I felt like I went to medical school to be taught how to prescribe medications.
- Dr. Johnny Luo, MD
Note: transcription provided by Otter.AI, which is a technology company that develops speech-to text transcription and translation applications using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Today we have Dr. Johnny Luo, a really fascinating individual, which you'll hear about later, he's in the field of healthcare startups. And I'm going to bring up his bio here. So, Dr. Johnny Luo is the CEO of Doctor's Choice USA. And he is passionate about improving health care through helping individuals live healthier lives.
Dr. Johnny Luo is the founder of Doctor's Choice, a company with a mission to provide clear and concise education to employers and retirees about Medicare. So you're going to hear all about the challenges with the healthcare system and the solutions that Johnny is bringing to these pain points. He is the author of the Retiree’s Guide to Medicare: what your insurance company does not want you to know, as well as author of over 15 peer reviewed medical articles on regenerative health. He graduated from Brown University, and as well as the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. So without much ado, welcome Dr. Johnny Lou, welcome.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: Thank you, Dr. Christopher Loo, we could be related.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Yeah. I know Asian’s last names could be changed depending on where you're from. It's great to have you on the show. I know both of us, we both follow the Tony Robbins community. And we're both Tony Robbins fans. And so I'm so in, I'm really interested in hearing your story. Because I like to find doctors out there who are not doing the traditional patient care activities. I want to find doctors that are really doing innovative things, different things that are changing the face of healthcare. So tell us all about your story, how you got started, and how you founded Doctor's Choice USA.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: Sure. And again, Chris, I go on tangents. So correct me if I end up going on one, and it's not helpful to your audience. And thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate this opportunity. It's always fun to know when we connected. I was like this guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to investing and retiring at 38. So really impressive. I hope to be there in a couple years when I'm that age.
So a little bit about my background and story. I grew up in Fuzhou, China. And I came to the US when I was eight years old and my parents were both physicians and professors and they had established their career in Rhode Island, the smallest state. Unless Washington DC becomes a state, it’ll no longer be the smallest state. So I have lived in Rhode Island my whole life. I went to school there, I went to medical school there. And I was in the process of going into primary care because I really liked patient care. I really liked helping people. I know that sounds cliche. But I guess everybody says that, You have a kid that says, I want to go to hurt somebody. I mean, their problem is probably bigger than getting into medical school.
One of the supporting factors in what I'm doing today and the direction that I took. So I ended up getting sick in my freshman year in college, and it was some type of an autoimmune disease. I really couldn't figure out what it really was, and part of it was exacerbated by a nickel allergy. So that's actually one of the published papers. I realized that your cell phone could give you a nickel allergy, and that could end up in some pretty bad rashes. And so long story short, I went through a lot of therapy. As a patient, I learned a lot about dermatology. My dermatologist was at my wedding, a good friend of mine, and he ended up giving me a lot of your steroids and creams that helped me temporarily. But the downside of using a lot of steroids is that you've got weight gain, you've got acne, which is not a fun thing when you're 18 years old, and you're trying to go out to parties.
And, what ended up helping me was Eastern medicine. I took about two years of herbal remedies, and acupuncture and all these other modalities, and I ended up getting better. So they really couldn't figure out what type of immune response I had, although I might be allergic to one or two things, but it was beyond that. And that's when I thought, jeez, there's a lot of things that we need to understand more in healthcare. And that's why I decided to go through because I was really interested in business. And that's why I decided to go through medical school. And because I want to learn more about the field, learn about patient care, how do you bring on new therapies? And what's the process of going from the bench to the clinic.
