Life to the Max Podcast
"A Cure is Coming!" Ft John O'Connor
Can you imagine turning a personal tragedy into a beacon of hope for countless others? That's exactly what John O'Connor son did when he was left paralyzed after a debilitating accident. Together, they founded the Rehabilitation Center and the "Next Steps" organization, dedicating their lives to helping those in similar circumstances, and even pioneered research on stem cell treatment for paralysis and other neurological conditions.
Their incredible journey has taken them from the early days of Next Steps, to experimental labs in San Diego, and to a future brimming with potential. We discuss the monumental challenges they faced in developing a breakthrough stem cell treatment, the evolution of rehabilitation technology, and the often overlooked struggles associated with insurance and healthcare funding. We also touch on John's son's remarkable philanthropic endeavors and his unwavering spirit, an inspiration to us all.
This conversation is not just about medical advancements or healthcare policies. It's about hope, determination, and the relentless pursuit of progress. It's about honoring the legacy of John's son who turned his personal pain into a purpose. So join us, as we celebrate the extraordinary work of John O'Connor, his son, and their tireless fight against paralysis. Our conversation is sure to leave you inspired and optimistic about the future of medical advancements.
All donations to "Next Steps" will be extremely appreciated by all of those who are in need.
https://www.nextstepschicago.org/
Can you imagine turning a personal tragedy into a beacon of hope for countless others? That's exactly what John O'Connor son did when he was left paralyzed after a debilitating accident. Together, they founded the Rehabilitation Center and the "Next Steps" organization, dedicating their lives to helping those in similar circumstances, and even pioneered research on stem cell treatment for paralysis and other neurological conditions.
Their incredible journey has taken them from the early days of Next Steps, to experimental labs in San Diego, and to a future brimming with potential. We discuss the monumental challenges they faced in developing a breakthrough stem cell treatment, the evolution of rehabilitation technology, and the often overlooked struggles associated with insurance and healthcare funding. We also touch on John's son's remarkable philanthropic endeavors and his unwavering spirit, an inspiration to us all.
This conversation is not just about medical advancements or healthcare policies. It's about hope, determination, and the relentless pursuit of progress. It's about honoring the legacy of John's son who turned his personal pain into a purpose. So join us, as we celebrate the extraordinary work of John O'Connor, his son, and their tireless fight against paralysis. Our conversation is sure to leave you inspired and optimistic about the future of medical advancements.
All donations to "Next Steps" will be extremely appreciated by all of those who are in need.
https://www.nextstepschicago.org/
It's what we do and shit the proof we live a life to the man.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, hey, go here, how you doing Good, good. Sorry we're late though, but man, oh, so we do, we, we. I was pushing man Trying to get the best, you know.
Speaker 1:This is John Eric. This is John Eric. That's Matrix. This is the movie. Hey Max, how you doing? Let me show you your gun.
Speaker 3:Come on, man, I've seen kids that all they are is paraplegic and they think their whole life was done right. And it's crazy when you look at this, you yourself and my son they look at my son and say what do you do? Run this rehab center and also do a construction and do this and do that, and look at it. Well, how do you do that? You can barely do a finger, but you're doing all this With your mind. You're doing your mind. Yeah, you got to go with what's up guys.
Speaker 1:It's the 50th episode of Life to Max. It's amazing. I can't believe we made it this far. It just really makes me happy that we have fans that actually enjoy the content and we put out. We love you all. Today, we are interviewing a man named John O'Connor. He owns the Rehabilitation Center. He's the founder of the next steps that I went to in 2018 until now, and he has a lot of intellect and a lot of knowledge of what's going on in the world for spinal cord injury research and the reversing of paralysis. John's son is actually the founder of the next steps. He was disabled because of a diving accident. He created next steps, which is an amazing place, and he's done amazing things for the community. Unfortunately, this marks the 10 year anniversary of his death, so we're honoring this episode towards him.
Speaker 1:So, John's father and his sister and everybody in the next steps organization continues to live on his legacy every single day. And you can too, if you donate to this wonderful place. They need it and they've helped me a ton Mentally, physically. It's just a great community. So I hope you guys enjoy the 50th episode. This is Life to the Max Squad Father, get ready.
Speaker 5:Welcome back to another episode of Life, to the Max. We got Thomas with us again and we got a very special guest today. I'm going to have Max kick off the introduction for our interview today, because this person is very dear to his heart. He's brought him up in a previous episode before. Who?
Speaker 1:we got with us Max, so Tom has brought up this guy, John, who is part owner of the next steps. Director.
Speaker 3:It's been donated, we donated next steps, and then it's. It's. It's not ours, it's, you know, a nonprofit rehab.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nonprofit. He's got a lot to say and I'm very excited, so I'm going to kick this off real quick. So paralyzed from the neck down, breathing through a machine, that doesn't stop me from following my dreams and doing what I love to do, I don't got any excuse, and neither should you. Let's get into this episode. I'm going to introduce you to us. I call it some awesome Thomas.
Speaker 3:Thomas and I met. What day was it? In June 2001, 2004?.
Speaker 2:I would say June 1717. Yeah, 1717.
Speaker 3:Thomas came in and big empty warehouse building in which we had just turned over to next steps, a nonprofit, and there was only a few pieces of equipment in there, a total gym and a few other rudimentary rehabilitation pieces of equipment. And he says, well, what do you want me to do? I introduced it to my paralyzed son C4, c5 injury from a diving accident and John was compromised. He had one collapse long. He had diaphragm damaged so he didn't have but one long, john, you're son, my son John.
Speaker 3:Okay, and being a high level quad, he just had a little bit of bicep control with one hand, but no fingers, just a little bit like that. That was it. And Thomas says, well, what do you want me to do? I said I want you to do this rehab and I'm going to send a person out from California to train you. And he goes well, how long you think I'll be here? And I said, well, I don't know, let's see. And it's going to go on 19 years, right, thomas?
Speaker 3:We'll be 90 years next week, so we're 19 years he finally gave up asking, you know, but since then we've gotten a little bit, a little bit bigger. We got like four pts and we got pta's and we've got a couple of sports therapists like Thomas, and Thomas is much more than just a sports therapist. Thomas is an inventor. Thomas is probably the best, or one of the leading best, quad, collegiate and paraplegic, basically pts. That you know, right, max?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I met Thomas in 2018. I was going through a lot and RIC what would take me as an outpatient? They said like the doctor basically told me that there's nothing that's going to happen for you, basically, so there's no point for you to do physical therapy. So my sister, she's like just like going all over the place because I'm like super depressed because a lot of stuff went down that I'm not going to get into. But she found next steps and they're like oh yeah, we'll take you, we'll take you and I go there for like the examination or whatever. A week later, or the next session, I'm doing like some intense therapy, which I loved. It was amazing and it kind of got me out of my funk, because back then I used to be in the military. I was in for treatment and all I love to do is work out and I feel like physical therapy is like working out. It's the same thing. So, to all the insurance companies out there, like you're not allowing people that want to work out to work out, you're just like deteriorating.
Speaker 3:It was just terrible. You brought up something that's very near and dear to my heart is that when the people come in, you look at them and you see a man or a woman or a child in a wheelchair, and that's what you see. But you do. What is coming in the door are athletes and soldiers and they want to be treated just like they were prior to their injuries. You got to be careful what insurance you get, because some of them, if you get really injured, they'll give you a little bit of therapy, they'll give you a little bit of money to pay for that therapy. And, of course, the doctors so many of them, they're still a little ignorant They'll say, well, the therapy isn't really needed. Well, the therapy what it does? It prevents pressure sores. It prevents 30,000, 20, $30,000 operations to get your skin fixed. It also prevents people from getting depressed. It promotes people starting to be entrepreneurial again. They go back in businesses, they get engaged in life, and that's all because you go to a gym and you see the guy next year, the lady next year, and she's still an attorney, or he's still doing contracting, like my son. They look at the guy, quad-plegic, and what do you do? Well, I'm building. I'm building additions for the city of Chicago. I'm the vice president of OCA Construction building 5, 10, 20 additions a year for the city of Chicago.
Speaker 3:When he got injured we were doing 27 additions. City of Chicago and he gets injured and he tells me Dad, I think you got to close this down. And he was doing this on his own and he was 30 years old, doing it on his own and he said Dad, I really created a problem. I got big liability out there and I was doing a power plant with Enron I do electrical, he was doing general. He was also had a seat on the mid-Am doing stocks. He was going to law school to be a lawyer. All of a sudden he was the co-captain of his rugby team. The next week before he got injured he was supposed to go to New Zealand for, you know, playoffs A week before, a week before. So here's a kid that was doing all of this and now he's paralyzed.
Speaker 3:But if it wasn't for us going around, we went to four different rehab centers throughout the United States and they were all traditional rehab and, like Max says, they say well, you plateaued, we're going. Wow, this isn't good, where can we go? We went out to California and we found a place called Project Walk and we thought that they were doing sports therapy and they were doing aggressive therapy with paraplegics and quadplegics. They weren't doing the high-tech stuff, they weren't doing e-stem, they had basic equipment. The people were excellent, great people, really good employees, and they met well and they did a lot of good. But it was extremely expensive and people would come out there and they'd go through a ton of money living out of state and paying all this money.
