live in the greatest country that's ever been and probably ever will be. Doesn't mean we don't have things to work on. We do. But in this country, any man, woman, or child can become anything they want to become. Years ago, before medical school, I was right-handed. And then when I applied to medical school and got in, I thought, "Wow, I really need to become ambidextrous." So for the next year, I spent an entire year doing everything with my left hand: brushing my teeth, playing tennis, playing ping-pong, everything. You know those Myers-Briggs tests that you take that does your personality?

Yeah, of course.

I had done about eight of those prior to this little experiment. And from all of my schooling and all that nonsense, and they were always the same. And I was always like 75% or 76% left brain, and the other 20-whatever, right brain. After one year of using my left hand continually, my whole Myers-Briggs changed everything. And I was now 49%, 51% left brain, right brain.

That's cool.

Yeah, and the cool thing is, is that it doesn't matter what your past is. Doesn't matter what you've experienced. It doesn't matter where your emotional home is. You have the power to change it if you're just not afraid of living to your potential.

You know, you've made some incredible points. And I think, you know, in this, we can get into, I know you've just written a book about the healthcare industry as a whole. And I think you just kind of gave an analogy for ourselves that can be applied to how we treat and how our current medical or healthcare system is, right? Meaning, your outlook. It's all because we're all about prevention in what we do, right? So all human behavior pattern recognition is all about, "Hey, how do you actually prevent an attack, a school shooting, a suicide?" Like, there's plenty of people out there to tell you how to respond to it. But we're the ones that have been pounding the streets every day for years going, "Hey, this is how you prevent it. It's all about identification and mitigation." Right? So again, like you just kind of said, our healthcare industry isn't really set up for that. It's not that way. Now, I think there's a lot more talk about it. It's getting better as we do with everything. But I know that it's, it's still an issue of it's all about just treating disease and, "Oh, you come in after something occurs, and then I fix it," or we do our best to manage it, whatever that issue is.

I know you just wrote about that, and I always preface this stuff with again, right, "Don't listen to the influencers, listen to the experts." Health care in the United States is a very, very complicated and complex issue, right? I only know a little bit about my dad, as he's a lawyer but does healthcare stuff, he's all, you know, clinical integration type stuff, and it's been in healthcare for 25, 30 years with hospitals and everything. So when he starts talking about it, I'm just like, "Oh my God, this is absolutely insane." Like, this is incredibly complicated. So I always preface those comments with that. So, how is it you can get into your book a little bit and what you're writing about? But what is it that you see the issues in that healthcare industry and how we treat humans?

Alright, so universal healthcare. Alright, I'm pausing here. Universal healthcare, whatever you just heard me say, whether you thought I was for it or against it, what you thought it was a good idea, bad idea, just like we were talking about someone's emotional home earlier, you just learned what your true political home is. Alright? So if you've heard of universal healthcare and you thought, "That S.O.B. Democrat, progressive, liberal, whatever!" Or if you thought, "Man, fiscally conservative!" You just now found your bias. And unfortunately, most of our biases on healthcare in this country are not really ours, they're the propaganda that we've been fed by industry, right? So when I say universal healthcare, people automatically say it's a socialist system, when in fact, if you look at all the universal healthcare—which, by the way, America is the only wealthy, industrialized, progressive nation on the planet that doesn't have it—we spend almost twice as much as any other country for the exact same services. We have about 700,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Everybody who's listening to this podcast, whatever you think of healthcare, you know that when you go to the doctor, you have no idea what it's going to cost, no idea if your insurance is going to cover it, no idea anything. At that point, we have no control.

So universal healthcare, guys, whatever you automatically judged me by, and what I was saying and the topic by, that gives you your bias. Now, once we know our biases, we know our weaknesses, because if we don't have an open mind to research and actually figure out what we're talking about and just stick to our biases, what that allows everybody to do is allows us to put somebody in a bucket. Once we put somebody in a bucket, maybe their nose is too big and genocide is okay. Maybe their skin is a little different color so we can judge them and put them in a box. All of these little things that we do that allow us to put another person in a box, that allows us to immediately discredit them, immediately marginalize them, and immediately take away our ability to grow, to become, and to become part of the solution.

So my book, it's 90% stories from Iraq, stories from America as a doctor, and stories as a veteran trying to be here in America. So it's 90% stories, and the stories are entertaining, let's face it. They're entertaining topics. And it's 10% using my Master of Public Health to explain why healthcare is how it is in this country and what we can do to change it. Just one little thing: if we were to do just one little thing, we would have enough money to reduce Greg and Brian and all of your family's copays and deductibles to zero and ensure every citizen in this country medically for major stuff, and have money left over. One little thing, and it's controlled the administrative costs that the major insurance companies place on us. Right now in America, 34%—over a third of all healthcare dollars spent—are spent handling the administrative requirements of the insurance companies that are put into place so that the insurance companies can make more money. They are about prior authorizations, denying care, denying medications, denying bills, putting it on the patients, advertising. All of this is 34% in America right now. And this, this came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine in January of this year. Right now in America, $2,500 per person per year is spent just on administrative costs of healthcare to make insurance companies more money. In Canada, the same thing, it's about $551 per person per year. If we were to just take away these administrative controls—99% of them are designed to save the insurance company money at your expense as a patient—if we were to just do that, we'd have an extra six billion dollars to spend on healthcare, again, reducing your insurance to zero, your copay to zero, deductible to zero. That doesn't even get into the, you know, the title of my book is Universal Death Care: A Solution for Health Care in the Age of Entitlement. So it doesn't even get into our personal responsibility for living up to our potential by being healthy. Alright? Forget about all of that.

Right now, we spend 17% of our GDP on healthcare. France spends 11%, has better outcomes for almost every measurable outcome you can possibly imagine in healthcare. They have more doctors per capita, they have more hospital beds per capita. The modifiable diseases to prevent death, they have better statistics than we do. And it is a free market system, it's not socialized medicine. Great Britain is really the only place that has socialized medicine. So for all these people that heard "Universal Death Care" and judged me as progressive, liberal, I actually think I'm about the most conservative topic that you could possibly be, and yet people judge it instantly without really knowing what they're talking about. So on that...

