Speaker 1: 0:43

you want to take a moment and thank first community bank for being a premier sponsor of the podcast? Hey, danielle, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2: 0:50

I'm really good, I'm excited to kind of touch on an area that's really special about Northwest Arkansas, which is aviation.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Yes.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Because I feel like every time I look up, there's some sort of really cool plane flying across and like not, you know, your traditional airline, you know like commercial jets, like all kinds of different planes and jets and things like that. But our guest is actually a pilot and a surgeon. Yes, he is. He grew up here in Northwest Arkansas.

Speaker 1: 1:15

He's going to tell us a little bit like that. But our guest is actually a pilot and a surgeon. Yes, he is. He grew up here in Northwest Arkansas. He's going to tell us a little bit about that and he is a general surgeon for Washington Regional Hospital, whoa, and he is a pilot and we're going to get into the nitty gritty of. I'm super excited to talk about some of the things he does as a pilot. So let's welcome, jeff. Morning, morning, morning. So good to have you on the show. So, jeff, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you ended up in Northwest Arkansas and just about growing up here and what that was like?

Speaker 3: 1:49

Well, I grew up here. My family moved from Chicago when I was second grade or something like that, and I lived here all the way until I finished college. So I went to Fayetteville High School and went to the University of Arkansas and I have a chemical engineering degree from the University of Arkansas. So I always wanted to come back and I was gone for about 13 years and then moved back in 2006.

Speaker 1: 2:09

All right, chemical engineering.

Speaker 2: 2:13

So, yeah, I need to know what does that? What did you think you were going to do?

Speaker 3: 2:17

Well, it sounds cool, right when I saw my Sunday school, teacher was a professor in the chemical engineering department and he talked me into doing chemical engineering and I, to be honest with you, had no idea what that entailed.

Speaker 3: 2:29

But during college I went and worked for Dow Chemical and I spent a semester in their glycerin plant, a semester in their polycarbonate plant, and then I spent a semester doing basic science research in their design chemicals R&D division, and while I enjoyed that a lot, it convinced me that I did not want to do chemical engineering for my life. It turns out, they don't put chemical plants in the nicest part of the country. If you can imagine that, I'm glad that you don't put chemical plants in the nicest part of the country.

Speaker 2: 2:56

If you can imagine that, I could imagine A lot of people don't, though? Yeah, yeah, you know I would be really concerned if right behind your nice subdivision there was a chemical plant.

Speaker 3: 3:04

So I had actually my first girlfriend in high school. Her dad was a general surgeon and, believe it or not, he's now my senior partner, what, and he has really been a great mentor to me and is a fantastic surgeon and he's still working and still operates, but he's slowed down his practice quite a bit, but he really influenced me to go to medical school.

Speaker 2: 3:26

That's really cool. I like to hear when someone has a story about a mentor, someone that inspired them, and I think it's important to, as you become successful, mentor somebody else, because you never know whose life you're going to change or turn in a different direction. I mean, you were in chemical engineering and my sister. She has a degree and just graduated and you know, I just tried to tell her she doesn't have to limit herself to what she studied, you know, in school. So you decided you wanted to go to med school.

Speaker 3: 3:56

Yeah. So strangely enough my driver's license expired while I was at Dow Chemical and I didn't really think a whole lot of it. So I went and got a Texas driver's license and that was enough to get me Texas residency. And so when I went to med school I applied to all over the country but I ended up going to UT Southwestern in Dallas.

Speaker 2: 4:15

Oh nice.

Speaker 3: 4:16

And so I was in Dallas for nine years. I went to med school in Dallas and then trained at Baylor in Dallas, so I was there for a total of nine years.

Speaker 2: 4:24

That's a great hospital. One of my friend's dad was like a lead heart surgeon there for a long time.

Speaker 3: 4:30

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2: 4:30

But I love Baylor.

Speaker 3: 4:32

They're a great campus yeah it's a really, really big place, a great place to train. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 1: 4:37

Oh yeah, Jeff, why don't you tell our listeners just kind of a capsule or just a quick definition of what a general surgeon does and what does your job look like on a daily basis? That's a good question yeah.

