Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks, Rob McNealy here. And we have another great show for you today, I am joined by someone who I’ve been connected with on social media for a long time and a big follower of his name is jack Connor. He is the co founder of this interesting company that’s focused on the medical space called hospital flip. He is also a renowned author, a renowned skateboarder. And I think he does everything that most Superman should be able to do. So he’s doing a lot of really fun stuff. And, you know, jack, welcome the show. How are you today?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Thank you for having me on. Rob, great to be on. And great to meet you in person. You know, we’ve talked a lot over Twitter and Social Media had a lot of great, great conversations. So it’s really fun to be here in person.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s good. And one of the things I like about you, and and I miss, like, sound like I got some bromance thing going on. But you’re a tech guy, but you also get business. And I think that’s pretty important. Because a lot of times, those two aren’t in the same person, the business guy, and the dev guy, those are usually different guys. And so when you find those kind of qualities in one person, that usually they’re kind of interesting individuals. So

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I started out as the business guy before, this is, this is also kind of a rare thing where, you know, I had gotten a master’s in business. And I had lived abroad a bunch, I’d started businesses started one in in China briefly and had done startups here in the states and stuff like that. And I was really, into digital startups, and I came from a family that had a lot of programmers I had been exposed to it. So six or seven years ago, I did a whole, you know, did the boot camp thing, and went full career switch by just basically putting my head down and programming about 14 hours a day for a year. And then ended up completely switching careers. And, you know, getting into that side. But part of it is I knew I wanted to do startups and wanted to have control over the product itself, you know, like, I want to be able to build things. And so it was a little bit I mean, it’s like a little bit risky is like career switching as is but found, I also found like, I really loved it. And I kind of knew that about it ahead of time. That, you know, programming for me, is one of the first jobs I’ve had that I really love it on a minute by minute basis where it’s like, you know, really fun solving problems. But when you talk about that business programming orientation, like, I was not a computer science major studied linguistics, really nerded out in languages. Again, there’s a little bit of relation there in terms of kind of like the skill level. But um, but yeah, and agreed. It’s been really fun talking startups and startups in business with you. You know, you bring really interesting perspective from the Utah startup scene. And you know, I’m in Long Beach, red, sad, LA. And neither one of those is Silicon Valley. So we have kind of that to compare against. But yeah, we had some good conversations on the topic.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, I think that, you know, and we mentioned this off the air, but I think there’s a big thing about startups that you see that there’s lots of startups out there that have nothing to do with technology, and they generally form differently than a lot of technology startups. So, you know, some I’m originally from the Midwest, and in someone like me, you know, I would just think, oh, if I want to start a business, you go borrow a little bit of money from your data, your uncle, get a small business loan, and then you just kind of bootstrap it and, you know, start up a business. And, and that it’s very, it’s very normal among low tech businesses, let’s say contractors, and construction and retailers and you know, things like that. It’s just a very different mindset of just like, let’s just get to work. Whereas, you know, it’s interesting, especially with TUSC, and getting into the crypto space, I’m closer to like, Silicon Valley kind of software and and that whole culture that I ever been in, have been in my life. And so you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur for a number of yours now, seeing the culture of like, I’ve never done anything in my life before I have an idea and a pitch deck and I’m going to raise millions of dollars is baffling to me.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I don’t know if that actually still exists, unless you’ve already maybe exited a startup. Because when I talk, but maybe this is where I met you know, I I’ve, I’ve had startups never exited. Never, you know, never had some mega success, anything like that. And it’s a, you know, whether it’s accelerators, or VCs or basically anything outside of maybe just a pitch night. They do really like it’s hard to get a seat at the table if you don’t have something that’s in the marketplace, or at least and this is this is for digital stuff. This is not for, you know, medical startups which you know, like a patent can raise, you know, 10s of millions of dollars or, although you’re in the crypto space, so I take back everything I said, Because crypto might actually might actually have that where you’re raising money off speculate, you know, we’re gonna build this blockchain for X, Y and Z. I do not know, confession. I did not know that much about crypto outside of the implementation side, some of the, you know, record sides of it. But uh, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a it’s it’s interesting. So what do you so what’s your experience been like? Building TUSC

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
building topspin interesting? Well, the thing is, it’s being I’ve never managed like an open source project before. So that’s kind of why you guys

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You open source. So that’s an interesting viewpoint into devote to working with developers as well.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Open source decentralized kind of project. Well, it’s interesting from a start, just from a startup perspective, since we have a coin and have had a token traded in markets for two and a half years. From the minute you start, like a crypto project like this, you’re an internationally traded, you know, an international publicly held company, essentially. And so even though I’ve had a lot of startup experience, I’ve been an entrepreneur, a self sufficient entrepreneur for a long time, meaning that I’ve made a living actually, as an entrepreneur for a long time. And that’s baffling to me, because even some of those things, I mean, I’ve worked when I was back in a corporate MBA guy, I worked for some big companies and big international companies. And so I know what that looks like. But you know, I’ve never been in charge as a as a, as an entrepreneur, I’ve never had like in charge of a mega Corporation. It’s been internationally traded and things like that. So that’s one of the different things about it, and then being decentralized. So when we started as a token project I, we had control, even though we set it up as what they call a low profit, LLC. But when we decided to build our own blockchain and move from our token, den to become TUSC, we became a public blockchain. So what happened is the minute we essentially, before we traded, the minute we let the, the outside block producers come in and take over the network from our test net. You know, I, we, I have no control over the project. I mean, I’m a co founder, I have influenced just because I am, the guy has been with it since the beginning. But it’s, it’s interesting, just from the standpoint that I no longer have control. And so you just got to like, beg. You gotta beg people to help out essentially, and, and, and trying to do deals and trying to sort out partnerships, you know, with these weird nuances. It’s interesting, it’s just a very interesting space, and then that’s

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
fraud and bullshit, it’s, it’s just, it’s just tough space, to be honest, I tend to want to have a lot of control on the digital projects that I build, and especially in recent years, you know, I’ve architected done, you know, majority of the code for a lot of the lot of the things I’ve worked on. And so yeah, that might be that might be tough. I mean, it’s, you know, delegations for the big digital projects, delegations, huge, because you can’t do everything yourself, you have to have people you work with, that you can trust to, you know, build a feature correctly, and not put massive security flaws in it and things like that. Open Source open source be interesting. I mean, I admit, like, I haven’t worked on that many open source projects, I, I feel like when I want to build something, I just kind of like come up with it and just start, you know, Tinker and MVP myself. But it’s a wild, it’s a wild world. Yeah, I’d like to check out your your project a little more. Maybe get involved or something

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
we could put you to work because we need everything, though a lot of good things are happening. And so it’s so we had to structure so how we kind of tried to deal with some of the things like with a lot of I’m not here to pitch to us, but you know, one of the I always feel if I could give it a plug. Yeah. So is how do you there’s just a lot of challenges, right? How did one I getting shit done is not easy, when you know, not everybody is trying to like hope that the tokens that you paid him with, you know, will be worth something at some point. And a lot of people have a hard time and they’re not patient all the time with that stuff. And so yeah, it’s interesting, I always try to tell the..