And this is coming from, I would say, I myself am not very informed in this. Meaning, the more I read into healthcare and the more I hear stuff from different articles or studies I've read, I'm just like, "Okay, the more I read, the less I know," right? Because I'm like, "Wow, this gets, there's a, and especially when you look at it from a macroeconomic perspective, you're dealing with a lot of people." So there's variables that affect the cost that you wouldn't think of. But when at a macro scale for a couple hundred million people, now it becomes a huge cost.

But so what would you say to the people that go, "Well, yeah, those countries don't have the quality of care that we do, and if we change it, it'll change incentive for doctors, and there might be less innovation, or those countries that we get compared, or people like to compare to, are a lot of times more like homogeneous type cultures or systems, or they don't have the quality that we have. They don't have the type of healthcare, like they don't have the amount of beds or respirators or MRIs per person." Like everyone does the Canada one, where I've heard like, "Well, yeah, but if you want to go get an MRI in Canada, you got to wait two, three weeks or something." Now, these are, I don't know how true they are, these are anecdotal stories, or whether there's actual data to back them up. But what would you say to that, someone who said that, you know, that would be against what you think is right?

I've learned that I can't change people's minds, right? And I can tell you about the World Health Organization. I can tell you all the studies they've done. I can tell you all that. And I can tell you that everything you said was just false. It's just propaganda.

Okay, so that's it, that, that might be an answer for me at least to go, "Well, look, there's no data to back that up." Right? Greg and I are information scientists, right? The saying that we look up stuff. They go, "Where does the data, what does the data show?" Because if it's, if the data set is good, right? If it expresses what the actual issue is accurately, well, then you can't, you can't deny it. Now, you might disagree on how to deal with that situation. Okay, I could see that. But in terms of numbers, you got to look at it and go, "What does the data actually say?"

And that's what my point is in the book. My point is, is I use these stories as parables, and then I ask people to look it up on their own, right? Listen, the U.S. has ranked 37th in the world on healthcare right now. Remember, there's about, I think 31st, something like that. I think France is more of the model, so I don't really like comparing to Canada because they've got some significant issues there. But still, with their significant issues, if you actually research it, you'll be quite shocked. So I've learned to stop saying, "Well, the World Health Organization says this, 37th and 31st," even though I have it. I've learned to say, "Guys, just look it up for yourselves," because we come to this and say, "I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat," and therefore, hold myself into a category of whatever I believe, whether or not it's backed by science or not. So again, everybody at the beginning of this learned their bias when I said the words "universal healthcare," right? That will tell you your vulnerability to either blindly accept it or blindly throw it out, and both are equally dangerous.

But my plea in the book is, I say it many times, "I do not have all the answers. I've researched it a lot. I think I have an idea of a way forward." But I promise you that we do have all the answers if we become educated. And I think that medical care is a human need. I do not think it has any realm in partisan power plays, because when your daughter or son is sick, you don't care. I promise you, you don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican. You want them to get the best care and get them better. And it's a human need. Now, politics and politicians, they've used words like "socialized medicine" to describe universal healthcare because "socialized" is a four-letter word for us. Rationally, one system that kind of sort of is, is Great Britain or our VA system, right? Very loosely. Maybe the Medicare system very loosely, and our elderly love Medicare. So my point is, is that, guys, you now know your bias, just like you know your emotional home. Now you know where you're vulnerable. Either change your destiny so your emotional home switches, so you have the life you want. Similarly, look into the research that's out there so you can be educated and informed. And if you're on the opposite side of the table from me and have a completely different opinion, I will listen to you all day long, as long as it's educated and informed. I really have no interest in listening to people just saying, "Hey, I'm a Republican, so therefore, universal healthcare," or "You're a socialist, get out of the country." You know? So we need to start talking to each other, not yelling at each other. And the only way to do that is do the research for yourself and then listen to the opposing point of view more than you talk.

Well, that's, that's the, that's the issue. So I had that issue as a kid in school, meaning my teachers were constantly telling me that I had to do my homework, and I didn't want to do my homework. It wasn't until much later in life that I went, "Oh, wow, all this information is out there. It's up to me to go on trying to understand it and look at yourself." And you're saying the same stuff as to us. As you know, we always tell people, "Hey, look, do your homework. Hey, we're going to talk about this case, we're going to break it down the way we do, and do your homework and actually find out what the real facts are behind it." Because that's going to open your eyes. And it's, it's difficult to do that. But, you know, you brought up a lot of stuff about just burning calories. And meaning it's not like, of course, healthcare shouldn't be a political issue, but it is. A certain thing should be, the coronavirus shouldn't be a political issue, but it absolutely is, and both sides are guilty of trying to capitalize the science. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So I would say this, Brian, I would say a couple of things got to come out of that. And one, Doc, because your description, first of all, everybody that's listening, all our normal viewers, you know that Brian's going to put something up on the site, a link to the doctor's book. Yes, please give it a like. I can't wait to read it. But because your description just now was so brief and it was so simple that it was elegant. Brian and I will pledge to provide the security for you because all of the numbskulls out there that are the haters that don't want to do their homework and that will line up and throw stuff at your house, we're there for it.

Well, I'd say, you know, and then the second part of that is I want to make sure that we don't lose focus on the fear aspect that goes along with this as well. Because one of the parallels, Brian, that Dr. Anderson Regan made just a few minutes ago. A long time ago, I wrote a thing, and I just drew a line on a yellow pad and I said, "Okay, this is 'bang.' All of these incidents are 'love to bang.' This would be 'at bang,' this would be 'right of bang,' and then way over here would be 'left of the next bang.'" You have to prepare for all of those in an emergency situation, specifically whether it's criminal or terroristic. And the reason that we're afraid of terrorists, the reason we're afraid of criminals, we don't know those things. And so, therefore, all the responses are at bang. Our response for suicide is at bang. A response for school shootings is at bang. And you made a great case that that's how our medical system is, the same thing. You go at bang and now you want some sort of wonderful solution to it. And I think we could liken that right back to COVID, where listen, we knew something was coming down the pipe because we had all these previous incidents. But what happened is, yeah, we have this, "Wait, you see" attitude. Brian and I get the "wait, you see" from everybody. We go to people, we go, "Listen, you know, you're more likely to die from heart disease or chronic respiratory disease than you are any of these other incidents. But you have to be mindful of terrorism and criminality." And they're like, walking around going, "Eh, I will feel my way through," you know, "discovery learning," rather than listen to the science. So we're on your side. I know, Brian.

