Terry Dubrow – Becoming the World’s Most Famous Plastic Surgeon | E175

23:08Remember, you know, even my father, who I started to hook up with a little bit later, my actual father, he didn't know anything about medicine. He was an engineer. He said, oh, you should be an engineer. And that's very boring. Anyway, so I worked, I volunteered at the UCLA emergency room. And the minute I walked in there, I was just lit. There was something about the smell and the residents were all young, good looking, studly, what I call relaxed brilliance. They were just confident and smart. And, you know, medical residents are encyclopedic because all you do, you know, the 10 ,000 hour rule.

23:49We do 10 ,000 hours in a week when you're in medical school. It's the most intensive study ever. So you walk around and you're constantly being asked, you know, it's called the Socratic method. You're constantly being asked questions, questions, questions. So you're always studying. You're always ready to take a verbal test. So they were so hyperverbal, which to me translated as hyper brilliant and confident and smart. And I thought, I got to do this. So that means I now have to take all the pre-med courses. What am I going to do? I transfer to Yale. I transfer to Yale in sort of before, now they have these post-back programs where if you decide you want to be a doctor and you haven't taken the pre-med course, you go to college and you take all the pre-med courses.

24:34They kind of let me do that while I was getting a master's degree also. So I was at Yale taking all the med school courses and getting a master's. I got straight A's there. And I volunteered at the Yale New Haven emergency room. And I was just lit. I just thought this is the greatest thing. Took the MCATs. I killed it. And I started teaching Stanley Kaplan MCAT course there as a job.

24:58Randall Kaplan:My Uncle Stanley. No, he's not my uncle. No, no. Oh, right, right. You know Stanley Kaplan? Remember that? Yeah, no, of course. The biggest prep group for law school, all the grad schools. Amazing. And so there I was in New Haven making$75 an hour teaching the MCATs. That's a lot. A lot back then. This is 80. Yeah. Now I'm going to apply to med school. Before we get there, I want to know what is an intoxicating smell of the emergency room? What does an emergency room smell like? So hospitals in general, as you imagine, have a certain sterile sort of smell to them. For some reason, you know, like I, about 30 % of people can't ingest or smell or be near truffle.

25:46You're probably aware of this. maybe not yeah and if you you the way people like me process truffles you make androstanone which is this it smells like excrement terrible and cilantro you've heard of this was soap correct yes i had the opposite with the hospital it just made me feel alive and awesome and i don't know

26:08Randall Kaplan:i just love the smell of hospitals weird right so i want to go back before college and talk about your brother Kevin. Yes. So he drops out of high school in the 11th grade. You're sharing a room. You're three years younger than him. Yeah. What did the effect of him dropping out do to you? Here's your brother. You're a student. Were you telling him, hey, don't drop out? Or were you thinking, gosh, you know, people can just quit? We never had. He my brother would not have that kind of conversation with me. My brother took an IQ test. They gave him some kind of IQ test when he was like 13. He did extraordinarily well.

26:51And they told him his score and told him his percentile. That translated to him that he was the smartest guy in the room and he respected no teachers. And he had no use for school. And he thought he was smarter than all the teachers, which he probably was in a public high school. But anyway, so he was completely disinterested in anything any authority figure had to say anyway, because it was that time in history. and he couldn't stand school and he loved music. He loved rock and roll music. He grew up in the era of Led Zeppelin, hard rock 70s, you know, the 68 to 73 period, arguably the best music in history.

27:29He wanted to be a rock star. That was it. This is a waste of time. I'm going to be a rock star. And, you know, he would never, if I were to say don't, we never talked about it. He really never talked to me. It was a really weird environment to grow up in.

27:44Randall Kaplan:He was a great musician. And ultimately, he was a lead singer of Quiet Riot. Yeah. So he was a very good drummer. One thing my brother and I both shared is the, and I know you have it and all your friends have it, obviously, is not only extreme passion, but the ability to focus on that passion for hours and hours and hours and days and weeks and think nothing else about than that thing. And my brother focused all that passion and that intensity on becoming a rock star. And, but he wanted to be the front man. He was like six, three and big noxious personality, knew he was a genius. And he said, I want to be, he want to be a Rod Stewart or a guy named Steve Marriott, who was the singer of Humble Pie.

