The Cost of Swinging the Bat Is Almost Zero

0:01 Broadcasting way too early from three separate Wi-Fi connections. It's PT Breakfast Club with Tony Meritato, Dave Kittle, and Jimmy McKay. Good Tuesday morning. Tuesday feels like a Monday, man, because a lot of people were out of work, closed yesterday for Labor Day. Yeah, that weekend was not long enough. What did we do? We had a Sunday party, big family party. Then Monday I just spent... I spent doing something that nobody seems to think that you can do. I spent the day learning stuff by myself.

0:45 Self-directed learning. It's an amazing concept. What were you eager? What were you curious about? And then what did you teach yourself? And then how did you teach yourself? Yeah, I wanted to see how the new ChatGBT Astra could create a website. I had heard people talking about it. Several people reached out and said, hey, we've been using it, doing it. So really, it was the whole weekend. but i go back to like this whole idea is blowing my mind um and look i'm a parent i get it i've got kids we want kids to be self teach self uh thinking you know they want to learn how to learn not just what to learn But I'm like, there's never been an opportunity better than AI for kids to learn how to learn, to learn how to get access to information, to learn how to critically think, to learn how to ask questions and probe and see both sides and question the responses that they are getting.

1:47 But apparently I'm one of the few people who seems to see that side of it because most other people, at least in my comments are saying, saying that yes, the government should take away AI from students. The government and local municipality should not let kids have access to the most innovative technology in the existence of mankind. No offense, but if anybody's going to have AI taken away from them, it should be adults. Like we are the ones who screw stuff up more often and bigger with a better batting average. So as you were saying that, because so this came from a post that you shared, was it about New York City public schools or is this? Yeah, I was genuinely blown away.

2:30 Now, I've got my ideas on why this position was taken. But, you know, New York mayor said we are putting a one year moratorium on AI use in schools for K through eighth grade. No AI-based learning applications, programs, things like that for these kids. And I said, the reality is you're only taking it away from kids who don't have access to AI outside of school. The kids who are genuinely disadvantaged, the kids who would benefit the most from this kind of opportunity. So remember a year and a half ago, we were having these debates? Not even debates. People were like, I will never bring an AI scribe into my clinical practice.

3:11 I'm like, do you even see those people anymore? Or are they just too afraid to surface their opinion because they know they get dogpiled in the comments? This isn't an if. It's a when, right? The only thing, not to defend the comments, This is bureaucracy, right? Because there's no policy and then there's no rollout plan and because it's September, now there's no way to do it. And I'll sort of defend teachers here. I bet you the teachers are the one who were looking like, how are we gonna use this? Because kids are gonna be using. It's not the teachers. This is definitely top down in terms of who made this decision. I think people's initial response to this might have something to do with, they don't know how to use it or they don't know what it is.

3:58 So then what do we do? Burn the book and ban the thing and shut the tool, shut it all down. I don't understand it. Therefore, I fear it. Do I think we should hand a blank chat GPT? Well, first of all, they're going to get access to it. So it's not like we're handing this to kids anyway. Like, they have access to the internet. It's everywhere, right? Do I think you should just use off-the-shelf chat GPT and say, figure stuff out? No. Should it be used, like, sort of in a box to, like, confine the kids to an idea and then see if they can solve themselves out? Hell yeah. Like... Are we a step away from the holodeck on Star Trek, like the next show?

4:38 Oh, we are absolutely half a step, half a step there. Have you seen, like, so some of the podcasts that I listen to when I go on longer runs. There are companies that have created just insanely realistic imaging surround video like you can create just about anything on demand as you are speaking is generating this imagery that is just lifelike and unbelievable. i go back to you know i i understand there's a gut response and fear and you know how are we going to do this but at the same time like we're talking about educators you would think educators are at the cusp of innovation and like this is going to be amazing this is how we can use this for the benefit of humanity educators are The education system is not so like, if you know, a lot of my friends are teachers, I was just hanging out with two of them.

5:40 My best friend since elementary school is a history teacher. If I spend an hour with him, because he would be self described sort of not a tech guy. If I talk to him for an hour, he'd be like, got it. I can think of sixteen ways to use this. I got another buddy who I've been friends with since college is a high school, high school, middle school tech teacher. So he's building rockets and CO two powered cars. And he's been three D printing in class for years, right? He's probably already got these. He's probably not allowed to. So it's not, I mean, I want to make sure I specify because when you piss teachers off, bro, they come for you and they come for you in groups. So I am defending the teachers. I bet you they would love to use it and use it well.

6:20 Um, it's the damn policy and it's, you're right. It's based on an emotion, the emotions fear. So, you know, I am saddened by the decision. I am more saddened by the response to the post because these are not teachers who are in my comments. I didn't see any of the responses. What were the responses? And who were they? Were they mainly PTs? Yeah, they were clinicians. They were PTs. I'm assuming parents. I'll pull up a couple here real quick. Twenty four comments. I'll skip some of the longer ones. But basically, like somebody said, pretty sure most schools already do not allow AI help for schoolwork, which is absurd.

