Navigating the Frontiers of Fatherhood and Health Tech with a Medical Innovator

From the delivery room to the boardroom, Dr. Ken Levey, a renowned healthcare expert, and fatherhood aficionado, joins us to unravel the tapestry of modern fatherhood entwined with a career in healthcare. This episode peels back the layers of a life led at the crossroads of nurturing newborns and innovative healthcare solutions. As we unfold Dr. Levey's personal narrative, from his entrepreneurial beginnings to the helm of Mother Goose Health, you'll be inspired by how love—be it for family or vocation—propels us toward outstanding achievements.

Amidst the laughter and dad jokes, we don't shy away from the real challenges that come with expectant fatherhood—the nesting, the midnight cravings (not ours, but we indulge anyway), and yes, the sympathetic weight gain. With Dr. Levey by my side, we examine how advancements in precision medicine and AI could soon transform parenting, bringing a level of personalization to healthcare that matches the uniqueness of each family. The conversation doesn't stop there; it's peppered with the wisdom of role models and mentors who have shaped our parenting philosophies and professional lives in indelible ways.

As the episode winds down, we step into the world of Mother Goose Health, a venture designed to streamline the complexity of maternity care into a symphony of coordinated efforts. Dr. Levey paints a vision of a future where healthcare is a seamless experience, and we nod in agreement, understanding that the journey of fatherhood is much the same. We're reminded, with a dose of humility and humor, that while our children's dependence on us may wane, our impact as fathers and healthcare pioneers endures. So, buckle up and get ready for a heartwarming ride that celebrates the confluence of fatherhood and healthcare through the eyes of an expert who embodies both.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to Dad Puzzles Everything Dad. If you're questioning yourself about dad functions, duties and life in general, you've come to the right place. Parenthood can be tough. Learning to juggle caring for your baby with your career and also keeping things fresh with your partner can be a struggle, but we're here to make things easier with helpful tips for making the most of your situation. Being a dad may seem like a puzzle, but it's one you can definitely solve. Now here's your host, dr Suleiman Ijani.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and all you dads out there who secretly wish they could be the superheroes Today. Just get ready for the super dad inspiration. Today we have a pleasure of hosting Dr Levy. He's not just a healthcare expert, but is a fatherhood guru with enough wisdom to make even your other say impressive. He is so, yes, so this dad doesn't just deliver babies, he delivers wisdom on fatherhood, with this side of pelvic pain expertise. So he's the CEO of Mother Goose Health, the healthcare wizard with more than 20 years of experience. He's here to share his secrets on balancing the crazy world of healthcare with the even crazier world of fatherhood. So welcome, my friend.

Speaker 3: 1:38

Thank you so much. That's such a kind introduction. I appreciate that I'm looking forward to an exciting for today's conversation.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Fantastic, thank you. So can you tell a little bit of a background? I'm sure I left a lot of things because I didn't want to.

Speaker 3: 1:52

Now, absolutely. I'm happy to share all of that. So this interesting career journey of the intersection of healthcare technology and entrepreneurialism that started when I was a kid, I think, basically started off always interested in starting some business or another, whether it was a paper route or selling chocolate or doing whatever I could to try to make an extra buck. I grew up in a house with no father interestingly for what I'm doing now and so it was raised by my mother and my older sister and spent my mother was a child protective services worker, so we always had that security.

Speaker 3: 2:31

But I grew up, went to medical school and then in Buffalo where I spent by the way, it's freezing in Buffalo spent eight years there in college of medical school and then I headed down to DC for residency and where I also did a master's in public health at George Washington. And it came back to New York, worked at NYU on the full time faculty for five and a half years. I started an office coffee services business, totally outside of medicine, just part of my entrepreneurial journey. That office coffee service business taught me a lot about balancing time and balancing life and giving myself opportunities to breathe and think about what I was doing. After that, really became interested in tech both a couple of platforms and eventually left NYU to start my own practice, which is a Made in Lane medical, which is now the largest privately held women's health care practice in New York City.

