Entrepreneur RX_Alexander Young: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Entrepreneur RX_Alexander Young: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx! Today, I'm really excited to talk to Alexander Young. Alex's a trauma surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon by training, and he's also the founder of several education technology companies. He scaled his first company from his bedroom, which I love that story while training as a surgeon, and he's teaching himself how to code. He holds a master's degree in surgical science and a postgraduate certificate in medical education. He's a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he has published over ten books, he owns a Human Performance podcast, which I'm really excited to talk about, and he promotes learning education through his blog and newsletter. Alex, welcome!

Alexander Young:
Thanks, John. Great to be on the podcast. Glad to be speaking with you today!

John Shufeldt:
Excellent, all right. Well, let's get started, right? Before we start, how did you end up with your, I mean, you're a renaissance person, clearly. How did you end up picking medicine as your foray into that?

Alexander Young:
It's a great question. I mean, when I was growing up, I definitely could never, ever have worked in an office, I was obsessed with sports, I was obsessed with video games. I secretly loved learning, although I'm sure my parents didn't believe that at the time, as I always got into trouble at school. But when I was looking at sort of careers, I wanted to do something that was very varied, I want to do something that obviously helped people. And one of the first pieces of work experience I saw was actually, bizarrely going and seeing a friend's father who was a practicing trauma and orthopedic surgeon near where I lived. And I went along and saw an operation, and that just blew my mind. I'd also been doing some work experience in kind of corporate settings, and everyone looked very bored, very tired, and medicine was the thing that just sort of really captured my attention I love. So I was 100% committed to getting into medical school, and I studied at the University of Bristol in the southwest of the UK. So for anyone listening, my Harry Potter accent is authentic English. I've spent a little bit of time over in the States as well, so I then did my medical training at Bristol University, did my surgical training around the UK, and also spent some time at the hospital for special surgery in Manhattan as well, which was an awesome experience. So yeah, it's, it was, it was a great, great career to pursue.

John Shufeldt:
All right. So, so I'm not all that familiar with medical education in Great Britain. Is it out of high school? Do you go to traditional college and then a medical school, or is it wrapped into one?

Alexander Young:
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think actually the US or American way of doing things is much better where it's much more of a kind of postgraduate pursued degree. In the UK, you kind of go into it straight away age kind of 17, 18, which.

Alexander Young:
Wow!

John Shufeldt:
Came back on is, it's pretty crazy. Like how can anyone make such a big decision on what is a 5 to 6-year university degree course in the UK? And then you basically you graduate, you do two years of general training, then you specialize, I did two years of general surgical training and trauma training and then became in the UK what's called a registrar, which is basically like your resident and fellow training in the US and then did part of my fellowship training over at HSS in Manhattan.

John Shufeldt:
Okay. So you did basically six years of medical school college wrapped into one and then two years of a residency. And then as everybody from, if you want to be a specialist after that was two years, then you have to go on and do a fellowship and that fellowship can be anywhere, US, UK, what have you?

Alexander Young:
Not always makes the time. You stay based in the UK so you sort of specialize as a family doctor, or you go into internal medicine or surgical, as I did, I did part of my time abroad just because I was fortunate enough to kind of make that happen. I wanted to work in the US for a little bit, but the majority of people stay in the UK and train there.

John Shufeldt:
And then when you, so when you went over to the US, what, what did they consider you? Were you a third-year resident, a fellow? How did that work?

Alexander Young:
Yes, it basically a fellow to the time that I was there and got some great experience working with some of the team and then went back to the UK to finish off some of my training. And I got to basically, probably about two years before fully qualifying, basically. So I'd spent all in all 12 years, six years in medical school, six and a half years of postgraduate training before I left in 2017.

John Shufeldt:
So now, that puts it in context so, and which is about the same. I mean, you know, you probably have got a little bit of a two-year head start because most of us do four and four. There are some that do.

Alexander Young:
Right!

John Shufeldt:
More, but something about the same level of training and work to get to the endpoint where you're fully qualified.

Alexander Young:
Right. It's going to be a grind, I think, anywhere on the planet.

John Shufeldt:
Exactly.

Alexander Young:
Yeah, I was right.

John Shufeldt:
That's right, what I was getting to. No matter where you are, it's definitely a grind. Okay, so you started coding at age 14 because you love video games. Is that, is that, was that the genesis of that?