7:09 It's so sad and so unfortunate that they don't. Another person said they have two elementary age students. They applaud the decision. Children need to think for themselves, not just consume the recycled outputs currently delivered by AI. So, OK, I'm a student. I'm sitting in seventh grade. My teacher gives me an assignment. Take AI out of the situation. What do I do? I go to a website. I go to a book. The ideas have already been selected. The information has already been there. Why is it different? Because it's got those two letters in front of it.

7:51 And the difference in my mind is the book is static. The book doesn't change. The author's biases, the history, all of that is when it was printed, it is never going to improve. AI can not only take that information, update it with current information, knowledge, research, access to databases, And I can say, hey, hey, what are my blind spots? What am I missing? This is how I'm interpreting this. Help me think critically about this. Like, are people just saying, hey, what is the answer to this question? Because if they are, then you're right. They don't know how to use this technology. Correct. But I would I would push back.

8:32 And because I was never in education, I remember there was a situation I'm trying to like dance around. Like I want to reveal people. There was a situation when I was in PT school where it was assumed that one person was cheating during tests. And I sort of surfaced that, or a couple of my classmates surfaced that. And I remember one of my closest friends now who is the educator was like, I write the questions so you can't just go Google it. And I was like, Oh, yeah, these are like application. Like you had to answer a question and understand a concept and then apply it. And then she said something to me that was very obvious once she said it. And then I looked at it. I was like, you can't Google these answers because she's constructed it that way.

9:13 That is an educator who understands what their job is. Their job wasn't just to get Jimmy to say, the answer is lateral aspect of the femur. It was to say, OK, I understand this. I've been applying that. It's this. And I think if a halfway decent educator were given some guardrails, not even for safety, but if they were just taught, here's ten ways to use it in your class. Because again, the concepts in most of elementary, middle, and high school haven't changed, right? You're trying to get someone to understand physics. You should be embracing the hell out of the way. Remember the thing that we used to get the projector thing and draw and that was rocket surgery back in the day.

9:55 Right? And then came like the smart board. I wasn't even around for the smart board. It was like a dry erase board was revolutionary. Right? Chalk kids used to breathe in chalk and used to either be the. the the teacher's pet or the or the kid in trouble if you if you cleaned out the chalk erasers yeah this is out of fear this is because when you fear something and you don't you don't understand that you fear it so then you ban it you throw it away yeah yeah so anyway that that was surprising to me for the audience that i was sharing that with um but you know it is what it is this is where we are would love to poll those people like a week later that they don't know they're being asked the question and say on a scale of zero to five how forward thinking and tech tech uh tech familiar are you tech comfortable and i bet you unofficially they would say i'm very forward thinking but you're not exhibiting that behavior you feel that you're forward thinking but when you when you when you fear something You want to avoid it and you want to ban it?

11:00 And I don't understand that. Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dunn, check it in. Steven, I sent you a message. I tried to connect with you because I had some free time, but we'll connect this week. Let me just share because I've got it up here anyway. Going back to when we opened the show. Yeah. So what is ChatGPT, Astra specifically capable of doing these days? Wow. I won't say this was like a one-shot, you know, prompt and generate a website. There was some back and forth. But basically what we've got, these are buttons that produce these little pop-up windows. Wow.

11:41 How much time? Ballpark it. An hour? um i would say each page no no it is more than that part part of it is me not even knowing really what i want and trying to iterate ideas and how to improve it part of it is the processing time you know when i give it a prompt and i'll tell you exactly what i did which is an interesting way to do this um But when I give it a prompt, just the time it takes to process the prompt and make the changes. So this particular site, we've got the home page. Oops. We've got a physical therapy page.

12:21 We've got... knee replacement insurance and cost about me page contact page then at the bottom, we also have some of the compliance and regulatory privacy policy notice of practices accessibility good faith estimate. So you know I would say like. each page each page would probably take thirty to forty minutes in total for me to get something that i was comfortable with that i liked that was ready to go but how long do you think you're going to use that page before you change it i mean i haven't changed my existing website that's what i mean like you're going to invest forty minutes on a page knowing that that's going to be like a semi-permanent resource, it feels like a good ROI.

13:12 You know what I mean? Somebody asked me this weekend if I could help him build a site. And I was like, listen, I just built one for my brother. I don't like the process. It's not a process I like. I actually wanted his page to be very, very simple. He does professional sound. corporate gigs big weddings you know big parties and he thinks he needs it's my brother though that's like the you don't treat your family you don't help your parent your friends or family market because he thinks he needs thirty two different pages i'm like dude you need one landing page this is what i this is who you are and if you ain't this person don't i don't want to work your party i'm like man do you want to do little kids seven-year-old back uh birthday party so he goes no and i go great then we're gonna make everything look like corporate events and big fancy weddings and he thinks he needs ten different tabs And so that's the thing.

13:56 So something like this, you know, five years ago, this would be a five thousand dollar website if I told somebody what I wanted and had somebody build it out. And they wouldn't have even made that much money for the time it would have taken them to do that. And the tools you would have needed to buy and pay for it to do it well. so i would have been out five thousand they would have made a couple hundred dollars you know nobody really would have been too happy with it um the the main thing that i liked about this was the simple back and forth like i hey i wanna you know highlight my social media accounts It puts the social media subscriber numbers and view numbers and stuff like that up there.