And what I quickly realized was, I was pretty disenfranchised by the system, I worked with great people, no complaints there. And during my clerkships, I started asking a lot of my preceptors. And I said, Look, are you happy? And they’re like, why are you asking me that question, like pay attention.l So after asking that enough, it came to be that nine out of 10 said no, I'm not happy. It was really interesting, because you saw these trends. With the primary care Doc's wanting to do something maybe NGO or nonprofit, a lot of I'm generalizing and apologize for doing so. But it's what I saw, a lot of the specialists, especially the surgeons, either were really engineering focused, or they wanted to make a lot of money. A lot of the specialists should have gone on Wall Street or did consulting or something like that. Yeah. And it was really interesting to see the patterns and I started to look at why is that? and I started talking to more patients, because when you're a student you can do that, there's not a whole lot of, as long as you don't hurt anybody, you can have a lot of freedom to explore and ask questions.
And what I ended up realizing was there's medicine, it's a marketplace, at the end of the day it’s an exchange between patients that need the service, and providers that can provide the service. And neither side were happy with the experience. And that led me to think, look, there's got to be something wrong with this exchange. Because, let's say you go into a hotdog stand, right, and you're getting a hot dog, and the guy that’s selling the hot dog to you is not happy selling you hot dogs and you're not happy buying hot dogs. So theoretically that hotdog stand should not exist.
So that's what is happening in medicine, and medicine is just ballooning close to 20% of our GDP, versus Singapore's 5% and other countries 10 to 15%. And our outcomes are not much better. And we've heard those statistics over and over again. And I just thought look, what am I missing here? And why is it so hard to innovate? The definition of innovation, you ask five people to get 10 different answers. And for me, it's about how do we just find a better way to meet our clients or our patients' needs? Originally the thought was, I'll finish medical school, finish residency. I'll join this practice, was about 4000 patients, two docs, two urgent cares and maybe figure out a micro practice concierge care, somewhere we give develop a experience for patients that they wanted to experience and also develop a lifestyle for doctors where you aren't working 70-80 hours a week and seeing your pay goes down every single year.
So that plan didn't really pan out because I just felt like I wasn't getting any younger. And I knew that I probably wouldn't have been able to work a lot. I had a good friend of mine who told me Look, he was at that point, he was 65 years old. And he said, Look, I spent the best 20 years of my life, time of my life between my late 20s to late 40s, where I could really work, I could work 70-80, 90 hours a week on something I'm passionate about and still keep going. Versus he goes, I'm 65 now and I can't, I just, energetically I can't.
So that really struck me and I was like back then, I was 25. And I said, I got these 20 years to work really, really hard. Let's make it count. So that's when I said look, what can I do immediately? How do I understand the healthcare system, because even though I was a medical student, and I had done a little bit of work at a local, very small biotech venture capital firm, done some medical research, but I really feel like I didn't understand how the pieces work together, like who's actually moving those pieces, because every time you, your small player, you go out go out there and have to exert a lot of energy, it's like riding a tricycle yet to get somewhere. And then, the realization was I need to learn more, I need to learn more about, if I'm going to bring new treatments to market, all of that, I need to first understand how things work. And then I can make some changes. Because otherwise I just got a bull in the china shop, I don't really understand what's going on. And this is right around the time that the Affordable Care Act was coming out. So Obamacare, and I'm still doing a lot of work in the same primary care office. And a lot of the patients that were coming into the office, they were older, they were on Medicare.
So Medicare is for people that are 65, or older, or people who are disabled. And they were really confused. They didn't know what to do, because there's a lot of communication on Obamacare, you got to do this, you gotta think about, I think $100 million, a state or something like that into developing the systems and marketing. So it was everywhere, people were really confused. And that was an independent system for Medicare, in terms of how the patient experienced it. So patients were really confused, I didn't really have a good resource to send them to, because I didn't know anything about insurance. But I quickly realized that insurance was one of the hidden forces, I mean, insurance. And pharmaceutical companies are some of the biggest forces, aside from these now big hospital chains, that are driving a lot of the decisions in healthcare because centralized demand and centralized supply and, and I needed to understand how all those big pieces worked. And I'd done some pharmaceutical research, I wasn't a big fan of that. Because even though we've got some really great life saving therapies, I also feel like a lot of times, we can be overall - frankly, I don't know if it was your experience, I felt like I just went to medical school to be taught how to prescribe medications. we'll do a couple surgeries here and there, which is fine, you did a lot more surgeries.
