Why This PT Charges More Than Your Copay (And Still Gets Booked Solid)

0:02 Broadcasting way too early from three separate Wi-Fi connections. It's PT Breakfast Club with Tony Meritato, Dave Kittle, and Jimmy McKay. Right. Good morning, physical therapy. And anybody else accidentally listening because the algorithm misfired, I want to apologize for myself and my co-hosts if that happened to you. Today's Tuesday, we're opening with something that explains a lot of what we're all feeling right now. Why some clinicians are pissed, students are stunned, and clinic owners are having a hard time hiring or retaining clinicians. And even though none of them caused this problem...

0:43 And here's the thing. Did hard work stop working or did it just start converting into upside reliably? We'll kick things off with that. We're also going to talk about why the PT career ladder collapsed, how Disney just engineered leverage with a twenty year old movie. What? And it's a musical. And how one creator monetized without ever selling. Let's kick things off as we bring Dave into the studio with our brand new sponsor. Congratulations. I'm excited for this. Last week, a lot of AI and tech-enabled sponsors. course the world is a pendulum things kick back the other way and we go completely analog this week uh welcome our first sponsor in this morning it's rehab stick the world's first rehabilitation tool that is it's a stick uh no sensors no resistance no software it is quite literally and i'm not exaggerating you're buying a stick and you can use it for posture correction gait training pointing at patients and occasionally emotional support.

1:49 I'm not actually sure how that works, but it says it in the copy. Now they have a premium model as well, RehabStick Pro. It's the same stick, but it's a darker word. It's just darker. RehabStick, because not everything needs technology. Sometimes things just need a stick. I mean, haven't you ever thought that, guys? You're like, you know what? If I just had a stick, I could solve everything right here. All right, our lead story. I wrote an article about... I'm going to say rehab stick. It's not a shtick. I see we're already running copy. There's a little delay there. I thought you guys were laughing. If you didn't, that's fine.

2:29 That's good. I saw another article or series of articles by somebody. I'm going to have them on the podcast because here's what I found. Life hack. If you disagree with people online and you have a podcast, inviting them on the podcast gives gets to the bottom of what you're talking about a lot faster. Turns out comment section doesn't get a lot of answers. And that's the fun part. So we're going to have Rob on the show. And I said to Rob in a DM, and I think I said in a comment, I think we agree mostly on this. But here was my pitch. I said hard work didn't stop working, but somewhere along the way, the physical therapy profession or system, it stopped converting it into upside consistently. You have to make sure you listen to all my words.

3:11 They all matter. I'm not saying there's no upside. I'm not saying you don't need to work hard. I'm saying you used to be able to do X and get Y, and now you need to do more X to get half of Y. That's what I'm saying. So this explains why clinicians are angry. Students are stunned. I met one this weekend. She got punched in the stomach. We talked about her yesterday. Four months. That's what she owes. She's like, I mean, I'm not a math guy, but I already had two financial advisors, Tony, reach out to me on LinkedIn after yesterday and being like, I was shoveling the driveway and listen to your episode. I will help this girl because she got bad advice. I can't undo that, but I can help now.

3:52 So even though none of them created this problem, this is created by, I mean, I'm just going to take shots here, right? Who are the big, big, hairy, scary are big insurance and big education. And I'm not talking about professors or deans. I'm talking about people who don't come to meetings. And I'm not talking about your local insurance payer rep. I'm talking about the people, forty-two levels above them. So here's all I'm saying in this conversation. The conversion factor is just off. And now Rob came back to me and did say, well, look at Elon Musk and look at any NFL wide receiver. Anybody that's ever made anything of himself has worked hard and thought outside the box. Don't disagree. I'm talking about go to school, become a clinician, go to work every day, do the thing we're talking about for someone else.

4:37 Not the only path. That used to convert better. Am I wrong? Am I right? Or am I somewhere in the middle mixed up? Dave, what do you think? No, I was going to kick it. Go ahead. I was going to kick it to you. I was just listening. I was going to try and look up the guy's name. I watched the All In podcast. He is one of the investors on the All In podcast. And he was saying they're building these data centers. They're working in AI. They're paying electricians four to five hundred thousand a year. So I don't know. I mean, did the electricians do anything special or were they in the right place at the right time to justify that kind of payment?

5:20 At the end of the day, what we do is incredibly impactful on a personal basis, but clearly the money isn't there. The payers, the insurance companies don't believe it's worth paying us more than ten or twelve bucks a unit. The patient in often a lot of situations doesn't believe it's worth paying the money to have us see them out of pocket beyond insurance. I don't know. It's just, maybe it's timing, you know? So again, I'm not, so I want to be very clear. I'm not blaming any part of the equation. I'm just saying I'm trying to fake when people, cause then people flood into my comments and like screw academics and screw insurance. And I'm like, guys, guys, guys, You can yell at the sun all you want for causing you to sunburn or you could not go outside.

6:04 I'm just trying to explain it and say, now make decisions. We got to launch a podcast for people who are three years before applying to PT school. The financial advisor was like, let me help her. I'm like, I got to be honest with you, man. Isn't it too late to help her? But you can't go upstream because those people are in the wild. They're not connected. So I am not saying don't work hard or don't open your own thing or be pissed. You can be pissed. But you got to understand that, like, you signed up for this. You didn't read the room. Dave. Well, I think someone that's coming out of school with all the student loan debt, they don't understand the whole game yet. It's just too much. And let me piggyback on Tony's example, right? So you got data centers being developed all over.

6:48 Companies are trying to do kind of like the NVIDIA. you know, company, but more domestically here in the United States. So there's more demand for electricians. Tony is a hundred percent right. There's a lot more content actually now being put out where the trades and the electricians are kind of like, yeah, yeah. Like, cause they're, they're hearing all this that like, there's basically more demand of their services now. I think that there's also some amount, I don't know, to the same magnitude, I don't know, or half the magnitude of that, if not equal magnitude of demand on the consumer side for health and wellness services. And I think physical therapy fits in that bucket. The challenge that we've mentioned before, the challenge is that the indoctrinated physical therapy model was through the insurance billing reimbursement.