Alexander Young:
Yeah, for sure. So I've always been really techy and my, my father had a business in sort of property and so even when I sort of back 14, I remember I sort of making websites and things for him and just kind of love diving into that sort of technical side of things. And when I was a little bit older, I was doing really nerdy things like building computers and sort of understanding. And I always had that kind of, I guess, medical mentality of wanting to know how things worked, how things ticked and sort of solving problems. And again, I think that's one of the reasons why something like orthopedics and medicine really appeal, because you've got that blend of technology. You know, keyhole surgery, arthroscopic surgery in orthopedics, is very much like a video game in many respects. And most orthopedic surgeons are basically like big children themselves. So I was kind of that was kind of my drive, and it was, it was super fun and yeah. And then I sort of along, alongside my medical training all the way through, I sort of kept my hand in coding, I was continuing to kind of practice things without ever going on like a coding course or anything like that. I always just learned via trial and error, building websites, building kind of software, and it was really when I got to medical school and I basically needed some cash, to be perfectly honest, kind of pay my way through. And I didn't really want to go and do bar work or work kind of outside of my studies because I knew it took up so much time and a lot of my friends who were tired, I was trying to be as efficient as possible. So I decided to build an online business that kind of promoted in-person teaching and training events and conferences, and that helped me kind of develop some of those coding skills even further.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I saw that, that you had a side hustle while in medical school, which, you know, I worked during medical school, but I was, you know, pretty traditionally boring, which I worked in a hospital as an orderly. But you and I did a true start-up side hustle, and I think people listening to this are going to think A, wow, I'm a real slacker because this guy, you go to medical school and run a business at the same time. That's pretty neat! How did you, was it just purely kind of money motivated? It was pragmatic?

Alexander Young:
Yeah. Well, actually, it's funny because I actually felt like I was the slacker in that scenario because I didn't want to go and work in a hospital, like as an orderly or do a lot of the stuff that my friends were doing at the time. I thought that, you know, I could try and use some of my skills to make some cash on the side, and that was because, again, a medical degree is very expensive in the UK, you obviously pay for your university time, you pay for your housing and so forth as a student and the government kind of gives you a grant to do so. But then you leave university in a huge amount of debt. So I was always very conscious that my parents had said, put up some of that cost and I wanted to make some extra cash on the side. And to be honest, I also wanted to learn a little bit more about business and see what I could do with some of my coding skills because I'm just a massive learning nerd. So as soon as I started thinking about how to make some extra cash and then took me down this rabbit hole of business books like The E-Myth, which I'm sure you've read and all these other ones, and that just kind of, I got bitten by that bug and sort of got obsessed with building technology companies.

John Shufeldt:
So what do you think? The, and I ask people this a lot because myself included, what do you think is the root cause of this? And because I have it as well, this insatiable quest to continue learning when everybody else is like, dude, slow down, you don't need to prove anything to anybody. What's, what's the genesis of that, at least in your mind?

Alexander Young:
It's a really good question. And I think I always jokingly say there's probably a genetic element for me. My mom was a school teacher, so I kind of grew up in a household where education was pretty much everything. And I think when I was going through school and when I was at medical school as well, I was really wanting to sort of improve. I was never say, you know, the top person in my class at med school, I was always someone who was putting in the work, but I wanted to work as efficiently as possible. And I think I was always, I always just had this sort of way of thinking about things, which was how can I do things efficiently and how can I do things in a way that is smarter rather than working harder? And I think I don't know where that came from, but it was probably from me reading a book when I was younger. But whenever I sort of approach a problem, I always think, what's the most efficient way to solve it? And that kind of passion and aptitude for learning, I'm kind of, even doing this podcast, I've got loads of books behind me that I've read and I kind of refer back to all the time. I just think, you know, reading and learning is pretty much anyone's superpower. I was never somebody who had a kind of fixed mindset. If you read Mindset by Carol Dweck, a fixed mindset is something where people think talent is all-natural and you can't do anything about it. And I was lucky to be good at things like sport, and I was smart in my class at school, but I always thought I need to be putting in the effort, training, battering myself, challenging myself to be the best I can be. And that was really my driver, which was how can I challenge myself? How can I learn to really sort of take myself to the next level?