I just want to make sure that no, no, it's, that's exactly it, because that goes back to kind of what you said earlier, and what we preach is, "Look, what part do I play in this?" Your healthcare is your responsibility. Largely, your security is your responsibility. And you talk about just preventive care because this gets into a little bit of your background, because of what you chose in terms of, you know, kind of where you went with, I know there's a difference between like an M.D. and a D.O., right? So you're an osteopathic doctor. So that's a difference. There's different types out there. So we can go in on that. But what you just said is, you know, "Hey, there's a lot of prevention, and it's all about me." Everything you talked about, the fear, it's all about, "What do you want to do?" And even what you said with researching universal healthcare, it's you have to burn the calories and go do it yourself. So that's difficult for people, right? All human. There was always, sometimes you're exactly right, we're all inherently lazy. You just say, "Yeah, brains just trying to conserve calories and keep us alive. So we have to fight that and expend them." But tell us a little bit different about, you know, how your view of healthcare kind of probably went into why you chose a certain path. Right?

Sure. So I'm an osteopathic physician, a D.O. Nothing against the allopaths or the M.D.s. We all have the same training. D.O.s take on more training because we're a little bit more, supposed to be a little bit more holistic, understand more about how the body all fits together. Structure is function. So if the structure of your arm is broken, you're not going to be able to lift weight, that sort of thing. So we try to be more holistic, and that's how I try to approach every topic in my life is more holistic. Like, look at what you have, look at why you have it, and then do another couple of levels down to figure out why you actually are doing what you're doing.

So my solution for healthcare in this country is to make it available to everybody. But in order to do that, everybody has to be held accountable for their own actions and decisions. Not if they were born with something, you know, it's not their fault. But right now, how healthcare is in this country is, let's do a car insurance analogy. So right now, what healthcare is like is car insurance where you're responsible for the person who's speeding next to you. So the person that whizzes by you at 100 miles an hour, you, Brian, actually get that ticket because you're driving responsibly. And that person, well, you know, whatever, because in this country right now, the obesity, first of all, about three-quarters of men are overweight or obese, and about 60% of women are overweight or obese. And we know that between 50% and 85% of all healthcare dollars spent in America are spent on treating enormously preventable diseases. Again, not the freak car accidents, not the "I was born with Type 1 diabetes, which you're genetically born with, and you still get diabetes." Things that people could absolutely control and not pass that burden on to everybody else.

So Medicare is set to be bankrupt by 2030. And right now, we have about 12% of the population suffer from diabetes, the type from being overweight, not the type that you're genetically born with. By 2050, one-third of the country is going to have diabetes from being overweight. If right now we're spending between 50% and 85% of all healthcare dollars treating preventable diseases, if we would just take care of ourselves, we wouldn't have them. Then what's it going to be in 2050 when a third of people are diabetic? We have to stop the insanity. If this is America, it's a free country. If you want to be overweight, smoke and drink too much, fine, just pay for it enough now and throughout your life so that when you get to Medicare age, and it's on the government's dime, that you actually cover the expenses that you're going to consume. Right?

So that's just one step. Another step is controlled the administrative things. Like in France right now, everybody carries around a card, and that card has their entire medical history on it. Everything that's ever happened, every medication, every surgery, everything. And they just plug it in. The doctor does his note, and the doctor gets immediately paid. Patient leaves, and now they have their, right there. There's only one set of rules. Right now, healthcare in America is like going into a grocery store and getting a jug of milk, and you take it to checkout and they say, "Hey, I don't know, it could be a dollar, it could be ten dollars. We'll send it to somebody else, we'll get the answer back in three weeks or three months, and then you're responsible for whatever it is." There's no price transparency. In France, lots of other countries, there's one price for everything. So when you go to the doctor, you know what you're going to pay.

So if we could just make people accountable, and if we could just reduce the administrative burden so there's not literally thousands of rules for each procedure that's out there, so it's so onerous that the cost is through the roof. But we would have so much money to spend on healthcare and so many other things, it would be insane. So all I'm asking for, I'm asking for people to be accountable for their own decisions. I think that's a very conservative platform. So yeah, I'm asking for administrative control so that people understand what they're purchasing when they purchase it. That's it. In order to accomplish that, I have to have government say, "Okay, insurance, look, you can have private insurance like they do in France. France has private insurance, guys. But there's only one price that you can charge a patient and only one price a doctor can get for this." And we can, by the way, do things like price negotiate medications, which Congress decided the government should not price negotiate for medications back in 2003. "Whatever the drug companies want to charge, they should charge it because government shouldn't be involved." Are you kidding me? So we are, when we talk about universal healthcare, first of all, it's not socialized medicine, look it up, guys. Second of all, I still want a free market. I just want that free market to have some reins on it so you and I know what we're purchasing and how much. And third of all, I want accountability. That's it.

Yeah, and those, I think, you know, at a general level, a lot of people can agree with, "Yeah, do I want people held accountable?" Okay, but that gets into a lot of like, "Well, can't we, we can't rely on people." Like, you know, when those laws first came out in New York a few years back, and a few other places, where they said, "You know, you can no longer buy a soft drink that's over this size," or something like that. You know, part of me says, "Well, wait a minute, like you can't control people. People want to do what they want."

Well, it's not that.

Yeah.

It's not that, it's just, though, it's, people should be free to make the decisions that they want to make, right?

Right.

But at the same time, we're paying for that. You are paying. Like, you always tell people, "Look, you're going to pay one way or the other."