14:39 Hey, make these hyperlinks to take the viewer straight to that media outlet. How much are you guys using AI in your daily marketing? I just want to see, because I know both you and I, and this is a different topic, but it's not. If the cost to generate content now is... as close to zero as it's going and it's just going to become a fraction of what it is now tomorrow and the cost to posting it and sharing it is zero we're just talking about time now um i see companies and individuals sharing the exact same amount of content they did two years ago and that confuses me tony walk me is that fear again or since i don't know what i'm doing i mean i wrote a whole linkedin post and i can't remember if i scheduled it or i actually shared it But where I essentially said when the cost of swinging the bat is zero and the cost of getting the pitcher to throw another pitch is zero, why aren't you taking a hundred swings a day versus a hundred swings a quarter?

15:42 I cannot understand this. This confuses me. Are you talking about physical therapy clinics specifically or are you talking about business in general? Business in general, but of course you and I live in the world of PT. So I see what people are doing. I poke, I look, I look for good examples because I want to hold those examples up and say, great job. I see you sharing a lot. Do you see anybody else that's close to your frequency? I would say the only large or medium-sized company, if you want to call them that, would be Rehab to Perform. And their stuff is very high-end, a lot of high touch, crazy high quality, and then high volume.

16:25 I feel like that's the thing, right? People think it's high volume, low quality, or low volume, high quality. And I got to be honest, I would be on the other end of the spectrum. Yeah, I saw this this morning. How'd this one do? This is the drinking from the fire hose or the water fountain from a hose. So I'm answering your question. I think part of it is, in the physical therapy space specifically, part of it is we tend to be more analytical than creative. We tend not to value this kind of stuff. So we don't do a whole lot of it. Like I saw a post about Gen X drinking from a hose. I was like, oh, water fountain with a hose on the end of it. That'd be hilarious.

17:06 Your tattoo series is bananas. Describe that briefly. I know we talked about it, but I feel like you can do it on the podcast so you can understand it. So I just take random at bats knowing that there is no negative consequence if I strike out. So probably a year ago or so I started putting out these little stick figures tattoos and people loved it. I had no idea. I had no idea what to expect. But then, you know, they've gotten more ornate like this whole chariot and roaming gladiator tattoo. So let me describe. So you're obviously focused on knee replacement. So you're using AI generated images of people with knee replacements and they're doing the tattoo they're sort of using the scar as part of the tattoo.

17:53 And here the chariot, it's the guy's whip, right? The scar is now the Roman gladiator on a chariot. Yeah, it's just, I mean, I did one yesterday where I did a goniometer on some, like a PT's arm, right? Like that's the shtick, right? It's like, where would you put the creative tattoo? But then even something like this. So I'm like, all right, my niche is total knee replacement. Tons of people want to go back to yoga after a knee replacement. I know there is huge controversy around kneeling after a knee replacement. so i i took some screenshots of different websites and different yoga poses and different people threw them into chat gpt i said hey create one infographic showing these poses by the same person i wanted to be a i think i said like sixty three year old female doing yoga at home clean well lighted you know set i said um Give me two columns, three pictures in each column.

18:52 And it generated this. And now I take this and I say, as the caption for the post, I would say five of the six yoga poses. I don't even know if these are legit yoga poses. I am not a yoga person. I said five of the six are maybe appropriate for someone who had a total knee replacement, but one of the six is not, or it is not appropriate without modifications. Can you tell which one? Oh, yeah. That's the highlights magazine. There's ten things wrong in this picture, and then you spend two hours trying to figure out what the thing is. Five, ten, fifteen years ago, how much money would it have cost me to take these photos, to set up the studio, to get something like this generated?

19:40 And now in twenty seconds, I can do a full series. I could do Pilates. I could do yoga. I could do whatever I want to do with it. You could spin this right now. Go back. You could now spin that series. to now give me a firefighter, now give me a painter, give me a plumber, give me six of the best yoga poses for all these different jobs. So that was sort of the twist that I took. I started biting off your tattoo idea. But I figured out why, I studied why, first, why are Tony's tattoo things doing so well?

20:20 Well, number one, all of the things that you create for that channel have to do around something that everybody has in common. They are maybe not self-selected into that group, but now they are choosing to identify and shoot. That one's got twenty-one thousand likes. So look, if we jump, this is, this has been one of my big successes, three point two million views that's spread across Instagram and Facebook, two and a half million views on Instagram. The rest came from Facebook. Um, what else? Uh, somewhere I had it, it showed like this post made three hundred and something dollars plus three hundred bucks.

21:06 So just for this one picture. then for people on the pod the image we're looking at is a front on anterior view of someone's knee replacement the scar is obviously vertical going up and down but the tattoo shows a fishing pole using the scar as the fishing line and then i got a big old big mouth bass and who does i mean if you understand knee replacements and you have one of those little scars there You relate. So I took your spin and I said, well, what's my version of that? A couple weeks ago I started doing, it needs to be easy, right? Physical therapy, but make it. Physical therapy, but make it dogs. Physical therapy, but make it sneakers. Physical therapy, but make it water bottles.