Speaker 3: 4:52

Yeah. So a funny thing that people always say to me when I meet them at parties they'll say, oh, what do you do for a living? And I'm like, well, I'm a surgeon. And they say, what kind of surgeon? And I'll say a general surgeon. And they'll say, oh, just a general surgeon.

Speaker 2: 5:05

And I'm like, okay, I would never say just, not just a general surgeon, and I guess that's opposed to just a neurosurgeon or orthopedic surgeon.

Speaker 3: 5:12

but really what we specialize in as general surgeon is abdominal surgery. So the branches. It's almost more descriptive to talk about what the branches of general surgery are. So if you want to be a cardiac surgeon, you do general surgery first. If you want to be a plastic surgeon, in some cases you do general surgery first. If you want to be a vascular surgeon, you do general surgery first. So we have training in all of those things. But my day-to-day practice, more than anything else, focuses on abdominal wall reconstruction, which that's a fancy way of saying complex hernias. I do simple to really complex hernias, but my practice really focuses on robotics and so we do a lot of things minimally invasively that used to have to be a really big operation, so we're able to get people out of the hospital faster, back to work faster and less pain with the minimally invasive approaches.

Speaker 1: 6:06

Yeah, that's awesome. That's really awesome. Thanks for that definition. Yeah, because I would have never.

Speaker 2: 6:12

When I was thinking general, I thought like I go to the. I guess that would be ER and like generally, you're just gonna hop on and fix whatever I need surgery on generally, I need a casual surgery when you think about the ER, it's like do you ever?

Speaker 1: 6:29

when you're saying, like, do people the question they ask you is, oh, you're just general do people also ask you like what's the worst thing that you've ever seen Things?

Speaker 3: 6:38

like that. People do ask me that and I usually kind of avoid that question.

Speaker 2: 6:42

I don't think you want to talk about those times.

Speaker 3: 6:45

Yeah, we're not going to talk about that here. You know the other part of general surgery is, so that's a niche that I have in general surgery, but I also take a lot of call from the emergency room where we see people with diverticulitis, appendicitis. I'm actually the trauma director at Washington Regional as well and so that involves. You know we are a level two trauma center at Washington Regional. We are actively pursuing becoming a level one trauma center, which is going to be a real benefit for the community.

Speaker 4: 7:17

Wow.

Speaker 3: 7:17

And so that's one of the things that I also do in my job is have quite a bit of administrative responsibility.

Speaker 2: 7:23

The hospital is great. I've actually driven myself to the ER there before in the middle of the night because I have kids, drive yourself there. I actually no, I did my husband was like are you sure. And I was like yeah, I was like you sure. And I was like yeah, I was like oh my god, I thought my appendix had burst, but it wasn't that. It was something else.

Speaker 2: 7:39

It was like a burst ovary or something crazy yeah, I thought it had burst, but great, I mean, and you never know, because I'm not from here so I don't know you know, you know what the yeah, I don't know what it's like in the. I'm used to dallas. I would either go to baylor or there was just presbyterian, but no, I love that hospital. It's a good one.

Speaker 1: 7:57

It's a good one. I think there are some really good medical facilities here.

Speaker 4: 8:01

Oh for sure so that's really great.

Speaker 1: 8:03

How would you say the work that you're doing and what Washington Regional is doing? How do you stand apart? You talked a little bit about becoming number one trauma. What else sets you apart from?

Speaker 3: 8:14

Well, my opinion is that the breadth of subspecialist backup at Washington Regional is pretty much unmatched in the region. For example, I would say areas of particular strength at Washington Regional are our neurosurgery service, which we have a very robust neurosurgery service. Our pulmonary critical care physicians are pretty much unmatched in.

Speaker 4: 8:37

Northwest.

