RX9_Kevin Jubbal, MD, Founder, Med School Insiders: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

RX9_Kevin Jubbal, MD, Founder, Med School Insiders: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Narrator:
ForbesBooks presents: Entrepreneur RX, with Dr. John Shufeldt. Helping health care professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hey, there, welcome to another episode of Entrepreneur RX, my name is John Shufeldt, and I've got an incredible guest today. You know, in past episodes, we've spoken to physicians that have leveraged social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to kind of use to grow their entrepreneurial ventures. This week, however, I'm joined by a Doctor/YouTube star, his name is Kevin Jubbal, and a few years ago, he started posting videos because he wanted to help struggling medical students by the way of which I was one, thirty, gosh, 35 years ago. Now he has over a million subscribers to his channels dedicated to physician and student lifestyle content. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.

Kevin Jubbal:
Thanks for having me, John. Pleasure to be here.

John Shufeldt:
First off, you're a natural on your YouTube channel, so I suspect there's going to be a film, some sort of film role for you in the future.

Kevin Jubbal:
I'm not so sure about that,

John Shufeldt:
But I don't know. I've got a face for podcasting and radio. You, however, I think, can go, go right to film. Ok, before we jump into your YouTube stardom, let's take a step back and talk about your medical, kind of medical and premedical background because it's pretty interesting. Tell us where you went to undergrad and med school.

Kevin Jubbal:
I went to UCLA for undergrad, majored in neuroscience, and I went to UC San Diego for medical school.

John Shufeldt:
And then when did you finish medical school?

Kevin Jubbal:
I went straight through, so I finished 2017. I did a research year as well.

John Shufeldt:
Ok, so some time in medical school and, I agree with you, I was watching one of your YouTube channel productions, you said plastic surgery is one of the cooler things you can do, and I agree with you, why plastic surgery?

Kevin Jubbal:
Great question. I think so it wasn't even on my radar, and I think the main reason I fell in love with it was because it seemed almost like science fiction. I remember my first case and just the things that you could do with complex reconstructions within plastic surgery was super, super fascinating, it still is super fascinating to me. And when I was first exposed as a third-year med student, I said, This is totally what I have to do.

John Shufeldt:
So, so you knew it when you did it?

Kevin Jubbal:
Yeah, it was, it was the first, the first case of my surgery rotation as a third-year med student. It was a joint neuro and plastics case, and I said, wow, this is like I remember calling my mom after the case being like, Mom, I'm going to be a surgeon. This is amazing. This is like the coolest thing I've ever seen.

John Shufeldt:
That's... Rememberber what kind of case it was?

Kevin Jubbal:
Yeah, it was an animated leftism ... transfer, so patient wasn't able to bend their elbow. So essentially taking the LAT and flipping it around the insertion on the humerus and then reattaching it, I think it was at the radius and then keeping that innorvated so that you could stimulate the nerve and essentially creating a makeshift bicep from your lab muscle.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. Yep, you're right. That's, that's pretty damn cool. Ok, so, so you've also become kind of an entrepreneur looking back, you know Steve Jobs, he says, connect the dots backwards or said, was there hints of your entrepreneurism when you were growing up?

Kevin Jubbal:
Actually, yeah, there was a little bit of that. In middle school, I would draw cars, so I've loved drawing cars. I've loved cars ever since I was, I don't know, three years old, but I would draw cars and people would ask me to draw cars, and I would, I would essentially charge them like, you know, two dollars of lunch money to draw a car for them based on their request until a teacher essentially caught me doing this and then had to shut down that operation. But then in high school, my brother and I, we started a tutoring company. And those are kind of the early inklings. But then I didn't really do much else in entrepreneurship until med school. So there was I mean, there was a little bit when I was a kid, but then a large, a large, long gap.

John Shufeldt:
So when you finally hit it off again, was that Blue LINC? Was that the kind of your first real entrepreneurial venture?

Kevin Jubbal:
That's correct.

John Shufeldt:
All right. Tell us about that.

