Episode #203. Billions Spent, Barely Discussed: Healthcare’s Quiet Crisis, with Greg Miller, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Carta Healthcare

Summary

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Risk Never Sleeps Podcast — Episode #203

Title: Billions Spent, Barely Discussed: Healthcare’s Quiet Crisis
Host: Ed Gaudet
Guest: Greg Miller (VP of Marketing and Business Development, Carta Healthcare)
Date: April 2, 2026
Location: VIVE Live, Los Angeles, California

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Episode Overview

This episode zeroes in on a "quiet crisis" in healthcare: the significant, underappreciated costs and risks associated with clinical data abstraction. Host Ed Gaudet chats with Greg Miller from Carta Healthcare about the billions spent annually by health systems on this hidden line item, the essential role of hybrid intelligence (AI plus human expertise), and how organizations can achieve tangible improvements in patient safety and operational efficiency. Beyond the technical, the conversation ranges into healthcare career advice, lessons in leadership, the power of empathy, and even an unexpected journey through music and lucid dreaming.

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Main Themes & Key Discussion Points

1. The Hidden Crisis of Clinical Data Abstraction

• Clinical data abstraction—the manual process of extracting data from electronic health records (EHRs) for use in registries and regulatory reporting—costs U.S. health systems between $10 and $15 billion each year ([00:51]).
  • This work is mostly invisible to executives, yet it underpins critical downstream functions: star ratings, accreditation, quality initiatives, and patient safety.
• Greg Miller:
  • "There's a hidden cost line item that most C Suite executives really have no idea that they're spending money on, which is called clinical data abstraction." ([00:51])
  • "Some registries are mandatory, like CMS, for regulatory compliance reasons, and then there's tons of different registries that are clinically focused, usually sponsored by the medical societies…" ([01:16])

2. Carta Healthcare’s ‘Hybrid Intelligence’ Approach

• What is Hybrid Intelligence?
  • The fusion of state-of-the-art AI with clinical expert validation ensures high-quality, reliable data for registries ([01:58], [02:19]).
• Package Offerings:
  • Professional services: Teams of clinical data abstractors augmenting hospital staff ([04:42], [05:05])
  • SaaS model: Hospitals use Carta's technology with their own teams ([05:20])
  • Hybrid model: Blended staffing and tech, flexible to the facility’s needs ([05:38])
  • Scalable across multi-region, multi-entity health systems
• Importance of Unstructured Data:
  • "All the unstructured data, that's where the story is… our function is to essentially unlock that clinical data." ([07:15])
  • Ed Gaudet: "They want purpose built solutions."
    Greg Miller: "Exactly… We are hyper-focused on where we can deliver the most value as quickly as possible." ([08:17]–[08:25])

3. The Human Side of Healthcare IT

• Greg Miller’s Origin Story:
  • 40 years in healthcare IT, starting in operations at New England Medical Center, learning healthcare "from the ground up" ([02:25]–[03:42])
  • "What really drew me deeply into health care was the empathy that I saw from the clinical teams and just the amount of care that was provided to the patients…" ([03:21])
• Industry Challenge:
  • IT talent from outside healthcare often struggles because “healthcare is unique… the connection points, the third party vendors, and all the supporting structure make it complex.” ([03:55]–[04:24])

4. Building and Retaining Value in Healthcare Partnerships

• Client Success Stories:
  • Carta has achieved 100% customer retention over 10 years ([06:42])
  • 90% of customers expand the relationship after initial engagements ([06:56])
  • Greg credits this to the quality, flexibility, and vital nature of their service ([06:56]–[07:09])

5. Greg Miller—Lessons, Leadership & Life

• Career Lessons:
  • Empathy: "The one thing that maybe I could have learned earlier in my career is the importance of empathy… It's really easy for people to lose track of the fact that an organization is people and everybody's human." ([09:24])
• Life Lessons:
  • Importance of parenting and family, learned from experiencing a "me-generation" upbringing ([10:18])
  • Spirituality and the energy of the universe—drawn from time spent in Utah’s wild places ([11:17]–[11:27])
• On Risk:
  • "I usually don't do many things unless there's a near death experience involved. But seriously, the riskiest thing is starting companies." ([12:32], [12:39])
  • Starting a company from zero with a family—“Exciting, exhilarating, frustrating, hard work. But I wouldn't have it any other way.” ([13:23])