Speaker 3: 8:37

Arkansas, and what that means is we have the ability to take care of very critically ill people and I think that's something that's a real point of strength for us. And I think obviously the trauma program is something that we kind of act as a de facto level one trauma center, but we want to get the accreditation and grow that program as well.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Yeah, I know that this is probably teetering into what you're comfortable talking about and obviously there's HIPAA law, but what has been something that has been rewarding about your job? You go, you go in, you're working on someone, you're essentially saving lives, and what about it has been rewarding. And then, maybe, on the flip side, what has made it challenging or hard?

Speaker 3: 9:39

You know, I think I can answer that question like in the same, almost in the same breath. Yeah, you know, I kind of, when I chose to go to medical school I was really when I chose to do medical school I was literally sitting behind a computer running reactor simulations at Dow Chemical and I'm like this is not what I want to do. And I knew that I wanted to do something that was very intellectual but also something that impacted people's lives intellectual but also something that impacted people's lives. And so you know Dr X words came back to me about you know what he did on a daily basis and you know that was very appealing to me. And you kind of have this idea when you go into medicine oh, I'm going to work really hard and I'm going to help people and people are going to love me for it and all this stuff. And the problem with being a physician is that the highs start to level out after a while but the lows are still really low.

Speaker 3: 10:35

And so you know, if you were to come in to me and you know I were to have a surgical problem that I could fix, and we were to fix, and everything went great, and you know, you went back to work in four days. That's kind of what your expectation is, right. So you know you, my expectation is that's what's going to happen, so your expectations, that's what's going to happen too. And so we just met expectations. And what's so great about meeting expectations? You know that's not winning a championship, but let's say that same scenario and things don't go so well. That feels really bad for everybody.

Speaker 3: 11:07

And I think that what I teach the medical students is one of the things that is going to probably determine most how satisfied they are with their career is how they learn to deal with that, how they learn to deal with when it doesn't go well, because sometimes it doesn't and we do everything we can for risk management and quality and that's actually kind of the focus of my administrative work at Washington Regional and so I see it all the time. But that's kind of the difficulty about being a physician.

Speaker 1: 11:39

Right. So how do you manage that and how do you deal with the stress of that from even a personal standpoint? What are your outlets and what are some things that you do to keep yourself centered?

Speaker 3: 11:51

I think that one of the things that you have to do is it almost feels like a moral obligation to feel bad when things go poorly. But the problem is that if you just beat yourself up over that, that doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help the patient, it doesn't help you and it doesn't help you get better. And so I think that kind of debriefing that situation with yourself and we debrief a lot of things in morbidity and mortality conferences and our trauma peer review conferences we debrief these things very explicitly. But it's kind of this idea of accountability and grace. Right, I mean, you've got to have accountability for the decisions that you made that might not have been the best decisions in the world, what you did, that might not have been as good as it possibly could have been, but also grace that you know what we're trying to get better and we're trying to make the system better and we're trying to make healthcare better in general for people in Northwest Arkansas.

Speaker 2: 12:53

So, playing off of that, I want to talk about a. I know that's like on everyone's minds right now. I have a good friend who's a physician and this topic comes up a lot and I know that five years from now, 10 years from now, it could completely change surgery, life, radiology, I mean just everything. So I'm curious if is this something that the medical community is embracing or hesitant about? Is it still kind of in like a contemplative place?

Speaker 3: 13:22

It's really how medicine changes, and so I finished my residency in 2002. So I'm getting kind of old now, but 23 years ago or 20, 22 years ago and 80% of the procedures that I do in what I chose to specialize in robotics were not done, so they're totally new procedures that were not done when I trained. But, on the other hand, I feel like nothing has changed, and so I think AI is going to be more of the same Now. Here's how I see AI being really useful. As for physicians is that, if you look at what the model of medicine is, basically what we do is a person comes in with a chief complaint, and then they have kind of a list of symptoms. We examine them, look at their labs, and from that we generate a list of symptoms. We examine them, look at their labs, and from that we generate a list of possible diagnosis, and then it's kind of a matching game. So you're like I have these symptoms, these 15 things could be what it is. Now, what does that most look like?