21:48 And essentially I'm saying ortho is this personality. Neuro is this. Peds is this. Geriatrics is this. and the dogs one blew up that's got a hundred thousand views on that video but i can have a video where i'm flashing the images of the dogs all day or i can have a static image where i've got the dogs on one side and the ortho sports neural on the other side and that's because it's part of people's identity it's part of you who you are and you know tony i am on purpose tweaking one of them like i made one recently where i made it was ice cream and i made geriatric i did all these like advanced like specific flavors and i made geriatrics vanilla Knowing that it would anger the geriatric.

22:36 I love you, geriatric. But you're in my experiment because now you're going to come in and go, no, we'd be butter pecan or we'd be fudge ripple. And I'll go, you know what? Subscribe and I'll redo it. Or I'm leaving specialties off. I can't put thirteen of them on an image. So I do five and I I'll do a weird one like aquatic and then leave an obvious one like geriatrics or pediatrics off because then they complain and they boost the attention leads to trust. Trust leads to action. All I'm doing now is farming attention for trust until one day I go, I've got a course, I've got a book, I've got a podcast, right?

23:17 Like it's attention to trust, trust to action. Or it's also attention to monetization, right? The platform wants you to earn trust. So it's still attention to trust, trust to action. It just moves the pieces around on whose attention it is, who's earning it, and who's able to profit on it. Because Facebook can slap an ad on Tony's post now. Remember, if you're not paying for it, you are the product. I did not charge listeners to listen to the radio. The listeners were my product, not the music. The music was the tattoo. AI generated tattoo picture, right? Well, look at this. This is cute.

23:57 I'll play some Linkin Park for three minutes. And then you get attention. Now when I go shop for a car dealership, I can say it's a hundred dollars a minute for whatever we used to charge. for ad rates. Understand the physics of the game that you're playing. It's different all the different times. Now, quick technical note, and I don't know if you realize this, are you eligible? Are you getting paid bonuses on images? Yes. Okay, so when I go into my app on Instagram and I'm putting a couple images up, sometimes it defaults an image to a reel and it lets me put music on the back of it. And the problem with that is reels are not, at least for me, not eligible for bonuses on Instagram.

24:43 So if I want to make money, I have to make it a post that is an image, a static image listed as a post, and it'll qualify for bonuses. And when these hit, they do amazing. That Home Depot total knee replacement made many, several hundreds of dollars. Yeah. And so it's one of those things where if I would have made that a reel as a static image with music behind it, it might have seemed more appealing, but it will not make me money. Yeah. But why are we doing this, Tony? If you're just a regular, like most of the people listening do not want to be, you know, and I hate this term because it makes me nauseous, but content creators.

25:24 But you are in the business of attention to trust, trust to action. You can earn trust in your community. Keep in mind, it doesn't need to be Facebook. Some of the most creative things I see are like the A-frame sign on the sidewalk outside with a chalkboard on it and bars. writing something funny on it right uh free beer buy the first one twice the price second one's free it gets people to stop and go hey i get i i get that right or churches you drive past a church and if they've got their churches are usually in pretty good um real estate areas right they're high traffic areas and you put something compelling you change it every single day like a good church will change their message every day or every couple of days or every week to make it play off of something in current events.

26:14 I mean, talk about churches. They're taking a three thousand year old book and comparing it to something recent. That's making it applicable to someone in their daily life. That's what you need to be doing. I need you to understand that because it's not just to make three hundred bucks Making an generated tattoo image, it's your earning attention that leads to trust and then that trust you can cash in in terms of a decision. Use me come to me. I am the, I am the authority on X, but you got to plant that flag. I did a talk with students and the line at the end was you have to earn trust long before you ever want to cash in on it. Trust me is the logo for used car salesman, right?

26:55 Just trust me. I'm telling you to trust me. Who do you not trust? People who tell you to trust them. Who do you trust? People who never asked for anything. They just gave and gave and gave and gave and gave until one day they go, by the way, I've got this thing. If you want it, you can have it. That's a way to earn trust before you need it. yeah talking about trust i've got a couple pt adjacent business ideas oh yeah you said this what is that so we're in the second half of the hour um but one more technical note that i did not know uh chat gbt does not have access to youtube transcripts unless you copy and paste the transcript into chat gbt gemini does have access to youtube transcripts so you you can go into gemini and say hey find this video or you give it the URL, process the transcript to that video, generate ideas, What I did the other day was I said, generate five ideas based on this other content creator.

27:59 And I gave it the URLs video. And I said, give me five ideas, generate ninety second scripts for each of those three ideas. Now, I didn't read the script because that's not what I do. But the script was enough to give me the idea. I sat down. I knocked out, I think, four talking head, ninety second videos and published them on Sunday because I didn't have any content. Do you have this feature? Now here's the funny thing about technology these days. Sometimes platforms will give you access to a feature and not really tell you. Do you have access to this? If you log into YouTube, if you're on someone else's video, can you click ask? I don't know. I'll check it out. Because I can ask questions. Like I've been given a video and been like, this is forty-five minutes, and I've been like, what are the three key points of this you know live stream that was that happened a week ago and i can do this on my videos and other people's videos because i've asked yeah i do have that i've never used that I wonder if everybody does, because again, tech platforms now will roll things out, which I think is great.