So I was really interested in insurance, because I felt like insurance was the one of the hidden, it’s not so hidden, but it's one of the big forces. This was my thinking at the time, if you get good enough at insurance, you'll be able to make a difference, because then nobody can come in and take you out really quickly. Because nowadays, I mean, we're seeing this nowadays to where it's like you, you say something a little bit that's off the fringe, you might get canned. So I figured if you have a really big, big insurance company behind you, and you're trying to do the right thing, then it's gonna have a lot more momentum. That was my thought. Whether that's true, I don't know, we still have to wait for it to pan out. So I said, What can I do to add value immediately, because even though I had a little bit of tiny, tiny bit of experience as an intern, with a little bit of venture capital firm, I still didn't understand the breadth of how you start a company? How do you go out there and either raise money or scale up or all of that knowing that a lot of my colleagues were thinking the same thing, they would think it'd be really cool. They all had an idea. Everybody had an idea. Now ideas are cheap. I have this great idea to do this. And I think it'd be great how I want to sell you the idea of 50% of the company or something like that. Yeah. And you'll quickly realize it's not about the idea, it's about execution. Two people can oftentimes have multiple people with the same ideas, but it’s about who can execute it better.
For me, I didn't really have an idea. But I did have this problem, which had a lot of patients that were confused about health insurance, and I wasn't equipped as a provider to be able to educate them when I should be. And hence, that's when Doctor’s Choice was started. Hence doctors helping patients make smarter choices. That was the etiology of the name. And what it quickly grew into was, it was taking a lot of education around what Medicare means and how to navigate Medicare. It was about 100 hours of research distilled down into about a 40 minute presentation. Initially, it was to teach doctors how to better talk to their patients by health insurance. That was a disaster because people were looking to get sued for Stark Law, you're going to have all these doctors, they're not getting paid for it, there's going to be all these issues, who's going to spend the time to do it. So I said, Okay, that's fine. It's not a good path. But then patients really wanted the education. And then we quickly realized that most people get their health insurance from employers. And employers, they were really the right venue. Employers in some, some essence doctors nowadays, because now they've gotten a lot intertwined with the insurance programs and risk sharing and all of that, but back then it was employers provide health insurance, employers had an aging workforce, one in four Americans are going to work past 65, the number one concern in retirement is, you're not going to have a catastrophic issue that's going to wipe me out financially from a healthcare perspective, because we hear all these scary statistics somebody saved for their whole lifetime. And then some health issue happens in the neck to spend hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars on care and so forth. People are really scared about that. That's the number one concern. And people were a lot of times delaying retirement because of that reason. Because just, there was a lack of information, there was a lack of clarity, and there's lack of concise guidance. And most of what was out there was a lot of people trying to just simply sell insurance. And nothing wrong with that, but just not the approach that I wanted to take, not the approach that I wanted to send my family towards, and definitely not my patients. So I wasn't comfortable sending patients to a sales presentation where they're going to be sold something.
So what we decided to do was, at the company, we we built a platform, which the process of going from employer insurance to Medicare is incredibly cumbersome, because not only do you have to go on the new insurance, you've got to navigate through your human resource department, you've got to go through the federal government, which we know it's always a breeze, right, we have to go to the federal government. And you've got to sort through over 2000 different plan combinations across the country, it’s probably a lot more than that. But there are a lot of insurance options. And the good thing is that it can be hyper tailored. An option can be hyper tailored to some of these doctors, medications, lifestyle, all that the downside is too many options to choose from. If I go to a restaurant, I get confused, because there are too many options in most restaurants. So same thing with the consumer, they're making a really in some cases of permanent decisions. So we wanted to have a better way of doing that. And that was really the knee that we were meeting and the pros and the benefits, we wanted to set up a win-win-win situation. So the win for the individual was they would get this guidance that was unbiased. It was from a team of people that a lot of times have healthcare backgrounds or counseling backgrounds, our advocacy team, and it was software driven, because we realize that, over 50 different enrollment periods, 2000 different combinations, one person is not going to get it straight in their head, I couldn't get a straight after I stopped to look things up after eight and a half years.