Speaker 3: 3:22

After that, started a medical staffing firm which was super exciting built a platform for that, and it was around 2008, 2007, when I met my wife and we wound up getting married in 2010, had our first child in 2012, and then our second in 2014. And it was all mixed in with continued, continued growth and continued development of who I was becoming, as a physician, as a father and as somebody who was dedicating his life to improving outcomes and opportunities in women's health care. Mother Goose Health came along much later, just pre COVID, and was an opportunity to pull together all of the all of what I had developed over the last 20 years, which was an understanding of technology and understanding of how EMRs work and understanding of what the issues are associated with. Adverse outcomes in women's health care and specifically in maternity care, gathered a great team and now we have this great company that we're super proud of Awesome, awesome.

Speaker 2: 4:26

And, by the way, sometimes you will notice a little bit of kind of discord. It looks like a bad connection on your end, on my head, but do not worry, in the end everything will be perfect. Yes, sir, can you please spill the beans on the secret sauce for making multi site, multi specialty practices run smoother From my?

Speaker 3: 4:44

part. I always. I have this conversation with a lot of my friends, and the secret sauce is love, and I don't mean the love for my children or love for my wife, but it's the love for what I spend my time doing. I count myself among the few and the incredibly lucky and blessed and fortunate who've had the opportunity to craft their own career around doing something that they truly enjoy doing. I truly enjoyed taking care of patients. I truly enjoy practicing medicine. I truly enjoy growing my business. None of it really feels like work. So after that, the aspect of the time that I'm spending away from my family gives me a tremendous amount of love and joy. It doesn't feel like torture and it's allowed me and having that as a base has allowed me to drive forward both from a career standpoint and from a family standpoint, and in no small part. You can't have any of this Absolutely none of this without a supportive partner.

Speaker 2: 5:51

Absolutely, absolutely. How is the technology, software for? So solutions play the role in improving the quality of maternity care and just supporting the healthcare professionals in the field.

Speaker 3: 6:02

My friend, I love the way you jump right into that. That's awesome. So, yeah, listen, there are, especially since the explosion of health tech since perhaps 2015 and beyond. Not that it hasn't been around since the late 90s and early 2000s, but it's really exploded in utility and functionality. So you know, step one is, from a physician standpoint what is it that drives to make our lives easier? How is health tech improving the life of the physician and potentially even at the next and higher and more important level, the outcomes for the patient?

Speaker 3: 6:41

Look, all the communication technology, all the breaking down of data silos, all the opportunities to connect directly to the EMR when you're just during what I call light downtime, when you're not really doing anything else, and it makes it easy to just get some work done All of those things have made the life of the physician easier and, in spite of the fact that you've experienced this, I'm sure nobody likes working inside of their electronic health record Some of them are really incredibly difficult to work with, but in the end, they've generally made life a little bit easier for us and they've made communications with patients easier.

Speaker 3: 7:20

So, in that regard, health tech has somewhat improved the life of the physicians, and I say that, in spite of all of the literature out there that suggests that kind of suggests the opposite, that health tech or especially EMRs make you stay in the office longer. I think the physicians that I know well that are interacting well with their EMRs and that understand the functionality of the EMRs and how to utilize the EMR for its efficiencies and not for its downfalls, are really experiencing a nice relationship with the technology.

Speaker 2: 7:50

But could you elaborate just from your clinical expertise, how can us understanding the women's health and family planning be good for us as dads?

Speaker 3: 8:01

Yeah, listen, for me anyway, the journey from brute and toot and single guy having fun out there as a man in his mid 30s to actual adult with fatherly responsibilities wasn't the easiest transition.

Speaker 1: 8:20

There are.

Speaker 3: 8:21

There are and I know we talked about. We talked about parenthood ventures and some of the involvement that I've had in that and some of the connectivity through that. There's what I like to say a boiling community of people out there, building the future of the way we work and the way we parent, and all of that technology lends itself towards one really important thing that would surprise you about technology is that out of it we get more time and more connectivity with our loved ones.