6. Advice for New Healthcare IT Entrants

• Stay Present and Listen:
  • “Don’t focus on the outcome... When you stop listening, you stop being present. And if you can't be present, you can't be empathetic. So I try to get people to just focus on the here and now.” ([16:38]–[17:32])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Why Health IT Is Different:

  "Healthcare is unique. Every industry says they're unique."
  — Greg Miller ([04:11])

• On the Value of Unstructured Data:

  "All the unstructured data, that's where the story is."
  — Greg Miller ([07:15])

• On Empathy in Leadership:

  "It's really easy for people to lose track of the fact that an organization is people and everybody's human."
  — Greg Miller ([09:44])

• On Building Something from Nothing:

  "The riskiest thing is starting companies...starting a company from zero, with a family...It's exciting, exhilarating, frustrating, hard work."
  — Greg Miller ([12:39]–[13:23])

• Life and Spirituality:

  "I take a lot of cues from the energy of the universe. I know this sounds a little mystical and weird."
  — Greg Miller ([11:27])

• Advice to Young Professionals:

  "When you start focusing on the outcome, you stop listening. When you stop listening you stop being present, and if you can't be present you can't be empathetic."
  — Greg Miller ([16:38]–[17:32])

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Fun & Off-Topic Moments

• Music Desert Island Picks (14:14–16:15):

  • Led Zeppelin I
  • Ozzy Osbourne (“Crazy Train”)
  • Grateful Dead (“Ripple”/American Beauty, live version preferred)
  • REO Speedwagon (“You Can Tune a Piano...”)
  • John Denver (“Rocky Mountain High”)
  • The Who (quadrophenia era; “Baba O'Riley” from Who’s Next)

• Dreams, Lucidity, and Sharks (18:11–21:50):

  • Ed reveals he's a lucid dreamer, describes using dreams to process recurring shark anxiety (and poetry about it), and suggests a technique for summoning lost loved ones into dreams.

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Key Timestamps

• 00:51: The hidden cost of clinical data abstraction is revealed
• 01:58: Introduction to “hybrid intelligence” and Carta's solution
• 03:21: The empathy and foundation of healthcare culture
• 04:42–06:42: The spectrum of service, SaaS, and hybrid models and how clients use them
• 07:15: The value of unlocking unstructured health data
• 09:24: Lessons in empathy and leadership
• 12:39: Riskiest thing done—starting a health tech company
• 14:21–16:15: Music that shaped Greg’s life
• 16:30–17:32: Advice for entering and thriving in healthcare IT
• 18:11–21:50: Lucid dreaming, grief, and finding meaning in dreams

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Tone & Language

The conversation is candid, authentic, and lightly humorous, with a shared sense of respect and mutual curiosity. Both Ed and Greg ground big industry themes in personal experience, music, family, and introspection, creating a blend of practical insight and human connection.

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Summary Takeaways

• Clinical data abstraction is a huge, under-recognized expense in healthcare, but essential to patient safety and quality.
• AI alone isn’t enough; hybrid intelligence (AI with clinician validation) ensures reliable, actionable data.
• Understanding healthcare’s unique culture—and approaching it with empathy and presence—is key to real impact.
• Startups offer fulfillment and risk in equal measure; large organizations bring process and bureaucracy.
• In leadership, presence and empathy matter more than outcome obsession.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to Risk Never Sleeps, where we meet and get to know the people delivering patient care and protecting patient safety. I'm your host, Ed Gaudet.

[A]

Welcome to the Risk Never Sleeps podcast in which we learn about the people that are on the front lines protecting patient safety and delivering patient care. I'm Ed Gaudette, the host, and today at VIVE Live in Los Angeles, California. I'm here with Greg Miller, Carter Healthcare VP of Marketing and Business development. Welcome, Greg.

[C]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

Yeah, I think we just pulled you out of the aisle or something, didn't we?