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I mean, interrupt you, I was just gonna interject that production working and production level and digital. Ther’re in my experience, there’s about a 10 x difference in the amount of time and the amount of code that you need to put in to get something that works well versus something that’s truly production level, you know, doesn’t have even those tail bugs that only happen on you know, Internet Explorer in certain situations or someone hasn’t dated their chrome You know, something like that?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I can I can tell you a chrome problem.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah. And, you know, you’re kind of a, you’re a gun guy. And I think that there’s a, there’s a level of perfectionism you have to have for both of them that actually, you know, sometimes there might be a little bit of overlap, if you want to be really good at it.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think so I think attention to detail, things need to work and things need to get done the right tool for the right job. So yeah, I see, there’s a lot of it. But I’ve adapted, and the thing is the last two and a half years, like, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, serial entrepreneurs being add, and then they, you know, jump from one thing before they finished the other. And, and I can tell you, I’ve learned a lot of patience over the last two and a half years working in this environment. I mean, when you’re not technically employing somebody, but you know, how to get stuff done. And then just, it’s actually made me more patient. Mm hmm. Yes, you know. And so, but I’m still, you know, still I always think like an entrepreneur, I’m not going to change that, right. That’s just going to be how I view the world through those lenses. I’m not a developer. So I don’t think of the world through a developer’s eyes either, right. But I think that’s the same thing with like, open store. syncretized Hell is what I tell people like, how do you explain like, open source and decentralized products to like, you know, a gun shop owner, right? They tend a lot of tend to be pretty low tech, depending on where you are.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I feel like that’s something that we have at Rs with, you know, where I can explain our business as a synchronous telemedicine for physical therapy, and you know, people’s eyes glaze over. But then I’m just like, now you just do your exam at home, and it sends it to the doctor, you know, try and keep it as simple and as, I’m a big fan of not using big words, big words when you don’t have to I because for me, it’s like language. You know, like I said, like, I nerd out in language. And I think at the end of the day, language is all about communication. And so when you’re explaining something, it’s like, you got to know who you’re explaining it to, like, if I talk to you versus a developer, versus a salesperson about my business, it’s all going to be a little bit different. But I think the true communicators, someone who knows how to like, break it down for whoever the hell you’re talking to, you know,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I described us like this, I said, or when someone asked, What’s a decentralized project, because outside of crypto, that’s never really happened, right? Well, that’s a new thing, kind of at least a minor time. But I say, Well, think about it somewhere between a co op and a nonprofit. Oh, okay. That makes sense. Mm hmm. And that’s how I explained it. I’m like, that’s what it is. It’s somewhere between a co op and a nonprofit, because, because that’s what really is, if you think about it, right. You know, and there is no company making money. We’re not profit driven from that, you know, way we don’t even. And so that’s kind of how that’s kind of true, you know, and so I think you’re right. Don’t use big words with you don’t need to. I mean….

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I don’t know if that works. And I don’t think that works. Actually, they’re probably smarter than that.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Maybe some ladies I don’t know, didn’t work with my wife. She’s smarter than me. So she knew more words than I did. So it was all good. But I would say this, it’s like, you know, it’s like how writers write, you know, like, and it even in science and business, sometimes people write in a way, I’m, you got an MBA, I got an MBA, right. So it’s like, you know, business writing is interesting, too. But I think, you know, you know, I read this statistic A while back, and it made a lot of sense to me, from a business standpoint, you look at some of the most famous classics that are out there, like Ernest Hemingway, at least in modern times, right? The Ernest Hemingway’s of the world. And they say there was an algorithm and some AI thing to analyze the reading level of some of these works. Mm hmm. And they found that the most successful works, including things like Harry Potter, mm hmm, are written in a very low level. So essentially, like, and I don’t know if this was, you know, done deliberately back then. Or maybe there was just a name that they said, I want it for the common person. But what happened is, apparently old man in the sea, by Ernest Hemingway was written at a fourth grade level.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Let me ask you a question. Do you ever read Stephen King?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I’m not long time ago.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you there. I was gonna say he’s not my he’s not necessarily my favorite author. But I’ve read a million books by Stephen King, and I love horror. I love horror books. The novel is the best form of horror in my opinion. It’s the scariest if you get a really good one. And he also has got to write at a third grade level, a fourth grade level, but in the best way possible, where it’s like, common vernaculars he’s, he’s one of the reasons he’s so effective like you are, you’re never more immersed in a in a fiction book. than if you’re reading something by Stephen King, shining or Pet Cemetery. He describes everything in the room like everything you know exactly what’s happening where you are. It’s one of the most immersive experiences you could possibly have reading a book. And just like you’re saying about Ernest Hemingway, it’s, it’s very simple language. And I think that’s part of the magic of it, you’re not trying to decipher it, you know what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I would say, it’s actually, they’re actually a little more scientific than that. And I think it’s scientific, from the standpoint is that as you expand your population size, the average reading ability in the United States and everywhere pretty much goes down. And so is, so if you wrote a book at, say, a 12th grade level, and the bell curve of your populations, reading comprehension, is at the fourth grade level, you just lost what, you know three fourths of your potential market size. And so if you bring down that reading level doesn’t mean that you dumb it down, but you bring the reading that required reading comprehension level down, you expand your market. Dramatic, absolutely. And so the more people that may be in your market, you’re probably more likely to win financial success from what you’re doing.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
This is 100% accurate, this is very true. Although I’d say the same effect might be part of the reason that I feel it’s so hard to find a good adult movie these days. Because they’ve kind of when it comes to sort of, especially Hollywood, blockbuster movies, they’ve really, they’ve taken what you just said, especially when you’re taking international markets into account to the extreme, you know, and you sort of end up with like, your Transformers movies that are play in China plan Indonesia play in Brazil, but, you know, kind of the same, just like nonsense, bullshit. And in every language,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
well, here’s an interesting thing. You know, it’s like, depending on where you are, I mean, you know, look at the average IQ, that can get into very political discussion about, you know, different, you know, developed people in some developing countries have lower IQs on average. And so, or they have much lower literacy rates, or, you know, numeracy rates and stuff in those places. So if you’re focusing on a global audience, where it may be playing in developing nations, you bring that down, you did just expand your market. Now the problem is, you might have almost, you know, gone too far on the domestic side. Mm hmm. So, and I think that’s where, you know, a lot of things just seem ridiculous. Like, I have a really hard time. I don’t normally watch sitcoms, and but if I watch any kind of like, national, I don’t have cable. So I don’t really so when I’m traveling or something, I flick on the TV. So I haven’t watched this in six months. I know, I haven’t watched this in six months. But if you look at the I think they’ve almost dumbed it down too much in the United States at this point. And I think that gets annoying to people like…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Sonds you’re watching Two and a Half Men.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I you know what, I never watched an episode of that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And that’s one of those TV shows, not to just harp on the dumbing down of TV because that’s, that’s sort of like, I mean, that’s a bottomless well of stupidity. But Two and a Half Men is one of those show that was, it was like, the most popular is the highest rated show for about 10 years. And I didn’t know a single person that could watch more than five minutes, minutes of it without just like, turning it off and boredom and disgust like, it’s so bad. And it’s just one of those mysteries of you know, you’re talking about cultures and populations and things translating and kind of like making something for the lowest common denominator. And it’s still really, you know, we talked about the difference between California and Utah and all kinds of things like that, but like it’s pretty wild. What that like kind of works for everybody is you know, it really is sometimes at that Honey Boo Boo level of just like the really lowest common you know, the Steven Seagal, police reality show things like

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
that, you know, well, well, it’s interesting. I mean, even look at what are the most popular sports, right? I think the two most popular sports I think in fall, I think NASCAR is number one, right? The NASCAR is the number one spectator sport, right? That’s at least it was like not that long ago. And then it’s like NFL and then. So if you look at what are the things that are, and again, it goes back to markets, but the things that have the largest economic, you know, successes, right as far in a given industry. And yeah, sometimes I’m like these people vote. It’s like, you know, the average American is average. And that means, you know, half the people so if the average IQ in the United States is around 100 mm. And that’s the average that means half the people you meet our below True story. So they add that’s pretty scary. You know, thinking about that