Speaker 3: 8:54

Because in the end all the apps, all the graphs, all the charts, all the databases, all of the UI and the UX and the JIRA tickets, all of all. You could build that all day, but none of it lends itself towards anything but the real, important outcome, which is how do we free up more of our time?

Speaker 3: 9:14

And how do we enable ourselves to use that free time in a productive way with our children so that we can give them the same kind of lessons and the same experiences that people are old guys like me because I'm 52. I'd say old guys like this so old guys like me can give my children the same types of non tech based experiences that I had growing up.

Speaker 2: 9:38

Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. This is very important because you as a physician and also you as a dad, you use that experience together. So what can a similar person like myself or other dads benefit from better understanding this healthcare administration and the public health?

Speaker 3: 9:56

That's a really interesting question because a lot of what we do when we're thinking about healthcare decisions for our family, a lot of what we do is related to our understanding of how healthcare is paid for, and it's more specifically and more locally, how we pay for healthcare as parents and parents, and also what type of decisions we make inside of our families about how to receive that healthcare that we've paid for. And look at no small way. The question of how we discuss decisions about how we pay for healthcare in the family is an incredibly complex one because it's associated with our finances. It's associated with how much freedom we have around those finances and where other opportunities for paying for healthcare, such as employers and government, is coming from. But I always worry from the standpoint of consumers who are outside of healthcare healthcare consumers who are outside of healthcare. I and as many other folks do, have a constant worry that the idea that you're buying something that you don't understand makes it incredibly challenging to make the right choices.

Speaker 3: 11:24

And what's happened in the last couple of years is that technology has somewhat caught up and helped start to close that gap.

Speaker 3: 11:35

So there's not only technology but the regulatory environment has somewhat caught up to help close that gap, and what we have at the forefront of all of that are hospital price transparency laws, and it's given us a tremendous opportunity.

Speaker 3: 11:51

So now you have all this.

Speaker 3: 11:52

So now you have these set of price transparency laws, and then you have a whole series of apps and mobile apps and web apps that have followed that.

Speaker 3: 12:03

One can go into one of these web apps and look up, literally on a map you could put in a procedure, say, I need to go for an MRI, or my partner needs to go for an MRI, my kids need a doctor's visit. You can literally put in what type of visit is needed and you can see what the price, the negotiated price for those various services has been in your local geographic area or really anywhere in the country, to the extent that hospitals have complied with the laws, and the vast majority of them in most localities have. That's a really nice way. That technology has helped us think about how we're making decisions around, how we're paying for health care and, more specifically and, I think, equally as important, what we're paying for. Then, on the heels of that, there's Because there's so much interest and there's been so much effort in breaking down what can only have been described as data silos. The opportunity to have an understanding of quality has also changed.

Speaker 3: 13:16

So I guess in any market, if you can understand price and you can understand quality. You don't have to understand medicine, you don't have to know the science of the medicine. So if you can understand price and quality and price and quality are transparent now you have a much more fair market for dads and moms too to make decisions about healthcare and, by the way, I always like to say that moms make almost 80% of the healthcare decisions in any given household. So dads get the short end, like mom says all right, I'm taking the kids to the pediatrician and I go.

Speaker 3: 13:48

Okay, honey, that's perfectly fine, go ahead and take the kids to the pediatrician, I guess, whatever copay there is. But there's more of an opportunity now for a conversation and participation by both parties, because that technology is there to facilitate that conversation.

Speaker 2: 14:02

This is beautiful, because this environment in medicine is very complex, so that definitely helps us to tackle that. So, my friend, how can fathers of activity support our partners when they're pregnant or just during the whole process with a childbirth? How can we do a better job with that?