Speaker 3:And so my son ends up being a friend with Christopher Reyes and another guy, pat Romerfield. Well, pat Romerfield was a dear friend of Christopher Reyes and Dr McDonald from St Louis and Chris was talking to my son saying you know, we get to do whatever. We want a lot of therapy, we do all the technology. He said I've been treated very well but nobody else gets this. You got to have a little bit of money in your pocket, you got to be special to get special treatment. And my son says you know, this is wrong. We can make a model and bring it to everybody. So, christopher Reyes and my son, you never hear about this.
Speaker 5:I think Chris Furrier believed in the same thing he believed in it.
Speaker 3:But you know, and God bless it, he believed it. In fact, there was podcasts. He had three or four podcasts and he had Dr McDonald on it all the time and he was talking about this extended care. Nobody was listening to him and in fact, I would say something that would just kind of stay in dark the fact that Chris Reeves is in a wheelchair. You know, some people would say he's diminished, he's hopeful, he wishes this was going to help, he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's so compromised he's believing in something that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:He was very into, you know, congress and the government he tried he went to Congress.
Speaker 3:I stayed up at night listening to all these things with Congress and debates about stem cells and everything. And he went to Congress and said this is what we need, this is what we want. And you know what? They didn't really listen. They're still not really listening.
Speaker 3:Because right now, 20 years ago, 22 years ago, when stem cells was a new word and everybody was fighting about it, what do we do with stem cells? It's secure, it's not secure, it's unethical, it's not religious. They didn't know what they were talking about. It's like saying that you can't get a liver transplant because it's immoral. They didn't know what vent cells were. They didn't know what the tree of life is with all these different cells. What do we know now, today? Well, now we know enough that this has nothing to do with a moral, religious choice. This is nothing but basic science. Taking a few cells that belong to maybe the heart, the liver or, in this case, the spinal cord, which is very similar to the brain right Neural stem cells, neural stem cells and the ones associated with vascularization and growing the cells in your body to transplant nerves right To move trans to send signals up and down your spine, we finally got to the point.
Speaker 3:After all these years and I think I mentioned that, do you have this for the podcast? Yeah, after all these years, and we're doing this my son and I asked the doctors what do we need? And they said we need a permanent location to test our theory with cell transplants, with monkeys New World, reese's Monkeys, fascinating and we said where do you do this? First thing we were told and God bless him, he passed away. Dr McDonald said well, you can't do it much in the United States because of PETA and because of all these do-gooders saying you don't want to hurt monkeys, right? Yeah? So he said we're going to do it in Jamaica and finally we're going to do it in Colombia and I go what?
Speaker 3:And so our families, we all got together and we donated a lot of money and it was a failure and we went wow, this is pretty bad. And then finally we started listening and we were talking to the Chris DeRise Foundation and they started talking about geniuses. I'm talking real geniuses and engineering geniuses that really know neural research, like Jack Kessler from Northwestern. And Jack Kessler says Mark Trezynski in San Diego is a genius. Well, you know, I saw birds of a feather flock together. Oh, good people hang around, good people, and then you ask about other scientists and they get quiet. They don't say bad things, they just don't want to say anything right, because they know it's not good science.
Speaker 3:So we said, well, who should we invest in? And they said Mark Trezynski really needs a primate lab out in California. I go where would they put it? And they said Sacramento. And there's 2,800 Reese's Monkeys in a colony out there and they use them for some research, but they only use so many a year. And I go wow, and my son says so where exactly is this? So my son, this young man with one lung paralyzed, gets on a phone and he finally gets the dean in Davis University to agree to let us have a little piece of land. And that's the foundation right here in Sacramento.
Speaker 3:And with the idea that we build this rehab surgical center and rehab center for the Reese's Monkeys. It stays there and the doctors can use it until there's a cure for paralysis.
Speaker 2:And, excuse me, that was 16 years ago, yeah.
Speaker 3:And so we started, in the first few years, basic research right. But about eight years ago there was a Eurica moment where they pretty much got the right formula together and they started curing the monkeys. Now what they do is they take one arm on the monkey and they cut the nerves and they'd have to make sure it's going to stay cut because it was severe enough that the monkey couldn't move his arm right. So the doctors would go in there, the researchers go in there and they surgically implant this is the best part human stem cells, not animals, not monkey, not something from a rodent, not from a rat or a mouse, but human stem cells which were the right ones to regenerate and make that arm on that monkey work again. Well, lo and behold, six months later, that monkey can re-grab and get grapes with his hand.
Speaker 3:And when I went out there, well, first off, I couldn't go out there unless they knew I was perfectly healthy, because you can't get the monkeys sick right, and that's the monkeys in the rehab center and out in the colonies. And they put a, like a marsuit, on you you know, a clean room right, and you're thinking what am I doing with all this on right and with a mask because they don't want to go and pollute anything, right. They don't want any kind of sickness coming in a cold if I had a cold I couldn't go there, right. So I mean I go there and I meet these zookeepers and I said so how do you pick the monkeys?
Speaker 3:Well, for your operation we take the brightest and the best temperament and the ones that want to be cured, like Max, the. That the best of the best. Because we know we can't just cure an animal that's lazy. We want to cure an animal that gets it. And we have an animal like that, they're gonna reach. They're gonna reach for recovery, because we don't want to waste this on an animal that doesn't really want recovery. So We've been doing this for years now. Finally, last year About almost a year ago to the date all of a sudden NIH and Department of Defense says yeah, you're gonna be approved to do this.
Speaker 5:So you said last year Yep so this is maybe still get.
Speaker 3:Everything takes time, yeah, but it's gonna happen, maybe at the end of this year and the the people in University of San Diego. They have a small lab, but they produced up to 250 doses with this treatment. Now what we got to understand is things still go slow, right, yeah, when if somebody knocks on the door and say I want to cure right now, it won't happen that way. Keep in mind this.
Speaker 1:20 other doors this doctor's done this.
Speaker 3:Doctor's been working on this for like 18 years, right, yeah, I nothing gets rushed because it's got to work, but it's gonna be at the end of this year. There should be something coming out Real soon that says this actually cures a High level.
Speaker 1:So we can do that Injury spot. All correct.
Speaker 3:I look for an injury, mm-hmm, so it's so. It makes that connection again. And of course, the ultimate goal is to work all the nerves and all the way down to the Lombard region and everything. But the fact that it's been going along consistently, the fact that what my son did, his vision, was we give them the facility and Eventually come up with a cure. And that's what happened in the past. They'd have a facility and they'd lose it and then they'd have to stop.
Speaker 3:And we said we can't stop every once in a while, when Mark to Jenski would say you know, I got a couple of real good scientists and are working on this, but we lost some of the refought with some of the funding, and we'd say here here's a hundred grand, keep it going. The thing is, consistently, we got to keep everything going. You don't stop. And that's what's been the problem with all of our medical funding for research. Now the NIH used to go and have people say I got an idea and they throw money into it and then nothing would come of it. But now we're at the cutting edge on so many things that the government should double down and really say when can you have this cure?
Speaker 3:And I guarantee you, I Know at least what Mark to Jenski. He's at a point right now he says I know we got it and the age knows it what I was told when Mark was asked you know, could you do a presentation? He says John, typically one or two people would come out. He's with 17 people. He said they finally get it, they finally really believe that you can grow neurological, neural stem cells. Once you got that, it's like going to the moon and you finally believe you can go to the moon. You do it.
Speaker 5:Well, how do you, how do you Retrieve those stem cells? I know nothing about it.
Speaker 3:You know this is the crazy thing, these, this stem cell line and I could be wrong, but I understand this was their original stem cell line, one of the very first lines created, I believe, in Minnesota, and that cells been cultured and kept alive for research and it was basically a point of contention with a lot of parties between the Democrat and the Republicans. Back then the Republicans thought and I'm not gonna play politics here Okay, but everything with Chris Flurry back then the politics was it?
Speaker 3:well, those stem cells are, is a human. That's like saying my toenails are human. That's it's not a human. That's like saying my hair is a human, right, yeah. So they just didn't go. They didn't understand it and they didn't want to understand it. And Were we passionate back then. My son and I put Like a thousand posters when there was politics going, who to vote for us for stem cell research. You know?
Speaker 2:I remember that very well.
Speaker 3:And we went all. We went all around Illinois and even California, put now posters and and saying look, this is not, this is not what you think it is. Believe me, if you, if you, engage in stem cell research, you will cure Diabetes, you'll cure paralysis, you'll cure all these things. Please don't stop this right. Our government plays politics with our health. We shouldn't play politics with health. We, real scientists. You listen to real scientists and and if they are right and if their colleagues say it's right, we invest in that and we invest in that as aggressively as possible.
Speaker 3:What country is going to go and not honor America that brings a cure for paralysis, a cure for Alzheimer's? We'd start doing this. We're back America's number one again and we can do that. But we got it. Believe in it and and maybe next year, when Mark Tuzensky and his group of scientists, dedicated people, start curing people, they're gonna go. Oh, I guess it's possible and the the good news is it's starting to. Actually, you see, you see not only the light at the end of the tunnel. You can see the end of the tunnel, not just the light. You can see what's out there. You can see beyond the tunnel yeah and it's bright for people.