[C]

Almost quite literally.

[A]

So let's start off with maybe sharing a little bit about your current role, your organization, and what you're trying to accomplish at VIVE over the next couple days.

[C]

Yeah, sure. So, Carter Healthcare, what we do is. Let me back up for a second. There's a hidden cost line item that most C Suite executives really have no idea that they're spending money on, which is called clinical data abstraction. And health systems in the United states spend between $10 and $15 billion a year with highly trained nurses manually going through electronic health records to extract data to populate some other downstream system. Often it's a clinical registry, and, you know, some registries are mandatory, like cms, for regulatory compliance reasons. And then there's tons of different registries that are clinically focused, usually sponsored by the medical societies, like the American College of Cardiology, for example. And so what we do is we apply AI to the challenge of automating the abstraction of the data, but we combine that with deep clinical expertise, humans that validate the AI results and validate the data going into the registry, which is hugely important because the registry data is used for downstream for a lot of different purposes. It's anything from star ratings to accreditation programs to quality and patient safety related initiatives and things like that.

[A]

Okay, and so how does Carter Healthcare help?

[C]

So we do, again, we apply what we call. It's not a well known term, but we see the value in it every day, which is something called hybrid intelligence. And it is that combination of state of the art AI with clinical expertise to validate and ensure that the data quality going into a registry is of the highest quality. Because you know how it goes downstream. Right. If you're using that data to drive

[A]

decision garbage in, garbage out.

[C]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

How did you get into healthcare?

[C]

Long, long time. I've been in the healthcare IT space for 40 years.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

And my career actually started at New England Medical center in Boston. Yeah, Medical Center. And I was in it. I Was a management engineer right out of college. And where'd you go to school? The University of Maine.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. Are you from Boston originally?

[C]

No, I'm originally from Lake plus in New York. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just a redneck who wound up in wearing a suit every day. I didn't have any I T experience really. I had an economic. But I was hired by the hospital to focus on quality and process improvement. And so the CIO at Noona medical center at the time, his name is Bob Raiko, he had me sit in nursing stations with a stopwatch and a clipboard.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And essentially what I did was time and motion studies. Did this for months and months and months. What it taught me though, and while it was, you know, it's boring at times, really, it taught me healthcare operations from the ground up because I would do rounds with doctors and nurses and I would learn how health care was actually being delivered.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And what really drew me deeply into health care was the empathy that I saw from the clinical teams and just the amount of care that was provided to the patients who are obviously sick or injured or what have you. And so I learned health care what I believe is the best way possible from actually witnessing how the health care delivery system works.

[A]

Yeah. You've got to get out there on the floors with the physicians to really understand it. And so many vendors don't do that.

[C]

No. Which is amazing.

[A]

And so many vendors think they understand healthcare, but going into healthcare, healthcare and actually going all in healthcare is quite an eye opener in terms of the journey.

[C]

Well, you know, it's interesting too. I was talking with a physician from Kaiser this morning and he was talking about how they had brought in a lot of IT talent, highly capable people from outside of healthcare. And I think we went through a trend of that a few years ago.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But it hasn't delivered the benefits that others might have hoped. And part of that is because healthcare is unique. Every industry says they're unique. Yeah.

[A]

No, healthcare is very, very unique. Yeah. And it's a big ecosystem.

[C]

It. That's the other thing.

[A]

People know multiple sub segments of the market and you've got to understand the connection points. Plus all the third party vendors that support.

[C]

Sure.

[A]

And suppliers that support health care.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

Yeah. It's incredible. So how much of your solution is services versus SaaS versus AI?