Speaker 3: 14:20

This is the age old question of too much versus too little. While I have a tremendous amount of professional experience around this question, I'll share with you some of my personal experiences. So miscarriage is a side and, pregnancy issues aside, my wife thankfully had two successful pregnancies that ended up both in cesarean deliveries During those pregnancies. So you're right, I'm going to OBGYN and during those pregnancies I had the opportunity to say listen, I'm going to pick the best doctor I know at NYU and have my wife be taken care of by that person. And during the pregnancy I was trying to be like the operative. We're trying to be as supportive as possible.

Speaker 3: 15:04

But just like a lot of just like often happens, as I'm told, in many relationships it sometimes doesn't. Sometimes it's best to keep your mouth shut and let your split, your spouse, do the talking and the and lead the way. So she would ask me. She always had questions. She would ask me questions and she knew that. I think she knew I could answer that. Well, board certified OBGYN. If you have a question about your pregnancy, there's a good chance I might know the answer. She would ask me a question and, on a consistent basis, I would give her the answer and she would say that's interesting, thanks for that. I'm going to call Dr Schweitzer. And then she would call, she would leave a message to get back to her the next day and talk to her, and 100% of the time I would say, oh, how to go with Dr Schweitzer. Did you get the information that you need? And she would say, yeah, he said the same thing you did.

Speaker 3: 15:59

But you had to find that out, but it didn't change every single time and with both pregnancies it would be the same conversation.

Speaker 3: 16:07

But outside of those personal experiences, pregnancy is the pregnancy. From watching a pregnancy or observing your spouse somebody you care tremendously about and probably couldn't live without can be a scary experience for dads, especially first time kind of dads to be, and there are a couple of things that I like to have as takeaways. One is that the experience can be as stressful for you as it is for your partner, and you shouldn't take that lightly, because you're a human being also, and while your wife is, or partner is, undergoing the most biological stress because she's actually the pregnant person in no small term, your emotional stress, your daily concern, your consideration, your reading on Google about all the bad stuff that can happen that's stressful too, and you need to. While you're helping to take care of your partner, you need to take care of yourself also, and then so that's one item I always talk to folks about and I think is a nice takeaway. But the other item that I found really interesting when I was becoming a first time dad is this phenol of nesting.

Speaker 3: 17:24

So people talk about nesting as if it's a pregnant person only thing. But couples nest and fathers really nest. So if you find yourself wanting to make sure all the light bulbs are changed and make sure that that little area of the wall that needed to be patched for the last two years finally gets patched, or there's some junk in your backyard that you need to clean up and you left it, my wife yells at me. The lawnmower has been sitting out there for a year and a half. I haven't touched it. So I bet if we got pregnant again, then the lawnmower would go away like the next day. But yeah, so there's this phenomenon of nesting. That is really interesting and go with it because it can be a lot of fun.

Speaker 3: 18:04

It also makes you feel really good and super secure about the pregnancy and then the outcomes. And then the third item that I'll share is women tend to gain weight during pregnancy.

Speaker 1: 18:16

You know who also tends to gain weight during pregnancy.

Speaker 3: 18:18

You, yeah, big guy. It took me years to take the pregnancy weight off. She was addicted to carbs. It was pizza two, three nights a week. It was pasta on the other nights, just because that's what she wanted to eat, and it was just the two of us.

Speaker 3: 18:31

So I wasn't making two different dinners or I wasn't going out and buying two different things, and I didn't have the wherewithal to buy salads and think about it, because I like carbs too. So I think I gained with the first pregnancy almost 30 pounds, barely took it off by the second pregnancy and then came to the run back and finally I have a nine and a half year old son and finally took most of that weight off. So take care of yourself. I think the end message in all of that is you're taking care of, you're trying to take care of your partner. You're a human being, but you also have to take care of yourself, because you're just as vulnerable.

Speaker 2: 19:06

Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that, and so you obviously are ahead of the curve in terms of the health care innovations. Can you spill the beans on what's the next big thing for dads that we should keep an eye on? Like, maybe, like a robot doctor, or like a magic pill that can make like broccoli taste better like pizza?