One way you're paying. Yes. That's why it's so important to have the soft drink, yeah, soft drinks so big it could be your hot tub. Yeah, but don't make me pay for that choice of yours.

And that's, that's what, Brian, it's with a distinction though, because a lot of people don't understand that those people that are doing that. Like you, you might be of the, "Hey, anyone should be able to walk in and buy, because every once in a while if I want to go get a 64-ounce Big Gulp, then I should be able to, right? Because I work out and I take care of myself." Right? But at the same time, all of those people that are doing that, living those unhealthy lives, they're not paying for their medical care. I am. We, all of us taxpayers are. So we get a vote.

And it's not unlike Dr. Anderson, Brian, and I used to (referring to military experiences). And Dr. Anderson, Brian, and I, yeah, I wore them boots one time in California specifically. We spent a lot of time training pre-deployment trips. So our teams would be going from Monterey back down to the SEAL camps and then everywhere in between. And one of the things that made me laugh all the time is that California is, and not to bash California, but I'm going to, and about, "Hey, listen, about the traffic and the environment and this and that." And I would look as we were driving up the 5 or under the 1 or on the 405, and every other vehicle around us was one player, one person that was in there, eating, doing their eyebrows and causing the stuff. Well, you can't have it both ways. You can't say that you want to safeguard the environment and then turn around and drive a big ultra Hummer alone everywhere you want to go. And that's a problem, Brian. I think that you just illustrated. Like, for example, mindfulness isn't a thing you do. Mindfulness is how you live your life. So if you want to live in an ethical and legal and moral manner, then you have to modify your behavior. And if you don't modify your behavior, somebody will call you on it. That's why we're a nation of laws. But it's funny when it comes to this issue, everything's up in the air. And today we're not going to go that way, and that every four years we have to choke down this rhetoric, this harmful horseshit that is put out by people fighting over issues that should come down to us. We should be able to vote on these issues as a nation, and just, just my rage.

So, guys, do you remember what President Bush said why we went into Iraq? Do you all remember that? "It threatened our lifestyle, our way of life." Right? People want to say that they're "woke," which I don't like the term, but it's out there. So they want to say that they're "woke" because they know about issues, but are they actually willing to change their lifestyle? Or they just want to be "woke"? Yeah, they think of something. Yeah, so they come by, they don't, somebody else. So you're going to talk about resilience, you want to tell your people how to become resilient? Realize that nothing defines you except for what you choose. Your actions define you. Your destiny defines you because you have control over it. You want resilience? When somebody says "universal healthcare," whether you agree with it or disagree with it, you want resilience, look it up for yourself. If I went to weather any storm in life, get the accurate information, ask other people who have different points of view. See, in our society right now, if you disagree with me on something, I just give you the proverbial middle finger, call you names, and then tell you why you're wrong, which leaves zero opportunity for growth for me, and it leaves our relationship fractured. So there's no relationship. All I've done is made you the other ignorant. Yeah, so if we want resilience, we have to be strong enough in ourselves to question everything, understand where our emotional homes are, our political homes are, and there's nothing wrong with those. But make it a conscious choice based on education and who you want to be ten years from now, not who you were ten years prior. That's it. That's resiliency. And that's why our tagline is, "Training changes behaviors." You have to do part of it. It's a larger area. You have to go out and seek out the industry experts on a topic and get that, and then weigh the information for yourself, not read a meme, not have an empty platitude to get what I'm trying to say, and everybody slaps the table and goes, "That's what I want," because that's horse crap. You're not doing your part, you're not doing any of the heavy lifting to get us from A to B.

And you know, you talk about questioning your own beliefs, but you know, that's difficult for a lot of people to do. I always try to, that one, I just assume most of what I know or believe is wrong due to my caring relationship with me and psychological emotional abuse from my father. So I just assume what I'm doing is wrong, so I already have a head start in that where I'm like, "Okay, this is probably wrong, but here's what I can prove, here's what I can show." But know that that's, and also, when going back to fear and control and how this works is, people don't like ambiguous answers, they don't like not knowing. You know, it's you being, you know, go back to, you've heard the line before, too, from your service, "You know, get comfortable being uncomfortable." That's very uncomfortable to go, "Well, I don't know." Like, "Here's the limit to what I can show and prove, but after that, hey, I'm not really certain." And people don't want to hear that. You know, that's why there's, we want black and white, we want concrete answers. You go, "We'll explain this." You know, that's why I love, you know, Greg sent me one book, but I'm always either reading or trying to understand physics or quantum mechanics or looking at, you know, astronomers explaining the stars and how everything works, and going, "Jesus, man, like this is incredible." And then when someone poses a question and they go, "Or not sure," and people go, "Then it's the conspiracy theory comes out! Well, then it's this, and then who even really knows?" Then it's like, "Well, look, this is the limits of where we're at right now. Well, one day we will know." Just like we didn't, there was a whole lot we didn't know just like a hundred years ago. We've come a long way. But this goes into fear and control, like, "If I have to question my beliefs and what I know, that's uncomfortable, and I got to burn calories, and I got to research stuff, and I got to look it up on my own." And you know, that's, that's difficult to do. But I would say that actually as a whole, people are doing that more. This is why people are listening to podcasts because they don't want to get the same crap they see on TV going, "Hey, this is BS." Let media shine as a message. Yeah, they're using their message, which, which, which there's always two sides of that coin that also can lead you down a really bad rabbit hole of some type of self-radicalization that's easy to occur. But also, I always think the net result is always going to be better in a more informed person. So that's kind of, that's kind of hard to do, and especially, but that is a good way to build resilience, right? We talked about learning adaptability and critical thinking and sense-making skills because that stuff actually builds your resilience. That's when you don't, you're less likely to have that emotional response over something because, "Hey, I've seen, I've been here before. I've seen something like this." And that's kind of what we get into a lot. But...

Can I share one? Human behavior is entirely predictable, right?

We're done here now.