[C]

Yeah, really good question. So in every hospital, everywhere, they have teams of people, nurses, again, who are manually doing this work. They usually have a huge backlog of cases that need abstraction and they can't keep up with the volume. So often they will turn to us and call and say, hey, do you have these types of people that can help us do abstraction for these types of registries? And so at one level, we will provide just professional services with our clinical team that will do the abstraction work. We have about 300 clinical data abstractors on staff. So that's one model. It's just purely services come in, augment their staff. Another model is where a health system has their own internal abstraction teams. They just want to make them more efficient and more effective and reduce the overall cost of abstraction. So they'll license our technology and use it internal with their internal teams. But there's this hybrid model that we see often, which is, hey, you know what? I don't have enough people. But we want to retain the function in house, but we want to leverage your technology. But do you also have some people that can use the technology with our people? And the reality is, with abstraction is it's usually buried within the service lines and each service line will have their own abstraction teams. It's rarely ever centralized at a corporate level. And so the reality is if you take like one of our customers, we have multiple customers that are multi state, multi entity health systems and they're divided up by regions. Right. And so it's not unusual for a region to. And let's just say it's 10 hospitals. It's not unusual for a region to have a mixed bag of models because it ultimately comes down to the individual facility and whether or not they have the teams. You know, you've got a hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana versus Minneapolis. The hiring pool is different.

[A]

Yeah, I like that.

[C]

And the availability of.

[A]

And you can consolidate all that into one view as well.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

Across those regions.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And the organization has sort of bit of an on demand model based on their needs. Right, Absolutely. Yeah. Which is really nice.

[C]

It's interesting. The, you know, we're very proud and very honored that at Carta healthcare we have 100% customer retention. And we've been in business doing this for 10 years. Wow. And 90% of our customers, they start somewhere, but they add on later.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I think that's just a testament to the importance of the function. Testament to the quality of the work we do. It's also a testament to the organization's commitment to doing abstraction to support registry efforts.

[A]

Yeah. If you look out over the next couple of years, what are some of your top initiatives, some of your strategic initiatives?

[C]

Yeah. I think for us, While we are 100% focused on clinical data abstraction for registries Today, if you think about, and really what we're doing is we're applying AI to abstract the unstructured data, which is 80%, 70, 80% of what's in the HR anyway. And so when you abstract the unstructured and the structured data together, the downstream possibilities for what you use that data for are really pretty endless. There's lots of, for example, analytic companies that do a good job with the structured data. That's easy, you can do data mapping and things like that. But all the unstructured data, that's where the story is. And so our function is to essentially unlock that clinical data. And once you've done that, downstream opportunities for analytics for patient safety, quality and process improvement, which essentially is what registry data is used for. There's tons of different use cases. Yeah. And I think for us as a company, we're not trying to be a general use AI company because I think at the end of the day, providers in particular, they have challenges and they're looking for solutions.

[A]

They want purpose built solutions.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

Yeah, I agree.

[C]

So we are hyper focused on where we can deliver the most value as quickly as possible. Nice.

[A]

When you think about you individually as a person, you've been 40 years in healthcare, IT. What would you be doing if you weren't doing this job?

[C]

Oh, I'd be a ski coach.

[A]

Okay. Yeah, I love it.

[C]

No, so.

[A]

So many people don't know how to answer that question. It blows my mind.

[C]

I grew up ski racing and I, and I have a background in. I actually have a degree in ski industry management as well as my economics. It's very unusual.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But that's what I'd be doing.

[A]

And you live in Park City.

[C]

Park City, Utah.

[A]

Yeah. What a wonderful place that is. Not a good year.

[C]

Not a good snow year this year. I feel bad for a lot of people because they come in, they spend a lot of money, expect Utah snow conditions and this year is not delivered.

[A]

Yeah, I had some of the best skiing in Utah. I did Snowbird and Alta.

[C]

Oh yeah, Phenomenal. They got almost six feet last week. Oh, did they last week?

[A]

Well, my skiing days are over. Boston's getting a bomb cyclone right now.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

On the blizzard.

[C]

Yeah. New England's doing quite well this year.

[A]

Yeah. That's great. You go back in time and tell your 20 year old self something. What would it be?

[C]

Probably tell myself a lot of things. But I think the one thing that maybe I could have learned earlier in my career is the importance of empathy. I saw it firsthand from the clinicians and I've been in anything from a pure startup to Fortune 50 companies. And the similarity of both types of companies is just a hard driving, growth oriented kind of machine. And it's really easy for people to lose track of the fact that an organization is people and everybody's human. And so I think if I learned that earlier in my career, it would have been better for me or at least I would have understood people and teams in a different way.