Speaker 3:It's not there yet completely but you, you really want to make sure that along with that treatment there's rehabilitation and that's where I've worked Years with Christopher Reeves and a lot of people like Dr Wise young and Rutgers. We helped us and a hundred other families helped make him to chair out there, you and Rutgers University, and Dr Wise young was one of the first to say you got to have a clinical trial network, you got to have a way of handling this because it's going to be coming and you got to have networks to prove your science, to prove that one science Scientist says yes, that works. So Wise young did a foundation and he did all these wonderful little trials. Now some of them. They weren't all that successful but I remember he invited me over because I had funded 17 Chinese doctors to do a Program with the afterbirth blood cells from the placenta to see how much that would help a spinal cord. So we take the core blood from a, from a baby's Afterbirth, and they were injecting that into the Chinese Injured people and there was some recovery. But it wasn't what they had hoped Because you know, we know that the, the human body, when it's growing, it grows like like a fire.
Speaker 3:Right, it's a firestorm. You have one, two cells and it becomes a baby. Well, that's like an explosion of life. Well, that's because the genes have been turned off. The genes are just growing. But then when you get later in life sometimes a week before, sometimes two weeks after, the body shuts down growing and it says go slow, maintenance, you know you're no longer gonna build a house, you just go paint the wall a little bit, so it doesn't have the strength to really cure something that's really devastatingly broken. Right, they found that out with infants. When and a child is injured in still a baby infant, they can sometimes recover Because they got months and months of recovery still in the mother.
Speaker 3:So what what we're looking at right now only is, is so, so much opportunity To use the stem cells and they create new cultures for new stem cells, so that not only do we do one set of people where we got to have immune suppressors Because the stem stem cells were meant for one gene, right, one kind of person, right? Well, we all know that you got so blood types, right, you only got so many blood types. So if you go to a blood transfusion, you got to have so many blood. You know, you know. But with stem cells they kind of think it's like 10 to 15 is good, 30 to 40 is really good. So if you create 40 stem cell lines and guess what they make it from now, make it from your skin, they can take your skin you get stem cells from your skin.
Speaker 3:Yes, all and and reverse it right and they could so they can create new stem cell lines and the new stem cell lines could almost be perfect. So you don't get this rejection right. Wow, it's not going to be rejected. Now, the first people getting this are gonna have to take immune suppressors to keep it from being rejected, just like they do sometimes at heart liver along, those kind of things right. But this is where we got to invest. This is where we got to keep our, our political aspirations at bay.
Speaker 5:We don't want the politicians people need to know that Stem cells can come from your skin, because I I assume the biggest problem that people have is they think we're getting it from babies.
Speaker 3:They think you're killing a child. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's that's playing God. That's the witchcraft, that's the witchcraft side.
Speaker 3:But you know, like I said, get getting back to. You know how we let me go back to like, like with with Thomas and next steps. Well, when Christopher reason and John decided you know, yeah, why don't we go and just have grassroot of family owned facilities and show them how to do it should give them a working model, financial working model and have these extended long-term SCI care for rehab, everybody said crazy and you're gonna hurt people. You got to do this, you're that. Well, when we first came to Chicago and we had, I think, six other rehab centers started in California all of which was next steps, but some of the guys wanted to change their names later and we didn't care. Nobody cared. Like pushing boundaries in Seattle, washington, and it went on and on. People just morph them into different things for their own Neighborhood right, their own local area. But we all were found out. It's the same thing.
Speaker 1:We're doing real good therapy for people, yeah, but it just amazes me like you guys are in this little place and willow springs and you, you have this much impact. You know, christopher Heaps, you know, you know, uh, like, we just read Christopher Reeves book Nothing is impossible. I mean, I Eric, my personal assistant, and just hearing this is amazing. And what really makes me happy is that your son Not only it was Investing and trying to find a cure for paralysis while all the bullshit was going on with the government and Congress, because we read about this, while Christopher Reeves fighting Congress, literally, we know that your son was part of this as well. But on top of that, he's like, you know, fuck all these places that are saying that I can't do therapy, I'm gonna just make my own place. And then you meet Thomas and he say I'm gonna train you. And now, 18, 19 years later, you guys like have people coming going every single day and you learned the equipment like you probably started with just a man, you know.
Speaker 3:Max, look what we had. You remember the local man. You know the big robotic thing that was like a quarter million dollars. Okay, and we laughed about it. I go, I could buy myself a Lamborghini this is 20 years ago or we'll buy a local man.
Speaker 3:And so I'm out in, I'm at Reno, nevada, at an air race and I'm racing a P 51 Mustang airplane. And I got a buddy of mine that own, I think, 17 rehab centers Mike Kenham it was called ortho sport and he's on a seafury, a big, strong, powerful fighter, and he's gonna go race. You have Reno, nevada, 400 miles an hour, 50 feet off the ground, and he's in the plane with his helmet on and he sees me and he jumps out of the plane and said John, you have a local man, I go, what he goes? You've got our local man. I go. Yeah, I said, don't you fly in about five minutes? Yeah, I said, don't you think you should just worry about flying? And he goes well, yeah, but but you see me after the race. I go. Okay, I'm like he's crazy. He should just be thinking about see what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a little vocal this man should only be, and, and you know it's. You know his partner was who Gibson the astronaut, one of the best Flyers in the world, right, and who Gibson's over there looking like what the hell's going on. You know, I got, I got this guy jumping out of the cockpit right of a big seafury called riff-riff.
Speaker 1:I love the name. Riff-riff wrote a name right.
Speaker 3:So After the, after the race, he says I want to be part of your team. I said what do you mean? He's I understand that you're using this tool and let anybody use it. This is a research tool. I said no, it's not. It's a tool we. We just use. And we we were. What did you say, Thomas? They said we were the highest use of that product for all these years in America.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah they. They say hours, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:Everybody else would take like an hour, half an hour to get somebody ready to go on it. Thomas and his crew could get somebody ready. And how how many minutes could you get somebody on those things?
Speaker 2:He depends yet 120, probably 15, 20 depends on a person.
Speaker 3:No, but after you got the parameters, how long would it take? Just to set it up after they were set up and you had all the codes and that you knew what that person was gonna take what's? How long will you take out of the wheelchair to get them working in the robotic Walking machine? How long?
Speaker 2:total setup is like 10, 10, 15 minutes total for each time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they used to figure of 45 minutes to an hour. I Mean, I'm not making fun of these rehab centers, but because they didn't do that often they go and do it, you know, once twice a week. We did it five times a day sometimes, right, Even, even even and they said what, what are you guys doing?
Speaker 3:We're doing rehab. This is called real rehab, this isn't bullshit. Yeah, this is like pardon me. Yeah, but you know there's a part of me. Think about it. I've got this paralyzed son and they won't let them have rehab.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, we'll show you, make our own place. And Christopher Reeves was a hundred percent behind it. Who's not behind it? Insurance companies? There's not behind it.
Speaker 3:Old-fashioned medicine doctors. That don't understand two things Rehab is great. It saves money in the long run and also brings the spirit back to the individual Right. The other thing that drives me crazy if I take a doctor and put his finger in a vise and Start to crush it and I leave it that way for a day or two, that finger is gonna be dead right. If I take a spinal cord injury and I leave it compressed and and bones the bones hitting against the spinal cord, and you wait until the next day because the doctors Went golfing and they didn't want to get interrupted, that's unethical, but we still do this day have people getting injured. I don't. I don't understand it. I would be embarrassed if I was a surgeon and if I found out a Person was coming into my hospital. I'd get there as quick as possible because every minute counts, unless that spinal cord is severed, unless it's totally severed, there's a lot of sparing and you only need about 10% recovery For the whole spinal cord.
Speaker 3:The human body was designed for recovery. The human can't hide in a cave for a month and recover. The human had to be able to crawl away from danger. So if a spinal cord got injured on a caveman Years ago, he had to find his way. So the spinal cord has redundancy, has a lot of redundancy, and that's the good thing.
Speaker 3:So if you can get in there early and save some of those connecting tissues, they can reconnect they. They can, they can, they can figure out a new way of making a passageway right. You can be clumsy, you, you'll have us. You know, maybe, like a stroke victim, it'll take a while, but you can get a lot of recovery. You get a lot of sparing of the nerves. Why they wait so long, why they wait a day or two to decompress, I don't know. That's probably the biggest concern I still have is Times of the essence. Take care of it immediately. And they still won't do that. They do better than they used to do, but they don't treat it like a heart attack, they don't treat it like a brain injury. They go oh, it's just a spinal cord. It's the most important thing to get to that person right away and almost everybody I've met that got immediate care, got a lot of recovery.
Speaker 1:When I got injured. I got injured in a car accident. I wasn't driving, I was coming up from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Chicago and I drove halfway. And then I told my, we switched seats, I told my friend, wake me up when we get to Chicago. And I woke up in a hospital.
Speaker 3:Three days later.