Speaker 3: 19:27

It's interesting. You asked that question because I have a sense that a lot of the work that's going on in the parent and adventurous community is going to be what we see more prominently. It's a little frothy now and there's a tremendous amount of tremendous amount being developed. I actually think the next that people have been talking about it for a number of years what I'm about to share with you and health plans have been wrestling with how to pay for what are ultimately going to be better outcomes on the long term. But so I think the next thing to really hit us is something that's been developing for at least the last decade, which is precision medicine. There's a lot of tech in that. There's a lot of science in that. It's the intersection of human medicine, of science, of technology and how we see ourselves as generally, as social creatures. So the models that are being developed right now are so much more powerful and so incredible. Because of the simple fact of the computing power that we have now to even have these conversations, we couldn't do these complex multivariate analyses on genetic markers, on lifestyle, and then back to breaking down data silos. We didn't have access to the type of data we did a decade ago. So now we have an opportunity to build these really complex models that give physicians the ability to guide patients towards both lifestyle changes and specific medical interventions that are most likely to be effective for them Right now.

Speaker 3: 21:16

So what's the current state? The current state is you go to your doctor and your doctor says I think you have disease X, here's the drug for this. Maybe that clinical recommendation to take this medication is based on some society recommendation from a professional society, or it's based on some level of evidence, or it's based on that clinician's experience. You know what it's not based on. It's not based on your genetics, it's not based on whether or not you're going to react positively or negatively to that medication. It's just not based on those things. And that's the next. I firmly believe that all of this stuff you hear about AI fantastic. Ai is a zillion years old, and I shouldn't say a zillion. Ai is a number of years away from proving itself, from proving it can think the way human beings do when it comes to the complex decisions being made in medical care Right and I think also like natural medicine, have been trying to touch a little bit on that in terms of tax study.

Speaker 2: 22:21

The genetics of Fox, and that's really beautiful. Yes.

Speaker 3: 22:26

Yeah, I think the technologies really come along and it's incredible. And then I, in thinking about this conversation with you, I think to myself how does? All of that affect our ability to, and actually, really, how does it affect the quality of how we're able to parent in the future? If we can do it for if we can create a precision medical schema or precision medicine schema for various conditions, various medications that's individualized, that are individualized, why can't we do that for other things in life? Right?

Speaker 3: 23:09

Why can't we have an understanding of the genetics of our children? And this kind of this goes back to nobody gave me. Nobody gave me a stinking book on how to be a parent. Maybe there is the opportunity to get a book on how to be a parent. Maybe there's the opportunity to understand who we are and who our children are and apply various parenting techniques. So, for example, parenting technique A is never going to work on these type of children with genetic makeup, but parenting technique B will work really well and that's how you get your children to point X. So that would be an incredible, an incredible advancement in technology, and I know there are a couple people thinking about it in those terms.

Speaker 2: 23:53

I am down to create a manual. I'm sure it's not going to be a small manual. It's definitely, absolutely yes, I am down for that one.

Speaker 3: 24:03

Look one of the challenges in. So this is off the topic of the technology. Alright, one of the biggest challenges in parenting is finding is daddying anyway is taking lessons from. But what do we have? What do we really have as fathers? Right, we have our understanding of human beings, of what's good and what's bad. We understand, as adults, what's right and what's wrong.

Speaker 3: 24:25

We would love our children to behave in a certain way but a lot of our children's behavior is guided by our own behavior and where we get our behavior from. We get it from our role models. We get it from their societal guardrails right, the societal guardrails on how we behave but for the most part, we get our behavior from role models. So you know, I always like to, I always praise the role models I had growing up and even as an adult I had without not having a father around. I always sought out adult male role models who were who I perceived as really great people and who had something to offer me, and I've been incredibly lucky and incredibly successful in that, in being able to have relationships with such people.