So we developed a software platform like TurboTax with Medicare called the Medicare Checkup. And it goes through somebody's specific situation. And the enrollment period identifies what options are right for them based on their specific lifestyle and medical needs and projects out also what we think that they'll need in five to 10 years, because we have enough data on that. And some really cool systems that we do have that our team uses to help provide that level of guidance that again, I want it for my family and patients. And then for the employer, the benefit of that is that the client gets a service where the client gets a service from us for no cost on our platform, because a lot of times the employer is paying for it. So the employer is paying us as an employee benefit because employers now concerning employees offer, employers offer health insurance, they offer caregiver benefits, and then they realize that for their employees that are getting older, and for the employees that are caregivers, there's a huge need a gap that needs to be filled in terms of helping people navigate Medicare.
And also the other financial benefit is that in cases where it is truly better for the employee to go on Medicare versus staying on their health insurance, the employer saves a lot of money. So we had one case where there was a 5000 person company, just recently, and they were self insured meaning that they were paying for their own claims. So big companies, what they can say is look, if we keep our employees healthier than the general public, and we pay their own claims, then we can say money on health insurance. So that's what they did. And the first week we implemented it. It was a service industry. There was a driver and the driver had been there for 30 years. So a lot of loyalty to his organization. His spouse, his wife had stage four ovarian cancer and she's still doing well today. But she was getting her care done in a big city big hospital system, about 1.3 million in claims every single year for that one person. Not even the employee, just the spouse. And, of course, the company was paying for it. And, what ended up happening was we did the back of napkin analysis from a third party perspective and said, hey, look, you can save $2,600 by having your wife go on Medicare, for you personally based on deductibles, and copays, and her doctors and so forth. And for him it was no brainer. So they save $2,600 in a company and save 1.3 $1.4 million a year, well, just off that one case. So that return on investment can be tremendously asymmetrical, and everybody's happy. So that's the first step.
So this is the value that we created in navigating people through the system, because I feel I'm still learning and whatever I want to learn, I want to then teach immediately, to people. And so this is our first step. And that's what the company Doctor's Choice is, is that we provide that crystal clear guidance and advocacy. And we help people actually fill out the paperwork to transition them from employer coverage to Medicare, it’s win-win-win across the board. I guess, in some cases, maybe we're offsetting the risks of the government. That's where people are like where’s the free lunch? the free lunch is kind of like the government, which is we're all paying for it. That's a bigger problem that we have to worry about, at least in the meantime, employers can save money, legally, because you can't push employees off, it's the employees choice. And we want to be a neutral third party where it's truly a better bet for the employees. And from there, we were able to now work with the insurance companies and understand how insurance truly works. And I realized, I mean, Chris, it's, it's funny when I was a medical student, and when my colleagues were trying to get in touch with the insurance companies, right, it was difficult that everything was a claim denied, and then I got to appeal it. And then the office hours, and we spent $200,000, a year off of a million dollar top line to just do all that stuff. That's something that we could either help give to charity care, it just boggles my mind. But you can't get a call back from insurance companies. And, into Medicare that essentially, we're in distribution. Now, the best part of the business model is we become their insurance agent. But everybody's salaried. So it's unbiased, but when I'm sitting in that seat, I give a call, and the VP, the SVP, the President, the CEO, all these insurance companies, they call me back, I can have a conversation, I can say, hey, look.
You know, we have one of the local plans. And my passion in Eastern medicine, I said, Look, we have a lot of clients who could benefit from acupuncture. This is back when Medicare didn't cover it, and this year, they did, overall. So look, we got to add a lot of these holistic medicine components into these plants. Because of our volume, in the amount of people we've helped, they did it. I was like, when did you ever as a physician, you could get an insurance company to move?