7:36 payment system. There are so many practices I wish I don't have my friends and colleagues approval right now to shut out names and practices, but I could list off practices where there are there's practices that are charging two three four five thousand dollar packages to folks that are teachers nurses meaning those are like those are the patients the the clients that arguably may or may not have discretionary income to pay i think that's the same type of potential earn like earning potential that these electricians have in tony's example The challenge is that the sales and the marketing, you need the sales and marketing chops.

8:16 That's exactly what I'm teaching my physical therapist today. That's what we're doing for onboarding and coaching today, which is we're going to literally review for hours objections and rebuttals. So that's a lot. That's expensive. That's a lot. I need to think about it. I want to sleep on it. I need to speak with my spouse. Let me check my budget and I'll get back to you. that type of stuff and and what to say right after that to continue the conversation to make it the customer's decision to continue to work with us there is equal if not similar magnitude of demand on the client side of consumers that have aches pains weekend warriors people that are doing races high rocks crossfit all that type of stuff and i would say it's somewhat in the same realm of the demand of these electricians so the the challenge is is We're not geared for that.

9:07 We're not taught. We're not coached on how to present what we do in a clear way and charge market rate or what physical therapists used to make twenty years ago per unit or per hour. You can make the best argument in the world to an insurance company. I gotta be honest. They're not listening. That's not how to do it. That's not going to work. I love that there are people doing advocacy. That's awesome. I... honestly never it will never work it's it's never going to work it's never going to catch us up to the adjusted inflation never i think people doing the advocacy are like we are at best a speed bump to slow the bad down right i i think the people who get it who do it who their salary depends on them doing it and they never promise we're going to solve this like the real people that i've met in advocacy people who really do this for a living they're not dumb They're not.

10:01 All right. I'm going to have more on this with Rob to go deeper if people want to. Tony, you shared this this morning. I don't even know what this is. What is this? I think this would be right up Dave's alley. So we got a text message literally this morning. I didn't cover up the practice's name because it's not bad. It's not a negative thing. For those listening, not watching, the text message from a dermatologist group said, we are reaching out to inform you of an important billing update at Dermatologists of Southwest Florida to streamline payments and enroll in our auto pay or enrollment in auto pay as required.

10:41 Patients who decline must provide a hundred dollar deposit and copay at the time of your visit. This excludes Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE. Charges occur only after insurance questions. Call this number, visit this website. So, you know, these guys obviously have boatloads of money. We set up a dermatologist appointment for one of our kids. It's a first time visit. This is what we got. And we've talked about this, like. okay so we can't twist the insurance company's arm to pay us more money we can't i i'm saying we as the universal the royal we um we seem to think that we can't get patients to pay us more money so the only thing that's really left in that scenario is how do we improve efficiency how do we reduce losses we spend less money on equipment We negotiate lower rent leases.

11:41 We do all of those things. And we make sure that we know that you can use a cancellation policy across all patients as long as it's a universal policy. But we start collecting some sort of deposit or some sort of payment just to reduce the negative impact of cancels and no-shows. And if you're not going to pay, if you're not willing to put a hundred dollars on the line, you're not the right patient. We can't afford to treat you. I'm trying to think really quickly, like on the fly, like other industries where this would not even be, then I would be batted. Like there's other, right? Like what are, like, am I just because I'm gonna have a camera in front of me? I can't think, but like, it feels like, I mean, I mean, even with restaurants, right.

12:25 There, there was, and it's still, it's still a open table and not seamless open table or any of the other, you know, book a table. uh, open seat. Um, and so those were just like, you could, you could do, you know, you could book it and then you could cancel last minute. And then the company Resi came out, R-E-S-Y, Resi, like reservations. And Resi is only certain restaurants. But if you want to book a table at certain restaurants, you got to put down twenty five or fifty bucks. Paying for access, baby. To hold the table. Because if you lay cancel, then they're going to charge you whatever, the twenty five or fifty, whatever you agree to up front. If you arrive, you don't get charged. So it enables restaurants to guess what?

13:07 Guys, gals have have better show up rates instead of having no shows. So great idea. I mean, it's in all other industries. I love this. I love this approach. Think about that. Don't bat an eye. I know my haircut guy. I booked through an app and it's like the last thing. It's like you are agreeing to a no-show fee if you don't show up for this. How much is it? I don't even know. I just click okay. And I've not showed before and Rod was just like, no big deal. Because I've been for five years. So he was like, no big deal. You texted me. Not a problem. But if you're just a random dude and you just ate thirty-five minutes of Rod's time, dude, Rod's got to eat, dude.

13:48 Like we all went to PT school. I mean, I'm not mad at Nazareth college. I got in, I popped five hundred bucks down and then I got in and I love you, Rochester. I love you. But if I got the choice between Arlington, Virginia, where it's a little warmer because Jimmy loves sun temperature, I picked Marymount. And it was also a great program. Right. But also, like, I ate that five hundred bucks. I was like, got it understood. And so haircut and restaurants, not people do not blink an eye. I'm sure people blink health care. Well, you can't do that. Oh, maybe are we just clutching our pearls? Is that why it feels weird for us to do this? But let's talk about the deeper level benefit of this, not even from a financial perspective, because we know therapists hate getting paid unless it's an employer paying them.

14:38 Let's talk about how this benefits the patient. Do you think if I already put a hundred dollars in the pot that I'm less likely or more likely to go attend the appointment? If I attend the appointment, do you think I'm more likely or less likely to get the benefit of the appointment? The motivation, the psychology behind this kind of commitment is so impactful. Uh-oh. Did we lose Tony? I think so, yeah. This will get you better outcomes. I know. Sorry, I'm cutting out. This will get you better outcomes than a manual certification or some special CEU that teaches you how to do an intervention better.

