Jeff Frazier (0:00)

Foreign. Welcome back. This is Jeff Frazier, your host of the Stimpak podcast. I've got a bonus episode for you. It's not part of the season three series. Why? Because it's actually the episode I recorded that was supposed to be the season kickoff for season three, but it was all about me and my background because I, I do think there's probably some value in you understanding my history and my capabilities and what I am and am not. And so I recorded this episode but then when I listened back to it I was like just felt too self indulgent and so I re recorded a new version of of episode of the season kickoff which you've heard presumably, but so I'm including it now as a bonus episode because it has nothing to do with the rest of the series. It's just all about me and my background. You'll. You'll miss nothing about the actual work of season three, which is putting that puzzle together, so feel free to skip it. I. I totally get it. I won't be offended. I'm not going to ask you eight as you listen to the All About Jeff episode. Anyway, I'm just having trouble getting episodes three and four wrapped up in a timely manner and I wanted to at least give you something to listen to if, if you're super bored, feel free to listen. I hope you listen to all this stuff on two times speed, right? Or, or at least at some sort of accelerated pace because I can't imagine you listening to it at one time speed. But anyway, thank you guys all. Hope you enjoy this bonus episode. Here it is. So before we move too much further into that, I'd love to give you a little bit of background into me. I hope that doesn't sound self serving and lame. If I'm going to be your guide on this journey, I would imagine you want to know at least a little bit about my background. So let me do that. So I was your pretty standard ADHD kid that was terrible in school. I think I've mentioned before my parents were divorced early, grew up in a fairly rough area and then a decent area after that. My mother remarried a abusive man who eventually killed her when I was 14, which was of course a horrific experience for us and messed me up pretty good. Father and stepmother did their best to straighten me out, but I was quite a handful. Ended up getting kicked out of my house when I was like 17. But before that they were doing their best to try to put up with me and my flailings. I often remember a fairly pivotal moment When I was up late watching infomercials, like many of us did in the 90s, and I was watching Tony Robbins. You remember those infomercials from the 90s? If not, I'm sure you could YouTube them and find some of those clips. But I remember being fired up by Tony Robbins, thinking, dude, that guy's awesome. But I could never afford the, I don't know, 200 bucks or whatever it is to get his kit and, you know, CD set or maybe his tapes at that time. I don't know, I think it was CDs, but he still got me fired up. And then the next infomercial after that was starting your own business, right? And so we did. I got a business license. I think I saved up maybe 100 bucks or something to get their starter kit. It was essentially a wholesaling business. You buy cheap leather goods or jewelry or whatever. And I would go around to these gift shops and try to sell them wholesale goods, and they would sell them to their retail customers. And we got a couple of little customers. We didn't make any money. We failed pretty quick. Probably lasted about six months. My bit. My buddy down the street was my business partner, Ryan Pierce. He's awesome. But we ended up folding and failing at that. That was pretty typical of my fits and starts at that age. But I want you to hear that I was pretty ambitious at a young age and had some tenacity, but was still learning how to be tough and disciplined. Fast forward to graduation day from high school. I barely graduated high school. When I say barely, I'll tell you this story. So the day of graduation, I get called in to Mrs. Nichols. She's our counselor, my guidance counselor. And she tells me, hey, sorry, you can't walk with everybody. You've got to do this summer school class before you can graduate because you're not passing your senior English class. And I was stunned and shocked, Terrified. So I put on my best salesman hat and didn't take no for an answer and was probably in her office for 15, 20 minutes just begging her to do something. Isn't there something that can be done? And she let out the phrase something like, I'm sorry, Mr. Archer is failing you. If you get him to change the grade, then I could do something. And of course, that light went off in my head. I went running out the office door to Mr. Archer's class to beg him to pass me. And he was a great English teacher, but he was not going to budge at all. And I remember spending another 15 or 20 minutes in there trying to get him to budge, and he let out the phrase, yeah, I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You transferred in here mid semester from some other class. I forget that teacher's name. And she transferred you in with a C or something. And that plus your grade makes you fail. But it had you transferred in with a slightly higher grade, then you'd be fine, right? And so I went out, running out his door into this other English teacher's class and begged her to