Speaker 1:Apparently, while I was in my coma, I was supposed to be airlifted to this hospital to like, probably do exactly what you were talking about, because I was in Kankakea, the trauma center, so I wasn't in a big city, so they were probably thinking about that, but then they were, like always, on a van.
Speaker 3:Oh man, you're right. That's I'm not saying it's an excuse. I don't want to throw doctors under the bus. Nobody gets up in the morning, and absolutely not doctors. However, it's old thinking. You got a person that's on a vet, or a person that's compromised, has other injuries, right, so you go. Well, we don't want to operate them now because they're compromised. What if they die? Well, how about this? Why don't you go and try to make the person live as holy as you can? You can take care of the vet. Find a way to do the operation. Be strong-minded. Let people make a choice. Let the family make a choice.
Speaker 3:Forgive the doctor if the person dies on the table, trying to go and decompress them. Do an operation and decompress the spinal cord or the brain or whatever they got to do. Take a piece of skull out to take the pressure off the brain, whatever they got to do. But we all know that when you have a brain injury, you're swelling. You take a piece of the skull out, you put that in the refrigerator, save that, or you can put it back in right, so you save the brain, you save it and let it swell up. Well, the spinal cord can't swell up because it's in this bone cavity. So here it's in this cavity and it starts to swell. And what do we do? We don't decompress it because, well, the guy's on a vet. It's awkward. Guess what it's awkward. Take care of it, I don't care how awkward it is. That's why you get paid good money to think outside the box, be aggressive, be bold. Anybody can do well. This is what we did 100 years ago. This isn't 100 years ago. We've got better technology. We've got better ways to take care of this. Right, I'm sure we got better monitoring equipment than 30, 40 years ago. We can see how the blood gases that go on, we can see how they're oxygenated, we can do interventions and maybe we can do those surgical operations and decompress a lot quicker, especially if we believe in it.
Speaker 3:If we go, I'm going to get this guy. He's going to be a quad. I'll make him a para. He's going to be maybe. Maybe he's going to just not be able to walk as good as he did. Maybe he's going to need a cane. Well, isn't that worth getting up in the morning a little earlier or cutting off your golf game? But if you don't know it for sure, the only way you know for sure is you got to practice it. You got to go and say every time we get a call, we're going to be in there and unless the person is so complicated with other injuries, we're going to operate on that person. But there's no protocol like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they said no, basically said no to my family, and my family was devastated because they were very excited because they were doing a trial, I guess, on someone in Chicago. It's a very prestigious hospital, I can't remember.
Speaker 3:Were they doing an OEG cell center?
Speaker 1:Probably. I wouldn't know. I was in the coma at the time, but they said that my injury was too high, so that's why they didn't know and we all know now that the high injuries.
Speaker 3:Quite frankly, we used to be afraid of touching the spinal cord. They used to think you look at it, it'll damage it. One thing we have learned with OEG trials with Dr Wang in China and Dr Lima in Portugal, is that the spinal cord can takea lot of abuse, in fact some bad abuse. In fact, the spinal cord is kind of like kicking an old car that won't start If you hit it hard enough. It gets a secondary insult and you get recovery. Why? The body goes holy shit, you injured me. And the natural immune system does some recovery. They go hey, the person got some recovery. It wasn't from the OEG cells, it wasn't from whatever peptide they gave you, it was just that they went in there, messed around a little bit and the cells woke up and they go oh shit, what do we got to do here? And they had a little bit of connections and they went oh, we got a cure. No, you don't have a cure.
Speaker 3:Our family had Dr Terzinski reproduce, dr Lima's and Dr Wang's experiment on OEG cells just to prove it doesn't work. Just to prove only thing was happening was the cells were being migrated. You take liquid and you push it into something, it will move around. Right, it was a hydrostatic pressure of the OEG cells being put in the spinal cord and they move. So they went. Look at that, within a day or two they moved or they grow. They didn't grow. It got moved with pressure and we had to spend a lot of money to disprove this. In fact, we got so good at disproving it.
Speaker 3:I was asked by Dr Weizh Young and Christopher was in the audience when this doctor from China was telling people, look for like $40,000, $50,000, you come to China, we're going to take OEG cells and we're going to put them in your spine and you're going to get some recovery. He was talking about it and I'm not going to say who, but one of the doctors, the United States doctor, said John, here's the facts. He killed four people. The other people got no recovery and we knew he had no recovery and we had the facts because we had paid for the research to prove.
Speaker 3:All it does is it's a pressure differential. It wasn't a recovery. But you know there were still people in the crowd that even after I had four talking points that I was asked by a good doctor to go and talk about that. This is not good. And I was beaten to heck out of Dr Wong from China. I mean I was just kicking him saying, well, isn't in fact four people died. I mean I just I just lambasted him with information and he's like where are you getting this information Right?
Speaker 1:And there was no. Are you a scientist?
Speaker 3:Yeah, like what? Who are you Right? You know I was his worst enemy because the doctors told me what to say. I was like I was their puppet. You know, I was just, I was delivering the thing.
Speaker 3:They didn't want to embarrass them. You know, nobody wants. If you're a colleague, you don't want to, necessarily, unless you know it's wrong. It's morally wrong. Then even the gentlest scientist says no, we're done. This guy can't go on. And wonderful people, wonderful scientists, told me stop this maniac. Because people were still paying money and they're still having this and they were getting sick and they're getting real sick and few of them died. So you got to stop it. And how do you do it? You get somebody like me to say what they didn't want to say, and I was more than glad to do it. But now I'm telling you the opposite. I'm telling you now there is a cure, and no one's asking for extra money, no one's asking for anything other than to be patient. And when it does come, you can't go and say, well, I wanted to right away, right away, because it's still going to be a slow process to make it happen, but it's happening.
Speaker 3:And when it happens, it'll be one of these things where those say, oh yeah, well, you just do this and yeah, you're going to. You're going to be maybe partially handicapped for a couple of years or a year, but eventually you'll get back to like 80, 90%, just like the monkeys, and it'll be a thing of the past and it'll be like oh yeah, that was terrible. I wrecked my life for a couple of years and you know we got drafted into this. We didn't ask to be involved in this, but when my son got injured, you know you're there and you get in a good fight and you keep, you keep throwing the punches right.
Speaker 1:I was literally about to ask you about, like you guys probably didn't know anything about this before your son got injured and you, just like we, had a.
Speaker 3:We had a great life we're making, we're making money. My son had a fat boy motorcycle. I had old military airplanes for my hobby and golfing and life was good. And when this happened, we're like, okay, we got lemons, we got to make lemonade and we went in it with both feet.
Speaker 3:We found out who were the good guys, who were the bad guys and, like I say the good guys, I don't want to collaborate together and the good guys write scientific papers in scientific journals. They're not the ones hiding somewhere saying, oh, I got to cure, that's probably a lie, that's going to get you hurt or just take your money out of your wallet. The good guys are busy in the laboratories writing good papers about what they're doing, keeping communication going. Those are the people that you think. Think of. Those are people you invest in and if they need money, you want to help them.
Speaker 3:In this case, right now, most of the things I'm looking at is eventually, these treatments are going to come to a market and when you see these things come to a market, you want to get behind those companies, because the companies that are behind this to take it to the clinical trial and take it arrested away out of people that we got to look up to look up to and get behind, because they're going to go and not only help the four or 500,000 people suffering from obvious neurological injuries, but the people with other injuries that are Alzheimer's coming out and everything else right, all the neurological injuries.
Speaker 3:Those are the companies and the investors. They're going to go and save us all this pain and suffering and they're coming. So when people talk about we don't want pharmaceuticals, we don't want this, we don't want that, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. There's a lot of good stuff that's coming and you can't just go and say the pharmaceuticals are all bad. This is all bad because we're going to need it and we're going to go and celebrate it and America's going to be one of the leading forces in paralysis and other cures. All I can talk about is that I know for a fact that the guys in San Diego right now are looking at how many people they can start treating and how quick they're going to show a result.
Speaker 3:The really cool thing about six months ago I was told they had one particular doctor wanted to be a doctor delivering the cells to some of the patients and his I believe his name was Savage and I thought what a perfect name for a neuroscientist, a neural doctor that they said, well, you're going to put the cells in the animal first. Because they said, well, we'll show you how it's done. Because these were all technicians, lab technicians, doing the animals right. These weren't human doctors, these were lab technicians, which often is the case A lot of cutting-edge things like transplants, and that they have people that are mechanical people to show the doctors this is how you add this or do this particular piece of hardware right. So they're showing the doctor how to do it.
Speaker 3:But I understand this particular doctor said, yeah, he wants to do this. And a perfect name Savage. You know, you gotta be aggressive to say I want to do what's impossible, I want to be able to be part of something that is impossible and that's like going to the moon. Do something impossible right. Do something that no one's done.
Speaker 5:Would you say that this situation with the monkeys is one of the biggest breakthroughs you've ever had in this 20-year long journey?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it took us almost 20 years of trailers made in Indiana.
Speaker 5:I'm curious to hear some of your biggest obstacles that you've overcame the biggest obstacle.