Kevin Jubbal:
So Blue LINC essentially was a biomedical incubator, and we would take students, graduate students, at UC San Diego, from business, from medicine, from engineering school, put them on these teams and have them essentially create health care startups. So it was very closely modeled after Stanford's Biodesign, which is like the gold standard in academic biomedical incubators. But we did a few things differently, namely that we weren't taking postgraduate fellows and then paying them a stipend. We took graduate students instead. That was because I fell in love with the idea of just medical innovation, medical technologies, and I wanted to get involved. And since we didn't have a biomedical incubator at my school, I figured, OK, like I might as well create one.

John Shufeldt:
Did the incubator take some equity that had helped fund them? How did, what was the how? How was it monetized?

Kevin Jubbal:
So it actually relied on funding, right? So like the university, gave us a grant our first year and we did not, we specifically did not want to take any equity from the teams. Yeah, the model was very much like, within academia it's easier to do this if you were starting like a separate business that had to be self-sustaining. It's harder to do that.

John Shufeldt:
So I have to ask you obviously crushed it in medical school, plastic surgery, straight plastic surgery is, we all know, is not the easiest residency to get into. Tell us, how long were you in that residency? And if you don't mind, kind of, why did you choose to go a different direction?

Kevin Jubbal:
So I was only in residency for about a year. The reason I decided against continuing that road, I mean, I still remember how difficult of a decision it was because I had worked so incredibly hard, work. Looking back, I find it difficult to comprehend, like how hard I worked because I don't think I could do it again. But so there was a huge sunk-cost fallacy in leaving, but essentially I had started med school insiders, the YouTube channel, in my, before residency by half a year or so. And that was growing. I wanted to keep that going. I'm still very heavily involved in Blue LINC at the time, and those were taking a lot of time plus then doing the residency thing. It was a lot and I wasn't sleeping much. I was sleeping maybe three or four hours a night, no days off, six days in the hospital, one day off, which was used just working on the businesses. I realized this is not sustainable. It's not good for my health. I can't do six years of this and I need to choose one or the other. So long story short, I made like these spreadsheets and I talked to people and I, you know, there's a lot of time and energy that went into the decision. But ultimately, I figured based on my long-term life goals, my ambitions, the impact I want to create, the lifestyle I want to have going the entrepreneur route is probably a better fit for me.

John Shufeldt:
Interesting. And I have to say, first off, hats off to I mean, that takes incredible balls to go that far and then say, you know what, it's like you said the sunk-cost fallacy. You know this is not where I want to end up and I'm going to make that decision now and go a different direction. That's an incredibly gutsy thing to do. You've probably heard that before.

Kevin Jubbal:
Yeah. And I want to say one thing about that, that's why, I appreciate that. I think people see it, see primarily the positive in it. And I don't think this is necessarily a negative, but you have to be a little bit maybe not delusional, but like a little bit, you have to kind of see things differently to make that decision because, everyone talks about the statistics of small businesses failing, 90 percent of them don't make it, and if you continue down the plastic surgery route, you're going to have a good, comfortable lifestyle. So then you have to be a little bit, a little bit crazy in a way to make that decision. But I am ultimately happy with that decision. I'm very happy with that decision, actually.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, but I don't know if it's, I don't know if crazy is the right word. Maybe prescient is the right word. I mean, you know, you think back about Bill Gates and Zuckerberg and Jobs all dropping out of college, and it's a little bit different because they didn't invest the same time and energy you did to get where, you get what you achieved. But they still had this, what turned out to be prescient idea about what their world could be like if they went down this path. And, you know, as it turns out, they were right. Now you don't hear all the stories about the people that weren't right, but I think you're in good company with them. Was it the medical school or Med School Insiders? It was that kind of the triggering one that said, hey, this is going to go somewhere, I'm going to keep this one moving?

Kevin Jubbal:
Yes, that was definitely the one that had a lot of momentum behind it, and I figured there's so much I want to do here. And I was willing to take the risk. I think I had the risk tolerance because it's harder to walk away from something if you don't really have something to fall back on. But with Med School Insiders, it wasn't very profitable at the time. But the YouTube channel was growing very fast. I already had the whole business model of like, hey, we want to monetize it in X, Y and Z ways with that kind of as my cushion in a way, even though again, I was making probably less than $1000 per month from that. Actually, I definitely was making less than a thousand per month, not enough to even pay rent when I quit, but I knew there was a lot of potential there, which made that decision much easier.