[A]

Yeah. I was often referred to as the bull in the china closet, so I can empathize with that.

[C]

I feel your pain.

[A]

Greatest lesson in life for you or a mistake you made that you took the most out of?

[C]

Well, I think it just gets super personal. I think I grew up in an environment where, you know, it was in the 60s and 70s and it was very much the me generation back then and my parents were, you know, off having fun and I was. Found myself on my own a lot and fortunately nothing extra bad happened. But I got, you know, just. I was a kid.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And fast forward to, you know, many years later when I had kids. And I think that I. What I took away from my childhood was the importance of parenting and family and in developing children. It's not just so hard. Right. It's really.

[A]

No, it's like a startup. There's no playbook you can pull off the shelf and apply. Everything's different. Everything. Every child is different too. Isn't it incredible how it is?

[C]

And I think, you know, I think if you take it from the perspective of you have an opportunity to shape a human and hopefully will go on to do good things in the world, I think that's something that I've thought deeply about in my adulthood.

[A]

Yeah, you seem spiritual.

[C]

You know, it's. I would say I'd be the first person to tell you I'm not religious, you know, but I am a little spiritual. And getting back to Utah, if you ever go down to southern Utah to Zion or Bryce.

[A]

I've been to Zion.

[C]

It's magical and it is spiritual. I think I personally, I take a lot of cues from the energy of the universe. I know this sounds a little mystical and weird.

[A]

Dude, you don't know who you're talking to. I'm a lucid dreamer.

[C]

So I see a Grateful Dead watch.

[A]

Yes, that's right. That is from a dead end. Yeah. Are you.

[C]

Oh, yeah. How many shows? Actually, not that many shows. Probably five.

[A]

Okay. Did you see Dead and Company when they were.

[C]

Well, they float around a lot and they've been in, in Utah. Yeah. And so you see them and.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Been to a bunch of fish shows.

[A]

Yeah. Nice. How about Goose?

[C]

I have not seen Goose camp. Have not seen camp. Heard the music. Have not seen.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. There's some good things coming out of newer bands these days. Yeah.

[C]

Goose in particular. Yeah, Goose.

[A]

Check out Goose. Yeah, yeah. Now you threw me off my question.

[C]

I'm talking about the dead.

[A]

If you want, we can talk about the dead. Okay.

[C]

Probably shouldn't. Probably shouldn't.

[A]

It's calling me off, but okay. All right. What's the riskiest thing you've ever done?

[C]

Well, so growing up ski racing, I have a high tolerance for both pain and adrenaline.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And what type of guy. So like I usually don't do many things unless there's a near death experience involved.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

But seriously, the. I think the riskiest thing is starting companies.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And you know, when I was at Tufts and Illegal Medical center back in the mid-80s and we had developed the first clinical and financial decision support system in healthcare long time ago. And so two years after I was there, maybe just over a year, four of us spun out of New England Medical center with zero funding. We were a wholly owned subsidiary of New England Medical center and we were still on salary with them, but we had to start a company. And so starting a company from 0,0 revenue and building it into something with a family. With a family. And yeah, everything goes around with it. Yeah, it's exciting, it's exhilarating, it's frustrating, it's hard, hard, hard work. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

[A]

Yeah. And you said you worked at larger companies too.

[C]

Yeah, I did.

[A]

What don't you like about larger? I mean, if you're a startup guy, then you know, like the difference.

[C]

Yeah, I do. And I think, you know, the two Fortune 50 companies I worked for were IBM and Aetna and I got acquired into both of those and tremendous companies and I learned a lot during the time there. But I think just the overall structure of the organization and the matrix, you know, and I don't want to use the term bureaucracy, I like to say matrix. There's a lot of process. Yes, Right. And I remember one situation where before we were acquired, for us to get a contract out the door to a customer would be like a couple of days. Yeah.

[A]

Moving a mountain.

[C]

And then bigger companies, it would take us two to three months to get the contract customer's hands. And when you're trying to grow the business, Prevention team sometimes gets the revenue police the Revenue Police. Exactly.