Speaker 3:They wouldn't give us a building guaranteeing the land rights to it for infinite, don't they? We said we may need it for 10, 20 years. Well, it's going to be like 20 years. We're almost done with it right now. They still wanted to have the doctors practice with the monkeys like one more time, but then, in theory, unless they come up with a better, now, this works. But you know, another peptide, another protein that works a little bit better. Right, they may be tweaking this and making it better and better years to come, but they got something that works, and once you have something that works, it's just going to expand, it's going to get better and better, right.
Speaker 2:Fundamental Sardar John right Fundamental Sardar.
Speaker 3:They've been there for about eight years and you know from my frustration when I looked at what they did to COVID. They said look, we got this thing. We know we can do this vaccine and we can do that right away. They pushed that immediately. Now, keep in mind, they've had that kind of figured out years ago. That vaccine isn't the first time they worked with that kind of technology. But the same thing here. They've known for many years that the stem cell line, this neuro-stem cell line, works. But they're cautious. They're so cautious and some of that's okay, but it's time to be bold now too. Yeah, it's a risk, it's time.
Speaker 3:And you know they'll always say that someone like my son, someone like a lot of guys that are handicapped, especially on a vent, they'll say look, throw me in there, I'll be a guinea pig. And the doctors say, look, we understand, but we can't abuse your loyalty and your bravery. We can't let you just be a guinea pig. We got to have something that we know works. And that's where now, when you talk to these doctors, they say we know it works, we know it will be good. They never said that these same doctors 18 years ago would say we don't know, we think we'll have something in five, ten years. We don't know. They're not saying anymore.
Speaker 3:Now they're saying we got it, we just got to go and make sure we don't mess it up. We got it, we got to do it and not even totally perfect it. You know the word perfection, that's a good. You know Max, that's a good thing. You look at the NASA NASA goes and they like to be conservative. They want to perfect everything, right. You look at Elon Musk. Well, let's set it up if it works, not if it doesn't work. We learned and we're going to the next one. We're going to do better. Right, there's two philosophies Get it working a little bit or a lot, and then make it better. But to say we're going to make it the best right away, that's like when we went to the moon, they tried to go and make sure it was going to be safe. I bet a lot of people don't know how we got to the moon, right?
Speaker 5:Tell us.
Speaker 3:Well, one of the ways and this is just one of the ways a little lab in Chicago, iit, they came up with something called Fortren. Right, fortren was one of the first computer program. And the Fortren, let them figure almost instantaneously how to change direction of a flight. When you figured the moon, the sun, figure all these bodies creating gravity, and you had to set a missile out into space. And you had to set it with one pitch, with one energy source, and once that energy was gone, there's very little to maneuver, right? So if they were off course by a lot, they would never come back to Earth, right? So when they figured that out, they called NASA. Nasa called the president and he said we're going to the moon.
Speaker 3:But what really got us to the moon was the computer, because even the best people by hand and they were using almost slide rules back then. Right, this is old technology and there was, I forget, I used to know 4Trad better, but there's so many codes, like the first 10 codes were the address code and there was like 40, some or 50 bits of information and you use the deck of cards to make this program work that thick. Then you just go through the computer, and the computer was bigger than this house or damn near, right. It was just a monster, right. And you needed cooling, you needed a lot of power, right, but when?
Speaker 5:they got that. Without now it's more powerful, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Your phone is so much more powerful. When you went to the center, the space center in Houston, and they had that big screen up there with like 20 TV sets and there were scientists at each station, the guy in the middle there's one guy in the middle, he was doing most of it. Everybody else was watching only one thing, because they wanted the Russians and they wanted the Chinese to think this is so complicated. Oh really, it was theatrical. They didn't need all that, it didn't do very much. There was only a few mission control people and then they had all these other people in there and they were watching something, but all the gauges that you really needed being watched by the one guy in the middle. He had all of them. But if something went wrong, people on the peripheral they might, might, they might catch it sooner and say, hey, this is off a little bit, the voltage is off on this fuel cell, this is off a little bit, right.
Speaker 3:But it was 90% theatrical because they didn't want anybody to know how this was really happening. What was happening with advancements in computers and some engines, right, they said a rocket. You know all that massive stuff, you know Rocket scientists, stuff. Literally right. But once they figured they'd do it, they said let's go. And the President himself says we're going to go. Right, because we got to beat Russia Space race. When I was a kid they had Echo and then Sputnik. Sputnik was like a 17 pound transmitter that went around the Earth in a really small orbit barely in orbit, because the closer you are to the Earth, the faster it's got to go or the Earth grabs it.
Speaker 1:That was the first one right, yes and all of them was going beep, beep, beep, beep.
Speaker 3:and everyone went. The Russians beat the Americans. So what did we do? We put up a weather balloon. This ain't no, this is funny as shit.
Speaker 3:We put up this big weather balloon and we painted it with silver paint and made it look like a mirror and we called it Echo. The reason we call it Echo we said it was in orbit. It was more like a weather balloon. All right, it was in the lowest orbit you could think of. And we put it up with a ballistic missile for a rocket. Right, we did nothing special, we just said we got to put something up there.
Speaker 3:So they put up this thing and they claimed what we're doing is we're taking a laser beam and echo and bounce it, echo, and we bounce it down to Australia and bounce it back to the United States. And we called that a scientific experiment. No, it wasn't. The thing is you could hear the Russians said like go beep, beep, beep with your AM radio, your transistor. So you went out on a night and you'd hear it, but you couldn't see it because it's only this big.
Speaker 3:But Echo was like 30, 40, 50 feet, whatever. It was big, you could see it. So the Americans said like you go, whoa, there it is, and it went like this right across the sky. It went across so fast because it was so low, it's low orbit. It was ready to fall out of the sky down there, but that was an insane thing. When we came up with the mission center, we had this great big thing with all these screens and all these guys standing around. There wasn't that much to it, but you got to give the guys credit. Only they sat in those little tiny capsules and they you know people say it never happened.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it did happen 1969, right yeah and it happened, and they were very brave men and we got lucky too, because everything was forecasted. That was supposed to be adult slow time on the sun and the sun wasn't going to be very active. But had the sun had a solar flare go out, those units weren't protected enough. If a very serious solar storm was to hit, they'd be irradiated. Nobody talks about the fact oh, we're going to go here, we're going to go here, we're going to go there. Well, until they finally perfected it and I don't know, I haven't kept up on it but the sun when it does a solar flare, that radiation is so much stronger. We could have lost those people only by like a day or two. That would have happened. So there was a little bit of luck and that's one of the reasons why we never went back there. There's a lot of reason we didn't go back there, but we weren't ready. We did it.
Speaker 1:I always wondered actually why we haven't gone back.
Speaker 3:We couldn't sustain it. We didn't know how to sustain it. Now we're getting to the point and if you go to the Houston Center, you see a lot of wonderful things happening. In fact, I had the pleasure being escorted around there by Hoot Gibson, the astronaut, my Kenems buddy, my Kenem, the guy that jumped off the plane and said you got to show me about, you, got this machine right and get back to that. Mike says I understand you're using this thing like an everyday operation. I go yeah, he's, I want to be part of that. Nobody does. That You're crazy.
Speaker 3:And I said well, I don't want people going around the world looking for the best rehab center I want to have. If it's Eastem, if it's robotics, whatever it is, and it's, it makes sense. I want to have it in our facility so people don't get worried that they're being missing out on something. I want people to check all the boxes and get outrageous training, get treated like a gym music plan, getting back to a normal life, but with, with, with PTs, with therapists and trainers that get it, and we'll do anything they want to try, but we're going to give them the basic tools to keep the blood pressure right, get some recovery, help their skin. You know, keep the mobility up. You know, keep flexibility up and get them, keep them ready so that when there is a cure, they can take it and get benefit from it.
Speaker 1:John, were you surprised on the resilience your son had after his injury? The what? Were you surprised of the resilience your son had after the injury?
Speaker 3:You know, I was surprised at my son all throughout life Before my son got injured. About a year before my son got injured, a very good man that I've known a lot of years came up to me and said you ought to be very proud. And I said what do you mean? He goes, that's a leader. Your son is a true leader. And I said well, thank you. I said, but it's not not me, he was born that way. And he says no, you had something to do with it. I said I got to tell you. I looked up to him and amazed at his strength and his clarity.
Speaker 3:And he's well, he's outstanding. And when he got injured, one of the biggest fears I had was he was going to lose his compassion for working with people, helping people and just just being a good soul. I mean, he did everything crazy. He was a boxing sparring guy with a heavyweight boxer he rugby team, you know he knew how to take a punch, you know how to give a punch.
Speaker 2:Did he do a bike ride through the island? Yeah, yeah, right, for one month.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but he did so many things. I mean, I remember one time he's out in the ocean. He goes out a couple of miles, swim in the ocean and he's scuba diving in the ocean skin and a boat comes along with a whole bunch of tourists and they're got scuba tanks on and everything and the captain says, hey, you get over here too far away. My son says too far away from what you were there boat right. He says no, how'd you get out here? I swam.