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Almost never, it's huge. I mean, it's like moving a mountain; you can’t.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: So maybe we're onto something. So our purpose of the company is to truly help people live healthier lives. Our short term mission is, how do we help a million people transition from their employer coverage to Medicare and beyond successfully? And for people that are wanting to start companies and, or providers and physicians that are thinking about, I have this great idea, I want to execute on it, there's no right way to do it. Frankly, the process of going from a provider, to be an entrepreneur, was a big move. And you did it successfully, took a lot of people you have on your podcast did it successfully. And everybody in general has a different story. But I feel like the similarity is, literally having faith.
I don't want to sound really corny, but I used to think it was all mechanics. It was about, alright, you got to write a business plan, you got to do this here. These business cards got to do something. And people that told me it was about culture, building company, culture building. Building culture and a lot of the soft stuff know, having faith in taking that step. And I was Dude, I'm just trying to survive here. I'm trying to pay my next month's bill because I've decided to do this. Give me some mechanics. What can I do immediately? But now that eight and a half years in and never took on any institutional money and I've grown the company, even though we're not even close to where I want to get to. But now having some experience I realized, we should slow down and focus on starting small instead of looking big. Cause when you first started like you, you got the suit on, I just, for me it was I wanted to seem like I was big because I was a one man, man. I wanted people to take me seriously, especially as a provider for somebody that's new out of school and out of training.
And, and, and I realize looking back that, for folks that want to start, no shame and being a one man band, because the people who are gonna buy into you seemingly big are the people that a lot of times want something from you, that's more than what you're typically willing to give. And if you just start by, who can I help? What can I do immediately? Everything's an exchange. I was exchanging guidance for the ability for either an employer to pay me or an insurance company to pay me to do the guidance. And that was it. That's fundamentally afflictive, what's the exchange, if you're helpful to somebody, and you're helpful to a point where they'll pay you to do something, because it's a big enough pain point, then you figure something out. And then you gotta keep on doing it, and you get very good at doing it. And then scaling up is then you have to get other people to do and that's where the culture comes in, you have to make sure that you have to hire people that fit into the mold of, you want diversity, but you also want people that believe in what you believe in. That's super hard to find. And that's why most most entrepreneurs fail to scale up more than having really like a solopreneur ship, which is just you owning your own job, which is more, is really, really stressful, because a lot of times, and I've said I've been there, and I feel like I'm still there's some days, where when you start a company, the first person you take advantage of is yourself, you underpay yourself, and you overwork yourself. And when you scale, when you first start to hire, you can't really hire a lot of top tier talent cuz you have the money to go out and raise a bunch of money, then who do you recruit and take advantage of people that you care about? You have your spouse, or you have your friend, you'll come work for the business, and you're really underpaying them and overworking them still.
And then from there, everybody goes through the same things. There's just very few stories out there that are different from, a lot of different approaches that you can take. But in terms of themes, and in terms of, right, that the superhero, there's 1000 different scenarios that superhero can be involved in, ultimately, the story is, the superhero goes through some type of transformation, gets beaten up and finds him or herself. Overcomes the villain. And then the end, like happily ever after, for the most part.
In entrepreneurship, I realized that they're the same themes, just different, much different scenarios. So those are some of the lessons that I've learned, which is okay with realizing where you are, seeing where you are, and taking the first step.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Yeah. So do you think, for example, the culture of medicine inhibits or promotes entrepreneurship? Because our medical system really just pushes us. It's almost like an assembly line. It pushes us into residency and then fellowship and then attending and working in hospitals. And during medical school, we never heard about investing or finance, finances or starting a company. you mentioned venture capital, none of that. Just, getting the residency, which didn't make sense to me, but I just wanted to hear your thoughts.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: When you're in residency you're broke. Struggling to get by, I don't know how they can pay you under minimum, like anyway.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: I think that'll change in the future.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: Hope so. Inflation really kicks in. I think that it's a huge disservice. Because once you get out of residency, you start making special specialists. Your salary is still relatively high versus the rest of the population of jobs out there. But the problem is, I hear this all the time, real estate guys, like what do you want? Do you want to find a fixer upper? Do you want to buy it at a discounted price to buy at maybe like a 10? Cap is still run down, fix it up, force appreciation and then sell it to a doctor. For like a five cap? Yeah. No, we double your money or triple your money. You have to sell it to the doctors. Oh, it's great. It's a no stress, passive income. You just put in your money and what happens, a doctor comes in, you're like this tenant leaving, this tenant wasn't a long term person, these things weren’t properly fixed. And, you're screwed financially. And that's it.