[A]

I got. That's great. All right, so you're on a desert island. You could bring five records with you. What would they be?

[C]

Oh, boy. Led Zepp one dude, right out of the gate.

[A]

You know where I was yesterday? Paramount Studios. Oh, you were Zeppelin 2. Went platinum there.

[C]

Oh, really?

[A]

At the studio? Yeah.

[C]

I didn't know that. So I started with Liz up one great album. I'm gonna.

[A]

How many more times? Oh, man. So good.

[C]

Probably there's an Ozzy Osbourne album in there.

[A]

Which one? Crazy Train.

[C]

I'm Crazy Train probably. Right. I have this.

[A]

That's my walk up song, by the way.

[C]

Is. Yeah, yeah, Fantastic. I have this weird thing like I don't remember actors names, for example, I don't remember albums as. But I would tell you what music would be in there.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

It's just this disassociation I have. So I think there's a Dead album in there somewhere.

[A]

Give me a song, I'll tell you the album.

[C]

Oh, boy. Ripple.

[A]

Oh, American Beauty.

[C]

Original song or live version?

[A]

Oh, got to go. Live, dude. Yeah, Live everything. Everything Dead is live is so much better than studio.

[C]

My brother actually was. He's a sou engineer and he's in the music business. And he followed the Dead for probably five years after college. He graduated and you know, hundreds of shows and he was recording, you know, back in those days. So I thought of a F to that probably. This might sound really weird, but like REO Speedwagon. Reminds me of high school.

[A]

Can't Tune a fish. Can't tune a piano, can tune a fish. Or something like that.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

Is that the name of that album? Yeah.

[C]

John Denver.

[A]

Oh, Rocky Mountain High.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Way back with that one.

[A]

That's good. I like John Denver. Yeah.

[C]

And boy, probably the who.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

I was a big who Stones fan. But probably.

[A]

Yeah. First, which who's next?

[C]

Actually, later. Probably quadrophenia. No, later.

[A]

Later.

[C]

This is where you're gonna test my knowledge of. Or give me a song. Baba Riley.

[A]

Oh, that's who's next.

[C]

I.

[A]

It's the one where they're urinating on the side of an oblique.

[C]

See, I just don't remember names like that.

[A]

Yeah, look at who's next. Okay, Very good question around someone coming out of college wants to break into healthcare. I t. What advice would you give them?

[C]

Yeah. What wisdom would you share?

[A]

It's crazy to come out of school now, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah. And my kids are 27 and 25.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

We have similar. And both have successful careers and all that one thing that I try to remind them of. And it's not just my kids, I try to teach this to younger professionals, even within company I might be with. Right. Which is it's often easy to focus on the outcome. Right. I want to make a lot of money, I want to do whatever. Okay. And what I coach people on is don't focus on the outcome. Because once you start focusing on the outcome, you stop listening. When you stop listening, you stop being present. And if you can't be present, you can't be empathetic. And so I try to get people to just focus on the here and now. It doesn't mean you don't think about the future.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But don't become so fixated on whatever you think the outcome is. Yeah. And that could even be an intermediate outcome, like a next week outcome. Don't focus on the outcome. Focus on the here now. Focus, be present and always be listening.

[A]

Yeah. And to your point about the universe, actually let the universe do its thing.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Don't be afraid to like enjoy the ride. Yeah, right.

[C]

That's absolutely true. And you know, I. I've been divorced and I tried dating and things like that and it was frustrating. It just wasn't me. It's not who I am. And at one point I said, you know what, I'm just going to give myself into the universe. And sure enough, faith, it's very quickly soon I now in the greatest relationship I've ever been.

[A]

Isn't that great when that happens? Yeah.

[C]

So there, there is a, there is a spiritual being out there that is looking out for us.

[A]

I absolutely agree with that 100%. Are you a lucid dreamer? Did I ask you that already?

[C]

No, I don't.

[A]

What does means where you can control your dream?

[C]

Oh no.

[A]

Oh no, what is that like you ever astral project?

[C]

No.

[A]

Oh, you gotta look this up. Look this stuff up.

[C]

Okay, tell me how you, how do you lucid dream? Yeah.