Speaker 3:When he was a 12 year old boy, I read I rented a catamaran in Hawaii. We're like half mile from shore and over the edge he goes and his mother is gone. My God, he's out in the water, sure enough, he beat us. He beat us to the shore, right, you know. So he pretty aggressive young man and, like I said, when he got injured he was doing all this work. He was going to school to be a lawyer. He was. He had a seat on the mid-am. He's doing day trading stocks. He had three computers gone, always had three computers gone, right, it gets paralyzed.
Speaker 3:And I thought, and I think I told you he'd always hit me up at Christmas time or Easter for donation. He loved Maraville Academy. He loved Father Smith. He loved idea of kids being taken care of and young people being taken care of. So he'd always hit me up for 20, 30 grand and say I'm going to match it. Give me this money. So why is that? Give me the money, give me the money. Got to give me the money. So I said why don't we just make it simple? We'll start a foundation. So he started Next Steps Foundation and that was for any charity we came up with. My son was Sergeant at Arms a lot of time with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He was always doing something with charity. When he got injured I thought I hope I don't lose him because he was way beyond his body. He was just a real passionate, great young man and for the first few months it was pretty bad. You know Everybody thinks about. I don't want to live this way right.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. A change happened and for the 13 years I had well, 12 and a half years I had him he never brought it up again. He never brought it up again like that and the only thing he cared about was people would be coming in. Somebody would come in, he'd greet them at the door hey, I'm John, and blah, blah, blah, right. And they'd look, you know, here's a pod, collegiate, that can barely move anything, and he's running this thing. And then they find out he's still doing construction, he's still in charge of a construction company and he did scheduling. People wanted to do schedule. He did all the scheduling. He had voice activated computer. Right, it'd be eight o'clock at night. They had to change the schedule. If somebody can't make it, he's the one that beat up the people in Sacramento, california, about us getting the laboratory and dedicating it until we don't need it no more. They said no, no, no, no. He's the one that got when he had the local mat.
Speaker 3:Ric calls my son up and says we understand, you have a local mat coming and we got to stop you from having it. And my son says what do you mean? We already paid for it. They go, we know, but we have a 50 mile radius. No, compete with local mat corporation. This was the Excel skeleton. This is a big thing, a quarter million dollar thing. And my son says well, I don't know, understand how this is. We're not competing, we're not charging for it. And the attorney these are attorneys now talking to us from RIC Well, what do you mean If we're not charging? Well, what are you doing? We're just using it. Well, you know you can't do it. And my son says well, you realize we donated the one you're using. And they said what? Yeah, I'm on the board of directors with Chris DeRis Foundation. You had two of them getting. We were funding the first one through the raise group. And the guys? He don't know what to say. Now this poor lawyer is talking to a quadplegic that says well, you're going to tell us we can't have it, but the only reason you have it, the only reason you have it, is because myself and our organization gave you one and they came back a day later. You know what they said we're going to let you have it. Now, keep in mind we paid for it, right, and not only did we have it, but we probably we don't intend to do this.
Speaker 3:By the way, we are not going to say that people at RIC or any of these institutions are bad. That's not right. They take someone that just got a surgery and they that's the first step right. So for a few months they do that, make sure they're stable, make sure they're safe, right. We only took the patients after we knew they were at least stable and they weren't going to get dysflexia, they weren't going to pass out. They were somewhat stable. We were prepared for the worst. I mean, we're as qualified, except we don't have a hospital a thousand feet away. You know, we've got a fire department 2,000 feet away. We got hospitals closed, but we're not a thousand feet away. So it was good for us to have people a few months out of injury, right. So we're not going to say we're better than RIC, we're better than Mary and Joy. We just do a totally different thing.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say your brother, what? Well, that's my opinion. What I'm going to say? You're better, but that's my opinion.
Speaker 3:You know we do more aggressive. We do much more aggressive stuff and we use all the modalities available. We don't use some of them. If there's a cutting edge tool and somebody wants to use it, let's try it.
Speaker 1:Well, and like that's what I did in the military. I always tried to like, think outside of the box, do different things, like when I came to my workouts and stuff so I can get stronger and stronger and faster and faster. When I was in the military and when I went to the next steps, I saw that you guys were doing completely different things than RIC was doing and I was like this is great, this is awesome and you've seen the technology and the equipment that Thomas invented.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thomas has equipment now that, without using high tech computers or without using heavy, heavy hardware, people can get all kinds of therapy and it's safer for the patient and a lot safer for the therapist because you can do sit sustain, you can do a lot of different modalities, you can talk about it, but it's basically a rehab center in five or six pieces of harnesses and equipment that can do a lot, a lot of recovery, just with something you can put in a suitcase. And that's for people that are in in second world, third world countries and for the therapist and the trainers locally where you don't have to worry about how do you do this. You got positive control of yourself and your patient and basically took every part of the technology and advanced it to be that much safer. Thomas, you talk about a little bit.
Speaker 2:I don't even know exactly what I really appreciate of kind of what is John, you know and, but yeah, it's a. You know it's a useful thing to use in a specific environment. You know it's a time saving, but you know, comparing with the equipment we have, this is very, very little thing you know. So we cannot compare with equipment you know, you guys have in the next steps. You know so just a belt.
Speaker 1:You know you got to stop being a humble man because you'd say in second world countries can use this device, which is good because we're in first world country and we have FES future electric stimulation. I have FES bike in my room, you know, shout out to the number five fund and you guys have FES equipment at next steps. And I mean it's, we're in a first world country and if someone needs therapy, I mean you're, you're kind of like an engineer. Engineers solve problems and you solve the problem. You haven't gotten the recognition yet.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I was fortunate all those years to be part of the next steps and, and you know, when you blend it in you see the things. But you know you have, you need to have the environment to get to get that, you know, creative state. So that's why I'm unfortunate. I think you know it's an incubator, you know incubators make people think right.
Speaker 3:You know it grows right and that's what next steps was. But he took he took simple tools that never got redesigned, never got thought about and safer for the therapist, so he's not hurting his or her back and you can be more aggressive with the patient because you know they're not going to get hurt. You're not going to get hurt, so you do a lot better therapy session with them and that means a lot. That means a real lot. I think that you know we've kind of talked enough about the rehab world and how it's been changing, and we know it is changing because at least now people are talking about long term rehabilitation. But we still need the insurance companies to be given the right amount of money money and backup we need support and, like I say, the ones they're doing good, cross blue shield.
Speaker 3:They should be committed. The ones they're doing bad, tell me why there's such a difference. Why is one only funding like a third of what is needed and they call that. They call that insurance. It's not insurance. You can't use it.
Speaker 2:General, would you agree? Most of those guys? They're getting like 30 sessions Per year, right yeah?
Speaker 3:but yeah, but I don't even fund the right price. They won't even turn.
Speaker 2:I mean, don't give it like like $50, right, a PT their cost 45 minutes session, right, we just, we just set up and everything and what they usually get right 30 minutes.
Speaker 3:You can't do that. You got to be an hour and you got it. I'm just saying that the insurance companies should all be looked at saying what are you charging and what are you giving the patients? And who's really neglected? People with paralysis, people in a mess? Any kind of paralysis, any kind of neurological condition? They love hiding behind the old dogma. You've plateaued. It doesn't do you any good. You've seen it right, max.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, you know, when you talk about insurance companies, I was told when I went into the recruiting station in 2014, the army that I was going to be taken care of no matter what, like no matter what. So I got injured in the army. You said, like screw, you were done with you, like you're just a number. They literally, they literally sold my family that my nursing is three hours, about three hours of letter. That's all I need and I'm on a ventilator. Wow.
Speaker 1:And so we had to like go through all these like hoops to find, to find just just for care, not just therapy, you know I mean. So I went through a lot in the beginning because we would go through different nurses. I would hire people off the street sometimes to be crack it. I wouldn't even know about it, you know, and it's. It's just like insurance companies they really need to reevaluate, like especially yeah, Especially when it comes to like our soldiers. I'm not trying to like single us out, but I was told at that recruiting station that I will be taken care of, and they told my family that I would be taken care of as soon as the DOD took me out and I became retired. The VA says you only need three hours of care.
Speaker 3:I get that.
Speaker 1:I'm feeling your feelings.
Speaker 3:My son with care. When I was told you know no big problem. Well, the care you get you can't afford to keep because they'll kill you. So for almost two years my son was still trying to run his company, I was still trying to finish up like a power plant with Enron and things like that and I was waking up every two hours to turn my son and we all know what it takes to take care of a quadriplegic. So I was doing that by myself most of the time for two years and I was getting burned out, shut up.
Speaker 3:Tim and I finally found a couple of great people to help me and one stayed with us. You know, thomas, you know, and she stayed with us for about seven, eight years and that was a God said. To get a good person to help you is like amazing and they're out there, but it's difficult and there's not too many great programs to help with that. Most of the time they don't wanna help you with the funding and thank God I made money, my son made some money, but I've been lucky in business and in construction and we could afford it. But so many people can't afford it and they get diminished because they're.