29:01 I'm watching this TV show, have you heard of Silicon Valley? No. It's not new. It was like, fourteen to twenty nineteen. But it's so great to watch now, because I think it was a little bit ahead of its time, where now that was like, cutting edge insider Silicon Valley things, that I think the average person like me even understands now. So I'm watching it. you know several years afterwards and that was one of the things which is like do we make a big deal about this feature or do we just sort of put it there and let that be a psychological test and see if people push the button or what color should we make the button or how big should we make the button where should we put the button so that was one feature that you could absolutely utilize I gave this suggestion yesterday and I gave it before And someone did point out that I forgot one big piece of the of the instruction, which is you have publicly available data on you.

29:54 That no, one's taking advantage of you have publicly available data on your biggest competitors, whoever you think they are publicly available to you that you're not taking advantage of. So I told people. Go to your Google reviews that you've been collecting that Google's been. In public, just filing away, highlight all of them, drop it into your favorite GPT. And then I gave people a prompt to steal. And it was pretty, you know, give me the, you know, ten most common words. Tell me which employees get brought up by name. Give me a sentiment score on how, like, if your front desk, you know, Louise gets brought up. Put her on the website, man. That's a benefit, not just a feature.

30:37 What are things people comment on that you explicitly don't, if you're gonna rebuild your website, what are things people commenting on that you explicitly don't say on your website? Maybe it's time to say them because you do them. What are things people, is there anything people wish that you did that you don't offer? Maybe that's time to start adding a few things, right? So there's publicly available data. All right, so I want Tony's PT adjacent business ideas. So there's four. We might not get through all of them, but we probably will. And these are ideas that I've really been thinking about for a long time, but the technology or other aspects just haven't caught up until now. You know, one of the things that in hospitals were required to publicly share their fee schedules, their patient pricing.

31:27 And so I go to the local hospital, I pull up their physical therapy pricing, I've shared it on the show, five hundred and something dollars for the eval, two hundred and eighty seven dollars for therapeutic exercise, each fifteen minute unit, you know, just crazy, crazy off the chart pricing. That's all publicly available. We know StrataPT has a resource available publicly where you could go put in your state. You can see what the average reimbursement is per payer. I don't know how deep the database goes. I don't know where the information is necessarily coming from, but I'm like, why hasn't somebody come out with a newer updated resource.

32:12 And there are a couple of websites that have it, but it's across all healthcare. I would just do a very rehab specific, PT, OT, SLP. What are the current bill rates that hospitals have publicly posted? What are the current reimbursement rates? And I think we could create an anonymized database where I think it was two thousand twenty two insurance companies were required to make available their actual payment amounts per CPT code. But what they did was they put it in text files that were thousands and thousands of lines of text that nobody could really access or understand. It's malicious compliance, right?

32:53 And I learned this because I have a very long career in law. I've watched lots of law and order episodes and lots of law shows. But yeah, if you're required to divulge information, what they'll do is they'll give you all the information in paper, in boxes. So it's in there. You've got to sift through it. That's exactly what big companies are doing. They're saying, Your Honor, it's right there. It's just not user-friendly or useful, but they complied. They maliciously complied. So there will, like a petulant three-year-old, they will lay down on the floor in aisle four if they don't want to move. They'll just lay there, but they'll do just enough that they don't break the law.

33:34 They're just not going to help you with it. So that is a perfect use. of a powerful platform like AI that you could do a little bit of work to help a lot of people a lot of ways. That is the good use of a tool. Because you'd only, you could probably even just create a workflow and tell it where to go every, I don't know, how often do those things change? Quarterly, yearly, whatever. Hey, once a year, quick scan, here's all the spots. Go update and then make sure you keep track. This is the delta is positive. The delta is negative. But, you know, what the insurance companies would do, right? They change, they would change the URL every year just so it would break.

34:14 But that's okay. We're just, we're just white spy black spy from from mad magazine. We're just going at each other to out spy each other. But that's the thing. And so now we're at the point where an AI like Astra or Claude or any of these, they're doing this kind of stuff on their own if you tell them to do it. And they're smart enough to understand, OK, even if the URL changed, even if an API changed, if something changed, they can still go out and find the information. Historically, we couldn't do that. Because we would be accused of price fixing if a bunch of therapists collectively got that information. Now, there are laws that make it required to be publicly available.

34:56 And so, you know, we go back to we are still operating in the dark. A lot of clinicians have no idea what reimbursement rates are. We should have access to that information. This is a great business. Tracks John on YouTube. How useful do you think Facebook is nowadays for PT clinics? As useful as a screwdriver is today and as useful as a screwdriver was twenty years ago, it depends on the person holding it. And this is not me trying to dodge an answer. Depends on what you want to do. Do you want to take apart a motherboard? Then a power drill probably ain't it. If you want to carefully take apart a motherboard, a very small screwdriver. So that's to say, I don't know what your goal is. So when you say, how useful is Facebook nowadays for PT clinics?