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You ever done jury duty?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I Got, I almost got in I didn’t get picked, though.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I did jury duty in Chicago once that was a wild experience, Cook County, Judge Cook County. And it was definitely like, a diverse, you know, in every way, like income levels, raised blah, blah, live it was that, you know, I forget Where’s in the city of Chicago, but you definitely saw like, and I think a lot of people get this experience where you kind of think that your point of view is like, more or less what most other people are thinking. And then you really get thrust into the situation with, you know, a lot of different people where there’s some stakes to it, and you sort of see like, Oh, that’s not actually the case. You know, what I mean, and I think jury duty is kind of can be a pretty eye opening such situation for a lot of people.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you know, for my day job, I do forensic consulting, in my field. And, and it actually, I don’t talk about it that often on the podcast, because it’s not, I’m more focused on TUSC, and crypto and small business. But in my day job, I’m actually pretty successful as a consultant, and I work all over the country. And it’s very flexible on time. So it gives me the opportunity to basically commit myself full time to TUSC and only have to work part time on that business. And I used to think that the world was a lot more black and white, you know, 567 years ago, and when I started getting into consulting, were in testimony and doing depositions. And I went through interrogation, training and investigation training, because I do accident claims, like I, I mean, I do occasionally death cases, like people get in an accident, you know, and get hurt. And so so I have this part of my job, I have to interview people, even on an insurance type of claim or something like that. I have to interview people on a regular basis. Like, I did one today. No, today to yesterday, you know, so it’s like, it’s so it’s just like when you then get around and you start seeing how people will lie to cover themselves up, people won’t take responsibility, people are not forthright. And I’ve seen it in court numerous times, where people I thought someone I might respect, you know, or someone a friend of mine, and they testified on the other side of a case. And I’m like, they straight up lied. And I’m just like, wow, you know, you know, I You and I both know, this is not what you just said in court. Mm hmm. And, and then dealing with people, like where they you know, I interview somebody, and then I might do an investigation or inspection, gather data and gather evidence and stuff. And I find that the evidence routinely will prove that the person lied. You know, and you’re just like, it’s amazing how often people are deceptive. And I think, and I also that a lot of times, there’s, there’s negligence to go around. And that was the interesting thing about, you know, working in legal environments as part of my job. Like, that’s only a part of what I do. I don’t spend a lot of our time doing just consulting for people, but, but when I do the legal stuff, it’s like it you will see how often everybody, like, everybody’s like, it’s their fault. It’s their fault. But then when you really look at it, it’s all their fault. Mm hmm. as I’ve gotten older, it is I’ve gotten older, I see that more and more situations in society are gray, they’re not clear cut, they’re black and white. There’s there’s fault that goes around everywhere. And that’s where I usually see the the most conflict is where everybody’s got a problem, and they don’t want it to be theirs. And in fact, it’s, it’s it actually makes my job harder. Sometimes when you guys like…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Solutions, would, you know, people would implement them, I think that that’s, that’s something that actually does occur a lot. And it’s, you know, a lot of anger. And this is, of course, like, you know, pretty topical in a couple of ways. But, you know, when there aren’t easy solutions, and there’s a lot of frustration, or like a problem is just building and building and building. Yeah, man, like, I mean, that’s one of the ways like, you know, where rage comes out where like, anger turns into rage is when like, there isn’t an outlet, you know what I mean? Or there isn’t, there isn’t that solution that you can, you know, if I, if I have, you know, if my faucet gets broken, I can figure out how to fix it. But if it’s like something that I just like, literally, you know, there’s what is the fix? So it’s a lot more nebulous, and it’s a lot scarier.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think it’s even this is what scares me is that when the masses have been convinced that the cause of their problems is not what the actual cause is, and and then people get worked up, and once someone’s been convinced to something, you generally can’t change their minds. Mm hmm. And so they’ll try it. And this is a problem. And this is a problem because if you don’t know the root cause of your problem, you can’t solve the problem.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah, this is very true. And you know, We were talking about this earlier regarding politics, but I come from, I come from a very split household with one parent is very conservative and parent is very, very liberal. And so I get the, quote unquote, pleasure of getting both sides to every issue. You know, a lot of times, like, yelled at me on the phone, like, I can’t believe, you know, whatever. Um, but you know, it’s one of those things where, like, I, and a lot of times, you just don’t have the energy for it. But you know, there’s, and this is I didn’t want to get political. But one example that has come here we got is, and I’m not, I’m not taking any sides on this, but it’s climate change, where one thing I have noticed is that both sides and DM me if you want to talk about this and get more details, but not getting not getting into it, but both sides tend to argue very different points of climate change. in a lot of situations, they’re not even talking about the same thing. And you know, where it’s like, and this is as a person who’s kind of like, I mean, I, you know, for better or for worse, if, you know, you get like both both sides of an issue, and you hear both sides of people, and you see both sides biases and things like that, you know, you kind of and I know that this has happened to you a lot is, you know, you can see where there’s, you know, one we’re both, you know, either left or right or whomever, when they’re picking out straw man, it tends to be pretty obvious. And this, of course, happens a lot. And you know, you and I are on Twitter a lot, which is kind of like the kingdom of the straw man. straw man argument. But yeah, it’s it’s tough man. And it’s, uh, yeah, sorry to bring up climate change. I know, I know that that’s gonna executive get this episode, like censored kicked off Google or something?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No, I think it has to be the opposite side of it. I can say those Dino those damn penguins got to figure their shit out. That’s all I know. of polar bears?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah, I love the polar bears. Yeah, it’s a that’s a complicated and that’s another thing where get not to not to get into but like one of many issues where like, there’s a ton of there’s a ton of things, there’s a ton of big problems that don’t have solutions that we know about. And this is very difficult to deal with. You know,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think there’s lots of problems that we you know, we have big problems that we could solve, that are more important than some other things. And that sense, it’s really tough. I mean, essentially, everybody’s like, Oh, well, I mean, given the like, the whole riots and stuff lately, stuff, the looting and all that. I mean, it’s really hard. When there’s not a good side, like, you can see, like, I can see the points on everybody’s side, and I can see lots of mistakes made on both sides. And so that doesn’t in my mind, it makes it really hard to pick a side. And the one thing I don’t like about our society, especially the US society, Americans, is that we want it to be left or right, black and white.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
By your side, we want it to be like, a sport almost.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
against us. You know, you’re not with me, I even had a friend of mine that we got along with really, really well. And, you know, he was basically taking this position, you know, he got really upset and about the whole Black Lives Matter thing. And, and, and he was just like, Well, you know, you know, and I didn’t I wasn’t arguing with them, just say that, you know, this is not the problem you think it is, and and over some different elements. And he got really mad at me. And he’s like, well, if you’re not gonna, you know, support Black Lives Matter, you don’t support me in blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, dude, we’re friends. I have no beef with you. And I’m like I’ve ever had a different big giving you a, you know, we’ve worked together on things professionally, if I ever given you a hard time about anything, you know, and nothing….