John Shufeldt:
So that efficiency gene, I share it as well. So every day, everything I do, I always think, how can I do this as efficiently as possible? The point where I go to the grocery store, it becomes a game to me. What can I do to make it, to take less steps, to take the less time even, more efficient in my decisions? And I can tell you from what people tell me, it drives people who know me crazy. They're like, dude, you do not have to be efficient in everything. Have you gotten that pushback yet? Like, you know, lighten up. You don't have to make this as time sensitive as possible.

Alexander Young:
Oh, for sure. And again, like I said, I jokingly say to my, my parents, my friends, like one of the reasons I work so hard and I'm as efficient as I am is because actually, fundamentally, I'm probably quite lazy, you know, and I don't want to spend ages doing some of these, these things. I want to sort of get to the outcomes and get to the point as quickly as possible. But yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think some people don't quite understand your books on outliers and how people behave, especially entrepreneurs, is just so, so on point and so true. I think anyone who has that passion to kind of challenge themselves going above and beyond what other people might consider as normal, you're going to get pushback because anyone's default position is one of comfort. And if they see other people doing something like challenging themselves or doing anything that sort of really is anything different than what they are doing, it makes them suddenly think, oh gosh, maybe I should be doing that. And of course, then their body in their brain says, no, you want to stay and be comfortable, say the way the mind, then kind of reacts, says, oh, we should, you know, we should kind of diminish what that person is doing, whether it's internally or whether it's kind of like externally in how they sort of communicate with people. So yeah, I think I've always kind of had pushback there, but have always just sort of thought of myself as a bit odd in terms of some of the stuff I do, and I quite enjoy that. So that's always been my sort of way of dealing with those things.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, my joke is always I'm, I'm an overcompensated, but I won't tell you for what, and leave it at that. How did you get interested in this teaching people how to, how to perform better, more efficiently, more on point? Was that just through your own experiences and seeing what humans really have potential in, or was there another driving motivation for you?

Alexander Young:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, with my, my background in kind of sports, I trained and played soccer to quite a high level. I was always very, very sporty. And again, a lot of that wasn't necessarily through pure genetic talent, it was from lots and lots of training and coaching, and I love that element of learning in sports specifically, again, all the teamwork elements there I really, really loved. And I think when I then moved into healthcare, I was very, very passionate about seeing a lot of my colleagues kind of struggling, whether it was with exams getting burnt out, certainly when I qualified and going on to the medical wards and doing your on call periods and being in charge of patients like lots and lots of people struggle with that and they burn out. And often you're put into situations, as you know, and anyone listening will kind of attest to as well, where you don't, you haven't necessarily done those things before despite having done all of your medical training. And that stress and emotion is very, very different to what's in a textbook or what might be in simulation training. And so when I was at med school, my kind of my second company was all about sort of preparing doctors and nurses to pass exams because so many of my friends kind of stressed out. And I had always been lucky enough to do pretty well at exams. But again, because I had this sort of way of learning things and this efficiency. And so I set up a company that sort of helped people to pass exams. Again, is a bit of a side hustle, no intention to kind of scale that company or really make any money from it. But then, as you could probably predict, it did do very well and ended up selling internationally and getting to kind of six figures by the time I was just graduating from med school, which was, which was really cool with me as the only employee. And then when I graduated, I sort of then was looking and thinking, okay, what's the next level up from this? And that's kind of where the, the idea for my most recent company, Virti, came from, which is how can we actually ... the stress and emotion of real clinical practice? And how can we take things that often you only learn on the job through experiences like, for example, communication, or what is a good leader or a bad leader in real world scenarios and what is empathy? How do you develop empathy? And a lot of that is delivered either through role play training or it's just learnt kind of serendipitously on the job. And obviously that then leads to a huge amount of variability in what you're seeing and what you're learning and things like soft skills, things like empathy really kind of create you as a person. And in healthcare, so important for, for the patients, the patient journey and their experiences through healthcare and outside of healthcare, it's equally as important, whether it's sales training, whether it is how you're dealing with the customer, whether it is your leadership as a CEO of a business. And so that really was the thing that kind of, became an obsession of mine and an obsession that was so, kind of, I was so passionate about, it made me leave medicine to go and try and put a dent in that in the world, which I did back in sort of 2018.

John Shufeldt:
So I noticed, as I've read a lot of your blogs and watched in some of the podcasts and one of the things you talked about and one of them was this kind of study technique you have about how to focus on and I didn't go into a deep dive, but how to focus on the most important points and then use them look at them repetitively to build them into memory. Is that a good synopsis?