15:23 Do not disagree. I'm not saying don't be improving. I'm saying nickel for nickel. you will get better. This is how you will afford your next CEU course, by doing this and making sure your business is running better. Dr. A says, personal trainers. I think he's shouting out about other industries where you have to pay and if you don't show up, tough... toenails, as my middle school gym teacher would say. You have to pay in advance. Cancer or no shows, they charge you for the visit. People don't care. They pay. Hotels, Ben Galen on LinkedIn. Of course. See, I knew there was things. I got a camera in front of me and I started going, you know, my IQ drops The camera adds ten pounds.

16:05 Flights! Really quick about hotels. You have to put a card down. You pay for a hotel up front? I can't remember because my wife handles it. Usually you can reserve a hotel room and then like twenty four, forty eight, seventy two hours before that's when you buy it. But how come when you check in, they usually ask for the card on file? I don't know. Is that to confirm the form of payment? Maybe. I don't know. Or I know that maybe the other trends that... So I do it a lot because I travel for business. So someone else is paying if I travel for work through an app. When I show up, I have to pay for incidentals. I know that's also why it's like, you know, if I rent a movie, I shouldn't be watching.

16:49 I don't know. Do people still rent movies in hotel rooms? We have laptops and iPads and phones, but incidentals, which are like, if you drink the water that's in front of you, you got to pay seventy eight dollars for the bottle of water. I do want to thank another sponsor when we're talking about money. Let's bring on a goniometer hat. The world's first wearable goniometer worn on your head. Simply place the hat on, tilt your head forward towards the patient and announce a number with confidence. You got to say it with your chest. No arms, no alignment, no calibration. Now featuring an adjustable brim for hip range of motion, a feather attachment for cervical rotation, and the premium model Goni Hat Pro with decorative uncertainty.

17:34 Goni Hat, if you say it confidently, it's probably accurate. These all have like a Monty Python flavor. I was going to ask if you're if you're watching live or on the replay via YouTube, are those pictures from the Renaissance period or the Roman Empire period or what? Is that a small man in his helmet? I don't understand. It might be a court jester. Maybe it's a a a gony jester. This guy is very small. He's got a bell. Look how if you say it confidently, it's probably accurate. There's their there's their line. All right. Tony's got Wi-Fi issues. My next story, I got to steal the strategies for today and I don't even know how to use them.

18:17 But sometimes that's the best way to steal the strategy. So here's the first steal the strategy. This was my tease in the beginning of the show. Disney just did this. So to celebrate the release of the twenty year anniversary of High School Musical, Zac Efron, right at his peak at age seventeen, they took the movie, they took the movie and they cut it up into fifty two pieces. And they put it on YouTube. So it's the movie, you push play, and you can watch it in a playlist, and it just plays through. And I'm like, why are they, okay, wait, why are they doing this? And then is it brilliant?

18:58 They're trying something. One viewer now becomes fifty-two views. Okay, that's different. It's time spent watching if you watch the whole movie, but now it's fifty-two views. I think the power is in fifty-two different comments sections. I think it's now we're watching along because I'm watching this twelve minute or I don't know how many minute segments they are. I think it's got nostalgia and we know where nostalgia lives on the value pyramid. It's super up at the top. There it is. I think it's fifty two comment sections. It's leveraged by design to leverage. Because if you're watching, if this was you twenty years ago, you're watching.

19:39 Oh, my God, I've quoted this four thousand times. Heart, heart, heart emojis. That's what you think. I thought I thought it would just be like it's just short form content. Like they're just chopping it up. Like are are we looking too far into it or what? So it's horizontal content, it's videos, and it's longer than short form content. I call it shmedium content. So they broke it. I don't know how long the movie is. I thought you said like twelve minute clips. Yeah, so that's not a short. Do you know what I mean? It's not a long, it's medium. Right. So my point is, if they really just wanted to share a bunch of clips, that's been done. I think they're doing this because more...

20:19 To pull you into the full? Yes. Because you can... So it's just one movie, but chopped up into a bunch of little... Like, it's a six-foot sub... You have to eat it from end to end, and now you can start anywhere you want, but now you have to watch each part. I've seen people do this in Facebook stories. They'll have one video, and then if you look at the top, it looks like Morse code. It's like, you're actually watching like, Sorry, stories instead of, but it's one, twelve minute, one, sixty two minute, sixty two second video. I think I. So my question to you, is this brilliant or is this gaming the algorithm or is it brilliantly gaming the algorithm?

21:00 So I'll tell you, I don't I don't know if you saw it about a month ago. I shared a five minute video. I think it was five or six minutes. Facebook automatically did that. Facebook automatically took the full video, chopped it into about twelve videos and uploaded them individually. Now, I thought it was going to be terrible. I thought the viewer retention was going to be horrible. I'll look up and see how it performed. It did better than I expected. So, like, meaning when you looked at the post, you uploaded a five-minute video file as one post. But then when it loaded or whatever, you went back and you looked at it.

21:40 Facebook chopped that five-minute video up into multiple smaller videos. Is that what you're saying? That start and stop, start and stop? Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that wild? They're telling you. And my guess is this doesn't happen to everybody. It happens to certain creators in the background. I don't know what's going on with my hair and this hat, but I'm trying to fix it. That's what I'm trying to tell you is they're playing with you as much as you're playing with them. They're figuring out how people... It's all a social experiment. It's all this thing is. It's a social experiment. So I don't know. The question is like, great. That's cool for Zac Efron. I'm a High School Musical, what do we do with it? And then my answers were like, dude, this is showing you that stories and keeping people along.

22:25 Like if you were smart, where's the EMR that can accept videos in the EMR and cue you and say, ask these three questions and record the person and upload the video right here. And then when you have the plan of care completed, you have the freaking movie, right? I mean, Jimmy, I sent you the screenshot in Messenger. Don't even start talking about EMRs because it drives me insane. This technology has been around forever and they refuse to bring it into the system. Some days I'm going to be the biggest defender of the EMR founders and technology and what they're doing.

23:05 Today is not that day. But yeah, like before and after photos in the EMR, you know, make it something that even the patient wants to use. The patient should be in there every single day. So Dave, you can see it on the screen. This was one video. that Facebook automatically, without me realizing, and they've never done it to another video, which is bizarre, but they automatically chopped it into this sequence. One leads to the next. And, you know, some of them, I mean, ten thousand, nineteen thousand views.