35:39 I need to know your goal, right? I like Facebook because it's terribly, if I was gonna pick, I'm very confused when I see PTs on LinkedIn with consumer facing content. Unless your content is like for the office worker, I don't know, I don't understand that. But in terms of Facebook, own your damn zip code. I mean, how many Facebook groups are there? Just be in every group and see what people are asking. So it's useful if you understand what your goal is, and you understand the physics of the platform how would you end i mean you i mean you use it for your for your clinic so pretty damn useful right yeah but for me facebook is immensely useful it's the most useful of the social media the people that i want to talk to are on facebook i am the people who i want to talk to i am on facebook You know, Facebook generates several tens of thousands of dollars a year.

36:33 Facebook gives me an expansive access to audience I would never otherwise have access to. But, you know, six years ago, Facebook was virtually useless for what I was doing at that time. So like Jimmy said, it just depends for me. Correct. So I would need to know what are you doing, right? Because you could say nowadays for a PT clinic, multi-state? Community-based, right? Like how many locations? What is your specialty, right? You can go play around with it. When people ask me which social platforms they have to be on, I go, you don't have to be on any of them. Which one should you be on? Start with the one you like consuming. If you don't like consuming there, don't be the one tasked to create things.

37:18 It's not just always hand content creation to the youngest person on your staff because they get the social medias. And I love pluralizing social medias because that's how one person used to say it to me. Make sure people understand what the goal is and what the tool is. Let them put the plan together and then get the hell out of their way. All right. So your first PT adjacent business idea, I almost said a suppository, a repository for payment information, easily accessible, easily usable and useful. I think that's a great idea. How would you monetize that? Just some banner ads? You could easily monetize it for traffic, right? Yeah. So historically, that's what it would have been.

37:59 It would have been paid ads I think there could be tiers of access to the information. You have the public tier, which it's available to everybody, general information, but then you could have a secondary tier behind a paywall where you get more detailed access to certain information, which would help with financial projections, help with business modeling, help with all of that kind of stuff. Staying in this kind of vertical, the second idea, now you're probably too young to remember this. There used to be, and it might still be around, like dentalplans.com.

38:40 It was a website and it was a membership. You would pay ninety-nine dollars a year. You would buy access to a fee schedule for dentists and dental work, a cleaning, x-ray, you know, a filling, bridge. It wasn't insurance and it was very important that people understand. And the disclosure was, it is not an insurance policy. It is a membership, a community where if you buy this membership for the year and participating dentists will give you this fee schedule and the fee schedule was already published. I always said like, why don't we have something like that for physical therapy? There are benefits and advantages to me as a physical therapy practice owner offering a discount, probably not even more than a Medicare discounted rate, but offering a discount directly to a consumer, especially if I had some sort of control over where that consumer goes on my schedule.

39:36 Am I going to give that consumer, you know, a Medicare discounted rate and a ten a.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday appointment? Probably not. But if I'm struggling to fill a two-thirty Tuesday appointment in the afternoon, or I want to build a caseload for a new therapist coming on board, yeah, I'm going to look for those kinds of options. So again, before i didn't have the resources to hire an attorney and study state law and understand the the nuances between what is insurance and what is not insurance and what is allowed now it's a twenty thirty minute you know uh go on your favorite ai start to brainstorm this idea, and then say, how do I market this?

40:20 How do I launch this? How do I start this? What do I need? We've got tools that build the website, at least initially, as a prototype. There's funding out there, like Y Combinator and other funding sources, if you really think this could be scalable across the country and a technology that's going to hit a billion dollar benchmark. There's opportunities in this and you solve a simple problem. There are people in the community today who would benefit from physical therapy, but they have a fifty dollar copay. They have a high deductible. They are looking to pay out of pocket, but they don't know what it costs. They have no idea.

41:00 I would wonder how many websites, physical therapy practice websites actually publish pricing right now that would allow somebody to go and see how much a physical therapy visit costs. Yeah, and keep in mind, Tony's not really selling, you're selling clarity and access and simplicity. And those are the most easily, if you have that problem and Tony just mentioned that, it's very obvious why this is valuable is because clarity and simplicity makes sense if you have that problem. If you walked in and showed someone how you can solve it, that's an easier pitch to make than creating the problem and the solution. If they already have that problem and you put it in front of them clearly, concisely, consistently, that's a business.

41:45 It's a business right there. It's simple, doesn't mean it's easy, but it means that's simple if you can describe it in three steps or less. Hilda agrees, great business strategy. awesome and it's proven like it worked well for the dental industry we were members we bought it before we had delta dental insurance like we bought it when we didn't have dental insurance there are insur there are health insurance plans today that don't cover physical therapy at all there are plans that have twenty visit limits on the calendar year so if you need more than that it's like you don't have insurance There's so many situations and now you bring in AI, AI voice. You don't have to have live human operators answering every phone call, answering every question.

42:31 You literally have infinite scalability to help any of the three hundred and fifty million US citizens or residents or whatever. That takes me into number three. You look at the theme here, right? How much does physical therapy cost? How much are therapists getting paid? How do I find ways to manage costs? If I go to buy a used car, I have a mechanic. I want the mechanic to check the engine. I want a third party, a non-biased individual If I buy a house, I probably have an attorney and a real estate agent and I have a buyer's agent, right? Why don't we have a healthcare buyer's agent?