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
It’s very, it’s very volatile right now. And I know that I know that this is not news to you in any sense. But like the story you’re telling me I’ve heard over and over. And it’s and it goes both ways. There’s a lot of there’s that one of the shitty things is like, there’s Black Lives Matter. And, you know, there’s like defending the police and blue Lives Matter and like anti maskers there’s, there’s a half dozen things out there that are causing family breakups to happen right now, like, tensions are high. And I think that part of this is, I mean, one of the you know, if you have, if you have a lot of different hotspots, culturally, part of me that’s like, get to psychological but I think this just in general because of the pandemic, a lot of pent up frustration and a lot of pent up energy. You know what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I absolutely agree with that. And, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how things Go in the next six months of this curls down to cools down, but I don’t think it’s going to no one’s going to accept the election, no one’s going to accept a cure for COVID. You know, it’s like, we’re at all these impasses. And you know, and now we got this weird culture war, you know, on your opinion, like, riots aren’t riots anymore. And you know, and if you don’t want stuff, your property burned down, you’re like, on the other side, and I’m like, you know, this is just not good for society.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
It’s, it’s rough. And this is, you know, doing the, as a skateboarder I got to say, like, you know, I was thrown in a cop car before I was 12 years old, like, I’ve, you know, had cops, like I’ve seen cops break boards, I’ve seen cops, yell at kids, and all kinds of things like that, if you’re skateboarder you’re basically like, half the time, wherever you’re skating, it’s, it’s illegal, and skaters tend to have water runs with cops. So when all these videos start coming out of like, cops, like beating the shit out of old people and stuff, there wasn’t a skateboarder on the planet that was surprised about it like this is. And it’s one of those things where, you know, in my experience, like, seven or eight police officers out of 10, that I’ve had personal experience with, like, in Chicago and LA, are totally cool, greatest people in the world, you know, like, they’ll come like your skateboarding, they get a call, because you’re in some school or something, and they come there’s like, you can’t do that here. You get out, you know, no big deal. But like, every once in a while, and not as every once in a while as you want it to be. Like, there’s somebody who is power tripping like crazy. And, you know, I’ve known people who’ve worked at that, you know, for the police, military, all kinds of stuff like that. And like, they’ll basically tell you the same thing, like they all know, you know, they all know that one or two people at the, at the precinct, or at least I’ve heard people kind of mentioned that. And this is this is one of the things and so like, whichever way and there’s obviously a lot of backlash, bro, we’re in this really insane political time where, you know, is it Trump in the lead polling? Is it Biden like blah, blah, blah, like everything is switching? We’re you know, if somebody listens to this a month out, like everything will have changed completely regarding 1010 catastrophic events will have happened and who knows where the polls will be. But um, yeah, it’s, you know, I say it’s like, on the anti cop thing, like, I don’t know if defunding the cops is the solution, because that I’m from Chicago, and Chicago’s major crime problem. And this seems to be exasperating the crime problem in at least certain areas.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
But I don’t know New York, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah, but this is also but then you’re getting the thing is like, Oh, well, that if they just defunded the cops that hasn’t even kicked in yet? Like, who the fuck knows? You know what I mean, but like, I’m trying to not take sides here.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think you have to take aside, there’s, I think that at some point that you don’t have to have a side to say that, when a group of people are angry about something that they’re not immediately going to go right and burn things down. I don’t think that’s a racial position. Or it shouldn’t even be a controversial position. But, you know, right now, this is, you know, recorded for posterity, you know, is it is a weird position that…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I think it’s a little bit less, should they do it? Well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s like, what’s the psychological position for that? Because, like, when you say, like, should someone burn something down for this? Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to I don’t want to get to that continue what you were saying I was gonna read that. I don’t know if it had a..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Don’t go down. I mean, look, I understand. You know, there’s one thing if you literally live under a dictator, that literally is doing all the things that you know, dictators have been accused of, then if you want to fight that system, because that system is unjust. I mean, I true. I have a I have a theory about cops because I grew up white, but I grew up fairly lower middle class fairly poor, did not grow up in a nice neighborhood.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And cops got a reputation to man we heard about you guys in Chicago.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I lived in I lived in like one burb over but the but the reality is, I know growing up white and poor, we got hassled a lot I and I remember this clearly my first I got not pulled over nine times in eight months when I was 16. Because I drove I had like a mullet and I drove like a beat up old Firebird. And and so I’m in a bad neighborhood. So it’s like, yeah, we just screw with you. And I’ve had cops be very disrespectful to me. I would say about a dozen times in my life, you know, and I’m not a troublemaker is just when I was a kid. You got pulled over for being a kid with a mullet driving a piece of crap car. And that was just how it was. And I think that first Some power tripping cops out there. If they’re going to pay, like they’re bullies just like any, you know anybody else, any industry, they have bullies, right? Well, bullies tend to pick on people they think they can get away with it from. Right? I mean, you know, it’s not going to be the the white shoot guy from, you know, Manhattan that you’re gonna shake down and beat the crap up on the sidewalk, you know, on the side of the road because you’re having a bad day, huh? You know, he won, he’s knows his rights, too, he’s probably got the money. He’s probably smarter than you. And he’s probably got the money to hire really good lawyers. And maybe…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You actually make an interesting point to where it’s also an unusual target, you know, like, somebody’s hassling, you know, 16 year old you with the mullet which, by the way, I’m ready to see those pictures of you with the mullet anytime you want. So I’ll be digital, I’d have to scan I’m not doing it. I can wait. I could wait. Don’t worry about it. But whether it’s you whether you know, whoever, you know, there’s a million there’s a million different, like, quote unquote, targets for cops, you know, skateboarder, somebody have the wrong ethnicity, whatever it is, yeah, it’s really easy to become a target for that for that type of police officer. And part of it is because like, if some you know, if a cop pulled over you and you’re 16 with the wallet driving, you’re 77, Thunderbird or whatever it was.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Somebody like Firebird with the big block Pontiac 400 Thank you.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
But who would believe you over them? You know, it’s, uh, you’re not just an easy target, you’re a very safe target. Mm

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
hmm. And so, you know, I have to wonder, based on that, and I spent a lot of time in the inner city as well, I had a business in inner city. And so, you know, I saw how people interacted with cops when I saw cops treated people they were interacting with and, you know, did I think that? I don’t know, I would say that. My opinion, most people’s problems in this world are self induced. You know, you and I’ve talked about this on Twitter, for instance, you know, COVID, didn’t make people broke. They were already broke. And they were fragile. And same thing of businesses. You know, businesses should have an emergency fund, just like individuals. And if they’re not putting money away for an emergency, they’re fragile.

JackConnor-HospitalFlip
Mm hmm.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
COVID just exposed that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, this is I mean, the restaurant not to pick on restaurants who are having a really difficult time right now. But this is a really interesting question, which is, if your typical restaurant had, and I think it was something like 12 to 14 days of working capital in the bank, and that was, I mean, that’s like your typical restaurant in the United States. You know, you you invoked fragile, as a very fragile position. I mean, you know, took the, you know, the pandemic obviously caused a lot of closures for more than two weeks, you know, more than a month. But it’s not the only thing in history that could have done it, you know, like, weather events. Who knows an E. coli outbreak, there’s one of a million long, you know, fat tail events that could happen in that. But it does kind of make you think that maybe we are, you know, maybe we’re building the system, that’s just like, based way too much on money coming in to just, you know, just keep things running. Justin times.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, everything’s Just-in-time.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And it’s funny, because I used to be a big advocate of just in time, because I thought, you know, because it’s like, very clever, and clever is actually what you find out, it’s kind of like one of the, one of the curses of modern life and a lot of situations, but you look at something, you know, like Zara, or h&m, and they have this insane, you know, insanely complex, or not, maybe not complex, but this very well done supply chain. And it’s really amazing. And you’re like, Oh, it’s almost a work of art, you know, it’s so efficient. And then one thing had, like, one monkey wrench gets thrown into the gears. And then we’re in the situation where now I mean, pandemic, you know, COVID was obviously more than a monkey wrench, but, um, you know, and then the whole thing shuts down. Like, that’s the problem of having a finely tuned motor that doesn’t work if anything goes wrong, is that it’s, it’s kind of all or nothing, you know?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And, yeah, and the problem is, when people are ill prepared for change, or for that system to fail. That’s when things get really ugly. Yeah. And, and so, and you’re right, I think, you know, think of all the things that can make things that mean, let’s talk about realistic things. How about an invasion can shut things down for a while. Ruined supply chain..