23:48 Yeah. Oh, do you know what this looks like? Oh, this is what this looks like or feels like to me. This is AB testing parts of the video. Do you know what I mean? Like, look at this. It's telling you this is one video, but why is it good? Like, why is that one at the end? Thirteen K. Right. Versus why is that one close to the beginning, but not the beginning? Ten. Why is the one in the middle? Nineteen. And the one next to ten. Yeah. Gosh, there's a lot of data here, but you got to sift through it. It's like there's so much data here. Or is it just lucky? Now, hold on a second. These got all shared at the exact same time and they got plopped. And where were they shared in the story or as videos?

24:28 They were reels on my Facebook business page. So just for people following along, it's like he put a lump of clay in that Play-Doh thing and then pressed the hammer down and like a bunch of little things. It's a cheese grater. It's exactly what Disney did. So this is what Disney did. Facebook cheese grater. What Disney did was they were like, hey, you want to watch High School Musical for free? No gated access? Great. And you push play on the first one. And you know how YouTube works. It just starts playing the next video. So there's going to be a little interruption. But hey, man, free movie. You'll deal with it. Maybe they're playing around with which moments. Now they take the data. Which are the most watched or rewatched sections?

25:08 Well, there's our trailer to promote this thing. I don't know. How else do you see clinics being able to use that? From the platform perspective, you also have to wonder, does this mean more ad breaks, more ad interruption? YouTube had gone from one ad to two ads. Now almost always you see two ads back to back before you get the video. This breaks it up, which obviously gives you the opportunity to feed more ads from a clinic perspective. I think it's the same thing. So so put this into clinical terms. Somebody does an hour long treatment.

25:48 I have been saying for decades, nobody remembers your name. let alone an hour of information that you just brain dumped on them in the clinic. So if we took this and we said, well, what if we broke an hour into, you know, twelve to fifteen micro sessions? What was the most impactful part of that hour? Now I'm going to take that and I'm going to focus my time, energy, effort on that piece because that had the biggest impact in the sixty minutes. This is Live Barn. You guys remember with Live Barn? No, because you're a forty six year old over the hill hockey player like me. Live Barn is this company. I do not know the company story.

26:31 They went to hockey rinks years ago and were like, hey, we want to we'll want to we want to give you free cameras to put in your hockey rinks. And they're like, okay. And then we're going to charge grandma or Steve's wife four dollars a month for access to the camera. And they're just these like, you know, fisheye cameras. So when my brother... pummels some dude on a Tuesday, we all go back to the bench as my brother's getting kicked out of the game. I love you, Matt. And we go, we text our other buddy who's not there, bring up the live barn feed and clip it for us so we can watch my brother getting into a fight with another forty-year-old dude in the locker room. Do you understand what I'm saying?

27:13 Yeah. Yes, there are HIPAA rules. We will respectfully obey them, but the clinic of the future, I think, will be a content machine, as we have talked about many times. So same thing, like in baseball, it's, Dave, do you know the name of the app in baseball where they track all the stats and they have the replay? Oh, their cameras? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You hook up your camera. It streams the whole game so grandma and grandpa can watch it. But you also track all the analytics during the game. I think there are some higher level versions that will do it for you. And then it gives you a summary, an AI summary of, you know, Maritato was at bat and hit a double into left field and the play was this and, you know, got out at first or whatever.

28:02 Huddle does it for basketball. So there are apps. Put that in a physical therapy clinic. Get the appropriate compliant release forms. And now you can stream that out. So people who are never going to have access again, we want to increase our visibility. We want to show the community what we can do. People in any part of the world can see what you're doing as a physical therapist, can get the benefit of the free physical therapy, demonetize it, democratize it. But then the people who want to work with you one on one have the ability to do so.

28:43 I think that ninety six percent of our profession will hate this idea. And the four percent that embrace it will be the ones that win. And I think in ten years, this will not be abstract. That's wild. I did not know that. I just thought it was live. This makes complete sense. Like, I'm shocked that I haven't heard more of it. That's what I'm shocked at. Not that it exists. I'm shocked that I haven't heard more of it. But even from a clinical documentation, you look at what these apps that are in kids sports right now can do. It is amazing. The documentation and the stories they can produce are amazing. And you put that into clinical terms.

29:25 with the ambient listening and what AI is doing already. I mean, the technology all exists. This is not like future. This is not theorizing. What's the app, Tony, that does like the play-by-play and... Dave's getting this. Dave wants his stuff. I thought you were going to talk about Game Changer, but that's just like the app where they... That's what game changer does that. Cause I thought that was just more like scoring and do it on a, like a premium level or a higher version. But you have to have a video, a video camera connected to a game changer. So the game changer app knows like where the ball was hit. And then that's how it'll track like what's going on.

30:08 I got to go back and find it. But I know that some of the parents, they had invested in, you know, the camera and the premium levels and all this stuff. Um, drones, bro. Where's drones in this? That's what I want. I want to see some drones. And then, and then when the kid wants to drop out of baseball, the parents are up in arms. We just bought all this AI technology to follow, to follow where you hit this ball, into the outfield. Yeah. Take the AI version of the kid so that they can keep watching the kid play through college, but it's an AI version of your kid. You can essentially do a live stream of your day and make your clinic into a daily series.

30:50 Some clinics are entertaining just to be part of the day. That's the answer. There are some, I mean, there's a clinic out there right now that doesn't have an Instagram account that has like four of the funniest PTs. And by funny, I mean, just like great person. There is the office of PT. Yes. Right now. And they're just going, oh, so much effort to like do this and who's going to watch it. People. That's the answer. People. People, people, people. There's an Instagram account called the Bandits Hockey Club. And it's literally two guys in suits with full on headset mics like my equipment doing commentary for beer league games.