43:15 Why don't we have somebody who maybe they're like, I want to get out of clinical care, but I've got all of this experience and knowledge. They're not a social worker. They're not a case manager. It's literally somebody like me. who you would say, hey, I'm going to have this surgery. My mom had a stroke. And you've done this with, I think, social workers. But the idea is you bring in this person and you're like, hey, these are my insurance benefits. This is the condition that I'm facing. This is what I'm dealing with. I need somebody not only to kind of guide me financially, But maybe even somebody who's going to go out, find the best provider for my needs based on cost, based on medical condition, somebody who understands what I'm dealing with.

44:08 You knew and you said it. Who's the guy on Instagram who calls and negotiates prices for cars? Tommy. Delivered to me. Tommy. T-O-M-I. Dude's awesome. I love that guy. So why don't we have that for health care? You know, like one more quick example. So when my wife and I were pregnant with twins, we had a four thousand dollar maternity benefit within our health insurance. We went to the OB and we're like, look, we only have four thousand of coverage. We want to get the most coverage we can get for the four thousand because my wife was advanced maternal age and we were you know, she was pregnant with twins.

44:48 He was like, I understand it, but I need you to come in for weekly checkups. He said at that moment, I will discount or waive the fee for the weekly checkups. if the insurance no longer covers. Well, guess what happened? We get through everything, they submit the claims for the weekly checkups, the claims get paid, we exceed our four thousand dollar limit, then the stuff that he didn't say he was gonna waive, that now has to get paid. The stuff that he said he was gonna waive, We don't have any reference of him saying he was going to waive it, so it got paid by the insurance. And we were out several thousand dollars because we didn't have somebody who understood the process and could be our agent, the buyer's agent.

45:38 The title is a Sherpa. The woman that I hire when my dad had a stroke Uh, only thing I was pissed about is I should have hired her sooner. I didn't know. I didn't know that type of a person existed. My aunt wound up finding her and this woman was in my town and I live in a tiny, tiny, tiny little upstate New York town. She does all that stuff everything you're talking about where I'm like, I don't really know how this works. She's like, I know how this works. So she sells clarity. She sells speed. She sells less, you know, reduce reduces frustration, reduces work. If you're someone who, like, the person you're looking to do this job, sorry, the person you're looking to sell this to needs to understand already and know the pain or at least be, like, prodded to be like, you know how much this sucks and how much this could cost you?

46:25 That's why you pay this. Because whatever this is, it's way less than what this is, plus frustration. You know, that's what you're looking to do. It's frustrating how so many successful business strategies don't exist in the world of PT. Yeah, I think it's more of a lag. I think they do, but eventually it's an inevitability. Tony started the show in terms of content creation saying we're more analytical and statistical and less creative. I don't think we lack the ability of creativity. I think we flex other muscles first. Somebody had a great Instagram video about PT content creation.

47:05 Oh, it's a woman who was a clinician who now, she's a website designer. She's awesome. I just found her on Instagram. She drops F-bombs too, all the time. She's like, look at this garbage website. You know, that's like her shtick. But she's like, we create content for each other. Like, when you all I've done this, I've audited people's Instagram accounts and I'm like, do like, sixty percent of the people I found are other in other markets. So, like, yeah, you're getting a lot of views and likes it's from your colleague people who are never going to put food on your table. You got to change your content, right? Change your content. change your audience, change your bottom line. So I think Scott's right. It is frustrating because people like Scott or Tony or me, or if you're listening, probably you too, you see the possibility.

47:47 What I want to say is the possibility is just the same as it is now as it will be six months from now. Are you waiting for permission to do it? Are you waiting for someone else to do it for then you to be third? You're going to be only kicking yourself if you're third because then it's harder to do because now you're third to market instead of first to market. But I get the fear. I get it. Yeah, and the reality is, why am I sharing these ideas instead of doing them? Because I took yesterday off. Guess what? Labor Day, right? We took a five-day week and compressed it into a four-day week. I'm not seeing fewer patients on the week. I've got the same number of patients that I've had. Yeah, you're doing five days of work in four days. Exactly. We're too busy. We're too deep in the trenches.

48:28 thank goodness i've been able to build the social media aspect of the business but the idea is most of us are running on an infinite hamster wheel that will never stop real quick so that was my last idea um and even going into that sherpa you know representative um again you could have levels you you could have somebody as simple as hey i'm having rotator cuff surgery i need to know the best option for a twelve week plan of care. OK, AI voice, go call the local physical therapy clinics and get me pricing. And then the AI voice goes out there. Hi, I'm an AI voice. I've got a client, you know, all the way to somebody with extremely complex cases who who will need skilled care and nursing and all this other stuff.

49:17 Now, maybe we bring the human into the loop to look at finances, tax implications, you know, current insurance. supplemental insurance and negotiate rates on all of it. I had something fall and put a hole in my roof. I woke up one morning and noticed like a stain on my ceiling. I'm like, how did I get dirt on my ceiling? Well, it was water coming through. So what did I do? I turned to chat GPT and said, you know, Montgomery, New York roofs. What do I do? Right. Guy was out there that afternoon. I picked the first person who said, I will be there this afternoon. Check. Got it there. Jerry Durham's just went, his ear just went, what? respond quickly because it's not the best. I'm looking for the quickest.