Alexander Young:
Yeah, 100%. So I mean, with my with my second coming in, ... exam preparation for doctors and nurses, one of my, my top study hacks, I guess, was rather than going through from sort of A to Z, reading your, your big medical textbook, going through your Grey's Anatomy atlas, it would be to really start off with the things that are the most high yield and that you're the worst at. And to not use your books, as you might traditionally read, say like a novel. And I think a lot of people and this is true of me when I was younger, kind of grew up thinking like, you know, your books are sacred or your, your lecture notes are sacred and you've got to read them from beginning to end. And if you don't, that's terrible. And, you know, you'll get into trouble or you won't know everything on the exam. And actually, that's complete nonsense. What you want to be doing is identifying the key learning points, figuring out what's likely to come up on the exam or the test, and then really doubling down on those. And one of the, the other components of that is instead of just reading something which we know from all the actual educational psychology literature, is not effective. So reading and highlighting don't help you to actually encode and store information very effectively. You will learn things if you read stuff, but you won't learn it effectively and you'll have to spend ages on it. The best study technique is one called active recall, which just basically means you're testing yourself as you go along. Whether that is through reading the key points in a book or your lecture notes or doing practice questions and starting with those, even though you might not have a full understanding of a subject and the topic. And, and it's really interesting diving into a lot of the educational psychology behind that, which I did in my medical education degree and looking at things like even, ..., forgetting curve and how we as humans, if you read something or if you just do something episodically, you will gradually forget that with time. And I think with something like medicine, where there's just so much information that you have to absorb, whether it's for exams or whether it's for making a clinical decision, it's absolutely critical that you focus on the salient points that you remember those effectively and that you can apply them when it matters.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's so true. All right, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about something that I think is going to be, for a lot of the listeners, the most challenging. And it's so you spent, you know, six plus six, at least 12 years going from the beginning, all the way through your training and fellowship. And then you basically hung up the white coat and switched to Virtim and I want to talk a lot about Virti because it's such a cool company, but that takes an incredible amount of courage to do that, particularly after one, all the expense and then all the time you put into it. How did that feel when you were doing it? And now, looking back four years later, any regrets?

Alexander Young:
Great question. I think for me, it was certainly to date the hardest decision of my life. I absolutely loved being a doctor, I actually loved working in trauma orthopedic surgery. And for me, even just getting to be a trauma orthopedic surgeon was, it was a huge time commitment, but it was also I felt very privileged to be there because it was so competitive to get some of those rotations in orthopedic surgery and some of the opportunities I was afforded, like getting to, to the United States. So I was coming from a really interesting position where I didn't hate medicine, I wasn't tired, I even quite enjoyed doing night shifts and operating at kind of three in the morning and stuff like that. But in the back of my mind I had this idea which was starting to kind of nor away at me, and I also had these other businesses that were doing really, really well and were generating passive income. And probably around about sort of halfway through my training, I realized that even though I love doing things like night shifts or I loved working and then coming back to my home, what I was looking forward to when I got back was not sort of relaxing or sleeping, it was actually working on those businesses and learning and trying to make these ideas of reality. And so I sort of came to a point where I thought, okay, I've got a real opportunity to do this. And that point was actually it was in New York, in the United States is when I was working at HSS and there was a huge blizzard back in sort of I think the February in 2017. And I actually got I was just trapped in the apartment building where I was staying and there was sort of a lobby area downstairs and I couldn't get out and I couldn't get to the gym, and it was one of the first times where I wasn't just super super busy, heads down thinking about, you know, my job as a doctor or, you know, doing some of my side hustles and just literally just having probably a Saturday where I was forced just to stop, I couldn't do anything. And I just took that time to really sort of reflect and think, okay, what do I want to be doing in 5 years time, in 10 years time, in 20 years time. And all of the scenarios that played out were I want to be working towards this passion of, of running a business which improves the lives of people on a, on a kind of global scale. And for me, that wasn't necessarily being a doctor, it was about training people, using technology because it was much more scalable. And I, at the time, felt that the challenge of that was more exciting than kind of continuing on with the end of my training where I'd learned lots and lots and lots, but that learning curve was beginning to plateau because I knew a lot of the operations, I'd, was going in and doing sort of similar stuff day after day, and it was that challenge that really excited me. So it was actually not that I hated my job at all, it was quite the opposite. It was almost the fear of missing out if I didn't take the leap and do something. And the way that my mind works is I would rather have a go and fail at something than stay around and regret and get to at the time, you know, 35, 40 and sort of look back and think, gosh, what could have happened? What would have happened? And I just thought, it's risky, but I know that my personality is such that that would always, always nor away on me. And now that we are sort of three or four years down the line from that, retrospectively, absolutely the best decision in my life. I've learned so much in a very concentrated period of time. I'm, got the opportunity to work with a lot of people who I trained with when I was working in orthopedic surgery, because for Virti a lot of our customers are in the health care sector and we've been able to scale up a hell of a lot, a lot of folks on the planet. So it definitely, definitely don't regret it. I think the only pieces I miss are some of the camaraderie of, of the medical specialty and especially when things get busy and everyone rallies around, as we've seen over the pandemic period, just that kind of brotherhood and bonding that you get in healthcare is so, so fun. But other than that, it's just been a fantastic career transition.