31:31 And it's fucking hysterical because they're like, oh, Johnson, Johnson wide open from three feet away. And wow, he missed that by seven feet. How do you shoot from three feet away and miss by seven feet? That's hard. That's a lot. That's a lot of like they're just like hamming. It's major league with Bob Euchre. for men's beer league. And I laugh at it for six seconds today, twelve seconds tomorrow. And that adds up. It adds up. Donis is not wrong. No one is doing this. The math checks out right here. No one will do this anytime soon. It will be a small clinic that does this before a franchise. Mark my words. Someone will eat your lunch first.

32:11 And self-pay out-of-network clinics before they network, most likely. Because they're the ones that have to eat what they kill. That was the top of the hour, which is like, well, just being on the assembly line doesn't pay as much anymore. And I go, yes, it doesn't. So I'm not disagreeing with you. That sucks. What are you going to do about it? Decide. Decide now. Real quick, in previous episodes, you shared, Jimmy, an idea about CEU courses and selling the inventory. Oh, yeah. I think Donis is who I was thinking about who has a business promoting, selling. CEUs? I'm pretty sure. Does he make them? Does he make the courses or just promote them?

32:53 I don't know. Maybe he'll comment. Here's my pitch. Yeah, Donis, give us information if you're for some reason still watching. I thought he owned a platform or something. My pitch was this, Donis, if you're listening or just literally, I'll just talk to the void. Let's say you've got three weeks to go before a course. In-person course probably works this a little better. You got three weeks to go. You give five seats. Let's say you have ten left with three weeks to go. You give five seats to Dave, Tony, and Jimmy. You give them to us for free. We talk about them for sixty seconds on a live stream that lots of people see. Let's say your course is a thousand dollars. We will, we will sell it for five hundred dollars and we keep the money.

33:34 You get nothing except you got sixty seconds worth of whatever on a radio show for PTs in the morning. And hopefully when that inventory goes to our inventory, it sells out. We sold our five seats. We keep the five hundred bucks per. You got enough juice to sell some other seats. So it's like, you got tomatoes, bro. You got ten tomatoes. They're going to rot if you do nothing with them. Give me five tomatoes. I'm going to sell them for fifty percent off. But you still have five tomatoes. And enough people were like, oh, those are pretty good tomatoes. They sold out. All right. Well, let's let's buy these tomatoes. That's my pitch. And the, and the, and the, you know, and the, you know, quote unquote ad placement that we're talking about lives on evergreen on the video content that we post online because people watch this video in three months or six months or whatever.

34:18 And then you get some, you get some juice down the, down the road of those folks hearing about you for the first time or clicking on your website or whatever. And you get some leads or some traffic that way. Even though that particular course has already passed. Correct. You got your name out there. We do an ad for you, and to pay for it, you might be like, I'm not giving you money. How am I going to get the ROI? That's cool. You give us seats that probably weren't going to sell anyway, or maybe weren't. I don't know. We're gambling here. And then we sell them. But keep in mind, you giving us five seats doesn't mean we get money, too. You might give us five seats, and we throw a turd, right? We get zero. For the record, it's January twenty-seventh.

34:58 We people have one, two, three, four more days to get their twenty four hours of time. And I think I think you could get twenty four hours and sixty minutes if you do it right. But I'm just letting reminding you clinicians that you have important see you credits done. Wow. Yes. OK. Do do do. OK, so that was what Disney did. Now, I want to do a pop quiz with a visual. Be honest. Two questions. Do you know who this is? As in, have you ever seen her before? And then do you know her name? Have you ever seen her on social media before? No.

35:41 Okay. I have seen her before, but I had no idea what her name is or who she is. If this popped up, I'm probably going to swipe away. Oh, I did see this on the Google Doc that you shared. Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't count in the wild. So this is a girl named Brooke Monk, and she's an influencer. She talks about stuff, makeup, hair, whatever. She is playing chess, not checkers. She looks like she looks, and she wants people to think that she doesn't know what's going on. She's like, look at me. I'm just cute. She's not. She's deviously smart. Here's what she did. Look at her. What do you notice physically about her? What jumps out at you?

36:22 Anything in particular about her physical appearance? You guys are careful. I already know the answer, so Tony. Tony, what do you notice about her physical appearance? What physical feature is probably most prominent? Her eyes? I don't know. Yes. Bingo. That is the safe answer and the correct answer. Good. Two years ago when she launched, this was her decided appearance. Now for the viewers who are, sorry, for the listeners not watching, she has like big, crazy long eyelashes, like over the top, like dark and huge. Like those are, I gotta be honest with you. Those are not natural. Those are fake. The eyelashes is what I'm talking about.

37:04 She's been doing this for two years. All of her content, that's what she looks like. That's her normal state. This is Brooke's normal state. Two years builds a following talking about lip gloss and blush and earrings. I don't know. I'm making this up. That's what she does for a year and a half looking like this. Two days ago, she launched eyelashes. Most people would launch eyelashes and then look at my eyelashes. Look at my she launches eyelashes. Now, of course, was this on purpose or by accident? Doesn't matter. She still wins. She's still standing in the end zone. She makes the most ridiculous part. And not ridiculous. I mean, like, what's the word?

37:45 Like, just over the top part of her appearance. The eyelashes. Everyone knows her. That's her signature. That is her signature move. If she's Little John, that is... Guy made a career on three words, but that's his thing. He would show up to parties for twenty grand and just do those three words and leave. That is what Brooke did. She launched the she got the attention first, made you remember her for it, and then started selling the eyelashes. And then she sold a gajillion amount of eyelashes yesterday. So I'm going to say it's chicken or the egg. I don't know. And none of us do. If she went into this with a long game planning to develop a following built around her eyelashes, eyelashes are going to become popular.

38:31 And then she was going to exploit that. Or like my situation. I had no intention of doing stuff with Medicare, teaching clinicians about Medicare. I had just started to build a following, connect with people, answer questions. And then Medicare was the lowest hanging fruit. It was the easiest thing for me to say, hey, you guys are struggling. I see the problem. You have a pain point that I'm going to solve. And the pain wasn't even really Medicare. The pain was fear of Medicare, fear of compliance, fear of losing everything. So I said, hey, I'm going to put out a solution to stop the pain and the fear. And it was well received, you know, but there was never a point going in that I was like, no.