Speaker 1:We're in the cost. It's $85 an hour for a nurse. It's crazy I'm paying $85 an hour for a nurse. Yeah, you know it's tough to hear about that and I wanted to bring it up because you're bringing up therapy insurance, company therapy. We're just talking about therapy. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the therapy is. You're lucky if you can get that. I mean that's at the high end. How about just basic care? How about just basic bowel and bladder care? I mean the money and the pain and suffering and embarrassment and the humanity of not being able to take care of yourself and all of the health problems that comes along with it. To do this research and the funding and to come up with a cure, a cure of bowel and bladder, we did a program with the Reeves Foundation for many years with the Electric Stem down in Louisville, kentucky, and it proved that this can give you back bowel and bladder and that kind of died in the vein. Often it didn't really.
Speaker 2:Excuse me, are you talking about epidural simulation?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so what? We did? Epidural simulation. So we finally got involved with the doctor, reggie Edgington in LA, and my daughter and people from the Reeves Group. But my daughter and I went out on our own once again on our own and we saw patients that could barely do anything. You put this simulator on them and they could stand and they could move their feet back and forth. Where are your resources? This is about seven years ago, six years ago maybe, and so we went wow, well, that became a company and now it's Onward. The company's called Onward and Onward's got the new stimulator coming out. It's going to have all these channels and we demonstrated the Onward equivalent. It's called an alpha program. We had it in our rehab center, the first prototype, and we put Jack Harrington a judge. We put him on display, never used it in his life and he's stuck in a wheelchair, right, thomas.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we had a seminar a couple of years ago downtown Chicago. We hooked Jack up to this and he stood up repeatedly up and down, up and down, First time using it, First, very first time using it. And we said, wow, look at this. And this is coming out now and you saw on TV the young man that was walking with brain connections were walking Guess what company that is Onward, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then now this is the best thing.
Speaker 3:This is the Crystal Rees Foundation. Like I said, you got to be patient. When you look at good people, good research, you say, well, they failed us. Wait a minute, wait, they didn't fail. They finally realized we did all the basic research for all these years. Now we want to take that research and we want them to make it a product. So they created a hedge fund kind of organization. And what do we do they do now they go and say this is a good concept, why don't we go invest in it and bring it to market, the same thing that NASA does. Nasa's got like a MAT program where if they got something, they want to give it to the industrial community and have them develop it and make it a marketable item and make it a product right and have it come out Like great example.
Speaker 3:We all know about lithium fuel cell. I mean batteries, right, tesla batteries, right. Well, the first battery was thrown in my hand when I was in college. It was invented at Argonne National Laboratory by two scientists that have their name on a patent. And the guy throws it at me and said do you know what that is? And that's the space race you're talking about. I said a fuel cell. And he goes no, it's a lithium battery. And I'm a dumb college kid in chemistry and he says what do you think that is? And I go what? He says that's equivalent to four big car batteries, like a die-hard battery. And he says pass it around the class. We passed it around the class. He's now limited to bad news.
Speaker 3:The United States paid all this money at Argonne National Laboratories outside Chicago to invent it. We wanted to sell it to an American company to make these batteries. The EPA right, I'm not going to say it, but the Democratic EPA said that's too dangerous. It's dangerous to produce. It will explode. You can't produce it. We cannot let you go and have anybody producing in the United States. Our government, for $1, sold it, gave it to Excite Battery in France. So they were the first ones producing it because our country said it was so dangerous. Now here I am. I'm getting old now See how old I am. Now I'm 50 years later. And now my same government that said you can't use this as so dangerous now says this has saved the world. They were wrong. They were wrong 50 years ago. They're wrong now because they're not listening to scientists. They never listen to scientists. You talk to people at Argonne. That's just one example.
Speaker 3:Argonne also was the benefactor of the first atomic pile. They was invented in Chicago, right? The first atomic reaction was underneath the stadium. And they went and they said well, why don't we make one of these and let's make it for uninterruptible power? So Argonne laboratories made a little tiny nuclear reactor and they used it to help have power for their experiments. So some experiments.
Speaker 3:You don't want them to ever lose power, right? Argonne has of all things. They have a generating station for their own use, with coal. You know why. You've got a big pile of coal, right, you never lose power. You've got a bunch of generators. When it goes bad, you've still got the coal right, you'll never lose power. But they also had this little nuclear pile, nuclear energy, and they used that for years and years. So when big industries said why don't we make a atomic generation and why don't we have energy with a great big mass-produced comethicin and whatnot, generating stations and manned corporation, ge, westinghouse, they all said make big ones. And because that's what they wanted, they had big ones. And the scientists they're only scientists, so they're dummies right. They said no, if you make little ones, you can control it. It will never be dangerous. You can't use it as a weapon. And they said no, no, we make big ones.
Speaker 3:Why the politicians wanted the big ones. And so now, here I go, fast forward. I'm working for Babcock and Wilcock, three Mile Island. Three Mile Island has a little incident which was unrelated to Babcock and Wilcock or even the nuclear industry, just a mistake done by the operators and they said well, no more nuclear power plants, right. So now we're not doing nuclear power plants. But now watch, we're going to have to so we can have enough electricity to use lithium batteries. I mean, I'm getting too old for this. What's happening is they're not listening to the scientists. If our politicians would take the money and listen to the scientists and not the people that are in there trying to pat their hands saying, look, why don't you use this, why don't you use that? But the real scientists, they'd be better off and we'd have better cures and we'd have a better society.
Speaker 3:They're not listening to the real scientists.
Speaker 1:I have a more question for you, john. It's been great having you. You are freaking in naked mom man, everything you know. I could talk to you for hours, man, but me and Eric we were reading Nothing Is Impossible by Christopher Reeves and we started looking up YouTube videos of Christopher Reeves, of him hosting the Oscars and of him really pushing for spinal cord injury research and stem cells, and all of the politicians were basically going to fuck themselves because he wants to help people, just like your son. And then you said Christopher and your son were close.
Speaker 1:We were reading the end of his book Nothing Is Impossible and the last chapter was Hope. That was the last chapter and he was talking about how, in the 70s, he was supposed to deliver a boat to Bermuda. I don't know if you know this story or if he told you this, but he was supposed to deliver a boat with three random people to Bermuda and the first day was fine and the second day there was this storm and they just didn't want to die, they wanted to make sure they were fine. They said, fuck it, I don't even care if we get to Bermuda, we just don't want to die. And he wakes up the next morning and he sees a light tower and he says that a light tower signifies hope. And that's what signifies hope for the disabled.
Speaker 3:I'll tell you what I saw with Christopher. Rage was a very brave man, a very smart man, but when he went to Congress, too often people would go and take him for granted. Did he know the exact terminology about? At that time, when we were just learning about stem cells, did they go and say what wasn't possible? Yes, they said what was wrong. They didn't say what's possible. They said, well, you're naive or you don't know enough about this, so you're not a scientist.
Speaker 1:You're just an actor.
Speaker 3:You're just an actor, right? Well, I gotta tell you President Reagan was just an actor. It doesn't mean he was wrong. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't have listened to him. When Christopher said to his own people, why don't we support long-term rehab centers, they came back to him and said how do we do it? This is where there's no faith in our society. Even the Chris Saree Foundation. The people that were running it then said to Chris well, how do we get behind that? How do we control it? What if it gets out of control? What if somebody does something wrong? They had lawyers saying what wasn't possible.
Speaker 3:Chris says no we're going to go and do this and this guy, o'connor, has got this Excel spreadsheet. It's going to be these and they go. Well, slow down, slow down. That's part of the problem that they all mean.
Speaker 3:Well, when the Mayo brothers came home from war, they were outrageous with cures and they got the Mayo Clinic right. They thought medicine was going to take off like crazy. Well, what happened? They said well, that's too dangerous, we got to slow it down. Now we all know the first thing you do as a doctor you do no harm, right. Well, they've turned it into. You do nothing, because then you do no harm. Well, doing nothing is harmful. I'm not saying they're all like that, but some people like to sit back on their laurels and say if I don't really do anything, I won't get in trouble. Well, I, like the doctors and I like the scientists, say I'm going to do what's reasonably, I'm going to take a chance, I'm going to go on the cutting edge and I'm going to advance medicine. I'm going to do something. In this case, chris Arrives with Pat Rummerfield, who was a friend of Dr McDonald, and a friend of Chris said why don't we do rehab centers?
Speaker 3:Called next steps to next step and everybody said that's impossible, you can't do it. Who's going to fund it? How's it going to work? And it hasn't been 100% successful around the world. But I know that there's next steps now in many places and the guys out in LA have been pushing it real hard and it's doing wonderful things for people. And, like I said, some of them have changed their name, but they're still the basic concept of local rehab centers, some with sports trainers and some with PTs and doctors, but they all do long-term extended care and everybody goes in those clinics to get what Max is talking about. You're not only going to get physically better, you get hope and you get collaboration with fellow injured people, injured warriors. And that's what you do at a gym, right, you did that all your life. Well, they take that away from these people and they tell you to go home and read a book or watch TV. That's not fair.
Speaker 5:That's what it stands for is super admirable and it sounds like a group that everyone in a handicap position would love to be in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you said, the future is bright. The future is bright.