John Shufeldt:
You know, as I always quote this, the definition of hell is on your deathbed, you meet the person you could have become, so much like you said, now, looking back and say, thank god you did this because had you not done it, you would have maybe gone on to regret it that you didn't go all then when the time has come. Do you think you had to be? Do you think the path that you went down is one you had to go down to get to this point? In other words, do you think your medical training was integral to your success in Virti?

Alexander Young:
It's a great question and one I've sort of mulled over every single year sort of since I left. And I think the answer is a resounding yes. I mean, I think if I look back at the person I was when I was 17 or 18, I was relatively kind of introverted, I still had good social skills, but, but nowhere near as outgoing and communicative a lamb now. And a lot of that was because I had been through my medical training, where you're speaking with patients, you're explaining things, you're developing your empathy, you're developing leadership skills. And I think a lot of those soft skills that we often take for granted in many respects, where people are kind of heads down learning stuff, you're learning surgical operations, you're practicing for your, you know, your exams or you're thinking about the technical aspects of treating a disease. A lot of the time, you kind of just forget and take for granted that empathy side, that communication with patients, with your team members. And I think just from working with a huge number of people in terms of, you know, doctors or nurses and an even larger number of people in terms of patients, you're able to see a complete variety of soft skills live in action, both good and bad, and develop those experiences really in a very high pressure environment. So now with me sort of as a CEO of a company with sort of over 50 or 60 people that scaled up really, really quickly in three years, any of those very difficult conversations that you have in medicine, like explaining end of life care with the patient or breaking bad news to a relative or explaining your diagnosis, that's like a really heightened version of having to fire somebody or have a difficult conversation with someone and work. So those conversations will say, although they're still difficult conversation to have and work with that perspective, they're much, much easier. And there's a lot of parallels between how we communicate with people in healthcare and how you should be communicating with anyone in any type of workplace.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I know, I totally agree, the conversations we have on a daily basis and at least in emergency medicine, you know, any business conversation kind of pales in comparison because it's like, okay, I would say if no one's dying, how bad can it be? And so it makes, it makes all our conversations much more, I don't want to say meaning-less, but less impactful because again, no one's dying, how bad can it be? So let's talk about, let's talk about Virti, because this is you know, I've been all over your website and read a lot of what you've written. Let's talk about Virti, where did you come up with the idea? And what's your, I guess, intention for the company? Where is it? Where is it headed?