let me do some sort of extra credit in order to bump my grade and then transfer over with a slightly higher grade. She agreed, did that, and the waterfall happened. And I went back Mrs. Nichols office with my new grade in hand and her jaw dropped. I can't believe you did that. But it worked and I was able to graduate with my class and move on. I tell that story to. To illustrate the. The tenacity to take no, never take no for an answer kind of thing. That, that really has done well for me. Although it probably would have been good for me to have lost some of those in order to grow up a little bit. But anyway, so that. So then I graduate high school and. But I don't want to go to college. I don't have the discipline and maturity to go do that. I want nothing to do with formal education at that point. And so I flounder from job to job while. And then eventually am work in. That's in 1995. In 1997, I'm working for my cousin selling for his cleaning service. And I am in his office and I look on his counter and it's those Tony Robbins CDs, and they're still in cellophane. Nobody's ever touched them. And I said to my cousin Rob said, hey, can I use these CDs? He says, yeah. And I listened to those like crazy, right? Those were. I just drank those. It was fascinating to me to start to learn a bit about myself and grow up a bit. And one of the things that I decided to do was join the army to get some discipline and some life experience and some structure and try to grow up a bit. And it worked. So I joined the army in 1997, September of 1997, and got every, every bit of discipline I was looking for and began to have more time to learn informally. I remember my dad sent a book on investing. This is in the early days of the Internet where you could trade stocks online. And I got excited about doing that and started doing it. I remember I started with 1300 dollars signature loan from my credit union that I had and turned that into $20,000, which was like a gajillion dollars to me at the time. I was making $846 a month from the army and was so proud of this nest egg that I had built up, not realizing this. This was the dot com boom era where everyone was making money on the Internet. And then by the dot com bomb or bust, I lost it all like everyone else. But during that process of learning about stocks and finance and whatnot, I learned how to read, how to like books. My dad sent me my first investment book in the mail and I devoured that sucker. It was probably the first book I'd ever actually read in my life. And then I loved that one. He sent me another stack of books on everything. And I swallowed those, that stack of books in like a month or two and just got addicted to books. And this is the early days of Amazon. And so I started getting all kinds of books. But that was my unconventional form of learning. I did take a few college classes they the army actually when I was in Bosnia. So I was living in Germany initially. That's where I was stationed. And then we deployed to Bosnia for operation Joint Guard and joint Forge in 98. And they actually I think they're from university in Maryland. They would send us professors to come in and educate us. And I began to really enjoy college level learning. And I remember sitting in a bunker, like a sandbag bunker, with a flak jacket and kevlar vest and a weapon. And my professor is sitting just to the side of me in the bunker teaching me about sociology or something like that. Anyways, it was a great way to learn and I started getting really excited about learning. So by the time I got out of the army, I was in for four years. So September of 2001, actually September 9, 2001. So two days before September 11. I ets it was a strange time to get out of the army. We can talk about that another day. But I went straight into technology. This Internet thing was very exciting to me. I had always been into technology for since I was young and so I didn't want to miss it. So I jumped in as an intern at a tech firm in Orange county, worked for them for two and a half years making websites, then went to work for autobytel.com, which is a large website company. They make all the car websites like car.com, car, tv.com, autoweb.com at the time. I don't Know if any of these websites are still around, but they're a big deal at the time, public company. And then I turned them into my first client when I started my own tech firm in 2005, and then very quickly started to get healthcare customers from the area that became our client. So making websites and brochures and things like that at that time, that's in 2005. So we continue to build that company up. Started it with just myself for my dining room table and grew that to about 50 people by 2015. When most of our clients were in the healthcare space, they were medical device companies or hospitals or a few pharma clients. And that was always really appealing to me. There's something very exciting about making significant contributions to humanity. I've always been a big thinker and wanted to change the world somehow for good, like many of us do. Presuming if you're listening to this podcast, you're within that group, so I'm sure you can identify with that. In 2015, we were about 50 people and doing pretty well. But on March 9th of 2015, everything changed for us, especially for me