Speaker 2: 25:13

Oh, that's good. That's good because that was the question I was gonna ask you if you had, if you didn't have, role models growing up in terms of just the father figure, because some people they will think of dad like, oh, like I need to be the biological father, but we still can be impactful in other kids in the society by just being the father figure. Did have any like father figure growing up?

Speaker 3: 25:34

I did. So there were these different phases of life, so really go back to my teen years. I ran, I was in the, I was in the jazz band, I ran track in high school. So there was this guy who was this awesome musician, who was the leader of the jazz band, and then I never forget his name, mr Frame. And then there was the track coach in high school who I actually still communicate with, even in 52 years old, a guy named Paul Duddy, who was a fantastic role model. Just needed to echo his behavior and you were a good person right off the bat.

Speaker 3: 26:08

As I moved into college and medical school, there were plenty of mentors around, physicians who were more than happy to take me under their wing, the two in particular. One was an ER doc named Dave Ellis awesome guy. And then there was a trauma surgeon that I became very close with, a guy named Kuthbert Simpkins, and just really good people. And I had opportunities even after that professionally, I was able to see and work under the examples of physicians that I work with. I'm incredibly lucky in the role model department, having not had a father to show me, to show me the ropes at every turn the people I had generally involved in my life were solid.

Speaker 2: 26:51

Fantastic. Thank you, and I think this is definitely an inspiration to other folks that in the in the similar situation to not really give up and take advantage of the mentorship. This is awesome.

Speaker 3: 27:02

Yeah, I, just when there's the opportunity, if you like what somebody's doing. Most men are a little shy about creating those relationships. Just because we're guys, we're like, hey, dude, what's up bro, just how we are. But I think and those relationships don't form overnight when there's the opportunity to create that type of relationship you have to seize it, because they don't come. They don't come that often and there aren't, and there may not be that many people willing to have those relationships. But I think when you shake hands with somebody and look them in the eye and tell them what you're interested in and share your thoughts with them and they're someone you admire, usually people who are successful and respected are understand the value of not only Mentoring people but having been, probably having in all likelihood been, mentored themselves.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Absolutely, thank you. Thank you for sharing this. I think this is very important. And, sir, we do have the healthcare, which is very demanding career, and then you have the family. You're trying to juggle all these things. Do you have a cloning machine or is there, like a special doctor, dad cape, that we don't know about?

Speaker 3: 28:11

I wish, I wish. The first thing is that my children have no respect for the door being closed in my office, so at any point they'll just walk in, and I've wavered between kicking them out and hugging them.

Speaker 3: 28:24

So now what I've done is, if you're going to walk into my office during a meeting you have to show everyone who you are and say hi to everyone, and I think now everyone on video meetings understands that. But yeah, there's a balance to strike and running two companies. I dedicate 95% of my time to the efforts at Mother Goose. The medical practice itself, while I am involved, is really run by an incredible team of leaders, from the director of operations to the medical director of the human resources folks. They're really, and we have this group of long-term office managers and docs have been there for a long time. We really have an incredible group of people running the medical practice, so the need for my involvement is much less. It's really Mother Goose where I spend the vast majority of my time and I think part of it is learning how to screw up and take those lessons.

Speaker 3: 29:18

I've messed up in every way, from left up and down. I've paid what an author of a book I read not to allow calls the dumb tax or it cost me money and time and other things. But what I've learned over the years is that if I can just balance what I'm doing and do my best to be present when I'm available, because I'm not always available so when I'm available that time, even if it's a small block of time, if it's an hour a day, that availability is so important to your children. It says to them you love them, you're there for them. They know. My kids know.

Speaker 3: 30:00

My kids didn't say to me they're like Dad, you work so hard. My kids know I work hard. I don't have to show them anymore that I work hard. They get it. But what they need now is that, when I'm not working, to not be doing something else, to be focusing on that. And that's probably the most important lesson Other than the time management. When the kids were younger and I was schlepping into New York City every day I live in the suburbs now when I was schlepping into New York City every day, I would try to make it home on time for dinner, have dinner with them, give them some time and then try to get them into bed. And then from that was eight o'clock, then from eight to 11, I was back to work.