39:15 I'm going to be the Medicare guy. And it's the same with the lift chairs. I wasn't intending to be the lift chair guy to the general population, but it just things lined up. The electrician who finds himself today, two thousand twenty six in an environment where he can make easy six figures moving toward, you know, multiple six figures. It wasn't in the plan. It just we identified the problem. We looked at the resources we had available and we said, where is the value? Yeah. Ben Galen pointing out, this segment brought to you by three creepy old men talking about Brooke Monk.

39:56 I didn't launch a podcast ten years ago because I thought I'd be standing here doing a live stream twice a week for several years at eight o'clock in the morning in sweatpants. That's not why I did it. So yeah, I don't think anyway, but maybe she did. Pretty good power play. Pretty smart. And then she's able to actually go, great, now you know me for this. Here's what I'm going to look at. So I think what she really did was, regardless of whether she thought this was the power play, that was her thing. She ran with it. And then someone probably was like, I can make those things and make you an owner of it. And she's like, got it. So someone sourced the eyelashes for her. And now she is a walking, talking billboard for her product. She ain't selling anybody else's thing.

40:36 She's selling... her thing uh i do want to thank our another sponsor as well not not eyelashes uh range of motion spoon if it stirs it moves this segment is brought to you by range of motion spoon the only only clinical assessment tool designed entirely for soup Very specific. Simply place the spoon in the soup. Stir gently. And if the soup moves, congratulations. Range of motion. No goniometer, no sensors, no continuing education. Now with advanced feature, chunk detection. This is a little bit technological. That's for strength testing in thicker stews or pot pies. Range of motion spoon. If it stirs, it moves.

41:17 Ask your therapist if soup moves. is right for you you got to think about that hand in the hand and upper extremity therapists are losing their minds right now where do i get this spoon big spoon has entered the chat everybody okay i have a mailbag segment this is a legit one do you guys want to do mailbag we haven't done mailbag mailbag it's mailbag time real questions real people no bots allowed I did not find this one on Reddit. And the dog agrees. Hey, PT Breakfast Club, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. PT content creation actually stresses me out. I don't disagree. It stresses me out.

41:58 I know I'm good at what I do, being a PT, but making PT content feels like more... work. Right now, as a person starting a clinic, chasing referrals, building systems, and I feel pressure that any content I make has to serve the business. But honestly, the content I want to make is lifestyle stuff like simple living, travel, retro gaming, hiking, training. When I think about hitting record for that, I feel relief. So my question is this, can a physical therapist build content that's not about PT and still have it be viable? Or does all the content have to tie back to the clinic, the brand, the monetization? Is it okay for content to just be like an outlet? I have thoughts. I know you do too. What are your thoughts as this person writes in?

42:40 million percent make make like gary v every hermosy everybody make the content you want to make it doesn't matter if it's pt content it you are still a pt there's likely to be some connection but you make the stuff you want to make it'll be a thousand times better than forcing any content yeah i mean um I mean, just go and take action. You know, I'm trying to... I am holding back. All your face muscles are in a weird state of tense right now. What is... Just say it, man. This is a friend of the show, so you don't have to be... But he's... I know this person.

43:21 I'm not going to say who it is. He... I think he's falling... He's... I think he's in the bottom of Dunning-Kruger and not in stupidity. In like, oh, God, look at how much I don't know. Like, he's in the goods part of Dunning-Kruger. He's saying this from a good place, in my opinion, anyway, how I read this. So what are you really going to say? Unclench your face, Dave. Well, can you just read it again one more time, please? Real quick. Let me summarize. I listen to you guys and you say make content to get attention, attention to the business. But like, dude, that's stressing me out. I know he's still doing this. I know he's doing this. But I think what he's saying is like, can I also do other things? Does everything need to be about the business and monetization?

44:05 Because that stresses me out. So I have thoughts too. So, okay. So no, I mean, you can mix in, you can even, I don't know, maybe Tony will say separate or maybe he'll say mix them in. But if you mix it in, then people, the prospective patients out there will be like, oh, this physical therapist likes whatever. They like to travel and hike and go to the Grand Canyon and go to Arizona or other places or New Mexico or wherever. Like, oh, interesting. And then you can see, the physical therapist and the physical therapy practice, you can see their personality mixed in with potentially their other content around physical therapy, health, wellness type stuff.

44:45 So, um, but I don't know, I feel like, like it doesn't have to be stressful. I, I might just be stressed because I have so many plates I'm spinning and I don't have time to do all the plates all the time. But if I pull my phone out for me, I mean, again, it's different because we've all been in front of videos for For me, for us, it's just like we can just talk right into the camera and maybe I'm overlooking it and thinking like, I don't I don't I can't see how it's stressful now. Or maybe you're just putting too much emphasis or pressure on yourself to do it. Just just do just like just do it. Just like record the lifestyle stuff that you want to do. Mix in some health and wellness, physical therapy stuff.

45:26 The folks out there, the audience, your neighbors, residents nearby that might do business with you in the future, they'll like all the stuff. And then also, again, the algorithms, Facebook, whatever. it'll tell you what the audience, what the people want more of. And so if it's like, they like more of this lifestyle stuff, then you're like, cool. I like to do that stuff anyway. Okay. So do more of that. And then at the end, you can have these little call to actions. I'm like, Oh, also like, if you have back pain, that's holding you back from hiking or doing this type of active lifestyle or whatever, you know, hit, hit me up or this is the practice and whatever. So yeah, I was just at my, my original response was like, like, come just like take action and do, I don't, I don't understand. Like, I don't know, like a little therapy session on it.

46:09 It just didn't make sense initially. But now Jimmy gave me a little bit more context. Yeah. Don is chiming in. Nowadays, your personal brand will build your ventures. So here's my advice. Here's my read on this guy because I know who this is. This dude is a rule follower. If you tell him to smash through a brick wall, this guy is like the perfect guy to be a linebacker on your team. If you're like, give me the ball, he will just like get you the ball. Like he's like, this is my read on this guy. He's like, if you tell me to do a hundred pushups, he's going to do a hundred pushups. He's never going to question why. So I want him to listen to me now and listen to what we're saying. You don't have to do any or all. You could do both. Do you want to do your lifestyle or retro gaming or hiking content on your channel for your business? Great.