Speaker 3: 14:30

Okay, sometimes that matching goes awry for a couple of reasons. One reason is that in certain specialties we have what's called expectation bias, and so we kind of expect when we're seeing somebody with a certain set of symptoms, that it's going to be something that we are an expert in, and then there's also the possibility of improperly matching because we haven't collected all the data and when you come in to see me in the office or I'm seeing you in the emergency room, the time is limited. I'm fairly efficient at collecting the data, but the fact is that sometimes it's difficult to take all of those data points and match correctly, and I think that with AI, what will happen is that there will be a data set of, let's say, all patients with a certain disease, and sometimes you don't even there's one little piece of data that changes it quite a bit and that's hard to ferret out as a human, and I think AI will help us ferret that out and suggest diagnoses that we might not consider.

Speaker 1: 15:33

That's so awesome, that's really cool and fascinating.

Speaker 2: 15:37

So you have a positive feeling about it.

Speaker 3: 15:39

Yeah, I think it's going to be. I mean, with any technology that comes by, there are winners and losers.

Speaker 2: 15:46

Oh sure.

Speaker 3: 15:47

And AI is going to be no different, but I also think that in industries like healthcare that have very long training programs and require a lot of expertise to make good decisions, I think they will be tools that help us rather than, like, take over.

Speaker 2: 16:04

Right right.

Speaker 3: 16:06

The other thing that AI is going to do is as we, particularly with robotics we have we're collecting a ton of data all the time Like it's crazy. We have we're collecting a ton of data all the time, like it's crazy.

Speaker 3: 16:19

I can show you an app that shows you all my surgical times on the robot, ever you know since I started, yeah, and one of the things that we're able to do with that data is look and see what is the difference between an expert surgeon and a novice surgeon.

Speaker 3: 16:33

Okay, so, and there's some really interesting work being done on this, where they look at the hand motions of those two groups of people and they're very different, and what's funny about it is that in the expert group of surgeons, some things happen much faster than in the novice group of surgeons, but also some things happen much slower. Okay, so, like, overall, the expert surgeon is much more efficient because their hand movements, they and if you look at the robot, if they look at, if you look at a plot of their hand movements on the robot, they're in a very confined, tight area, as opposed to being spread out all over the place just because they're using the all of the efficiencies, but with certain things that they do like, for example, throwing a stitch through a blood vessel, that is very slowly done by the expert because they want to get that exact positioning of the needle.

Speaker 2: 17:28

I don't know how you guys do that, so it's really cool Thinking about it. I'm like, oh, I would pass out.

Speaker 1: 17:34

It's very precise and very oh my goodness, yeah, it's really thinking about it. I'm like, oh, I would pass out. It's very precise and very oh my goodness, yeah, yeah, I'm thankful for people like you that are not squeamish.

Speaker 2: 17:41

Yeah well, you know what I was? I was squeamish.

Speaker 3: 17:43

That's why that's why, when I was in high school and I was dating this I was I was dating dr x daughter, as he would talk about being a surgeon. I'm like, ah no, but you go through gross anatomy the first year of medical school and that kind of cures you of all squeamishness oh, and that smells bad, but but there's this intellectual discovery that's happening.

Speaker 1: 18:04

That's like whoa, this is really yeah really neat and this is you know, do you ever throw up during gross anatomy? Okay, so stomach of steel, maybe this helped you with flying, because some people are scared of heights.

Speaker 2: 18:18

Yeah, I am, but I'd still love to learn to fly.

Speaker 1: 18:21

I think it'd be really cool. Yeah, tell us a little bit about your journey of becoming a pilot and when you got interested in flying, and kind of a little bit about that story.

Speaker 3: 18:29

So I think I got interested in flying when I was about three months old.

Speaker 1: 18:33

Oh, wow and.

Speaker 3: 18:35

I always wanted to learn how to fly, that's amazing.