Yeah, so I want to share a brief story about my biggest failure, my biggest shameful moment in my entire life, and it illustrates why I try to ask people to do research on their own. It's a question. So I'm in Iraq, it's a mass casualty, and I write about this in the book. But it's a mass casualty, and there's a lot of people who are injured, but there's two really bad ones. And Iraq, the insurgent who shot the Marine that was in the same cargo bay as me. Now, I had a reputation over there. I was very good at trauma. And so I took the most injured, who happened to be the Iraqi citizen who shot the Marine. It was 10 feet away, but 8 feet away, something like that. And it's in an old, dirty building, and we're getting mortared, right? So dust is coming off the ceiling, and the building's shaking. And I can hear not only the Marine 8-10 feet away, but also all the others and the agony and misery that's happening. And my patient, the Iraqi insurgent who attacked us, he's got multiple gunshot wounds, and he's cold. So one of the rules of trauma is, you can't call a code until somebody is warm. So normal body temperature. Because when your body starts to shut down, your metabolism starts to shut down, and you know, you could be 70 degrees, but that's just your body's response. So you have to be warm and dead. I mean, we're taught that day one medical school: warm and dead. You can't be cold and dead.

So I do a couple of maneuvers to act like I'm resuscitating this guy, but my heart wasn't in it. And I just left. I left to let him die. And I walked up to the other, another doctor there, because there's a rule that you have to pronounce somebody dead by presenting to another doctor. This is the first time I was willing to let go of somebody. And I just gave him really quick, whatever. And the doctor briefed. And the doctor said, "Regan, hold on, cold? 70 degrees, or 65 degrees, or whatever his body temperature was." I said, "Yeah." He goes, "Not dead until warm and dead." I was like, "Yeah, but he's multiple gunshot wounds, hypovolemic shock, all the sorts of things. He's dead. I want to go utilize my resources over here on the Marines." He looked at me, he said, "Not dead until warm and dead." And I literally wanted to rip his throat out at that moment. You know, there's no part of me that wanted to treat an Iraqi who had shot Marines because he was the "other." And again, this is my most shameful moment in life. But he was the "other," and I wanted him to die. I wanted to help the Marines, my brothers. He stared me down, and I had a choice: rip his throat out or actually do my job and be a human. I went back to the Iraqi. Within two minutes, I had his body temperature up, him stabilized, and him off to surgery, and his life was saved. And then I could go help the Marines.

See, my little temper tantrum of judging another human because he, whatever, he shot at us, he has a different point of view than us, he did whatever than us, kept me from my goal of saving lives. And even kept me from the goal of helping the other Marines because the more time I messed around with this Iraqi, not really doing my job, I could have done it well and moved on. I'm still deeply ashamed of that. I mean, it hurts to the core. But it taught me something very valuable. You hear the term universal healthcare, you hear anything that's contentious, and if you immediately go to a snap judgment and label the other person, think about that story. Because that's what I did. It almost cost dearly. A couple lives would have been ruined that day: the Iraqi's and mine. I would have never, if I have a hard time letting go of it now, I never would let go of it if I actually let him die. And that's why it's just such an important point to me, and that's why I wrote the book. Because we need to start talking to each other, researching on our own, and not being afraid to learn something different. Man, if I am the same person now that I will be in ten years, or vice versa, if I'm the same person ten years from now, I just wasted a decade. I ought to be vastly different, vastly wiser, vastly smarter. And if I'm not, if I haven't changed, that just means I've stuck to my old dogmatic ways, and I assumed everybody else was an idiot, and I wasn't going to research things for my own because I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat, or I'm some other category that I can make myself into the most unresilient in the world because I am now defining myself on one characteristic instead of defining myself on my potential.

One, you sound like somebody that's been in our classes before, and we're honored to have you on because, I mean, you're spot-on. Thank you for sharing that story. I will tell you something. The roots of PTSD, why people kill each other, why people go and shoot up a school, is because we're all fragile little snowflakes, and we're afraid. And humans, we make mistakes. It's hard being a good human, it really is. And the more that we socialize that, the more that we talk to other folks about it, the more that we learn from mentors, the more that we're introspective. You know, you said on one of your sites, you quote Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the world." So I was back in the Beltway and talking to a guy, and I just say, "Be the change," because I know everybody could fill in the rest. And he stops, and he turns around, and he gets face-to-face with me, and he goes, "You know, there's no evidence that Gandhi ever said that quote. As a matter of fact, there were three other people before him during the same time." And I stopped, and the same throat-ripping scenario was about to happen. And I said, "If that's what you got out of my whole message, you're lost, man. I'm never going to be able to bring you back in the boat." And I think what you did is, you just, you just laid it out for folks that the most highly trained, the most wonderful and empathetic highly trained surgeon in that room on that day was having an ethical dilemma. You know what I'm saying? So me standing in Costco and wondering if I should punch this guy and grab the next roll of Quilted Northern, it pales in comparison. And I think that's the real key here is that human beings, it's hard to be resilient. You have to train at it. It's hard to be empathetically gifted. You have to learn about that. And I just love your approach, Doc. I absolutely, a pleasure to have you.

That's a pretty incredible story. I mean, I can't say, I mean, there's, we've all been, had that situation or something similar, I guess, in whatever shape, moral dilemma of what's right and what you want to do. And especially when you got that anger and fear of, I mean, yeah, that's how these situations escalate, too. You know, you look at even like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and all these things, people go, "Oh, so one," you know, "the," which we were talking about, "the plunger incident inside of a guy in a police station." And you're just going, "How does this stuff happen?" It's right there where you just went, "No, I'm not done with this guy. I don't want to help him." But you know, you had someone there who's going, "Hey, what's the right thing to do here? What's your actual job? What's your role? What's legal, moral, and ethical?" And when in places where you don't have those people, where that starts to break down, where you don't have that leadership to right the ship, to get you back on course, it becomes catastrophic. Because what if, because then if no one's there to do anything, will that continue? Will that even get worse? We're going to go from, or your friend or your, so that's, I mean, it's, it's important to have that. And so you like to back those stressful times where you need to lean on each other. Right? We can't do everything on our own. We can't handle all the problems in the world on our own. It just doesn't work. There are no self-made people. You know, I don't like that term. "There's always a self-made guy." No, he's not. He learned from everyone who told him no or yes, or helped him or didn't help him a whole life. Self-made people are like Ted Kaczynski was a self-made guy. If you know, you are likely a human. You know. So that's, it's, we're kind of in this together. And you know, you had that person there. And so we have to be that.