John Shufeldt:
And so give me, I mean, give us an idea what was Medical School Insiders then? What are they consist of? What is it now? What's the most popular piece of that or feature you have?

Kevin Jubbal:
Med School Insiders started off as a YouTube channel in, I believe, October 2016, it was primarily just a YouTube channel at the beginning and creating the YouTube videos it takes a lot of work, and I don't mean to say just a YouTube channel to kind of downplay the time and effort to build that. But since then, it has grown into much more. So we're a full-fledged med school admissions consulting and tutoring company. Now we have 140 tutors and advisors that provide various services, from personal statement editing to tutoring and everything between. And we even have some courses as well. So that's Med School Insiders, and there's some initiatives that we've also been very passionate about, talking about physician wellbeing and things like that. So essentially the YouTube channel plus this business side comprise Med School Insiders.

John Shufeldt:
Interesting. I get hit up probably 15 to 20 times a year to write letters of recommendation and help people edit their personal statements. I'm going to start sending them all to you because although I think I'm OK at it, it takes a ton of time and I'm clearly not all. I have a pretty good track record of people getting in, but clearly there's more competent people out there than me, particularly with redoing people's personal statements. So I'm glad to know that exists. So for all you physicians out there who are getting hit up constantly for this, Medical School Insiders, I'm going to seriously start pushing this out to a lot of people because I definitely get hit up a lot.

Kevin Jubbal:
I appreciate that.

John Shufeldt:
Now, I haven't been in medical school in quite a while, but like I said, I mentor a lot of these folks. It seems competitive as hell. I was doing admissions interviews for Creighton this last year. Holy crap. I mean, these adults I would interview were rock stars. I would never even get in medical school these days. How are you helping them?

Kevin Jubbal:
There's a lot of different things, right? So it depends on the student's needs. One thing that we really focus on and really prioritize is having a narrative-based application because I mean, if you've ever been on an admissions committee, you'll see that a lot of applicants have very similar kind of cookie-cutter applications, and they're more or less pretty generic and similar, and that hurts the applicant. So a big part of it is actually crafting a better narrative between the personal statement and the actual work and activity section and the secondaries that tells a more compelling story. That's one part. Another huge part and one that I talk a lot about on the YouTube channel is how can you actually just become a better student, become more efficient, become more productive? And I think that oftentimes we focus too much on professional versus personal life as being these two siloed entities, when in reality they are extremely intertwined, deeply intertwined. So on the Med School Insider's channel, I'll talk about everything from study strategies using active learning and evidence-based learning techniques all the way to sleep optimization. How can you sleep more effectively? Because this is something that I think a lot of us in medicine are really forced to dive into, because when you're sleep-deprived, getting only three or four or five hours a night, you want to make sure every minute really counts, can be as restorative as possible, so we really cover everything on student optimization because I do think that becoming more productive and efficient is going to translate to getting into a better medical school or getting to a better residency

John Shufeldt:
Or getting into medical school. You know, there's a student that I know really well, who is the, great in the MCAT, great grades, has not gotten in three years in a row, and I've tried to coach him up on his personal statement and I think you hit it on the head. There is no narrative about him. The narrative was about what's wrong with medicine. And I, you know, kept saying, that's not going to get you in, this needs to come from your heart and soul, but I'm going to point him to you because I think I'm obviously not connecting with them. So first off, why did you pick YouTube to start with? I've done a lot of businesses, and zero of them have started with YouTube.