Speaker 1: 30:37

I was back working on the computer.

Speaker 3: 30:39

There was that time management piece, but now the kids are fatherhood's almost. It's almost. Each time frame is almost fleeting Because now the kids are I have a nine and a half year old and an 11 and a half year old, so now they've got a ton of activities. They're off in school all day, they have friends they want to see. On the weekends, they have stuff happening and my ability to spend time with them is significantly lower. And I know that my daughter, who's a tween, it's almost like you feel her, I can feel her slipping away, not slipping away from a love from a daddy. I love a standpoint, but just a time standpoint. I feel that opportunity, like I've passed that moment where a snuggle's on the couch and no longer viable Like a hug at night is the best I can get and, like somebody was mentioning, I was speaking with the gentleman last week.

Speaker 2: 31:31

He said this movement called Warrior Dad and he was talking about how really that time is really not much we have with him and he was trying to say maybe about 18 years only we have and in your case, as you can see, half of that you feel like he's already not much left.

Speaker 3: 31:47

Yeah, yeah, If I had to, if I had to. No, you can't. Guys are guys, I generalize, but men are stubborn. Right, I got this.

Speaker 3: 31:59

No worries, man, I got this, I'm going to be a great dad, I'm going to sure I got this and that's my attitude when my kids are born. But looking back, I wish somebody had grabbed me by the neck and said dude, this goes by really fast. This is going to be over soon and you're going to miss it. And don't miss it, don't miss this Right, because it only happens once and then it's gone and the rest of your life is just like get your next thing you're doing is dying. Tell me about it. Kids are out of the house, it's all right. Okay, you're headed towards death.

Speaker 2: 32:30

That's it. Oh, my goodness, that's the reality. My friend, yeah, oh.

Speaker 3: 32:35

Let's think about it from a biological standpoint. Once our kids are strong and safe and able to feed themselves and able to take care of themselves, what good or what's our utility from an evolutionary standpoint? What's our utility?

Speaker 2: 32:50

Just emotional thing, right, just emotional thing.

Speaker 3: 32:53

Right, right, exactly. It's a human, emotional thing. But they don't need like with a capital and bowl like they don't need us anymore. Oh man, and you want to be, and you want to be needed, and you want to do stuff for your kids, you want to help them out.

Speaker 2: 33:05

And this is the time that you feel like, after all these experiences and stuff, you want to share that with them. And then, oops, they're not here anymore.

Speaker 3: 33:15

And I've come to a point where I actually now have the tools.

Speaker 2: 33:18

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: 33:19

Because of where I am in my career, because of what I've done and because of my experiences, I have the tools to offer them an awful lot Right.

Speaker 2: 33:27

It's all about the money, oh man, it's okay. But you know what you know other folks Keep. I keep helping other people as well, my friend, don't you know? My goal is really to do like orphanages and stuff, like help kids. It's like I don't end up with. Only Mike is, if they go, fine, I'll try to find emptiness, my friend.

Speaker 3: 33:51

Yes, sir, I like that yeah, so, yeah, you consider all the opportunities around Volunteering and, as I said earlier about put all the opportunities around as something you could do to fulfill yourself as A dad. You can go mentor somebody. You can volunteer somewhere and be a mentor for a group of people. You could even in healthcare. Healthcare is probably one of the one of the coolest things about being a doctor is that there's and there are endless opportunities for that type of mentorship. You can go and be a Not a so-called father figure Right to a very young physician who, whether they're struggling or not so relevant you can help somebody out in their career by offering them advice, by, put it, by putting yourself out there. And it's interesting you said that because that's some of what I've started to do.