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Like red, red dawn style,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Like Red Dawn, style. Absolutely. And and I think, you know, whatever. If you had like, a hurricane to hurricanes and a major earthquake happened within a month period, you’re gonna have major sections of the country shut down.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
For that, I mean, there’s so many different possibilities solar flare that they keep talking about EMP is a Is it an EMP?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Electromagnetic pulse?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. Well, this is or manmade?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Mm hmm. Um, yeah. I mean, there’s like literally, like, you know, if you go back, go back 500 years, and look at all the events of like this that could have shut down society for more than a couple of days, big volcano going off, you know, or an asteroid hitting or something. And I know that they’re all like long tail. But eventually one of these is gonna happen. And we do see now you’re getting me into something that I do feel passionately about. But we need a motherfucking plan, you know what I mean? Like, otherwise? You know, we’re not, we’ve been around for 12,000 years, we 12,000. Or I think that that one that one site in Turkey is from, I think, 17,000 BC, I think that’s the oldest, you know, evidence of civilization we have, like, this isn’t this is definitely not very long on like an earth scale. It’s very not long in a cosmic space scale. And so I was watching, I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I really loved the show Doctor Who. And I was watching an episode that takes place 250,000 years in the future, and you know, there’s like, mankind is living on a different, you know, star system and stuff like that. And I just remember thinking, like, if we’re gonna get to 250,000 years, like, we need some robustness, as this pandemic, kind of proved, like, we didn’t have a plan for this, like, we kind of thought we had a plan. You know, I think if you had asked every single person in the world in a year ago today, like could could humanity handle an epidemic pretty well, most people would have thought, Yeah, man, we got it. You know, like, I saw that movie where the who swoops in and they isolate, you know, an outbreak, they isolate the region, and, you know, everything, everybody instantly has other perfect PP Nah, there’s a, you know, one person got stabbed by a dirty needle. But, you know, we got that under control. And the reality is, it was just a complete and utter shit show from day one, and it never really got any better.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No, and, and, you know, I think, and I said this before that, you know, if we can’t come together as a country, to create policies and plans to deal with COVID, which is deadly as it is, it could be a lot worse, is that what happens when the next deadly bug comes around or slightly deadly or bug comes around? Or an actual bio weapon gets unleashed in the night seats? What are we going to do while we’re going to argue our masks can comply, and then politicians are just going to do dumb stuff, because they want to get reelected. And, you know, I think we’re host i think that that expose a cultural and that’s the thing watching, for me watching all this COVID stuff is watching how people are reacting to it. And what are they doing because of it? And I am worried now that maybe Bill Gates is right, because we’re so screwed culturally United States, if we had a serious shit show kind of thing come through. Not saying that 185,000 people dead so far isn’t a shitshow. But it could be a lot worse could be millions. I think we’re really weak. And that’s, that’s scares me as a culture that I fear that we can’t survive something really tough.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
In this in this sense. I agree. I mean, there’s a lot of ways we’re strong, but this like, we really, we really dropped the ball. Also, I need to get that audio drop of you saying Bill Gates was right. I feel like that’s something. I feel like that’s not something you say every day. So it’s pretty happy about that?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No. And and yeah, and depending half the listeners will say that I’m trying to, you know, kill them with chem trails or something. But, you know, ultimately, you know, I think that, you know, you look at the countries that are dealing with COVID the best and how they did that is they came together with and basically back their governments with the unified plan. And in the ones that did the best had the highest compliance with those plans. And I think the problem is in the United States, you know, it became a political I’m not here to judge, you know, Donald Trump, but there was a lot of denial in the beginning and New York, there was a lot of denial with the Democratic politicians there and democrat governor, and so they all drop the ball in my opinion. And I think the fact that they could that everyone wanted to make it a political issue, and then everybody dug in and then the tribal lines were Set.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And then nothing happened. I mean, we just fought about it. And, you know, the action. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s not like nothing happened, like there was, you know, testing centers, ropin Drive throughs rope and, you know, things, things did go down, but especially at a national level, like I couldn’t even tell you what our federal government did regarding COVID, that was especially useful, you know, what I mean, like, everything I’ve seen, at least, for me is all more or less at a local level, you know, like, the things open here was more or less like Long Beach grants. I mean, I’m sure I’m missing something, because I have not followed the whole trail of money and anything like that, but..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you know, I and I used to be emergency responder, and I can tell you that most This is like, and especially on the biological stuff, most of that is responded in supposed to be responded to by the local governments, that is how it’s supposed to work, you know, public health is done at a county level of pretty much in every county in the country. And then even additionally, sometime at the municipal, you know, municipal level, like and, you know, so Denver, and a lot of us, a lot of cities have still have, you know, government hospitals. And so that’s where disaster response normally comes from, but with the biological and public health is almost always done at the local and state level. And so I don’t necessarily fault the government for that what I felt the government for, is how generally the leadership did not come together behind a unified plan, everybody dug in and made a political issue. And I think that that shows me that people on both sides of the aisle care more about their tribe than they do solving problems. And that’s unfortunate.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I got a question for you, though, as you know, especially coming from your background, do you think that this this whole event, that one potential upside, could be a big uptick in people kind of like taking control of their own lives, like being like, I mean, something that I had the sort of questionable blessing of growing up in Chicago, there’s like, it’s very corrupt in Chicago, and I was there under like the, you know, second Mayor Daley. And they’d be like, photos of him like having dinner with mob bosses and stuff. Like it wasn’t even in going ice fishing with gangsters and you know, things like that, like people laughed about it. And so I never really, for better for worse, I just never really trusted the government, I was always kind of taught like, it was just all corrupt. And it was all kind of blah, blah, blah. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t trust the government, because Chicago is kind of its own special little situation. But I do think the pandemic I mean, even with everything from the gardening and breadmaking to, you know, you were talking about, like liberals buying guns and people moving to the country, do you think there is going to be an uptick in like decentralization, localization, and basically people just saying, Hey, I’m kind of on my own. So let’s figure this thing out,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
take care of ourselves. And I think COVID showed us very quickly that the technological infrastructure was there. So I would say, a family member of mine, their office went all remote. Mm hmm. And that was really hard for the company to go all remote. And then after like, six, eight weeks, of the company going remote, because part of the part of the company was really trying to get people back in the office as much as possible. And but then they found that most of the people don’t want to go back. And they just decided to like stop leasing, you know, some class A office space. So I think COVID started that. And I think the fact is, I think more people are gonna homeschool people are seeing that. So I think we’re not done yet. You know, we haven’t finished all these things out lately. But you know, but I think the bigger trigger for the one the gun sales, and I know this, and then it’s the riots and the burnings, and and i think that’s going to scare the hell out of people, and people are going to rethink being in an urban area. Because of that. And I think that that’s a different animal. And we don’t know how it’s gonna play out. So the, the, you know, and I think this is interesting about the current protests, riots, whatever you want to call them, right? It and, you know, they never used to allow riots and protests to go on as long as these have been allowed in various cities. Like we’re like Portland and Seattle, you know, three months solid, right. And, and I think the government, you know, if you go back and look at like 92 in LA, and you go back and look at, you know, the riots in the 70s and late 60s in Detroit. Those things only lasted a couple days. And then they’re over with and people cleaned up and moved on. I think the problem we’re seeing and this is why I say I don’t know where I think this is going to go I think there’s a lot of things seems to be getting worse, not better. But I would say, from a prepping standpoint, Mm hmm. The longer these violent riots because they’re violent riots, these are not protests if I when people are getting killed and and people are burning, you know, whole areas to the ground, that’s no longer protest. And and so I think the longer it’s allowed to go on anything about the cops haven’t been shooting anybody with real bullets. Right. And they certainly did in 92. And they certainly did in the 60s in the 70s. And so, you know, I know in the Detroit riots in 68, one of my friend’s dad’s was in the National Guard at the time, and he quote unquote, said we stacked him up like, cordwood Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s like, and so if you look at how many people were declared dead during the Detroit riots, apparently that number was like, 10 x or something like a lot of people got shot.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
No photos going on social media back then. You know,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
There are some photos, though. There are some pretty damning photos, but it was like..