Kevin Jubbal:
Youtube is one of the most amazing platforms. If you want to start a business because you get free exposure, you get free content marketing for your business. And depending on the view count, you can even get paid, right, based on the automatic ads that Google places on your videos. So I don't come from having a lot of financial resources. I was in debt when I started this channel. I remember the first investment I had in the business was buying a $16 tripod from Amazon because before animating my videos, I would use my old iPhone to record a piece of paper that I was writing on. Because there's such a low barrier to entry, it's much easier to start with YouTube. You can just use your smartphone. It's essentially anyone can do it. You can edit your own videos, getting some free iMovie software or something similar. We're going to look back at today and even I mean, people always say, hey, it's too late to start a YouTube channel. We will still look back at today in 2021 and say, wow, that was, that would have been a fantastic time to start a YouTube channel because it's only going to get more and more difficult, more and more competitive in the future.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, no. That part I totally agree with. So I was, I was looking into the YouTube channel, it's kind of laughing. So I'm, wake up at 4:30 every morning and work out sort of person. But one of your most popular videos is how to wake up early and not be miserable. Why? Why does that strike a chord? What was it about that?

Kevin Jubbal:
So there's a lot of things. Part of it is the video topic and the thumbnail. There's all this strategy that goes into YouTube growth. Part of it, too, is actually the fact that this was one of my first videos. So the way the YouTube algorithm works is that they're more favorable when you're first starting out to help promote new content creators. But that video I'm very proud of, even though the production has really changed and improved since then because what we really focused on and what I still try to focus on is providing as much high-density value in a short video. So the video is maybe, what, seven-eight minutes, something like that. But I go over everything I learned in medical school about how to sleep better, everything from the lights that you use, the temperature to daily routines, and like the importance of having a regular sleep and wake time, A to Z. Everything is really jam-packed, and I think it's, it really resonated with a lot of people because a lot of us don't like waking up earlier than we need to, we want to sleep. But unfortunately, given our various school and work demands, we don't get all the sleep that we need.

John Shufeldt:
No, it's funny. I, there's a book called Why We Sleep. I read it probably four or five years ago, and I went from, I was probably sleep-deprived for 20 years, literally four -five hours sleep. And I always said, oh, I don't need a lot of sleep, I'll sleep when I'm dead. All those things you hear, then I read this book, I'm like, Wow, did I get that wrong? And it literally changed my life.

Kevin Jubbal:
Is that the book by Matthew Walker?

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Kevin Jubbal:
Yeah, that's a fantastic book. And listening to him on various podcasts. I haven't actually read the full book, but listening to some of those key insights has really forced me in the last year to actually prioritize getting more sleep before I was OK with six to seven hours a night. I was like oh yeah, this is pretty good. I feel fine. But now I'm like, I'm trying to get eight hours, at least every night.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, and I've come down about the same conclusion. It's between seven to eight hours a night for me was, I think, my sweet spot, but it literally went from four to five to that. So I mean, for me, I'm doing remarkably better than I was. And I, you know, I, now I tell everybody about it because it is so absolutely important and it's such a harbinger of a lot of disease states that you develop over time very insidiously. So knock on wood, I caught it, as late as it was early enough. Now, another one of your, this one cracked me up, another one of your very popular one videos was "Do not go to medical school". So give me the origin of that one.

Kevin Jubbal:
Ok, so I tend to be a straight shooter. I'm, at times maybe more blunt than I should I. I speak my mind and a lot of people would think that, hey, if you are, if you have a med school admissions consulting and tutoring company, why would you tell people not to go to med school? That's going to. That's going to be bad for your business, but I kind of worry about, that's like a secondary consideration, my main consideration is telling people what I, like, what I think the truth is and what they need to hear. And you see so many premeds that want to go into medicine, they want to become doctors, and yet they don't have an accurate understanding of what being a doctor entails. And then when you talk to senior medical students or senior residents or full-fledged attendings, you see how the perception on average is very, very different at each stage. So in that video and across not only that, but several other videos, I try to highlight what the reality is of medicine. And I think that too many people want to become doctors compared to who actually should. Because out of those, let's say you have a hundred people, a substantial proportion would be unhappy as physicians. I'm not saying that no one should become a physician, obviously not. But if, let's say, 20, 30, 40 percent of them would be unhappy, then I wanted them to know now, rather than once, they're already deep in the process.