Alexander Young:
So the kind of mission and the purpose of Virti really is to scale soft skills training and make it more data-driven for anyone on the planet. So a lot of the things we've been talking about already, you will learn in work, on the job, episodically or through kind of role play or these environments. And unlike a surgical procedure which you could look up the steps of it in an operation technical manual or if you're learning something like how to play the guitar or something technical, you can do that via an app and that's quite well accepted. Soft skills, it's a bit more of a frontier that, what good soft skills is still hasn't really been, been defined very well. Everyone brings their own flavor to it. And so what Virti sort of set out to do was to create these on-demand experiential simulated environments that anyone can go through at any time which recreates some of these difficult conversations or difficult kind of happenstance workplace encounters. But you can go through in a simulated environment practice and then have a scoring system applied to how well you've done, which then allows you to kind of compare yourself to others and to a gold standard, and when we built the company, we weren't really predominantly interested in the technology, we were interested in how do we solve that problem of improving people's soft skills as quickly as possible? And so back in 2018, when when the company was founded, we decided that one of the best ways to do that was actually using virtual reality technology, because in a VR headset, you can be immersed into a completely new environment. You can be put in front of an avatar, you might be a patient, you might be a team member, and then you can have a conversation, just like in real life. But the system will capture all of that data, such as how you speak. And really it works a little bit like an Amazon Alexa, so you can speak to this sort of AI who looks like a real human. You are challenged with performing scenarios, so it might be in healthcare, something like breaking bad news, it might be on the technical side, understanding what a disease is and explaining that back to a patient. In something like a corporate setting, it might be sales training or delivering a feedback report to somebody. And then anyone can access that in the VR device or on their mobile phone or on web. And that basically allows people to recreate these difficult, that quite infrequently practiced training encounters, and that's sort of what we're obsessed with. And we've now built out this other suite of tools as well as having what we call these virtual humans, we've also got video based training in the, in the education suite. We've got live streaming and we've got a feedback tool. So we're really sort of providing an all-in-one training solution for these experiential encounters where we've now got everything from surgical operations on how to put in a kind of event on and take blood from people for nurses. And in the corporate setting we've got loads of stuff around wellness and how to be a good leader and so forth. So it's been, been really, really exciting and we've been very fortunate in that the company scaled up at a time where in-person training, which was the gold standard for a lot of these things, was wiped out by the pandemic. So our whole kind of messaging back in 2019 was why practice things infrequently in person when you could do it digitally? And then obviously the pandemic came along and we had a huge influx of interest for doing this kind of remote soft skills training, which is just so important. And then, yeah, we were really lucky to pick up things like a Time magazine Best Invention Award, were named it Fast Company, the most innovative company list, and got featured in the Nasdaq, on the Nasdaq tower in Times Square during the pandemic for some of the work we did. So it's been, been a pretty crazy rollercoaster from someone who was very much a surgeon about sort of 36 months ago.

John Shufeldt:
Well, and it's always funny, you know, when you, when you think of the typical surgeon, soft skills do not come to mind.

Alexander Young:
Right.

John Shufeldt:
The, so it's really interesting because so I try to mentor a lot of early-stage leaders and, you know, let them know about all the mistakes I've made and how maybe they couldn't make them. But this is really cool because they can go on and practice these mistakes, practice these difficult conversations as they've been called, and get instant feedback and then compare themselves to other. How do you script the answers? So if you're the VR and I'm, and I'm the one practicing coaching, you know, I'll say, Alex, I'm here to chat with you about your performance. We've both agreed in the past that it should be X, your performance is X minus. Let's talk about that. So then is there a feedback where you and VR says, okay, John, you could have done this a little better. Here's what, here's, what I'd suggest, is that the back and forth?

Alexander Young:
Yeah, exactly right. So the way that we have sort of built the platform is I mean, when we did our early kind of product discovery with people who were either simulation experts in health care or health care educators or people in the corporate setting, one of the big things that everyone said was, we have our own way of doing things in our institution and think about hospitals anywhere in the world, everyone has a slightly different protocol for doing something and every individual doctor has learned their communication style and their social skills from their own experiences over time. And one of the things that we built with Virti was as well as having this very AI and virtual reality-driven interface with the learners, we also behind the scenes built a no-code creation suite for anyone who wants to design these particular simulations. So how that looks is you can build out the entire conversation, you can select options for the learner to choose from, and then you can enter the type of feedback depending on the response that they give. And for some of the, the off-the-shelf virtual humans that we have, our learning development team have worked with people who are kind of experts in everything kind of sales, training to empathy to leadership trainers. And so the actual options that people choose, you can sort of map that out onto the analytics and you can say, okay, this learner chose to say this all the way through the conversation compared to the majority of the rest of the learners at your organization. Why is that? Was that a good thing? Was that a bad thing? And you can start to paint a picture for who your best communicators are, who your best leaders are, and compare that to a, to a gold standard, which if you revert back to how we learned communication skills in medical school, which for me was very much... Sit with some actors or be observed by somebody else. And that trainer's own biases as an observer of those encounters would come into play. And I remember sort of being told, you know, yeah, you did a, you did a good job, you know, maybe improve your eye contact next time. But otherwise that was really good. And I was like, okay, cool, that's how I break bad news to people. And then you get to work and it's absolutely terrifying and it's completely different. So that's what we're sort of trying to avoid by putting people through this training in a safe environment with multiple different scenarios and ways to do it.