Speaker 3: 18:39

I had some. Well, to be honest, my ex-wife would not let me learn how to fly, and when it became apparent that relationship wasn't going to work out, I was like, well, okay, I'm going to learn how to fly and I kind of went a little crazy with it. How to fly and I kind of went a little crazy with it. So right now I am an airline transport pilot, multi-engine rated captain for a 135 program and what that means is that we are able to charter an airplane out to the public and fly that airplane, and what we do with that is we transport for the airlines and organs for organ procurement to be taken from where the donor is to where it's going to be implanted into the next patient.

Speaker 1: 19:20

Wow, that's amazing. That's so cool. Yes, that was one of the things that I first learned about you is that you were a pilot and that you flew organs.

Speaker 2: 19:30

So when you're flying this organ, are you nervous? No, I don't think so.

Speaker 3: 19:34

No, I mean, it's the same question. You know this organ. Are you nervous? No, I don't think so. No, I mean, it's the same question. You know you operate. Are you nervous? I mean, yeah, you know there's. You have a mission to accomplish. Yeah, you have. It's almost like a chest or a puzzle that you're putting together in a lot of these cases, because when you're delivering these organs, they have to get there. So it's a lot of times it's at night, a lot of times it's in the weather, and you know. So you're delivering these organs, they have to get there. So it's a lot of times it's at night, a lot of times it's in the weather, and you know, so you're looking at the capabilities of your airplane.

Speaker 3: 19:59

You're looking at the, you know what you're having to do in terms of and usually you're going into bigger airports and bigger parts of the country and so you're trying to put all those things together to make sure you're doing it in a very safe way, but also getting the mission done.

Speaker 1: 20:14

Whoa, sounds like a good mission. Okay, so when we see scenes in movies or television that show organ transportation, how accurate and inaccurate those cannot be accurate because it's like the top falls off.

Speaker 2: 20:29

And then there's some like high speed chase and like machine guns and then like the person's about to die on the operating table and they like peel out into the you I'm afraid it's not quite that dramatic.

Speaker 3: 20:39

You know, it's what's.

Speaker 3: 20:41

There's two sides of this right so the first side of it is there is a very robust documentation trail that goes on with this and all of these organs are HLA typed so that they're matched for the donor.

Speaker 3: 20:57

There's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into it, but at the end of the day it's also a dude handing me a box, driving up in a Mercedes Sprinter van. Handing me a box, I put it in the airplane I fly wherever, and then I take the box out of the airplane and hand it to another dude in a Mercedes Sprinter van. So it's kind of this curious combo of you know, lots and lots of work that goes into that from the organ procurement teams to you know, probably the biggest part of that process that is so under-recognized. There are and they're generally nurses that work for these organ recovery programs and Aurora is the name of the organ recovery program in Arkansas and they go talk to these families in horrible situations. I mean it's never a good situation when someone is going to talk to a family about organ procurement and they do this amazing job.

Speaker 3: 21:55

I mean they should get to walk the red carpet and be the stars of the show, because what they're doing is they're setting up the rest of this process for the surgeons to come in and procure the organs, for us to move the organs, for these very highly skilled surgical teams to go at these transplant centers and transplant these organs into other people. It's just, it's an amazing process, but it really starts with those nurses that are talking to families in tough situations.

Speaker 1: 22:25

Oh sure. And then also from, like, the standpoint of I've seen some of the work that Aurora does, and also from even, you know, taking a step back of people being willing to be an organ donor yes, and how?

Speaker 1: 22:39

important. That is, I'm an organ donor. I believe in it. I've seen it happen within family members of needing certain things that that you can only get through an organ donation when sorry, I got really serious and I wanted to ask a funny question Do you ever peek? Do you ever look and see what the organ looks like?

Speaker 2: 22:57

Oh, he's not allowed to do that?

Speaker 4: 22:59

No, because they're preserved.

Speaker 2: 23:00

He's not going to tell you if he does.

Speaker 3: 23:02

But I know what they look like. That's right, true.

Speaker 1: 23:05

He's like I have a good question. I love that he like saves lives. Oh yeah, look it in the operating room and in the air.