personally. I'll back up a little bit. Probably around 2013. Got a. I met a guy named AJ Triano. He was our VP of Technology at the time. And he introduced me to this concept of mobile health and connected health through a book he introduced me to called the Creative Destruction of Medicine by Dr. Eric Topol. And he was all about the technologies at that time converging together to push our health forward and being this new and exciting thing. That Sounds silly now 10 years later, because technology and health is a huge space and kind of seems very normal at this time. You know, my. My watch, my Apple watch, has all kinds of health capability and there are many, many other devices. But at that time, it was new and still unfolding, but very exciting to me when I read that book and started talking to AJ about it. And that really opened my mind to wanting to get into other businesses. And what I realized was that technology was going to replace doctors in many of the ways that they operated at that time. I could see AI coming. That was a very new thing at the time. But I could see that doctors were essentially a decision tree. Right. You know that when you go to see a doctor, they ask you questions, and what they're doing when they ask those questions is they're walking down a decision tree. Is it this or is it that? And of course, they're involving x rays and MRIs and blood tests and those kinds of things, but it's still a decision tree. They're trying to decide their diagnosis and their therapeutic recommendation. And I realized that a computer could do that decision tree much better than a human could do at some point. And you could see that. But you could also see that we did not know very much about human biology. And when AI could be the best doctor in the world, we were going to be disappointed with how poor it was at understanding human biology. And so that left me at research. I started to study health research, clinical research and quote that came out of Stanford back then a guy named John Ioannidis, he studied research and the reproducibility and quality of clinical research and other types of human research. And his quote said that it is more likely that your research findings are false than true. And that's a scary realization to recognize that we just don't know much about human biology. And so I really wanted to contribute to objective, tech driven clinical research, but I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to start. What technology should we build first? Who will the customers be? And. And there was all sorts of politics and organizational obstacles that you had to overcome in order to do clinical research. And I didn't know how to overcome those at that time. And just as I'm struggling with trying to figure out how to build this kind of a business, Apple comes out with something called a research kit, which is centrally and well, you might be familiar with the health kit or health app on your phone. It's a little white Chiclet with a heart on it if you've got an iPhone. Google has a similar technology, but back in 2015 it was about a year old and it started collecting your health data, your personal health data, if you had an Apple Watch or some other clinical device. And on March 9, 2015, Apple announced ResearchKit, which would essentially enable researchers like universities or drug companies to build these apps that would ask phone users to donate their health data for the sake of research. And you could build other kind of cool technologies around that. That essentially opened up the opportunity for people like me to build those technologies. So I got super excited about ResearchKit and I didn't know how to break in, but I found this email address at the bottom of some obscure webpage. It's like infopple or some sort of huge bucke. And I sent him an email. I tried to do my best, to be memorable. I said something like, hey, this research kit thing is going to change the world. I want to get in and I'll do it for free. And I have this company that can make tech and we'll do whatever it takes to get in. And the next day or maybe two days later, I get an email from the director of the whole research kit program, Divya Nag, who emails me. She essentially says, are you serious? And I write back, yes. And that next morning I was on a conference call with their team and we started working together and we were able to launch, I believe it was five of the first eight research kit projects came out of our shop. And that really put us on the map. I remember meeting Jeff Williams. That's Tim Cook's number two guy. Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, and many of you know that name. And then Jeff Williams is underneath him. And he was at one of our launch events. And I remember him when he was introduced to me. He says, oh, yes, I know who you are. You're, you're from Thread. You guys are the best developers in the world. And that was certainly hyperbole, but was incredibly flattering. And I floated on that phrase for days thereafter, but that's what put us on the map. And we really took off after that. Most famous technology was called EPI Watch out of. We partnered with Johns Hopkins University and of course Apple to turn the Apple Watch using the accelerometer, the gyroscope and heart rate sensor embedded in the watch to detect seizures in epilepsy patients and then notify emergency contacts of where you are and what's going on and obviously collect lots of data on the seizure itself. And that was very exciting to be part of a number of other cool techs that we built at that point. So why do I bring that up to you? Oh, and then we sold that company in 2019 and that's what enables me to have retired, effectively. I'm still. We sold the controlling stake of that company. I'm still on the board, but just as an observer. Right. And that allowed me to retire and then focus entirely on Haiti, move our family out here to South Florida and start going to Haiti regularly. So that that's what enables all this Stimpak stuff. So why do I tell you that story? I would like for you to understand a little bit about me. I am kind of bragging because I want you to give me a little bit of credibility and know who I am, but I also want you to know who I am not. So I am an innovator. I do understand research. That's the business that I came from. I am very strategic. That's kind of my one trick is I can come up with good strategies that's leveraging relative strength against relative relative opportunity or weakness. And I can learn things really fast, but also know the right things to learn. There's an interesting case study that Malcolm Gladwell made famous in his book Blink, where he's discussing the issues that this particular hospital, I forget the name of the hospital had, but they were having issues with their cardiology department, and they were bringing in too many heart attack patients, admitting them into the hospital, and then turning away the wrong patients. So people were being turned away and going home and having heart attacks and dying. And then a lot of those that they would admit into the hospital were actually fine and would never actually surface a heart attack. Right. So they were getting that wrong. And the case study essentially blames that on they were looking at the wrong things. Right? So each doctor would ask a barrage of questions to each patient, using their expertise and experience, and make a decision on their own. And what they found was there's actually only two or three factors that that really mattered in predicting whether or not somebody was going to have a cardiac event right then and there in the next hour or so, or few. And why do I tell you that story? Something I've been really good at in my career is treating life like a math word problem, where you're trying to kind of peel off the parts of the word problem that don't matter to get to the factors that do matter. And that's what I would really like to do now in this podcast with my work, now our work with Stimpak, let's figure out what it is about Haiti that really does matter. I want to take a comprehensive look at Haiti, but also in order to understand what we should not be looking at, that's what happened in this. This case study with Malcolm Gladwell was that they found a couple of factors that really mattered, and they cranked on those and were much more effective at determining whether or not people were really going to have a cardiac event. And I would like that to be true for us here at Stimpach is that we find those few leather levers that really matter, that will really move the needle dramatically in Haiti. And I think we've actually found that. And that's the argument that I hope to make to all of you in this season. You know, to be good at those things that I just mentioned, I have to be a generalist, which means I. I am a Haiti expert, but I'm not an expert in every discipline. So what I'VE become an expert at is pulling in true experts, right, that are expert in a narrow space. For example, to truly understand Haiti properly, you have to understand its history, its governance, both present politics and past and, and all the context around that. You need to understand the security situation, the women's rights issues, the children's exploitation issues, and children's issues at large, human rights in general in Haiti, agriculture, of course, commerce and economics, and on and on and on and on. And I couldn't possibly be able to call myself an expert in each of those. But what I hope that we will do together is, is get enough information from those experts during this season to feel like we do have an understanding broadly, so we can see the whole picture and figure out what the most important levers are. Right? So, yes, I am a Haiti expert, but I'm not an expert in everything. There's plenty of people who can run circles around me. I've only been doing this for what, five years now? A little more than five years now. And understanding Haiti, technically, my third career, right, I was in advertising in tech and then clinical research in tech. And now I'm doing this Haiti thing, right? So don't, don't let me get too big for my British and over claim capability. I am who I am, but please understand who I'm not. And so I'll ask experts to join me and then of course, ask you guys as the audience to pressure test some of these claims I make. Right? Mix it up. But feel free to be a troll, a nice troll, and get on the comment threads and ask hard questions and that'll allow me to understand where you're at and what you need to hear more of. And, you know, have we been exhaustive in a