And you brought up another great point when you said, "Man, you're still affected by that, by your thoughts and actions then, even though the situation was correct, and he did the right thing." You know, what if he didn't? What if you hadn't done that right thing? When people are still going to judge you now and judge you by second-guessing what you did, and those are, have to accept, those are the people that have never been in a morally compromising situation. So tell them to F off. You know what I'm saying? I mean, go learn, because if you haven't had those, those have become very, very gray areas, and they get tough, man, and it shakes you to your core.

And so, on that, because we've all, like we said, kind of at the beginning, we call ourselves the island of misfit toys of broken. We use the term broken human beings. And I don't mean that in a negative way at all because if you're broken, you can be fixed, right? We just mean like we've been through different trauma or experienced our life work, man, it's, it's, it's had a significant effect on us where we've had to get help or had issues from it. And that's an ongoing process. I don't ever, like, I proudly admit, like, "Look, I'm a broken, fragile human being. Here's where my stress fractures are, and here's what causes it to break." But you look at that. You know, I know you had difficulties with different post-traumatic stress and transitioning into civilian life. It's so night and day different, even though you're still in the medical field, completely different than what you did and your mission was. And so, so how did that stuff affect you? And what did you use? Because a lot of people use faith or family or friends or alcohol followed by poor decisions, rock bottom, then realizing. So what do you do then for your resilience? What helped you transition and do that to be? I mean, you're a business owner, you employ people, you're still a successful doctor. I mean, you're continuing on that, but I know that stuff has affected you. So what have you found useful or what have you been able to do?

So, first of all, to be clear, I have PTSD, and I've had it. And it's actually one of the things that makes me the strongest. One of the things that makes me stronger. So when I first got out of the military, I went into alcohol and all sorts of unhealthy behaviors. I mean, I remember being at a bar, and a whole team of hockey players was there, all wearing the same, you know, whatever shirt because I'd just gotten done playing hockey. And there was me and a friend, and one of them had dog tags on. And so I went up and I said, "Hey man, who'd you serve with? I want to buy you a drink." He's like, "Oh, why? Who do they represent?" "They don't represent anybody?" I said, "So nobody served?" "No." "Well, you realize what dog tags are used for, right? They're used to identify the dead, the soldiers are dead. And I did a couple tours in Iraq. And when they're used as jewelry, they're a little insulting to us. They're there to remember." And he kind of muffed off. So Brian, I lunged at him and his 12 friends. You're fighting a whole hockey team, that's not going to end well, delusions of grandeur aside, it's not going to end. Yeah, and I had a number of those experiences. I engaged in a lot of unhealthy behaviors because it came down to I now had an excuse not to live up to my potential. I now had an excuse to crawl into a hole and never become anything.

The day I woke up and realized how selfish I was and I needed to get over it, "I'm not that important," that was the beginning. The next step was every time I see people with PTSD, we don't remember the event, we relive it. Because any event that is significant enough to spark PTSD is an event that, by definition, means your brain cannot process it and put it in its proper spot, right? So you will not remember it because memories are for things that your brain has put in the right spot. You relive it, and your body forces you physically, viscerally, to relive the experience. That's why the hypervigilance turns to aggressive behaviors so much, because we are there, man. I mean, I know you've had probably moments, too, of reliving something that happened in your deployments, and Greg in law enforcement. You are reliving it. Your pulse goes up, you sweat, your posture changes, and your mindset is now in combat or in a dangerous, threatening situation because your body's trying to reprocess it so it can put it in its right place in your mind so that you can remember it.

So every time I felt my body going back to Iraq—adrenaline, pulse, posture, anger, whatever mindset—I forced myself to look at the situation and remember the event in Iraq. And I had to. I mean, man, I spent years looking out on the street and seeing dead bodies, burning bodies, burning buildings right in front of me as I'm walking past. Years I haven't been there for a couple of years because I forced myself to look at it and remember the burning bus of women and children who weren't separate from the bus anymore, they were now part of it because their flesh had become the bus, right? So I forced myself to look at that, and then I forced myself to be there, and I forced myself to feel it, and then I forced myself to realize that I'm not there anymore. And at first, it took like an hour or however long, and then now it takes like half a second where my mind goes through all of that because I am not willing to let the past dictate my future. I'm willing to let the past make me stronger for the future so that I can help others.

So every morning now I get up, I do, whether you want to call them affirmations or prayer or meditation or visualization, I don't care what you want to call it. But I sit there and I visualize, pray about how my day will go. I think about things that could "trigger" me. Really, the more accurate saying is, "I would allow them to trigger me," as it's my choice. And so, first, you have to realize that you're not that important and get over yourself, too. That there's a greater good, and realize where you're at and face the fear, be there, sit there in the moment, and then bring yourself back to the reality that is present day. And then you need to plan. You need to care enough about the people around you, you need to care enough about yourself. If you love this country, which I do, about this great country, to say, "It's not about me, it's about me helping others," and so I'm going to plan so that when it happens in the future, I can actually think about all the predictable behaviors that somebody else is going to do or go through. And I don't need to be that. I can be the cool, calm, and collected and make my way through it. But if you don't plan for it, man, if you don't visualize it, if you don't realize that it's not about you, and you're really not that important, it's about helping your fellow man, country and country, then you're never going to get there. All these people with PTSD, these problems, they like to wallow in it and have that be an excuse for throwing their life away. I know the trauma that you went through is significant, and I'm not minimizing it. It's horrific by definition. But are you going to keep renting space in your mind to that? Are you going to keep giving that person or that situation power over you? Or are you going to say, "Enough. I'm my own person, and this ends now, so that I can live the life I want so that I can help others live the life they want."