[A]

You get to a point in your dream where you actually are conscious of dreaming. And so if you can then harness that consciousness to then control the dream in a way that creates. So I used to have a lot of shark dreams. This is actually really interesting, but I don't think we have time to go into it.

[C]

But I want to know the root cause on that.

[A]

Jaws.

[C]

Oh, really?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, probably. But every year I would have. I have a couple of recurring dream themes. But the shark dream, 15, 20, 30 times a year.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Seriously, like, you know, it was all.

[C]

That's a lot.

[A]

Yeah. No, no, I know.

[C]

So.

[A]

And then I tapped into the lucidity of dreaming and realized nothing is going to happen with the shark. It's all going to be good. So then I was able to experience the dream in a calm way.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Not really get freaked out about it or exert myself or whatever during the dream process. And so I'm a poet. I write poetry. Yeah. That's my thing. Right. I wrote a poem back in 2022 about having a conversation with a shark off of Cape Cod. I get picked up by a literary magazine. It's just the dialogue I'm having with shark because I was trying to, like, you know, again, get it down on paper and get it out of me. And the next year I was in Aruba.

[C]

I used to go there a lot. Yeah. Surfing. Yeah.

[A]

It was awesome. Right. I've been there five years. The second year I was there, after I published the poem, I literally was in the water and a shark was coming at me and everybody was cleared out. I was. Had my back to the beach, so I didn't know. And they were screaming my name and screaming, shark. And I literally saw the finger and I started running. And all of a sudden I went into the dream state. Like a portal almost.

[C]

I know it's going to sound crazy

[A]

on this podcast, like, what do you

[C]

guys have for breakfast?

[A]

But as I was doing it, everything slowed down and I had this sense of calmness that I've never experienced yet in my life. And.

[C]

Because you knew that. Because I knew that it was.

[A]

I was in this dream state.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But I was, you know, it was real. My wife's yelling. I could see my wife on. On the beach, yelling, screaming. Like this look of horror on her face. And I'm literally just running in slow motion and I'm in this dream portal.

[C]

It was. That's why.

[A]

Weirdest thing in the world. Never had the dream since.

[C]

Wow. Never had the port. Are you the kind of person if you wake up, like, you really wake up in the middle of the night. Yeah. And you realize you were having a dream.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

When you go to sleep again, the dream continues.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[C]

That's happened to me a couple times, in fact.

[A]

In color, too. Do you dream in color?

[C]

See, Yeah, I do.

[A]

The other thing you can do too is. So my parents both passed away, like a couple years, whatever. And so I can bring them into the dream state if I need to talk to them and physically hug them, which is mind blowing.

[C]

Okay, that's.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

What if you have for breakfast, It's

[A]

There's a whole dimension of the universe that I think if you can tap into. I mean, there are people that can do this in a really deep level. I just feel like I'm just, you know.

[C]

You know, I'm gonna have to try scratching the surface.

[A]

Try it. When you go to sleep, if you've lost a loved one, if you've lost a parent. Yeah. So think about them as you're sleeping. As you're going to sleep, bring them into your consciousness and then call them into your dream and they'll appear.

[C]

Okay. In your dream, I'm giving it a shot.

[A]

And then remember, if you can, try to be conscious, try to hug them and then tell me about it. All right?

[C]

Okay. I'm going to try. All I can do is try.

[A]

I tell everyone this, because if you can do it, it's nothing like it. It's amazing. Y. Yeah, I'm gonna give it a shot. Yeah. It's pretty incredible. I'm completely lost on this podcast now. We've gone to places I've never been to. Greg Miller, what a great guest you've been. This was fun. Yeah. No, I really appreciate your time. This is Ed Gaudette from the Risk Never Sleeps podcast. If you're on the front lines protecting patient safety and delivering patient care, remember to stay vigilant because Risk never sleeps.

[B]

Thanks for listening to Risk Never Sleeps. For the show, notes, resources and more information and how to transform the protection of patient safety, Visit [e-mail] that's C-E N S I N-E-T.com I'm your host, Ed Gaudet, and until next time, stay vigilant because Risk never sleeps.