John Shufeldt:
You know, I used to have this business called Pass and this professional assessment service and solutions, and we would get referred physicians who were generally there on the outs. I mean, they were getting kicked out of their off their medical staff because they had constant behavioral issues. And we had these psychologists who would do in-depth analysis and studies in 360 degree survey, and many of them came back and they were narcissists. And what I learned is that they are generally incurable because they don't see any problem with their behavior. But now I see if they, if you could put them into a Verti environment, you could literally, what the psychologist would say is, look, you're never going to get into their head that they should be doing something different. So you have to teach them how to act because this does not come, stuff that you and I think about hopefully does not come naturally to them, so you've got to teach them how to be on stage. But this would be the perfect ..., this would be the perfect thing for those at least physicians and probably a lot of other specialties or professions as well, where communication is so key, but yet the person does not possess and may never possess the inherent skills required for their, their role. And they're failing at their role because they lack these soft skills, I can see this being, it's a huge benefit for those folks.

Alexander Young:
And I think, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that that behavior change piece really is, is absolutely critical. And we obsess over the behavior change in the healthcare profession when we talk to patients about changing their lifestyle if they have a particular disease, and how do you make somebody do something? And I think education is one of the cornerstones of that. So obviously, as physicians, we educate patients, we try and help them to understand we use our sort of empathetic negotiating skills to get them to change their behavior. But often that behavior change is only instigated when they have a serious illness that kind of shocks them to the point where like, gosh, I've got to do something or I'm going to have another stroke, I'm going to have a cardiac event. And it's a similar type of process with people like you say, people who might have very specific ways of doing things and be sort of very, very ego-driven. If you say to somebody who is, say, a bully or someone who might be racist and you sort of feed that back to them, you confront them, they're going to push back on that and they're not going to care what you say and they're going to keep doing what they're doing. But if you put those individuals into these solo, isolated environments, and one of the cool things we can do is actually we can switch up to the position and the demographics of people. So what I mean by that is if you are a white male going through an interview, the questions that you receive, the eye contact and the body language from someone else who is a white male interviewing might be very different than if you are, say, for example, a black female or someone who has a disability. And so we can actually put people in the shoes of, of demographics, of people with demographics who are not their own. And then we can show them what it's like to be on the receiving end of some of those biases. And that's really, really powerful because then suddenly you're giving people that insight into, oh, firstly, do I have any of these biases? Do I, do I do this? But also, you're actually helping to drive empathy because you're thinking, gosh, this is not nice, I might have said that to somebody in passing. So, you know, a simple thing is if you're interviewing, say, a female candidate for a job and all of your pronouns like, yeah, all the guys here or this kind of stuff that is HR nightmare, but, but a lot of the time people just slip up on it and don't appreciate that it could affect others. And I think when you put people into these environments where that's very obvious because they're on the receiving end of it, that can really drive insight and behaviour change. Now obviously that's not going to work for everybody. If you've got a very, someone who is, as you say, a real narcissist, they might not even want to go through that training. But I think that's a really powerful tool to then try and make a dent in that and cause that loss in behaviour change.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, we, you know, I've read a lot in the last few years on intrinsic bias and you know, I like to think I'm as color blind and gender blind as is anybody. That said, going through this training, I was like, okay, so you're really not because everybody has biases and no matter as much as you try to wash them out of your mindset and thought process, they're still there and they're embedded culturally. And so it'd be very cool to be on the receiving end, and I always tell this example a couple, about a month or so ago, I spent a lot of time with this patient. I mean, I did a thorough exam and I'm getting up to leave the room and shows, when's a doctor to come in? Now, I'm a 60-year-old white dude with greying hair, and I had scrubs and stethoscope on and, you know, MD on my name. And I started laughing, I go, oh my god, thank god you just said this to me. I said, all my female counterparts hear this daily, and as much as I think I have empathy for them, clearly I don't. So thank you for enlightening me to see how this feels after spending 20 minutes with you and examining you. And yet you still didn't think I was a physician and they get this patient after patient, how annoying that must be? So, I mean, she was my virtual reality. Like, now I know what it feels like, thank you, it was awesome.