Yeah, it's, it's, it's amazing. You incorporate a lot of stuff that we try to teach. And, you know, I even back to when you talk about we put people in buckets, and we categorize things. So it's part of how we were kind of taught growing up in school or life, education, right? We have to, you know, we like to categorize things for a purpose. That's how your brain works, partially. That's how we know I need to understand it rather than taking the time because I don't want to burn too many calories. I can just throw you back in this, this bucket or this box that you had. And Greg has a great analogy of what he uses with the ice cube trays, right? So we pull an ice cube tray out of the freezer, yeah, they're all frozen ice cubes in their own individual slot. But when it's just water in there and hasn't frozen yet, you can, you can move that ice cube tray around, and that water goes from one to the next. Because yeah, we can categorize ourselves into little groups, but we fall in a whole bunch of different ones, right? And we can go from one to the next. So kind of sloppy, life is a little sloppy, it's not clear-cut. There's a lot of chaos out there. Then we, we want to make some edges once in a while.

And, you know, you illustrated such an incredible point. I would say that PTSD has been around a while because if you look back in historical literature, you hear Aristotle, you hear Jesus, you hear a lot of influential people back then saying, "Hey, first you got to take care of yourself before you can help others." And then it becomes part of a Hippocratic oath, do you get what I'm trying to say, "Surgeon, heal thyself." So the mindset is important, but I think it's important to have role models like you, Doc, that come up and say, "I'm a fragile, broken human as well." And that helps open doors and opens the floodgates for a lot of people that need help to get it. I really think so. Get up, bootstrap it. You're largely responsible for your future, so take some control, get back that control. That's a great, great, great story.

So, what do you have kind of going on now? I know you're in Colorado Springs, right? And you got your own, by the way, we're only a couple hours away. Rob Manners West is right up in Gunnison. Yeah. So you tell us a little bit how you were able to kind of, like, what you got going on now and your transition out from active duty military, and what you went into and what all the good stuff you're doing right now. And actually, how this whole kind of lockdown quarantine is affecting your business.

Sure. We shut down as of Monday, and so we're taking a couple of weeks off. I mostly do skin cancer, so I'm taking two weeks off, and then we're going to see what the situation is like because, you know, the cancer is not something that you can just keep kicking the bucket down the road. Right? You've got to, and people oftentimes don't know what's cancerous, so they need to come in and get it checked out. So we've given two weeks off. I prepared for this. So I ordered a year's worth of medical supplies a couple months ago. Everybody laughed at me, but again, things repeat, right? History repeats. It's not that big of a lesson. We gave a lot of that to the local hospital systems because, wow, they wouldn't listen to me when I went and spoke to them about this back at the beginning of February. We've taken a list of volunteers. So the moment the hospital calls and needs volunteers, they get it. But, you know, Colorado's a healthier state, so we are the healthiest state. It's funny though, when you compare Colorado to the world, we would rank about the 22nd healthiest country in the world, even though Colorado's the healthiest state in America. Anyway, that's another topic.

I don't think Colorado is going to be hit as hard as other places that tend to have more obesity and other health problems. I think we're still going to have a problem here, but I don't think it's going to be as hard. But I run the dermatology clinic. I have a number of different businesses. One of them is aimed to help doctors learn the business because we are horribly bad at it. And you know, the burnout rates among physicians range between about 32% and 68%. And the depression and suicide rates for physicians are some of the worst of any profession. When they look at medical students coming out of medical school right now, one medical school did a study: 75% of the kids getting out of medical school right now are on antidepressants or stimulants or both. And so the house of medicine is really, really fractured. So I wrote the book to try to help people understand why we are where we're at. I'm doing a year-long course to try to help doctors take control over where they're being abused, I guess is the best way to say it. I mean, I do so many things, but everything about my personality from start to finish, my emotional home is trying to help and trying to become someone who can help. So that's, that's where I'm at now. I'm civilian. I was very well-known in the military in a very small community, which, and I owned a business now. We have, I don't know, 57 employees now, and none of them, even though they're home, they're all getting paid their normal salary. That's not debatable because I plan. And so when we go back to work, it's back to work time. But I could not go into the reserves because I was very well-known in a very small community, which means if I went to active duty, everybody would lose their jobs. So I'm out of the military, and I'm doing what I can as a civilian. That's incredible.

You know, yeah, on a number of points, you know, I mean, just to be able to. It's funny because obviously, some of the good stuff that's come out of everyone being at home on quarantine is just the comments and memes and stuff out there on social media are just getting hilarious. I mean, people are really cool. But the one that I just said, I just said that Greg was, you know, someone holding a sign in a protest and says, "You know, every disaster movie starts with the government not listening to a scientist." And it was just hilarious because it's true. But, you know, we, it's so, you know, we see it so much, and it's like, you know, the advice of, "Hey, get up and, you know, make your bed, clean your room." Well, that's not about making your bed and cleaning your room. That's life advice to live your life. But it's the same thing you just wanted, you were preparing. Like, "Well, I bought, I have a year of medical supplies, and here, I told everyone else to do that, and I said, 'You're not, so you don't need to do that.'" And then, and then it happens. You're like, "Okay, how much do you need? Here you go." You know.

The only thing I would caution you against saying is this whole thing that you're paying your employees. Brian and I have worked together for a good long time now, and it's now on the A/P (accounts payable) because we're all doing it for duty, honor, country, and the flag, and not a lot of money, especially with the money. Thank God you're married, Brian, that's all I'm saying.

So no, it's, it's incredible. But same thing, even from, because you brought up a number of issues, man. You got doctors are out there doing, doing, trying to save the world and save their patients and do good, right? You don't join, or you don't get into the healthcare field in any way, or first responder, law enforcement, military, because you know, you're just like, you want to become a modern famous person, right? You go into finance if you want to do that, right? But yeah, it's interesting you bring up, you know, how many doctors are suffering from different types of burnout, post-traumatic stress, all that different stuff. You know, and even though it's like, "Wait a minute, you're the ones that are supposed to be telling us how to live our lives, and you can't do it for yourself." And it's not because it's because they're so focused on what they're, so we're all looking down and focused on what we have to do that we don't take the time to step back and look up and out and go, "Well, how does this affect big picture?" And I think a lot of your experience, maybe the military and life, have led you to go, "Well, we have to be prepared, we have to plan these are the things." And it's where that comes from. You know, it. So we always tell people it's the physician heal thyself, right? Or the oxygen mask on the airplane analogy, right? When those oxygen masks come down, what are you supposed to do? Put it on yourself first and then anyone else that you're traveling with. Why? Because, and it says, "Breathe normally," and we all know that the idea is if you're not studying and rehearsing for that, there's going to be a rude awakening. Problems don't get easier at 30,000 feet. Yeah.