46:49 Do you want to do a separate channel and talk about that stuff and get those things out? Because it's an exercise. This is why people paint and write poetry and do other things. It's not to check a box. You don't have to be great at your hobbies. I heard that great, that advice from someone was like, you could just be doing it because you like it. So yes, to all those, you also don't have to create content for your business. Now it's cost effective to do it. Like I could replace my air conditioning unit for zero dollars. I will pay for it though. Do you know what I mean? I'll hurt myself and damage it and drop it through my ceiling or whatever. So don't feel the need that you have to do all these things. When you hear us talking about the sixty-eight things we made yesterday, make one.

47:33 And then do you like that? What's the best exercise to do? The one you like and you're going to do. A PT will figure out how to make that. effective for the thing that you're worried about. A good PT, anyway, in my opinion, right? So, dude, do your simple living, travel, retro gaming, hiking training. Play with it. Do that on your thing. And not everything needs to be like, hi, I'm hiking today, and here's how somebody dealing with hip pain should step on a rock. No. Don't do that. Maybe do that. Dave, this brings up something you shared in the group chat the other day, the Frank Kern curve. Do you remember that? The video about the Frank Kern curve? Can you explain that? Because I think these two things play around with each other. I can't remember what was on the X and Y axis.

48:14 Was it content or personality or something? Content was on the... x-axis the up-axis and and personality was on the y no x x is y is vertical podcast nobody knows not in my world dude these are variables you put whatever the hell you want i'm still trying to find x from eighth grade all right so all right so you have personality and content on a graph on a chart both axes what now uh and it was it was um People will basically where they intersect in the middle was like an X, but it's basically like people who find your content, like people who find Tony Meritato's total knee replacement content.

48:56 They originally start looking at multiple videos or consuming one channel's content. based off of whatever the actual content is, right? So it's the knee, it's the knee replacement stitching. It's, oh, does that person have swelling or not? Like, do I feel like that's me and the content, whatever. So people will, as like the bug lamps that attract the bugs to zap them, like what attracts the people is the content initially. And then over time, it becomes less about the content and more about the personality of the person or the channel. And when those intersect, that's like the, The sweet spot or that's like that. Yeah, that's that's the point where you could do monetization.

49:37 So you sell them a course or ads or or physical products or whatever. But over time, the viewers like so everyone that's just like just like the example here from Brooke that you gave or all the people that have subscribed to Total Therapy Solutions on Facebook, Facebook. um youtube or wherever it might be over time the the people start to then comment and engage more with the content because they like they know like and trust tony and his practice of course they still like the content but they've become attached more to the personality of the person or the channel over time and that was basically like this guy wrote out like this is what he learned from frank kern frank kern is like a marketer copywriter i don't know who he is He's awesome.

50:22 Yeah. He's, he's like, uh, don't know who he is. I've never heard of Frank Kern. Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, you, you gotta go back and research him, go back and look at his old videos. He's not as popular as he used to be, but he comes out of the direct response marketing world. He was, he was there, uh, kind of earlier on, um, great content, like Gary V kind of stuff, but just earlier Alex or Mosey stuff, but earlier, uh, Got it. I love that. So anonymous person from the mailbag. Katie on... For some reason, the comments aren't letting me... I can't bring them on screen.

51:02 But Katie says, show you're a human, make human content. Dude, I was like every other twenty-five-year-old and I had a radio show and a rock station. If I found out someone liked gardening, I would make fun of that person. That was twenty years ago. Now I'm older and I'm like, I don't like gardening either, but I'm excited that you like it. I'm like, wow, look how freaking pumped this person is about petunias. And I might watch a little bit of it, but I'm like, I'm now focusing on the other thing, which is... I don't care about Pokemon, but I'm sort of like, look how flippin' excited this dude is about Charizard. I think that's a real Pokemon that I just pulled out. I just, wapow! I just had that holstered. Like, I don't care.

51:43 I'm looking, now I'm watching, I'm on whatnot, because I'm figuring out how do PTs sell stuff on whatnot. Could you imagine? So here's my idea. This isn't an official pitch, but like, why wouldn't you do what Tony just said, which is like, hey, everybody, today I'm going to treat this patient. And if this is like you and pick a pathology that has like a bajillion other people doing it, and I'm going to treat this person for free in an exchange, they get free care. But then I'm going to put up a camera and I'm going to take questions live from the audience. And I'm going to, why wouldn't you do that? Why would not, why wouldn't you do that? Well, that wouldn't work. Really? There are TV shows where people cook things. Can any of you taste anything? Am I the only one licking the screen and getting nothing?

52:24 Yeah, you can't taste any of it. Look how good this food looks. What? At least if you're doing this, you can be moving and feeling that. You can't lick the screen. I mean, you can, but it doesn't do anything. So like, yes to all of these things. So do the content, do the thing that lights you up. To tie this all with a bow, I wrote a post on LinkedIn. I've got a series going on now. I'm trying to find what... I'm poking on LinkedIn. What lights people up? Before I did the series of like, if certain company hired Jimmy, here's the first three things I do. And I did a marketing analysis where I threw out crazy, funny ideas that probably maybe would work, but who the hell knows? The point was, it was an exercise. Now I'm doing this. Here's my new series.

53:05 Cut. What if Anthony Bourdain ran your PT clinic? What would the first six things Anthony Bourdain would do? So I've got the full breakdown on my LinkedIn profile, but it's just the idea. It's a thought experiment. That's all we did in radio. Oh, how did you guys stay so current? How did you guys always have fun? We looked at who screwed up. Oh, my God. When Justin Timberlake pulled off Janet Jackson's... top at the Super Bowl, everybody in radio was like, guess what we're talking about for the next three years. And everyone talks about it every year at every Super Bowl. Correct. But that's how radio DJs looked at this. We were like, oh, how am I going to spin this? Well, what are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?