I know a lot of doctors who are shrewd investors, but they had to learn it themselves. I do agree. It took me, to go into entrepreneurship, about three, maybe five years to unlearn medical school, because I was living in a state of fear. Because, in medical school, even in residency, in some cases. A big chunk of your grade is one that somebody likes you. It's like something if you take a test, and if Dr. Jones didn't like you then you're screwed.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: 80% of your grade is
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: whether somebody likes you, which is, which I get that in business, you need to have relationships, that's really, really important. When you're delivering tangible value. Whether somebody likes you, is irrelevant, because it’s whether or not you can deliver a value at scale to somebody because Chris, frankly, it's if you can help me with something, you're probably one of the nicest guys I've ever met, but if I'm like Chris is an asshole. If you're the only guy that can provide me that service. Who am I working with? I'm working with you, and you can name whatever price you want.
So that's the thing is that once you get into sort of the real real world, get into business or get into it doesn't matter if you're liked, you have to be really smart about it. What's the exchange, that you're providing something valuable. And if you're a nice person, that means I'm going to continue to work with you. There's another option, we have to first deliver the value. And then you're kind, oftentimes it's yes, if you're if you're not a nice person, if you're not well liked, then you end up, people are going to find the next best thing as quickly as they can. So going back to your original comment about, does medicine, does medical training allow you to think entrepreneurially? I don't think so. Don't think it does. And there are some institutions that are trying to instill, when I was at Brown, they had allowed me to do essentially like an independent study, which was my opportunity to, to really investigate how to start a business. But I was paying tuition to do that, right. I was paying tuition to kind of explore on my own. And then what's the real ROI is really self directed. So, but I, but it's about the people, I can't say I won't say that.
From a blanket perspective, the system doesn't allow you to be entrepreneurial, because you can find the people that are going to be really supportive that say Hey, Johnny, you can do it, or you're still young, go out and do it. We'll do what we can to help you. but the system as a whole? I don't think we're there. Individuals. Absolutely. And so I had a few individuals that were, he unfortunately passed away a few years ago. He started one of the largest physician groups where we were on Rhode Island, and he said, Look, you can do it. Looking back, I probably should have said, Look, I don't need the approval. Being Asian, being all that, the whole the whole thing. He was almost like I was looking for permission. That's what the medical system also forces you to become as you need to ask for permission. Because I get it, in surgery if you don't follow the rules, and you are entrepreneurial, you can kill somebody.