So, but just going into basic preparation. And like you just said, so you get up in the morning and you take your minute. We just had John McAskill on recently, he's a, he's still, he's getting out of active duty, he's a Navy SEAL, Technical Master, and a great guy. But he does all the mindfulness and meditation stuff, and he's like, "Look, this is what I do. You know, you start out in the morning, and you do your breathing exercises, you focus." And like you just said, you went through a tactical decision game. "Alright, what can I get done today? What could happen today that I can prepare for?" And people don't realize is that five minutes that it takes to do that, five to ten minutes in the morning, that's worth setting your alarm clock 15 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, to do that. Because otherwise, you know, your, your, your, as we say, when an alarm goes off, you're at bang, and, "Oh, I got to get up, and I got to do this, I got to..." And I always do that because I'm, I, you know, Greg is similarly, but I do, where I'm the guy that wakes up in the morning and works out first thing. I get up early, I don't care. If it means losing sleep to do that, it's actually better for me to wake up and do something versus trying to get an extra half hour, hour of sleep. Because then I'm going to be miserable. Then I'm not going to get the blood flow, and then I'm not going to have my workout done. So I'm going to be pissed all day because I know I'm not going to do it later at night because I'm going to come up with thirty excuses why I don't need to. Right? And so sometimes just that planning process in the morning by yourself, "What do I need to get done today?" Have five minutes alone before anyone else wakes up. It's beautiful in the morning when it's dark still and knowing that everything is still quiet and asleep. And I'm alone with my hate and my fear. It's just me. It's just me to hate me. There's not a lot of other people. But that's where you're truly creative.

I mean, listen, you can be blown by the wind. And the wind will blow you wherever, and you, you might wind up on your feet, but chances are you're not going to wind up where you want to be. So you, you can be blown by the wind, or you can decide where you're going to go. You know, it really is, is that the choice is yours. I just wish people would have a little intention behind it. You know, so there's, they did an interesting study a while ago that this one little thing is more effective at fixing or helping depression than antidepressants. And that is, when you go to sleep at night, write down on a piece of paper three things that you're truly grateful for. And don't just write "family and house" and, yeah. Like, spend a minute actually living in that spot of what you're grateful for. The exercise takes less than five minutes, and it actually reduces depressive symptoms more than antidepressants just by focusing on being grateful. A little bit of planning, a little bit of intention. It's huge. But people are again, there's going to be some people listening to this podcast who are depressed, and that's not, all of us have problems in our life. All of us have things that we need to overcome. Actually, if you can look at it and overcome it, you'll be stronger than you ever would have been. I've never experienced it. So, but there's going to be a lot of people who are on antidepressants right now listening to this, or like, "You know, I'm not going to do. I'm not going to, I don't know what could happen to me if I wrote down on a piece of paper three things I'm grateful for and why not." What are you afraid of? Take control. You are the captain of your ship. The worst that you have to lose, try it for a month. If it doesn't work, you've burned through a couple pieces of paper. That's way less than a copay or your prescription, I'm sure. But how many people are actually going to do it?

Yeah, well, I, you know, that one, I appreciate again coming on and sharing some awesome stuff when you went into your story from Iraq. Like, I could have just, I felt, man, the cortisol was coming on, my heart rate was going up. I'm sitting here like, man, I was right there or thinking of some other, other situations. And of course, I've been in as well, and Greg has countless as well from his life. So, you know, we all deal with that and kind of differently and talk about it differently, articulated. But it's so funny how your story just immediately reminds me, and we have these come up with these coping mechanisms that are positive, right? That allow us. If this podcast has become over. Yeah, I mean, this, you know, this is a large part of our therapy. Yeah, it's, it's therapy for you. It just ends up you just berating me for a while. (Just mention Judy.) So that's all I describe it as. Greg's Uber driver slash emotional punching bag. But he seems to be my alcohol supplier since it's people working for him. But no, we, we thank you so much for coming on here. And, you know, we'd love to have you back on again sometime. Please tell me you'll do that, please tell me, of course.

I'm honored. I feel like I should be thanking you. And thank you so much for allowing me on your space, and I'm sorry for raising your cortisol. I'm sure you've got the coping mechanisms around. So thank you, guys, so much. I really appreciate it. And everybody listening, thank you for hearing me out and not just following me, whatever, to put me in a box.

Yeah, and I'll put up links. I know your book's coming out eventually soon here. I'll put up links to that in the episode details and everything. But, you know, Universal Death Care: A Solution for Health Care in the Age of Entitlement. So that's, that's the point. It's not just, "Hey, here's the problem." It's, "Here's how you can address that problem." And like you said, you use a little anecdote, those stories, and then highlight it into, "Hey, this is, this is some of the things we see, and this is how I think we should provide a solution to it." So I'll put all that stuff up, and we appreciate you and thank you for everything you've done in the past and continue, sir. I mean, even in tough times, you're, you know, we could get into another thing. If, like you said, you know, just running a successful business as a doctor is not what people think, and there's not a lot of people that can do that. And the fact that you are and employing people and still paying, this is very admirable. So I appreciate you coming on. Thanks. Greg, do you have any other closing comments?

He's only in Colorado Springs. And Brian and I do stuff in the Springs for the United States Army, for Fort Carson, obviously, for different clients that are down there. Let's do something together. Let's put together where we're going to help some folks and put it up where everybody can show up, and then film it and put it online. I think it'll be great stuff.

That'd be great. And I'd be honored to be at your side doing that.

Likewise. Semper Fi, gentlemen. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, sir.

Don't forget, everyone, that training changes behavior.