certain recommendation or diagnosis of Haiti? Is there something that we're not considering? I would like to think that we're, we're going to do that thoroughly, but I want to hear lots of feedback and pushback from you guys. So you might be thinking right now, this is a very strange podcast. And it is, you know, I, from my advertising world, often consulting other nonprofits as a pro bono thing. And one of the things I was very clear with them about is their conversion funnel, their emotional conversion funnel. If you want to get somebody to donate money, you don't confuse them. You make them feel pain about the problem, whether it be child exploitation, puppies who need to be adopted, or a particular disease state that you're trying to cancer or whatever. You need people to feel pain about that problem and feel clear about Your solution to that problem and their role in it. That's the process, right? If you do that well and then ask them to hit to mash the donate button, they'll do it, right? They'll pick up the phone and they'll donate or whatever the call to action is. We're not doing that here, right? Instead telling you a little bit about the problem. Hopefully you listen to season two and got a little bit of that. But I should, at this point, telling you, be telling you the clear solution that we have in about 30 seconds and then asking you to mash the donate now button. But that's not what we're doing. And that's because I'm trying to, rather than raise awareness about Haiti and some easy solution that we have, I'm not trying to raise awareness. I'm trying to recruit you. I'm trying to build a pack of powerful people who understand this situation, who are ready to act and engage and become activists in order to make real change. That's probably going to be a pretty small group of people who are willing to actually raise their hand and jump in and roll up their sleeves and get to work. I hope that you'll share and get other people involved as well. But that's. That's our intent, right? We're. We're not doing the easy thing. We're doing the hard thing. But thank you for being willing to. To pay attention and come with me on this journey. I also remember a girl that. Her face comes back to me fairly frequently, was driving in a. In a truck down the road, and she crossed in front of me, and I remember just being stunned. She was young. She's probably, you know, 19 or 20, but looked like she came right out of the Walking Dead. She was covered in all kinds of terrible and, you know, absolutely losing her hair because she's malnourished and had that what I call trauma face. Right? It's just a blank zombie stare. I don't know what had ravaged her, but she was barely alive. And I wanted so badly to just pull that truck over and dig in and try to figure out a way to rescue this woman. And I'm sure you're feeling that as well. Like, Jeff, why didn't you just do that? Why didn't you go help her? And I remember this woman, but I know thousands that are in similar or worse situations that are actually dying. So we, you and I, have to fix this whole country. We have to do our part to try to intervene in an incredibly complex environment, to try to help the whole country. There's that poem. It's something like a guy's walking down the shore and he's throwing the starfish back in the water so that they don't die. And somebody approaches him and says, hey, you know, you're never gonna save all these starfish. Why don't you just give up? And the guy responds, well, well, it's going to make a big difference to that one, right? And he throws that one in. And of course that's true, but in this situation, I think we really can help all the starfish, so to speak. I really think we can fix the whole country for the first time in history. And that's what I would like to do with you guys. I hope that you'll get excited about jumping in with me and figuring out, why is Haiti so poor? Why is it in this situation? Why is it the doctor, which is right next to it, have five times the economy that Haiti has? Why with all the donations that have gone there in the past, why isn't that fixed? It? What. What's the deal? Why is it the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere being right off the coast of Florida? Right? Let's answer those questions. I believe we have the answers to them. I'm excited to share them with you. I'm excited to get you educated on our stimp diagnosis and therapeutic recommendations or interventional recommendations for Haiti. I'm excited to teach you on how to become, to some degree, an expert on development and how to help developing nations progress. We'll explore a lot of different modes and styles of thinking around those things. We'll do quite a few quote unquote book reports to understand these things. And you're going to learn a lot along the way and hopefully get excited about digging in with us. Thank you for your time. That's all we got for the kickoff of the season. I hope you're excited to to dig in with us and let's go. We'll see you next time. We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Stimpak Podcast Season 3. Will you please subscribe, rate, review and share it with your friends and colleagues? Thank you for your help. This podcast has been brought to you by stimpak incorporated. Copyright 2024, all rights reserved.