But to drive for innovation and to build something that's beyond yourself, instead of being an operator in the, I guess, no pun intended, but to be an operator in the medical system. I don't think we do a very good job when you do a better job. But it's scary, because I mean, the institutions don't want you to be entrepreneurial. Not a few guys do something really big to help them and put a couple million bucks back in the pot, a couple 100 million bucks back in the pot. But if everybody does it, you have no, no you’d have no providers.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Exactly.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: Long, hard hours. Yeah. So there's sort of the incentives there as well. So at the end of the day, it's for me, it's not being a victim. It's why it's so hard nowadays to turn on anything you read, unless you're focused on positivity, right? And you focused on people who are successful. If you look at healthcare, I think health care is broken. Yes, it's important just to study the mechanisms of everything. But why do we almost exclusively study sick people to get healthy? I don't want to study somebody that makes poor financial decisions to see how I can be financially successful. I want to study people who are wealthy, who have done it and say, What did you do? What all 100,000 of you have done that made you successful? And every single one of them is okay, read these books. Like the top five books are like the same. I gotta do Think and Grow Rich, you got to do Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
The same same books to the same set of books. And so it's okay, well, if it works for all these people in all these different scenarios, who do I take advice from? the guy who's saying, Hey, Johnny, I'm struggling to pay rent, but you shouldn't do that. Because that's dumb. And you never make it? Who do you think you are? Or the guy that says, Look, I built a 10 figure business, and I’m now able to sponsor all these hospitals and help these millions able to travel in my community and around the world and, and help millions and millions of people. I'd rather be that guy. Yeah. And follow get advice from that guy.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Exactly.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: So it's about it. It's about fun. Yes, the system is, is messed up, the system is, is crazy. And it doesn't inspire entrepreneurship. But doesn't that doesn't mean it's an excuse. If you truly got it inside of you to say, this is what I want to do. Then you kind of have the faith to do it. What's that story where people, it's on your deathbed, and you've got the dreams and all the ideas that you had, were never executed on and the dreams are saying, Look, we came to you, because you had the gifts to bring us into reality. And you didn't, because you were afraid, because you felt like you fit into, you wanted to fit in some boxes you wanted to be liked. Because my friend Joey wasn't going to accept me if I went a certain route. And you have to live with that regret, even for that millisecond, before you transition to the next thing. Just the thought that is painful, I don't know if that's painful enough to, to, to do something. That was painful enough for me to do something about it.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Don't die with regret, it's better to take action and fail and learn then not take action and just hold on to that. And the pain of regret is worse than the pain of failure. We don't understand that. Because we have, everybody has time, but once you run out of time, then you realize that you know everybody's going towards the same path. It's just how you use that time and the decisions and actions that you take that are so. And you mentioned the good thing. that is everything is like our culture is fear based, don't make mistakes, if you put the wrong answer on the test, you're rewarded for not making mistakes rather than in, in business entrepreneurship, you were rewarded for taking risks, taking action, making mistakes, but we learn, we learn, and we move forward. So you've given so many great pearls.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: It’s all a broken record, it's all the same stuff that everybody else says. maybe you hear it enough to, either reinforce it or or take that leap.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: I'm sure a lot of the listeners would be interested in connecting with you. So how would they find you on the website and your social media and feel free to let listeners know.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: I gotta get better at social media. So if you want to follow us on Facebook, Doctor’s Choice USA. And then also on Twitter, @doctorschoiceu, and we're on LinkedIn, and we are currently starting a YouTube channel, maybe there's another conversation around why we're doing that. And then if you want to follow me personally, I think the most active, I don’t know if it’s going to be helpful to you. I go to Disney World and take pictures of food on Instagram. So it's just my full name Johnny Z Luo. There's no followers, they want me to post more other kinds of stuff, I'm happy to do so. Yeah. But I welcome you out anybody to connect with, happy to see, however, I can help in terms of getting people off the ground or if somebody is interested in the Medicare space or if you're an employer interested in putting this service in for your employees. More than happy to chat.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Yeah. And for all the listeners, we'll put all of Dr. Johnny Luo’s information and references in the show notes. So thanks so much. You've dropped so many tons of words of advice, wisdom, your story is so inspirational and you've given so many examples. So take care, and we hope to hear about your progress in the future.
Dr. Johnny Luo, MD: Chris, thank you. Thank you. I'm following your success as well.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Thanks so much.
Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD: Many thanks again for being here. If you’re new, you can find me online at Christopher H. Loo, MD-PhD, where I have links to other episodes or links to online resources that will support you on your financial literacy journey. I’ll see you there in on next week’s show. While I bring you thoroughly vetted information on this show regarding a variety of financial topics, I cannot promise you a one size fits all solution. This is why I caution you to continue to learn. Educate yourself and seek professional advice unique to your situation. If you want to talk to me, I welcome it. Please reach out via my website or email at Chris@drchrisloomdphd.com. I read and personally respond to all of my emails. Talk soon!
Editor's note: This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.