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You know, what the immediacy not like, they wouldn’t get out like that. Unless, unless, you know, next day, write a press. Yeah, somebody happened to get it.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. And so so I think that the fact is governments I mean, there’s no water cannons, right. There’s no alle rats running around.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
So it was the last one. There’s no what.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
LRAD you know, those audible things that are this, you know, noisy things?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Oh, it’s like the the noise yet to basically get people to disperse by playing but it’s,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
But it’s the one that has like an acoustic thing to it that, you know, actually has some pressure, I don’t know, something like that. But you have all these other tonic Ray. Yeah, they have that they all rads. And then, you know, they have that microwave weapon now too. Right. So the question is, so far the government has, and these have gotten wave more violent in many respects, and some of those other riots that, you know, 92 and stuff. But government hasn’t unleashed any of that they haven’t been using lethal force. And think about that, and lots of major cities. And so to me, the longer the people that are angry, and and I’m not saying they shouldn’t be angry, and that there’s not problems and they’re frustrated, and I recognize all that. But what I think, ultimately, the longer you let people throw, let’s just say they’re allowed to throw a tantrum. Mm hmm. Every time something appears to go wrong. Okay, because at this point, you know, we got things that are legitimately Bad Dudes, you know, being stopped by police for legitimately bad crimes. And now even though and people are writing over that, so in my mind, we’ve crossed some threshold about how we deal with something in a rational way. So the thing is, the more these people are allowed to get away with it as a group that and any group would do this right, the more they can, you know, torching, something’s becoming socially protected, and politically, okay, which is absolutely, they’re normalizing it. That’s really dangerous as a society that you have, you know, groups of society normalize burning down buildings, killing people, mobbing people blocking traffic from innocent people. I’m a, I’m a very, very staunch like, let’s talk it out guy.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You know, I really do. And it’s been as like, you know, language nerd. It’s also a big part of it. Like, I love language. I love talking. I love words. I love communicating with people. And I find it very frustrating when there is, you know, we’re discussing kind of seeing multiple sides of, you know, various issues. But yeah, I mean, I, I really, I know, it’s I know, it’s like, idealist bullshit. But like, I really think that like, ideally, there should be, we should talk about every problem, you know what I mean? And this is, and yeah, I get like, the the riots are super complicated. And I actually had an answer for you, when you’re saying like, why is the Why are these less violent? And why are they going on so long? Because this is something I’m thinking about too. And I have a strategic answer. I don’t necessarily have like a political answer. But you know, if the government came in, and we saw those videos of like DHS, grabbing people and putting them in vans and things like that, right government came in now, like full, you know, duerr taste style, and just, you know, full force like military, you know, shooting protesters that posed a threat to people as opposed to like, hitting them with you know, like, whatever the beanbags and the the tear gas and stuff like that, like it would, it would escalate to like insane levels. I mean, I think that not that they not that they wouldn’t and not that they couldn’t have an excuse to but if they if the bodies were stacking up right now, like, it wouldn’t get better, it would get worse like it would be very hard for them to step in and control Portland without Really getting in there, if that makes sense. And I, and I feel like at a local level, you know, I thought I thought it was kind of crazy that these are going on so long to because like, I’d never seen this in the States. I’d seen this in like South America, like Mexico and stuff where there’s, you know, day 187 of riots or you know, of protests in front of the building or whatever, whatever’s going on. But yeah, I’d never heard of this here. You know, I’ve been to a protest that was event at a time and a place and you know, all kinds of stuff like that. And my impression is basically at a local level, like, they’re kind of I mean, you saw the thing with Ted Wheeler, they, they had his whole apartment building staked out, and the cops wouldn’t touch it, you know, they wouldn’t get in there. Um…

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And that’s a problem. And, you know, this is, the fact is, I think it’s, I think they’re, I think you’re right, I think that if they came in now, it’s going to be less well received, then, two and a half months ago.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I was cheering it the way you described it, I kind of pictured, like, as if the military came in, like, willing to shoot, you know what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think, you know, they could have shut this down. No, no, I think the problem is, since they let it go for so long, people are getting more emboldened. They’re being normalized to violence and destruction now as the response to something they perceived to be an injustice. And I’m not arguing in justices are not and all those need to be discussed on a case by case basis, right? Because the world is not black and white. As much as people want it to be.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
A forensic investigator, you’re definitely not allowed to think the world’s black and white. Didn’t know that about you, either. That’s really cool. That’s very impressive.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I’m really nerdy. We’ll talk about it off the air. But yeah, it’s it’s, it’s interesting. And they say, Yeah, I think that’s my concern is like, so, you know, kind of back to the startups. Right? How does this impact startup? So I think, since we don’t even know how bad it’s gonna get. We don’t know if this stuff’s going to calm down. Right. We don’t know if the racial relations will improve. And and what timeframe in I think the elections coming up, and I don’t think anybody’s going to be happy with that. So I’m, at this point, I am expecting more normalized violence to occur, then the question is, and this is what’s been interesting what Donald Trump psychologically and is that after he got elected, right, usually the other side’s a little butthurt. They lost, that’s kind of normal. They never got over it. with Trump ever, in four years. And to me, I think so. This goes back to the psychology thing, too, is I think, the longer you’re your best if you’re raging every day, and I see this, on Twitter, I follow I mean, even a lot of Silicon Valley people just rage at Hollywood people every day, day, day day, for years. Mm hmm. Just raging. And to me, I think the law, I think you can almost have like emotional damage as a society, the longer you’re like that, I think it changes people’s personalities. And And so…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