Speaker 2: 23:12

No this isn't an organ, but it is an appendage question. I've heard different things about if you, let's say, lose a finger, do you put it on ice or no, or do you wrap it?

Speaker 3: 23:24

You want it not to get moist, but you want it to be cold, wrap it up. Wrap it up, saran wrap and do it.

Speaker 2: 23:30

I don't know why.

Speaker 3: 23:32

I was talking about this the other day, if you to it, but I don't know why.

Speaker 2: 23:34

yeah, I was talking about this and they were like if you put it directly on ice it will damage the tissue. So just you know, if you ever lose a finger, yeah, if you have a cyber truck, a tesla cyber truck and you close the trunk and lose a finger, wrap it then throw it on ice oh my god no, I was thinking it would be at first. When she told me about what you did, I thought wait, is he transporting and doing the surgery?

Speaker 3: 23:54

Because she said you were such a. I did do transplant surgery as a resident, so I have some experience helping with those procedures, both ends, where we went and did the organ procurement and we did the transplant. But I don't do any of that.

Speaker 2: 24:07

So when you're not like saving you know the day because, like, not all superheroes wear capes, right, right, he's like a superhero For sure when you're not doing all of this, which sounds like keeps you pretty busy, what do you like to do outside of that?

Speaker 3: 24:20

You know I love to teach flying. Really that's really what I like to do. You know, flying has it's almost like medicine, where there's so many different things you can do with it. You know there's and different types of flying are really different. So, to give you an example, probably the most fun flying I've ever done is in a Piper Cub. I don't know if you've ever seen them. They're very iconic airplanes. They're yellow and they've got a lightning bolt down the side. You can fly. They only fly like about 60 miles an hour and you can fly with the window open and it's so cool. Oh, wow. I mean I don't know if you're afraid of heights, if it's good or bad for that, I don't know, but it's cool.

Speaker 2: 25:03

I want to overcome it because I have bungee jumped.

Speaker 3: 25:06

Yeah Well, I mean, I would say, this is not like a thrill, like bungee jumping. Sure sure this is more like a thrill, like bungee jumping, sure, sure this is more just a super cool experience. I mean you can smell the mode grass.

Speaker 2: 25:17

I mean it, it's just yeah so you could teach us, so could we can become certified yeah, really yeah. So I've heard that you have to land three times in a row as your final test before. Is that true?

Speaker 3: 25:30

well, there's different maneuvers that you have to do and there's at least three landings that you have to have that they check you out on before they'll give you your license.

Speaker 2: 25:39

In ballpark. How quickly could you learn to fly a plane?

Speaker 3: 25:45

To learn to fly it well, takes a lifetime. Okay. To learn to land an airplane walk away, you're okay, the airplane's okay. That's what I'm looking for here, you know a couple weeks, get your license a couple weeks.

Speaker 1: 25:56

get your license a couple weeks.

Speaker 2: 25:57

you know what right now I know I told my husband like hey, do you learn to fly? He's like I don't you. Do you like you want to learn to?

Speaker 1: 26:04

fly, you go for it. I would love to learn to fly. So my grandmother, she flew in the civil air patrol. Back in the day, like during like world war. Two times my grandfather was in the Air Force, grandma she flew a Cessna, and so there's like history there. So it's something that I've always been fascinated with.

Speaker 2: 26:21

We're going to stay in touch, yeah we are going to stay in touch. He's going to teach us how to fly.

Speaker 1: 26:25

All right, and, as we just you know, wrap things up with you, jeff, like what are some of the things that you love about Northwest Arkansas? We love to ask our guests this question and just kind of hear about what is it about this community that you love?

Speaker 3: 26:39

So I'll put a plug in. Since we talked about aviation, I put about a plug in for the Oz Club and the flying that's going up in Bentonville.