28:37These are his, his idols back then. He said he bought a mic stand and started singing in the room. Of course. Didn't care. Had the greatest ego ever because couldn't sing at all. Didn't care that he couldn't sing. Didn't care that I would sit there and listen to him and look at him and go, wow, like you can't sing. I mean, you could see it on my face. You have no singing talent at all. Zero. He literally didn't. And then through sheer will, intensity, and whatever self-training, there was no internet back then. I don't know how he actually became a really good rock and roll singer to the point where he was the first hard rock band to have a number one album.

29:14He displaced Thriller on the Billboard charts at number one.

29:19Randall Kaplan:So let's talk about at that time. You were in first or second year of med school, and he's at the Starwood Lounge in West Hollywood, this famous club. Yeah, Sunset. Still there. Still there. Randy Rhodes is there. He's in the band with your brother. That's right. Ozzy Osbourne comes in. Yes. He's with Robert Palmer. Yes. And he says within minutes, he goes and steals Randy Rhodes. Right. When you learn about that, I think your mom told you afterward it had happened, but what were you thinking and what does that say about human nature? Yeah, we were a little closer by then. He was a little less funky with me.

29:56And he was a struggling lead singer of Quiet Riot who they would line around the block at the whiskey and the starwood and the rainbow, but he couldn't get a record contract. But they were huge in LA. Sell out every time they were at these places. And he had like one of the finest guitarists on the planet as his best friend and guitarist, a guy named Randy Rhodes, who your audience doesn't know. He played for Ozzy Osbourne. He died at the, you know, I think it was 27, like everybody else who dies in rock and roll. And there was that one night at the starwood where I used to go watch him a lot.

30:28It was very supportive. And I'm sitting back there watching. And it was just, as you mentioned i see ozzy osbourne come in with carl palmer who i was familiar with because he's the gifted drummer for emerson lake and palmer amazing drummer all three of those guys were amazing and they walk in and i could see there were like two seats over and ozzy's pointing and they're watching randy and robert palmer uh robert palmer i think it's robert palmer robert who's the guy who's the singer that's a different palmer carl palmer excuse me his name's carl palmer carl palmer Robert Palmer is the guy who was a solo artist.

31:02Carl Palmer is the drummer for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Gotcha. Okay. Super gifted musician. So he's there. I could see them. Weird. I'm watching. Why are they? And he's going like this. And he's just, you know, Robert Palmer, Carl Palmer's encouraging him. I see after the show, Ozzy, Carl Palmer take off backstage and they just corner Randy Rhodes. I remember one time I had an ex-girlfriend and there was this really good looking guy at this club and I could see him see my ex-girlfriend. She was very pretty. And he goes over to her and I go, oh, he's going to start dating my ex-girlfriend. I just knew it was on.

31:39You could tell there was something going on and like the next day he joined Ozzy's band and left Quiet Riot. And it devastated my brother. Because not only did he have a popular band who couldn't get a record contract, now he's lost his best musician.

31:54Randall Kaplan:so it's devastating what did that teach you about human nature when you saw that go down it taught me a little bit about the concept and i'm extremely loyal to a fault super loyal i have a thing going on my right my life right now where i have an opportunity to something that's next level for me in the television industry and if i do it it's very disloyal i'm not going to do it but i am trying to work it by the way but uh i'm not going to do it on its face like that because it's so disloyal. But it taught me about, you know, loyalty. But they couldn't get a record contract. They tried for two and a half years.

32:31And to go on the road with Ozzy Osbourne, how can you possibly turn that down? Who would give you advice otherwise?

32:38Randall Kaplan:Loyalty, I think, is one of the most important traits as a human being. And I've had tremendous breaks of loyalty on my end in the last year that are just, you gotta look around and think, wow, shocking. teaches you a lot about doing so many amazing things for people. Yes. And then turning on you for very crazy reasons that I'm not allowed to get into on the show. Right. But it's, you know, these are lifetime memories. Right. And it kind of makes you not want to do things for people in the future when you've been so amazingly kind, generous, taking phone calls at 10 o 'clock at night, making recommendations to graduate school or calling the CEO of Goldman Sachs to help someone get a job.