yeah, I’ve seen I have seen politics somewhat ruin people’s lives before because it’sa turned, you know, turn them from, and this is I’ve never done it, I’ve seen this, both sides, honestly. People I was really close to and it just turns like, turn someone into like, a very angry person. And, you know, like, I’m not gonna argue with other people’s, like, emotions, and like the reasons for being angry. But like, that’s a tough way to live man. Like, it’s, it’s hard to just be angry all the time.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. And I, and I see a lot of that, and, and my concern about our society, right, if we can, again, come back to the table and rationally discuss an issue, like you’re talking about, if we can if the solution is that it’s going to be violence every time and it’s only going to get worse. There will be blowback and and there’s going to be backlash to that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, should we What about what about you and I moderating some right left debates, perhaps maybe get a couple couple of topics and trying to actually have some kind of a rational conversation about it?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Absolutely. And and I think, you know, I think that’s important. And the fact is, it comes back to how do we know our knowledge? And, you know, we could have a whole discussion on knee these issues politically, but I think the fact is, we’re not coming back together. Mm hmm. After the election, we didn’t from the last election. I don’t think that’s going to happen after this election. And so I think so I think, and this gets into your startup, too, right? Like, where do you pick to live? Where do you pick the headquarters for your startup know what hospital you know, flip. It’s like how do you How is that going to impact? I mean, what’s your start? How would How do you think you’re going to view real estate? And where you, you know, put your residence for your startup now? How would you What is your What are your thoughts on that with what you guys are doing?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, I mentioned that earlier, I mentioned earlier about the California wealth tax that has been being bandied about, as we’re launching this that’s like, you know, kind of on my head regarding staying in California, but actually do have an interesting answer to that, which is that, you know, our platform like our platform right now, our first product up is for ankle and foot exams, like you literally come, you do an ankle or foot exam from your phone, just videos, very, you know, you’re talking about, like low tech versus high tech. And I actually have your platform as a very low tech digital product. Um, there’s like, almost no data. One of the things is, I, I’m a big privacy guy, because every time a hack comes out, you know, like, Canva, got hacked, oh, Reddit got hacked, or whatever it is, I swear to God, my my name and password always shows up on Have I been poned. And so and I’m one of those, you know, I feel like every time I put a phone number into even some religion, it’s, you know, I put my phone number into spectrum for two, you know, two factor authentication. And three days later, the robo calls start, and you know exactly where that came from. So one of the things is that, you know, we’re, you literally just need an email to get like a physical therapists thing with us. Like, it’s all like, we’re not collecting data, because we don’t want to hold your data unnecessarily. And, and I’m like, I think it’s good to be private, on the where to be located thing, our physical therapists are mostly some form of freelance, some many of that, like, distributed, not in LA, in, you know, San Bernardino County, by Santa Barbara, like places like that. And our platform, because what we do is if you take an exam with us do this, you know, ankle foot exam, if you got a sprain, and we’re gonna be launching more exams, as we go, we’re kind of doing it falling a Lumosity model re kind of come up with one thing at a time and kind of just release them, right? Because we really want to like, you know, as a startup, working on our, you know, our first product here in this space, we’re going to get really, really good. It’s this, like I said, it’s kind of like a low fi product. There’s no fancy technology, there’s no AI yet, although I would like to I’m really excited about the idea of doing things like skin cancer, skin cancer exams, or like eye exams and things like that, which could use AI in the future. Um, but yeah, I mean, part of, part of what I’m stoked about is that one, our physical therapists are really good, I’ve kind of done a session with all of them. And a lot, the the ones we have so far are trying to build an at home, basically, telehealth business. So, uh, you know, people who look, one of them, their clinic got shut down, or it didn’t get, I think it went out of business. I mean, if you think about all the dentists and all the the doctor’s offices that have been closed down, like, since the pandemic started, an insane amount of physical therapy, businesses have closed or, you know, close temporarily. So you got a lot of people trying to start freelance style, um, it’s not exactly an Uber situation, because like, you know, Uber was people who weren’t drivers, whereas all of a sudden, you have a lot of physical therapists that are out of a job, or, you know, some are like working at two or three places, and there’s a kind of a competitor app, but actually, they sort of work in sync with us a little bit called Luna, which is to get in home physical therapy, to do you know, kind of one on one sessions, and that’s blown up since the pandemic, man if you invested in that, that would have been a killer investment. And it’s all because you know, everything’s closed, all the gyms are closed and everything. So, like Luna, this competitor, you you basically say, like add, like a physical therapist, and they come to your house, us you take the exam at the house, and it gets sent to a physical therapists, um, but kind of both of both of them. You know, one of the things I’m stoked about with Luna and especially with us is potentially letting people kind of like work and, like work during the pandemic, as you know, too, and we’re hoping that this will really sync well with our physical therapists, but like, getting customers is hard. And that’s essentially for the physical therapists who are working on our platform. We’re just like shuffling them customers, because all we’re doing is the evaluations. So we get to you know, if somebody signs up with us, every time they they look at one of our evaluations, and then you know, they they have the opportunity you they want To the patient can keep doing sessions with them. Especially if they really, you know, obviously, like you get a physical therapist you like, same thing with like a physical trainer, you know, whoever, like you want to stick with them. And so, in terms of, you know, kind of like locations in the, in the pandemic, like, that’s probably the part I’m most stoked about is that if, you know, pulling this off correctly, would actually be providing work and like at home or, you know, maybe like, we actually one of the things we’re thinking about doing is like renting a space in LA now that real estate is just completely commercial real estate completely plummeted. So we’re kind of like exploring deals where maybe we could build a little, you know, like a little studio kind of thing that if we get some physical, you know, they could come in and film or they could do it from home. And then for us, I mean, there’s one other co founder, you know, he’s kind of like, the, the designer hipster, he’s like a DJ who’s, you know, really, like, helps produce a lot of our visual content. And we’re like, best friends, you know, very close friends going back, we’re in the same skateboard crew kind of old dude skateboard career out here in LA. And then I’m the programmer. So we’re just, you know, we’re just like, building and trying to sell and things like that. But then, you know, also on the, on the topic of like, Where are we? Yeah, the whole thing’s remote. And for the immediate future, like, the only non remote, I’ve done a lot of backing up, I’ve done a lot of remote work as a programmer, so I’m very, it was almost not a transition when the pandemic started, like, I almost felt bad for how little My life changed compared to some other people. Um, but yeah, for the immediate future, like, I would be 10 times more interested in getting commercial real estate, to build a little studio for pts, and a filming studio, where we could do like podcasting and things like that. But like, I can program at home, you know, and a lot of, and I and I think going forward, like in terms of growing out our business, you know, as we expand, if we can, you know, cut down on costs by things like real estate, and having remote people work remotely, like, that’s awesome. And then on our programmers standpoint, you know, a lot of our stack one, if you have a tech stack, you have to find people who program on that sec stack. And we do a lot of streaming and video. So you know, as we as we grow, we’ll be looking for people with some specialties. And, you know, straight up if you can have the whole country or the whole world to look for, for somebody on especially on like a tech programming side, it really makes a difference, you know, opening up your market that way. And if your startup where you don’t necessarily have 180 grand plus an insane amount of stock to give up the way Google or Facebook does, you know, it’s kind of hard to get tough to get top talent, especially in California, especially in LA where everybody, you know, has a tendency to go to Silicon Valley, if they’re, that’s where a lot of the money is your programmer, which is Silicon Valley, you can make 3050 70% more than you can make an LA