John Shufeldt:
You hit the nail on the head. I mean, I see a lot of. So I've been doing this now, finished medical school in 86 so and finished residency in 89. So a number of years and I would do it all again. Hands down, no question asked, but I see a lot of folks who do not love what they do. There's plenty of times when I don't love it either, candidly, but I've never gotten to the point where I felt burnt out or felt like I shouldn't be here. But, man, I know a lot of folks who are like, what the hell was I thinking? This is not what I signed up for. And so literally that sort of video to dampen people's abject enthusiasm if they're not really born to do it. I had friends in medical school whose parents literally pushed them in the medical school and hated every minute of it.

Kevin Jubbal:
That's way more common than I think most people would realize.

John Shufeldt:
Now, do you think it's those folks primarily who are getting burned out in medical school, the ones who were, medical school and residency and beyond who probably shouldn't have been there in the first place?

Kevin Jubbal:
Partially, yes. I remember having a phone call with a pre-med student not too long ago who said, hey, you know what, Kevin, point-blank, I'm honestly going to medicine because family pressure and prestige, I care a lot about that. And I tried telling him, that's probably not going to lead to happiness, right, at some point, whether in med school or in residency, you will very likely be unhappy. So I think a portion of that can be attributed to going into medicine for the wrong reasons. I think the other portion is not optimizing one's life and being as productive and efficient as they could be. Not to say that you need to have every single minute in every nanosecond planned out in your day, but there are a lot of ways that people waste a great deal of time and that eats like, you only have 24 hours in a day. So if you are wasting an hour or two here and there, that means an hour or two less of sleep. Or maybe you don't exercise because you're shorter on time and those things over the long term, those compounds to have tremendous negative consequences that people don't really appreciate.

John Shufeldt:
Oh, it's totally, it's death by a thousand cuts. And I mean, people make fun of me because I try to be hyper-efficient and like ... I mean, not everything has to be planned, but I go, but if it's not, you waste a lot of time in the interim. So I'd rather do exactly what you said, get more done in the day or sleep more or have fun more as opposed to sit around and waste my time. Do you think like when you, give me your perspective on burnout because, you know, I've heard it called moral injury and I talked to a lot of providers over the years who have faced significant burnout. And then, as you know, there's a whole depression-suicide challenge that we have in medicine now. What's your perspective on all this?

Kevin Jubbal:
I think it's a huge, systemic issue. It's primarily a systemic issue. Yet we still have to take personal responsibility because on one hand, medicine treats residents in particular as cheap labor. It's not about educating the residents, it's about, OK, this is better for our bottom line. Let's have the resident do it rather than the mid-level, because it's cheaper. I think that's a huge problem. Medical students are not treated that well, and I can think back to some, some of my own instances where it's more about like tradition and like it's supposed to be hard and it's kind of silly, right, like, why was I sleeping three hours? Like, there was one week where I was a triple call on an away rotation in plastic surgery, and they wanted to see what you're made out of. So I remember one day I worked 19 hours that day and I had to go home and study. I was like, what is the point of this? This is so silly. But of course, I wanted to get into plastics, so I sucked it up and I dealt with it. But that kind of stuff is just not necessary. Expecting the system to change overnight is not going to happen, which is why I say personal responsibility is also important. Now it's more of a systemic issue. But when I say personal responsibility, that means if you can manage to be more efficient, maybe more efficient than you would normally want to be because there are downsides to being efficient. I've been told in the past that, hey Kevin, you're not as generous with your time and like, yeah, that's actually a downside. I don't want to have that strain on my social relationships, but managing it in other ways like to still prioritize your sleep or still try to exercise, those are important. What really gets under my skin and I know under the skin of so many other people in health care, at least med students and residents is when the program will require you go to a wellness session, which they are putting on to help curb burnout, yet you're required to go and it's like, hey, me attending this one-hour session about burnout, which yes, I already know about and you telling me that sleep is important is eating into my sleep, time, is eating into my exercise, time, is eating into my time with friends and family. So that like, that's useless lip service that you know, programs have good intentions, but very poor implementation on that front.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I think most residences now, at least one of the households I met has a number of residences, and obviously they're very focused on burnout and attrition rate in medicine. And you know, I always said I had it easy. I mean, I'm a six-foot-four male in what was once a very male-dominated profession. You know, when I went to medical school, probably 30 percent of our class were women. I mean, I had it really easy. But boy, if you're a person of color, if you're a woman, thank God this is changing. It's not changing fast enough. But holy cow, I had it easy to compare it to a lot of my female counterparts and people of color counterparts, and I can't even imagine the difficulties they had. I mean, it's hard enough, as you said, but you know, imagine if you're a minority or a woman and once as a white male-dominated profession, it had to be much worse.