Alexander Young:
That's exactly the perfect example because that's happened to you. But it's happened kind of once episodically, like.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, once in my lifetime.

Alexander Young:
Exactly, right. And other people might never get that experience. And equally like for those people who it does happen to on a daily basis, if you remember back to the first time that maybe a relative or a patient was angry with you, maybe you're kind of fresh out of med school, it's incredibly scary. And for females, when they have things like that said to them, it can be very embarrassing, very hurtful. People take it very personally and it can lead to stress, lead to burnout, and just people thinking like, why do I even bother doing this? Whereas if you can slowly, again, in a safe environment, expose people to the fact that this happens, but also then factor in with, with the feedback we mentioned about how to deal with that and help them actually develop empathy for the people who say those things. So, you know, the patients are not always they might be on some occasions but are not always racist and sexist, it's just how they were kind of culturally brought up or they're from a different time. And I think teaching people on the receiving end of that to be empathetic ahead of when it happens helps to lessen that kind of emotional impact and, and save them from feeling really, really bad when it does happen.

John Shufeldt:
And I can't wait to try this out, that is brilliant. Okay, last question. There will be a lot of people listen to this who say I want to be Alex when I grow up, and what advice would you give them, those physicians, these primarily physicians, but other professionals as well too, what advice would you give them too, if they want to go down this entrepreneurial path, if they have this idea or idea as much like you did?

Alexander Young:
Yeah. So I think I kind of break it up into three steps. So I think the first one is mindset. And regardless of your age, whether you're young or you're old or whatever, the key thing that I always say to everybody is we are basically all carbon atoms on a on a giant rock spinning around like a solar system. The chances you actually being alive at infinitesimally small and everyone is fundamentally the same regardless of your genetics. So there's no reason why you can't do any of the stuff that I've done or, you know, you've done, John, or, you know, what Elon Musk has done. But that leads to step two, which is like the process of how you get there. So what are the steps that you need to take to try and set yourself up for success and with any kind of startup idea or project. An idea is worthless, it's the execution that counts. And so hundreds of people come to me all the time on LinkedIn or anything.

John Shufeldt:
Great idea.

Alexander Young:
I've got this, I've got this great idea for a startup. And I'm like, well what have you done? And so if you have an idea, that's fantastic. But you've got to research it. You've got to do all the work under the iceberg like I did, which was kind of failing at different things, reading lots of books, figuring out your business model and then making it happen and being absolutely passionate about whatever it is that you've chosen as your mission. You should choose something not because you think it's going to make money, but because you're unbelievably passionate about it. Because startups are hard, businesses are hard. You'll have ups and downs regardless of how good your, your company is. You know, Tesla got bailed out by the government, but before it sort of really took off. So you've got to be 100% committed and passion about what you're doing. And if you have that and you have a process to get there, you will likely do well. And and then the thirds, the third point is make sure you enjoy it because, you know, you shouldn't be doing anything unless you feel it's challenging you, unless you feel it's fun, in my opinion. So I wake up every single morning, I slip out of bed, you know, just feeling very grateful and very fortunate to be doing what I'm doing with a great team around me. And Barometer is basically, am I having fun doing what I'm doing at the moment? And I had funding Orthopedics, buy new, there's going to be more fun pursuing this career instead of entrepreneurship. And so I think when you're making that decision, be guided by your own internal compass, be guided by fun and excitement and your passions, but have a process there to guide you along the way. So whatever it is, there's hundreds of different business models that you want to be an, you know, Instagram influencer and sell products socially, whether you want to build a tech company, it doesn't matter, it's just got to be aligned to you and your personality.

John Shufeldt:
I love that. Okay, great advice. The three steps like the five wise. Okay, where can people learn more about you, Alex?

Alexander Young:
Yup. So anyone's welcome to connect with me on on LinkedIn or social media, I'm AlexanderFYoung across all social media, Virti's, VirtiLabs and at Virti.com, and I've got the Human Performance podcast which I host where we have lots of guests who've done amazing things to inspire people through their stories.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. Well, Alex, this has been mind-blowing. I think in some respects, you and I are twin sons from different mothers, and I'm quite a bit older than you. So, so you've done a tremendous amount, I could not be more impressed. This has been amazing. Thank you.

Alexander Young:
Thank you, John, it's been an absolute pleasure.

John Shufeldt:
Appreciate it.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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