Speaker 3: 34:40

I've been incredibly supportive of younger physicians starting their own private practices. I'm a big proponent of young doctors going out and hanging their shingle like we used to do back in the day, and Getting away from the corporatized medicine environment and the RVU and the RVU hamster wheel of having to earn which are basically Points for your work and then having to hand in those points for a paycheck like nothing's nothing makes a professional feel worse. So I've put myself out to say I've actually I've offered my consulting services for free, even if I'm able to share with somebody some of the easy stuff. How do we probably what vendors do we go to order supplies? How do we negotiate a lease? How do we do a human resources manual? All of these things are critical skills needed to start a business and I'm happy to I've always been happy to mentor people in that way and I think that from the standpoint of health care and certainly in technology, that whatever those opportunities arise, the there's a lot of fatherly satisfaction in fulfilling that that need.

Speaker 2: 35:44

Awesome, awesome. One question one of the old guests asked me was the question to ask. The next guess is that's a dad. She's wondering what can the ladies do to help, because sometimes, let's say, we don't speak. What we need?

Speaker 3: 35:57

figuring out the trials of we're figuring out how to Be the best dad you could possibly be. Who doesn't want that right? Everyone theoretically wants that. So how can partners and spouses be supportive of that? And I think that personally, I think that all comes down to the nature of the relationship. If you have a mutually supportive, mutually respectful relationship with your partner, then that kind of comes naturally. I'm incredibly lucky to be in that type of relationship and that's what I get support around, around things that I want to say and I want to do, and so does my wife. So that's that I think that comes down to. Whatever that relationship looks, okay is important. I wonder about Single dads and how they navigate those waters.

Speaker 2: 36:48

I'm actually.

Speaker 3: 36:50

Significantly more difficult, because if there's the absence of a partner, then it all falls on. At all falls on your head. I have a couple of buddies who are single dads and have conversations with them about it and it's challenging, I think mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 37:03

Thank you, sir. I think that's a good question. I'll be pausing that to any particular person that happens to be the guest and is in that situation. I will do that, my friend. My friend, you have that only cracked the code in on the healthcare and also, like the fatherhood, and you also Crack this up with with your wit and wisdom. I who knew that, that in that that could Double, as a stand-up comedian who knows.

Speaker 3: 37:29

I have my. I have my moments. They're few and far between, but I definitely have my moments.

Speaker 2: 37:33

Thank you, my friend. Thanks so much for really doing this. We truly appreciate you. And is there a way that force can can support mother goose, or is there anything that you want folks to know about it?

Speaker 3: 37:48

Yeah, I love that. I appreciate that. Yeah, so mother goose is a just very briefly, a.

Speaker 3: 37:53

Mother goose is a maternity care management platform that we developed to to improve the outcomes associated with our current state of maternity care in the United States, which is one where the United States is the single most dangerous place in the developed world to have a baby and also the most expensive.

Speaker 3: 38:09

We developed the platform to tackle the two most prevalent issues based on our market data, which are that the maternity care ecosystem is incredibly fragmented and it doesn't really support well the actors. So what we did was created a unified tech enabled 80% SAS, 20% human platform that improves the care coordination, collaboration and communication between patients, physicians, our internal care management team of registered nurses and social workers, as well as the rest of the maternity care ecosystem of lactation consultants, mental health professionals, doulas, physical therapists, dme providers, durable medical equipment and and I think I said nutritionists in there as well. And so, yeah, if anyone's interested in learning more about mother goose, we're happy to happy to engage you. And it's not. It's not something. It's a product that's in a physician's office. There's no app to download unless you're a patient in a particular physicians office where mother goose lives.

Speaker 2: 39:07

Oh, awesome. Thanks so much for sharing this. As we say goodbye, please does remember that you do not need a medical degree to be a hero at home. Just love, laughter and good sense of humor can cure almost anything. And so until next time, keep those dad jokes coming and don't forget to take your past, because you're definitely doing an amazing job as a dad. Thank you again, and the catch will catch you on the next episode. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1: 39:59

Thank you again for listening to dad puzzles.