Kevin Jubbal:
Absolutely. They're definitely unique challenges there. And a lot of my female medical school friends and colleagues would complain about being called nurse while they were in the hospital, and I can only imagine how frustrating that would be after the tenth time.

John Shufeldt:
Well, you know my wife's 32-year physician as well, and she's still walk out of her room and someone will say, when's the doctor going to be there? For a while I'd say, like, oh, you know, blah blah blah, it's, you know, it's an old veteran or something like that. And she goes, yeah, after the first thousand times or after the first 10 years, that gets a little old. And I've learned obviously not to make excuses because it would get old if, it happened to me for the first time about two weeks to, I walked out of the room and somebody said to the nurse, when's the doctor coming in to see me? I'm like, the hell, I look like Marcus Welby, you know, my name on my jacket, and a stethoscope around my neck like, what did I miss here? But for that one moment I had like a little more empathy because like, now I get it, and it was only once, imagine, you know, ten thousand times.

Kevin Jubbal:
Absolutely.

John Shufeldt:
All right. Switching gears a little bit. So you've been involved in now, a number of entrepreneurial ventures. What's your entrepreneurial inspiration? What causes you to go down these paths? Because there's not a lot of entrepreneurs in medicine, There's a lot, I mean, hopefully there's a lot because that's what this is geared to. But you know, most of my colleagues would not consider themselves entrepreneurial. Why you?

Kevin Jubbal:
Well, I think a big reason why you see fewer entrepreneurs in medicine is because a lot of people who go into medicine tend to be more risk-averse on average. I think that's a big reason why we don't see it as often. Why I'm drawn to entrepreneurship, a few different reasons, with Med School Insiders I felt like I could make an impact. That's what got me to create that first-ever video on YouTube. And there's different ways to make an impact, whether as a physician, working one-on-one with patients, or creating educational videos, creating an impact I think is intrinsically rewarding. Even if you want to remove morality and ethics from the conversation. Just from a, you deriving satisfaction and happiness in your life, you're going to be better off by trying to help others and making a positive impact. So I no longer see patients in a clinical setting, but my emails or DMs and YouTube comments blowing up with positive comments and like things, things changing for the better in these people's lives. That makes my day, that makes me so happy. The other thing that I really love about entrepreneurship that I've only appreciated in the last couple of years is how exciting it is to start a new company. And I see myself starting more and more companies in the future because they call it the art of the start, right, the first beginning stages of a new company are intrinsically just exciting because there's all these possibilities. Things are changing rapidly. You don't know where this is going. And, you know, maybe after 5, 10 years, you're less enamored by whatever that business was, and yeah, sure, you can move on to the next one. But in the first couple of years, maybe even longer than that, I think it's super exciting to be growing these businesses and just seeing where they can go and what you can learn in the process. Because learning at the end of the day, right, when you are challenged and when you learn those two things tend to result in rewarding experiences like I remember, a little bit of a side tangent, I remember driving a stick shift car when I was visiting Cape Town before South Africa. This is like the little pre-residency vacation, so I was driving stick shift on the opposite side of the road and the car had no power steering, so it was initially a little bit challenging. I mean, I drive stick in the U.S., but doing it on the opposite side and no power steering and all that stuff, it was more fun, at least at the beginning, until I got used to it, and it felt just kind of more routine. So that challenge was more exciting, more engaging, more rewarding. And similarly, when we learn things like one of my recent obsessions is loose leaf tea. Learning at that accelerated pace at the early stage is also just fun. If people, if more people try to entrepreneurship, they would probably discover these truths for themselves as well, and they may be drawn to it.