Speaker 3: 26:48

And that's really raised the game all across Northwest Arkansas. Across Northwest Arkansas. They're just doing some amazing things up there with backcountry flying and access to backcountry strips and flight education basically. So that's. I don't know anywhere else that has that. It's such a cool thing that has happened in Northwest Arkansas. But I think, in general, what I love about Fayetteville and I loved it growing up here I wanted my kids to have a similar experience. That's one of the reasons I wanted to come back. I think that we just punch so far above our weight in terms of amenities and cool things to do and yet we don't seem to have as much as the pain in the buttness for lack of a better term that goes along with that. If you live in Dallas or Chicago or New York or one of those places.

Speaker 3: 27:38

I mean, I leave my house and I'm at the hospital in five minutes. I probably spend 10, 20 minutes in the car a day and then I still have access to this great aviation program, the hiking trails, the bike trails, all the things in downtown Fayetteville, downtown Bentonville, downtown Springdale. You know, it's just an amazing place to live and a great place to raise kids, and that's what I've really appreciated about coming back. You know, I came back for all of those reasons and it's almost exceeded my expectations for what I came back for.

Speaker 2: 28:11

That's awesome. I'm going to agree with all of what he said.

Speaker 1: 28:15

That was very articulate and insulated so much.

Speaker 2: 28:18

Yeah, like I'm from Dallas and I live there a really long, really large portion of my life and there's I mean, just the amount of time you spend commuting is just it's the reason it's the number one like road rage city. I saw something the other day that said Dallas is number one in road rage and infidelity. That's nice, interesting combination. I was like what's going wrong in this city? This is it's not going in a good direction, but no, I do love Dallas and it's forever like my hometown.

Speaker 3: 28:49

It was a great place to spend, you know, my twenties and early thirties. I'm glad I'm here.

Speaker 2: 28:55

Oh, me too. I can't take the traffic. I think I used to spend two hours of my day commuting, yeah it's insane. I know, no, can't do that anymore.

Speaker 1: 29:02

Yeah, so if our listeners would like to learn how to fly with you, jeff, where could they find you and how can they look that up? Do you know?

Speaker 3: 29:10

Boy, we do mostly word of mouth. Obviously, I've got a lot on my plate so I only take one or two students at a time and it's mostly word of mouth.

Speaker 2: 29:22

So don't contact him because Daniel and I want to be his next students. No, I'm kidding.

Speaker 1: 29:26

That's true, this is true. Maybe a plug for.

Speaker 3: 29:33

Washington Regional and tell us where people can find you can. Yeah, so so I can be emailed at jbell at wregionalcom. You can send that to me if you want to learn how to fly too. We're on the website there. We're on the website there. They've got a great website and I would not give a plug for people to show up with the trauma program, but they seem to anyway. So you know, wear your helmets while riding motorcycles and be careful while driving.

Speaker 2: 29:53

And that's my plug. I'm glad he said that because I always see these TikToks of like top three things trauma surgeons would not do. And it's riding on a motorcycle without a helmet, and I see it more times than not.

Speaker 1: 30:05

I would not ride on a motorcycle without a helmet. Or with a helmet at all Well, I would wear it on a motorcycle just with the helmet.

Speaker 3: 30:11

I wouldn't ride one, but it's kind of crazy. We have such beautiful roads up here and with bikes, blues and barbecue and just the great weather we have in the spring and the fall. Here it's a great place to ride motorcycles, but we just see so many injuries that could have been prevented with wearing a helmet. So wear your helmet, folks. Yeah, I'm sure it's fun to have the wind whipping through the hair, as they say, but helmet's a good thing.

Speaker 2: 30:39

Yeah, I'm going to keep your head. That's my plug, all right. Well, thank you for coming on. It was so nice to get to know you and hear about all the amazing things you're doing.

Speaker 3: 30:47

You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: 30:49

Hey, thanks so much for listening today. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing to the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can also follow us on Instagram at people of NWA. Thanks so much.

Speaker 4: 31:00

People of Northwest Arkansas with the two Daniels produced by me. Brock Short of Civil Republic Productions. Please rate, review and like us on any podcast platform where you listen. For more information about today's guests and the show, please check the show notes. Thanks for listening.