Speaker 3:Keep an eye on people like Dr Mark Trzynski. Keep an eye on California Sacramento, california and Davis University there, and La Jolla California University of San Diego.
Speaker 3:And you're going to see articles about human stem cells being implanted, making connections and curing paralysis. It's only the beginning. Once they know it works, people are going to go and jump on that and be supportive and thank them for being so strong and brave. Can you imagine a doctor saying at the end of my career I'm going to be successful, I'm going to spend 18, 19 years to come up with a cure for something that people tell you is impossible, that this will kill your career, that if you go down that path you will end up a bitter, tired old scientist with no accomplishments? And yet guys like Mark Trzynski decided I think I got something, I think I know what I'm talking about, and he was patient enough to do it.
Speaker 3:These are people you celebrate. I'm not going to take anything away from an athlete NBA golf. I don't want to take anything away from a famous sports Back when I was a kid Mickey Mantle. Right, people like that, right, these are my Mickey Mantles. These are the people that are true geniuses and heroes. And that's who we. We gotta celebrate intellectual properties with people like this that have the tenacity to every day, go in the laboratory and work on something little by little and get small accomplishment and build a bridge and build a knowledge to get to that point.
Speaker 5:Little things.
Speaker 1:Little things Little things.
Speaker 2:John, most amazing thing for me is knowing you guys so many years and seeing John and you and next steps now grow. But I know we have a very sad anniversary coming. John is not with us right for ten years but even losing your son and Kelly you losing her brother you guys keep going and continuing to do as far as research and keeping next steps going and doing wonderful things for that community.
Speaker 3:How can you give up on the scientists and the people and the patients?
Speaker 2:But John, sometimes is very easy because I saw the families that you know, just naturally you know it's.
Speaker 3:But not if you had a son like my son. Do you want?
Speaker 1:you to go on.
Speaker 3:Not if you had a son like my son, and this sounds kind of corny, but I always thought he was this old soul because he had a maturity and a power that was almost spiritual. Now that sounds, that sounds pretty biased. You know, my son, my daughter, they're, you know, wonderful right, and I think they are. But I gotta say it was strange having a son like my son because he was always impressing me and other people and he cared so much about the community. I don't care about his rugby team, I don't care what it was In construction. He didn't want anybody to fail.
Speaker 2:He had a lady or John, if something happens, he would take the blame.
Speaker 3:He would always take the blame. He said I should have caught that. I remember once he was having a hard time with a lady in Chicago building department, public building commission, and he didn't understand why. But instead of complaining he goes to see her and he says oh, you know, you think maybe this is gonna go like that. And she's well, I haven't had time to do this. And he's oh, maybe I can help. She's what do you mean? And she didn't really know how to go and correlate all this information into her computer to serve it up to the building commissioner. So he says oh, yeah, I'm pretty good with computers, why don't you do this? And she says what do you mean? So he sits behind her desk, he shows her for about three weeks out and off how to do all this stuff with information. She ended up being like the I don't know vice president. She came a big shot in the city, but someone else would have said boy, she's a pain in the butt.
Speaker 3:He figured out she's not a pain in the butt, there's something going on here. Because he was thinking what's wrong, what's really wrong, and he could go and figure out what people needed and need help. And, of course, you know, years later we were in downtown Chicago and we're in the building department and we're getting permits for some schools or something like that. And they said, no, we can't do this, we can't do that, we can't do that. She comes walking in and says, oh, there are counter boys. You know I'm not a boy, right, it's a little bit older, like a lot. And uh, john, come on in here. And what? Oh, no, we're gonna do this, that's fine, just good, yeah, it's like. Well, it's nice to know people in big places, right, well, he always helped people. He just didn't know how to not help people.
Speaker 2:You always say to the guys you know, five, six, seven years ago, when we were bigger guys remember the time. This is the best boss ever. You want to, you want to. You know, have a boss in your life better than John, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that's true I think that's very true and can you imagine having a son like that?
Speaker 4:yeah, I mean funny, funny as heck like I said, he wasn't.
Speaker 3:He wasn't like an altar boy, but he was an altar boy but he also had boxing gloves. He also had a fat boy motorcycle. He also flew his plane when he was 60. He flew my plane when he was 16. He actually soloed before. I'm not going to admit this, but I will. He soloed before he was legally he. He did an instrument approach in a rainstorm and I was in the backseat of my bonanza and the poor kid in the front seat with my son was crying Mr O'Connor, you got to get in the front seat like, oh no, you guys will be fine. And he's doing an instrument approach in the canke key at 16, and the guy in the front seat it's like, oh my lord, you know we're gonna die. I'm just sitting back there like this, you know so. You know he, he had a lot of talents, but we had a lot of fun too. You know I'm not gonna say we didn't ever fun, we had fun too and we, we even had fun after his injury.
Speaker 3:We laughed. We laughed at people that said you can't do things we. We laughed when somebody told us like when they said, well, you can't have the local man because we have a 50 mile radius, right, we go. What do you mean? We gave you that one. You're going to tell us we can't have our own after we helped pay for yours. And they're like what do you mean? That's the kind of stuff that made life fun is to go and create and do something different and then to finally meet true scientists that said I got a path but it's going to take a number of years. So we go.
Speaker 3:What do you need? We need a facility. Well, we don't have the money to give you a detachment hall. We can't give you some brick mausoleum that's beautiful, with a restaurant, everything in it. We can give you trailers. We give you stainless steel trailers that will take from Indiana, bristol, indiana, and take them all the way out there and plug them together and that's all you got. I got a real great picture of about 20 scientists and all the people and they're, they're staying. There's a big plectus as the John E O'Connor primate laboratory and that's when they commemorated it. But it's only trailers. But trailers will cure paralysis along with geniuses, but that's all they need and the people like you.
Speaker 2:You know that puts put how you say put the fuel in a fire we just gave them a little.
Speaker 3:We gave them a little field of dreams, right. We gave them the ball field, right. We gave them a place that can't be taken away and that's my son. And they said, well, we'll let you have a five-year lease. He's no, I need it until we don't need it no more. And they said no. And then finally they realized they're dealing with this quadplegic maniac that won't, and that's what you need to do. You got to be aggressive, right. Everything in life, any big change in life, has been with aggressive people and typically nobody wants that kind of aggression. Right, you don't want you to be that aggressive, but you really need it. People have to say, look, that's bullshit. We got to do this and that's what makes life fun and that's why I know my son. He felt fulfilled in a different way. You know, would he, would, he had loved to had his whole life back? Yep, he would have loved it. But he found just like you do, max, you find a conflict and a conflict and fulfillment, and doing what you can do that, what you can't do absolutely.
Speaker 1:I think that's a good way to end this off. John, it has been a pleasure having you on and you are always welcome back anytime. And a recent piece to your son, I know it's uh, absolutely, you know, is series coming up soon? But his legacy move, his legacy, they live on because he is a legend, and his self, and so are you, and I think you perspired off your son and you guys are just this.
Speaker 3:Thanks max, we didn't talk about my, my daughter and this whole podcast, but, uh, my daughter's birthday is coming up, uh next week and you know, when my son got injured she stayed two days in a row, wouldn't leave his side and my daughter has been an advocate of everything we've been doing for all these years and she's on the board of directors.
Speaker 3:Chris terry's foundation and we all have been following in john's footsteps our family and, uh, it's not something that we thought we were going to be doing, but once you decided this is the way life is going to go and you embrace it, it's a good mission and we think we're getting close to the end of that mission and that would be great and it wouldn't have been possible without your son's intuition and ambition a lot of people, at least a lot of people not just your son.
Speaker 1:I apologize to scientists, everybody you've mentioned. It wouldn't have been possible but, like you said, we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. We actually are like seeing the the light.
Speaker 3:You know, it's not just this little peak not the little light you're seeing beyond the tunnel and you're seeing a future yeah, and the future looks pretty.
Speaker 1:Man, it's been a pleasure again having you on me and, uh, you know, uh, thank you so much for all this. I have a feeling a lot of our fans are gonna be. They're gonna be dumbfounded because they see me I'm quadruple, you shake and they think probably, um, it's gonna take a little bit. But you're like saying, oh, it's not gonna take a little bit, it's gonna. It's gonna take time, of course, like you said, but it's not going to be this 20, 40, 30 years of time, because you are, I already got something.
Speaker 3:I would not want to say exactly when, but I know I've never heard this from the doctors before the scientists before. They're saying that at the end of this year they're gonna be treating patients and that's crazy. When we started this mission, we were working with rats and mice and doing just basic research and that was necessary.
Speaker 3:You know I'm not going to diminish any of that. Uh, there's so many doctors and scientists that did some wonderful things, but we're not at that point now. We're at the point now that gotta get in there and do it. We got the tools. Gotta be aggressive. We got the tools. It's not like we want to be faint hearted. It's time to it's the time is the time is now the time is right now fascinating and it's gonna happen these six months are gonna fly by next, thanks for having us
Speaker 3:no, absolutely my name is John O'Connor senior and I am living life to the max thanks, thanks, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 5:You said you only had an hour.
Speaker 3:Ended up being two hours geez, good thing we didn't talk about airplanes gotta be next podcast oh.