John Shufeldt:
I totally agree. I always tell everyone I'm a great startup guy, but long-term operator, I just frankly get bored, you know, the day after day grind. But boy, that startup phase those first three to five years, I'm like in deep as far as being energized and excited about it. So your analogy was perfect. Which leads me to probably one of the, probably the last question, which is you start again, where were you when I needed you? But you started an MCAT study tool called Is it called MEMM?

Kevin Jubbal:
Yes, MEMM.

John Shufeldt:
First off, how did you do that? And how did you come up with all the questions and tell me about that?

Kevin Jubbal:
So MeEM was actually there's a long story here, but in short, I met with one of my, one of my former high school classmates who's also a physician. He was doing residency at the same time as me. We met up in Los Angeles and we had this idea for a business. We essentially refined and pivoted a few times and essentially resulted on what is now MEMM and it is a flashcard app for the MCAT, but it also incorporates some high yield review sheets. So for the medical students or residents out there, I like to explain it as a cross between Anki and First Aid, but for the MCAT, it addresses a lot of the issues with something like Anki or with something like First Aid. And we, if you think studying for the MCAT is hard, man creating, creating content to for other people to study for the MCAT was, was 10 times worse. So we spent like over a year creating the content, going through all the official materials and really just trying to create the best quality content out there. And now it's been live since August of 2020. We've been having very, very good feedback. We actually have preliminary data, which I will be publishing. But 27 point average improvement for those who use MEMM, which is massive and the average score was a 514 for those who did it. That's I think like a high 80th percentile or maybe even lower ... percentile. So we're super excited about that. And MEMM is also very different from Med School Insiders in that, Med School Insiders is a service-based business, we provide a service to customers for the most part with the tutoring and stuff, whereas MEMM is just software, so someone will buy a subscription and that's a different kind of business model and learning the nuances there is also very exciting.

John Shufeldt:
So it's funny. I was, I don't know, working a number of years ago now, and one of the, one of the texts or somebody in the emergency department was had their MCAT book out. And I'm like, and I sit down next to her, I'm like, OK, let's go over some of these questions. Literally, I don't, I might have gotten a couple of biology ones right, but the physics, organic chemistry, stuff I did pretty well in, not a chance. I mean, that is whatever part of my brain that was in is gone. So I kind of want to pull out MEMM, try it and see how poorly I do.

Kevin Jubbal:
It's, it's actually really interesting to go back, right, because you don't use it, you lose it. But I don't know. I'm kind of a, maybe you're the same way I kind of enjoy, I definitely enjoyed physics and chemistry and things like that so going back and visiting these things is fun when you're doing the cards. However, I will say that creating the flash cards is so challenging and was like, I definitely became a better flash card maker in the process of creating them, absolutely. Even though I have been creating flash cards for five years in med school and residency.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I use tons of them in medical school and residency. But the thought of going back to pre-med, creating organic chemistry flashcard, I think I'd rather shoot myself so, so thank God you did it because God knows I couldn't have done it

Kevin Jubbal:
And my co-founders as well. I wanted, you know, it's a three, MEMM is a, there's three of us co-founders. So I don't want to imply that I was creating all the flash cards. It was definitely not just me.

John Shufeldt:
That is a really cool business model, and I love it. I just wish it would have been there a zillion years ago. So Kevin, where can people find out more about you?

Kevin Jubbal:
They can find me on my personal website, which is KevinJubbal.com or on any of the social media handles. I'm KevinJubbalMD, on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube, as well.

John Shufeldt:
Very, Kevin. This has been a real, real pleasure talking to you. We love having entrepreneurs on and in the pivots you did, as I said, they're, a tremendous amount of guts and foresight, so congratulations for doing that and on your success. I'll be keeping my eye on you because I think it's gonna be very cool to watch, watch these businesses grow.

Kevin Jubbal:
Thanks, John. It was really a pleasure being on. Thanks again for having me.

Narrator:
Thanks for listening to Entrepreneur RX with Dr. John Shufeldt. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. This has been a presentation of ForbesBooks.

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