53:46 Take it, spin it. So to the person writing in, you want to talk about hiking, retro game it, do it. Do it. But understand what Dave just said about the current curve. Good, Tony. And then I have something. I was just going to say, and lifestyle is such a great topic. Like I had spent a lot of time early in the media world just talking about lifestyle, talking about what I was eating, why I was eating it, what I'm looking at, how I'm researching this, mindfulness, sleep, food. You know, there's always going to be ideas there. What you got, Dave? All right. There's something I can't stop thinking about it. I mentioned it to you guys about doing things differently with the whole PT Barnum approach.

54:30 The thing that just reminded me is because you had Anthony Bourdain on the screen and Jimmy said, what if Anthony Bourdain helped you with your practice and all that? I keep thinking about PT Barnum in terms of the historic attention getting. And there was the video recently, I think I shared with you or we shared it together or something about Jesse Cole, the founder of Savannah Bananas. And he was talking about attention. attention is more important than marketing. Attention is before marketing. And I mentioned on the show, maybe a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about Christmas in July and we were talking about having, you know, a fake Santa at our office in July. And, or you, we were talking about, um, having some type of a Halloween thing in the summer, like some like off off season, things that like don't make sense.

55:15 And then Jimmy was saying, maybe I'll pull a bar and we're talking about things on fifty seven street in Midtown Manhattan that we could do. I've been thinking and here's a little teaser. I'll give I'll give a few examples, but here's a teaser. I'm thinking of making a crazy list of. almost like these mini publicity stunts. Jimmy and I, we talked about putting up a little wooden stand in Times Square and doing it. The thing, it just takes a little bit of time and effort to implement. But I was thinking of so running season is now it's coming up because then there's going to be the half marathons and the full marathons coming up. And even my my new full time therapist, Andrew, just started and just got hired. He's running a half marathon in like April. And yesterday he just started his training block.

55:58 And here's an example that doesn't even make sense. But it's a thing to film content and to get potential attention. So imagine we're in Central Park. Jimmy, you used to live nearby Central Park. People were running in the loop inside Central Park. We would make signs and the signs say run ball. So anyone that's running by, they're jogging by and we're going to have, I don't know, buckets or nets or whatever. And we're throwing and we're tossing tennis balls to the runners going by. And the runners are having to get the ball and don't throw because now running is great in so many ways. But it's in some ways people think is extremely boring to just run and jog for hours. thirty minutes forty five minutes for two hours like it's insane it's amazing but it's also like whatever so this would be a way we capture the video of the runners coming up now of course like in the beginning all the runners are like serious runners are not going to grab a ball but if you say you know we'll give you a dollar we'll give you five dollars whatever you know and it's called run ball throw ball in bucket or whatever and and as they're running they have to throw or toss the ball in the bucket now of course it would make good content because Many runners may not be great in terms of hand-eye coordination because they're potentially, not necessarily, but it could be default runners and it could create a potential ridiculous, I don't want to say viral moment.

57:18 Yeah. But here's the thing. Every time I take a shower, I have dozens of these ridiculous ideas. Write them down. Which brings up our new sponsor, Shower Pad. The only pad that doesn't get ruined when it gets wet in the shower. You have funny ideas in the shower? Write them down on Shower Pad. No, this is not ridiculous. Shower Pad connects to my chat GBT and it just automatically takes my ideas. Which is a new sponsor, GPT in the Shower. Tired of showering alone? This AI-enabled camera watches you and listens to you in the shower. So if you have any ideas or do anything you should or shouldn't be doing, we write it down. You've seen these videos.

57:58 They have them. Five or six dudes grab a phone and they go out to like Columbus Circle or Times Square. Three of them have like a portable net and they just have someone with their headphones on just to relure, luring their through their day. And they one of them rolls a basketball towards this person and three of them set the net and they're all like, go, go, go. And then they have the person shoot. And then on the screen, like if it goes in or not. And you have to watch to the end to see if one person made it or not. And then they hand the person a hundred dollars. Exactly. Exactly. Now you could, you, you, anyone else out there could take this idea. And then that piece of content could be on your physical therapy, social media account.

58:41 And that's the, again, the beginning of people get sucked in for whatever the content is. Then over time, you could warm them up for, for with your personality. I think Paul just ended the show. Paul, yeah, that's the comment of the day. New sponsor, are you tired of pooping alone? Well, let me introduce to you ShatGPT. Never poop alone. You used to read magazines. That's boring. Now, have a conversation with a computer while you're pooping. You can ask fun things like, hey, is this normal? Should it hurt this much? How long is too long to poop? These are the questions you can answer to right now if you download ShatGPT.com.

59:26 That's a really good one. Yeah, there's a lot of things. I got to leave after that. Parting shot. If you want to see Dave do this in his neighborhood, leave a comment. Yes. I'll jump on a train. I'll hold the camera. We'll do something. You have a brick and mortar. Let's go play there. Let's go play there. It's a playground. What's your parting shot? Never poop alone with your ideas on the throne. Welcome to Shat GPT. This is fun. Fake commercials for things that don't make sense, make sense. Dave, what do you got? Parting shot. Parting shot. Go take action and don't beg others or ask others for permission.

1:00:10 I would say just do it, man. I hate to quote Nike or whatever, but that's the thing. That's why it's such a brilliant slogan, which is do the thing. What's the thing? I have this crazy idea. No one's going to do it. No one's going to steal it from you. Nope. It's crazy. They're not going to do it. You're going to be the better one to do it. Plus, it doesn't matter if you don't want to do it. People still have ice cream stands and pizza parlors. The pizza is a good idea. It's a good idea times a bajillion. Do it. We're back on Thursday. Follow us wherever we are. Hit it. And follow Jimmy McKay at PT Podcasts on YouTube, the socials, and wherever you binge podcasts you pretend are for CEUs.

1:00:57 And hey, just a reminder, none of this was for advice. This was for entertainment only. Our lawyers say that counts. Thanks, Key.