49:57 And his whole system for telling me and diagnosing the problem and then being like, here's how much it'll cost. Let me know if you want me to solve it. And if you don't, that process was terribly easy to the point where I go, hey, man, can you swing by my brother's house? I think he needs a roof. Can you get up on his roof? And he's like, no problem. So that guy just made three grand for me solving a roof. And while he was up there, he's like, hey, your chimney caps a little whatever. And of course, what did I do? I took his gutter recommendation for needs new gutters because he gave me photos. I took his chimney recommendation for new chimney cap. He gave me photos and the invoice, and I ran that through ChatGPT and said, act like my bro who knows everything about roofs. Is this guy legit?

50:38 And it was like, yeah, and I actually think that price is pretty good for the area. The same thing. ChatGPT analyzed it for me. And I'm like, do I pull the trigger on this or not? It said, yes, lock them up, great price if they can deliver on this. Same thing Tony is saying for health care. OK, so kind of parting shot, but it's a little bit of a longer one. I didn't get a chance to tell you and Dave the oil change story, but this is what I share with my kids. So go to the oil change. Now, it's the five minute, you stay in your car, you drive over the thing. Yeah. Couple kids, super nice kids. Like, they couldn't have been more than eighteen to twenty years old.

51:19 Come over to the door, you know, he's talking to me, he's explaining things, he offers me a water. Great care, great experience. I've gone to them, I know I pay a premium when I go, but I always like this particular place. For the first time, now I'm driving a two thousand twenty-four, I think? Twenty-four or twenty-five, I think it's a twenty-five car. twenty five thousand miles on it the kid comes over he's like hey you know we're gonna check your coolant i just let you know this is the tool that we use he's got these three little floating devices if three or more float above the line then there's too much acidity in the coolant we would recommend the flush i haven't checked it yet is it okay if i check it i'm like yeah go ahead i've never seen that tool i don't know what the heck he's doing i know a little bit about cars but not that much he goes he checks it he sucks the water out he comes over i could hear the concern in his voice like legit he's like look i'm sorry there's six balls floating it this is the most acidic your coolant can be i really recommend you flush if you don't flush it then there's a chance you're going to start burning oil and you know the oil we're putting in isn't going to last as long as it should I was like, oh, OK, just give me a second.

52:37 Let me think about it. How much is a flush? Well, it's a hundred and fifty dollars. How long does it take? It takes five to ten minutes. OK, just give me a second. I grab my phone, snap a picture of the little tool. HHCPT, I'm getting an oil change. The technician said my my coolant needs flushed. um you know twenty five thousand miles two thousand twenty five car well that's unusual this car usually goes a hundred and thirty thousand miles before needing a flush show me the tool that they used and i'll give you a recommendation i show it chat's like no that tool tells you how effective the the antifreeze is it doesn't tell you how acidic it is it tells you how like it can stop freezing not how acidic unless you use a strip to test acidity, there is no way that in conjunction with normal hundred and thirty thousand, not twenty five thousand, I would recommend you do not do the coolant flush.

53:41 So I went back to the kid and I was like, hey, I'm going to skip the coolant flush. And the kid was so upset, genuinely upset. It was like, wow, I just I really think it's important. You know, this is the most acidic it can be. I think the kid was told this is the tool. This is a city. This is important. It'll ruin the guy's engine if you don't. I think he really believed the information that he was given. I don't think he was just trying to sell me on a coolant flush. But regardless, like again. Am I the idiot? Because I didn't take the time to go research in an encyclopedia and look up, you know, how to read coolant acidity. And I just went straight to chat TBD to ask it.

54:22 No, you're smart. And so between the five thousand, it saved me on a website rebuild. The hundred and fifty has sent me on a save me on a coolant, you know, multiple examples I can bring for a twenty dollar a month membership. I still think the benefits outweigh any potential occasional hallucination that might be happening. Correct. Use it as a tool. It's a chainsaw. It can cut off a finger if you use it poorly, right? But if you use it and give it, I'll say use it with respect. Understand what things can give you, right?

55:04 Like two years ago, three years ago, when we were first all using ChatGPT, people were like, see, there's an error. There's an error. See, see, it can't be trusted. I was like, My man, have you met humans? Have you met humans? Have you met us? Are you kidding me? That thing bats ninety-nine out of a hundred, and you point out the one, and I'm like, meet Steve, who sits in the cubicle next to you. That guy's a nitwit, but that's a good idea. Yes, it will screw up. Will it screw up less than humans? Sure. The one who wields it well. That's probably my parting shot. The one who wields it well... You know what? Don't use it because it's only going to make me and Tony separate from the herd, right? Don't tell anybody to use it. You keep it for yourself. We'll be back on Thursday.

55:46 I'll think of an idea. Maybe we'll do another six pack. And Scott's parting shot is change fear to face everything and rise. Love it. Scott Embry as we wrap up. That's it. We're out. Boys, what the hell are you doing? Follow me. Tony Meritato on YouTube at Total Therapy Solution. Find Dave Kittle at conciergepainrelief.com and on YouTube at The Dave Kittle Show. And follow Jimmy McKay at PT Podcast on YouTube, the socials, and wherever you binge podcasts you pretend are for CEUs. And hey, just a reminder, none of this was for advice. This was for entertainment only. Our lawyers say that counts. Thanks, Keith.