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Wow. How did you Why did you guys start with the ankles?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Uh, the backing up the It actually started out as a tool for physical therapists. And, you know, for doctors and stuff. I became very interested in aggregator theory, I don’t know, if you read tritech re the Ben Thompson newsletter. Oh, it’s really good. I’ll forward you a couple of really good ones. He gets very deep on aggregator theory. He writes articles and articles on this. And so I because it is unusual, because our, you know, we started out as like, okay, we want to make a tool like I love building streaming and video and things like that. And this was their tech, our technology was actually based off a former startup by hads tech that was, you know, doing translation was doing real time translation for focus groups. That market got killed by the pandemic, and hence the, you know, sort of exploring the space. But, um, excuse me. Sorry, repeat the question one more time.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
How did you get started? Or why did you decide to go with ankle…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Oh the ankle, the ankle is because I found it to be a lot harder to be a tool that physical therapists could use. And there was already a lot of those around. When I was looking at this, like, looking into aggregator theory that companies like Google is probably the most famous aggregator in the world, but Uber Lyft. What they do differently is they they Cooper could very easily have taken that tool and then a tool for riders and you know, for like you to be a private driver and, you know, find clients and stuff like that, but what they chose to do was own the customer relationship. And that way, they were able to basically dominate the market, because rather than having like all the suppliers on their side, and then they would, you know, make up and this is actually very traditional medical business model for aggregators is like insurance, you get all the suppliers, like all the different medical people on your, under your umbrella. And then you kind of call the shots with the customers. This is this is sort of traditional business model, whereas like the new COVID, digital aggregator model, is you control the customer relationship. And then you rely on the, the providers to come to you. And so looking at this model sighted, like, Well, how do you make a portal for people to come and get checked out? Like, what’s the like, what’s the play there. And so I was looking at injuries, and everyone talked about skateboarding in terms of this. But, you know, I’ve mentioned a million times to you before, like, essentially, like, because I know, very enmeshed in the skateboard culture and stuff like that, not the industry, because I don’t work in skateboarding, but this was sort of our initial target market, because it just, you know, following the Crossing the Chasm model of finding like a niche market that you can really get embedded in, and, you know, solve the problems for people specific as opposed for people, you know, a general problem, you know, which is a lot, it tends to be for no one you find a very specific problem. And then the skate community, you have the big issue of people being under insured, or a lot of times not having insurance. And what I’ve noticed with anecdotally, with a lot of my friends, a lot of people I know they’ve chronic injuries from things that they really should got checked out, but never got checked out. And one of the, the two biggest ones, to be honest, are ankle and wrist. And what almost always happens is somebody gets, you know, you sprain your ankle, you know, at the skatepark, it’s bad, but you know, you’re just like, you know, 23 year old, maybe doesn’t have insurance definitely would struggle to pay $160 copay to go to, you know, a place in Santa Monica, I’m working a couple jobs, you know, day doesn’t have money for this stuff. And then they just decide to walk it off or like, you know, wrap it up or get an air cast from Walgreens or something. But if it turns out that there’s a microfracture in there, then that can be a permanent injury, and a lot of people get derailed for a long time. Like I personally know, several people that essentially can’t skate anymore because of wrist injury is really common. Same thing, it’s like, you know, a fracture or really bad sprain, that, you know, essentially, people take the walk it off attitude towards. And this is a, you know, this is a real bummer to me, especially when it’s someone you like, like the idea of them having a chronic injury, like, That’s horrible. And especially if it’s something where the reason to not get checked out is things like, it’s a little too expensive. You know, you got to drive to the clinic, like LA, it’s an sounds like a small thing. But when you get to drive an hour each way, you get paid 15 bucks for parking, you’re injured, maybe you’re taking Uber, like, that sucks. And if you’re on the fence about it, it’s really easy to say no to it. So we figured with ours, you know, you build something where you just take it from home, it gets forwarded to a physical therapist. And then, you know, it takes a lot of the friction out of that experience. And then for y ankles, it was between ankles and wrists to start with. We want we want to have an exam that’s gonna be really useful that we can, like, get really, really, really good. We want this to be amazing, spa like experience that you’re doing where it’s, and it’s pretty fun. You know, it’s kind of like halfway towards doing a DUI test. We kind of walk and stand on one foot and things like that. Um, but I am..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I can’t pass those sober.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, you got to try. You got to try earthing man, I’ll give you a free one. If you want to get checked out, checked out by physical therapist, get you some exercises get some stretches. Sure,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
why not? I would I would love to. So So are you only rolling this out in California? Or is it already nationwide? How does that work?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Um, we’re trying to be very HIPAA conscious right now as HIPAA laws regarding telehealth change fairly aggressively. So we’re being conscientious about doing things in state. So yeah, right now we’re California focused, but that’s going to be you know, kind of rapidly changing it. Were one as you know, if it’s, there’s, if you’re in state, there’s obviously that’s the most over the, you know, across the board way of doing it. But then there’s a lot of states that have these packs and while the pandemic goes on, so we’re going to be kind of navigating these waters. But right now, yeah, right now we’re just focused on getting, basically just getting customers checked out, you know, really improving the flow with our physical therapists, they’ve been really helpful. And that’s, that’s been a lot of fun. It’s kind of improving the product on their side. But you know, we’re in this launch zone. And I know that you know, this well, where we’ve got something that we think that people seem to, like, maybe a little rough around the edges, but you know, we’re polishing aggressively and trying to get it, trying to get really good. But right now, it’s about, you know, really looking for that product market fit by making something that people really like. And so yeah, we’re focused in California, but we’re gonna be I mean, for any of your, especially your listeners who want to who want to want to try this hit us up, you can hit me up on Twitter or anything like that. And let’s talk because we’re, you know, enrolling physical therapists pretty pretty quickly. And on that side, too, because it’s sort of, I know, the gig economy is not like very popular these days. But we essentially become an alternative revenue source for pts. And what we’ve found is, with the ones we’re working with, so far, we’re like, one of several revenue sources they have, you know, so it’s been pretty easy, and they’ve been pretty stoked about it. You know, they like the idea of like, working from home and stuff. So I think we’re signing someone up in Seattle, and we’re getting new york online really quickly.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So how does it work? legally? I mean, is this like, so essentially, if you have the, the, I guess, if you’re doing the PT is in New York, and then the patients in New York, then you’re gonna just you’ll probably be compliant. So I was wondering if there’s much worry about crossing the borders for that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
But yeah, we got a we got to be careful about that. There’s certain situations where it’s legal. There’s heavy implications that the enforcement’s really is, basically they’re gonna turn a blind eye to stuff, but we’re trying to be really careful. And then there’s Yeah, like I said, there’s this like 13 state pact, which is basically a lot of like, mid country, mid country states, where you can do telehealth across the, you know, from like Wyoming to I think Utah’s in it actually, or Arizona. And there’s like no legal issues. And then during the panel, I mean, I keep coming to this during the pandemic, but I think we were discussing earlier, but they they passed something to make, basically every form of telehealth like now HIPAA compliant, and yeah, I’m off to come back and answer this question with with more details. Because right now, we’re just trying to keep it like, I mean, basically, just keep it simple. But as we do this nationwide rollout, it’s going to be we’re gonna we’re gonna have to be, you know, diligent about being careful about this.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And I think that’s probably prudent. course, we’re in very dangerous times. Anyway, right now, so. So how are you funding this? You got a lot of VC money investors?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
A lot of these see money? I mean, we don’t have any VC money, if that counts as a lot. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, it’s all it’s all like, you know, I’m doing all the technology on my side. To be honest, at the beginning of the pandemic, I basically like, marathon a couple of freelance projects to to just get a bunch of money rolling. And so it’s all like, literally all self funded, you know, through my credit card. and stuff we have to do. Yeah, just paid, paid to get a trademark done last night. You know, 600 bucks right there. But yeah, you know, at the moment, and this and I talked to you about this, like, we’re focused on this organic, we’re doing a lot of video content, we’re doing a lot of, you know, trying to do original things to kind of make our presence known and get ourselves out there. I you know, I’ve seen a lot of startups throw a lot of money at ad bucks, you know, Facebook bucks, Instagram dollars, things like that, with uneven results. And so it could work but that’s not really I mean, I could see just like tossing a lot of money down the down the furnace and being really frustrated a couple, you know, a couple months down the line. And we have an you know, we’re kind of fortunate to have a product where success and more importantly, things like breakeven for us at this point, is like a couple of thousand customers per month. It’s not, you know, a couple million or anything like that, like we’re a small tight operation. We’re all like you said, we’re all remote and all the programs I mean, all the design is done in house. And so if for the time being, we’re just kind of keeping it scrappy. The other side is, you know, having been in a million pitch rooms and in a lot of, you know, startup scenarios and things like that. I figured if we, if and when it’s time to do VC money, or you know, something of that nature, when you want to have a reason to do it. So for us, it would be it would be, we have product market fit, we like what we’re doing, uh, you know, maybe we just have the ankle exam, or maybe we have two or three exams on the market. And so maybe we get VC money so that we can do, you know, hire sales team to open up like, a bunch of different regions, or maybe we do VC money to open up in a different country, or maybe we get VC money to do because we find out we do to grow from, you know, kind of a scrappy level to the next level up, but we do need a major digital campaign. So I’m not 100% Sure. And I’m not against a diff taking stuff. But I, I do think it should be for a reason. And I as an unintuitive, as it sounds I’ve seen and worked at startups not founded but worked at startups that got way too much VC money, and it was the reason for their demise. So..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you’re never gonna hear me say no to bootstrapping. I think scrappy is a good thing. So I wish you the best success. This sounds really cool. And I do think that in the future, you know, I think projects like yours, where people are taking the technological angle to solving healthcare related kind of issues, I think that’s going to increase and I think what you’re doing is pretty cool.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Thanks, man, I really appreciate it and you know, it’d be really cool. One is this, this kind of, it’s a healthcare thing that kind of adds to the pie. Because a lot of our initial you know, customers are talking about it’s for things that they basically should get checked out for, but maybe aren’t. And so it’ll be really interesting to see. And I think that you know, on what you’re talking about healthcare changing. Since starting this I have talked to so many people that are involved with in home diagnostics, in home health care, like in five years, you know, being monitored, you know, having your doctor monitoring you while at home and as opposed to coming into the hospital and doing an overnight it’s going to be you know, a reality that we couldn’t even believe right now because I’ve talked to some people working on things in the space and it’s all getting it’s all getting you know, pushed really hard because of the pandemic.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think it’s gonna be really interesting to watch so yeah, man. So jack, where can people find out more about you and your project.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Project? go to hospital flip COMM And especially if you especially if you need to have ankle foot problems a sprain want to get that checked out you know, mentioned mentioned this podcast and we’ll hook up a discount, but it’s not very expensive though. So maybe you don’t even decide you want it. And then for me, you can find me at Twitter is jack Connor but the K is a five. Rob, if you post this as a you know with a description, maybe you can drop those things in there, but HospitalFlip.com.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Jack, I’ll have all that stuff up at Rob mcnealy.com. And folks, make sure you subscribe, mash that follow button. Check out our library and our YouTube and guys you have a great day.

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