33:23Randall Kaplan:And when someone on a team of people kind of break from that, it just, it really makes you not want to help other people. But I'm still going to do it. Yeah, for sure. Because I think good karma goes on. But I must say, you know, in the entertainment industry, loyalty, there is no loyalty in the entertainment industry anyway, I don't think. But when you're a struggling artist and you have an opportunity, if you would have asked my brother, hey, Ozzy asked me to join the band and go on tour with them. What do you think? I mean, if I was my brother, I would have said, go. Who wouldn't? You got to go, man.

33:57We tried for two and a half years. And my brother was the front man. It's not like the front man's leaving.

34:02Randall Kaplan:Yeah. And so, but he just told my brother, I'm joining Ozzy. My brother was devastated. And that seemed like the end of Quiet Riot. But it wasn't. And did you, do you know who, what the first gig is that Quiet Riot played? As? Ever as Quiet Riot? When they first formed the band? No. Randy Rhodes Prom. Is that true? That is true. That's so funny. Randy Rhodes graduated high school. Apparently he did. Randy Rhodes was one of the nicer guys you could meet. Yeah, your brother was a year older, so he was 19 when he played Randy Rhodes Prom. No kidding. Yeah, that's very interesting. But Randy Rhodes, I mean, after they got past that.

34:43But, you know, you know what happened to Randy Rhodes, right? Yeah, yeah.

34:45Randall Kaplan:I think as a kid, a lot of people want to be famous. I had and still have a rock star fantasy. I taught myself to play the drums at 35 years old. I went to Costco and I bought myself a drum set. Now I have an eight piece DM drum set in the bedroom next to our bed, in my bedroom. And you can play. Yeah, I can play. You took the lessons, you did the whole thing? No lessons, self-taught. It's weird because I can hear a song for the first time and play the song when I hear it for the first time. It's this weird kind of... It's your drummer. It's this weird kind of a thing. That's cool. My brother, when we were living five boys together, had a drum set in the family room, but I was not allowed to touch the drums.

35:23Randall Kaplan:Really? So twice when nobody was home and it's hard to, you know, when there's seven people in the home, you know, your mom, stepdad, and five boys, there's very few times that you can hop on when you're alone in the house. Right. And, you know, you're not doing it when you're young. You're doing it as a teenager. So I played twice. And I always played in college. We had this wood desk in the dorm room, and I would play so hard the chips would go flying off the wood. And at the end of the year, it was like the whole end was just raw wood. And I played the drums on my desk before I got here. I psyched myself up before the show.

36:01Randall Kaplan:I jammed the music. And this morning, I was playing Bob Seger. Feels like a number. Bob Seger from Detroit. And I was just jamming the music. I mean, Todd John's in the other room thinking, hey, what's going on here? Uh, but, um, I'll play where we have our, uh, summer home. They, they have, uh, events, uh, where, where we bring in bands and I'll always set it up in advance where I get to play a song in front of our residents where we, where we have our homes in the summer. So if you're ever up there for the barn dance, I mean, you know, yes and really no. I mean, if you're not a drummer and you hear someone playing the drums, you don't know when they're making a mistake.

36:41Randall Kaplan:You don't really know if they're good. It just sounds great, you know, making a lot of noise up there. No clue. But, yeah, it's fun. And we have properties in Nashville. In Nashville, you know, Broadway Street, it's, you know, one venue after the other. And Kid Rock has this amazing venue, and they have an amazing band up there. So when I go, I'll play a song in front of 2 ,000 people. Cool. You know, you hit the bass drum, and the thing just reverberates everywhere. Speaking of the rock star fantasy, it's interesting. You know, when you think about it and you're at the Forum or Staples Center now, it has a new name, Crypto Arena now.

37:19Randall Kaplan:And you think about all these bands, you look out. What would it be like on stage looking out at 20 ,000 people? So what was it like? You had that opportunity. Tell us about that. As I went to UCLA Medical School, my first year in medical school, my brother's album went to number one on the charts. And so he bought a very big house in Hancock Park. They were doing a lot of construction and he said to my mother, hey, I'll let Terry live there for free above the garage near the pool house if he takes care of my cat. Larry the cat. Larry the cat. And I said, yeah. So I lived there. My mom calls me, goes, well, he sold out the forum, which was like our Madison Square Garden back then.

38:06Before we had all these arenas here in Los Angeles. there was the Los Angeles forum. It wasn't the great Western forum. It was even before that. It was the forum. And if you were a major rock band, you played at the forum and he sold out, I think three nights of the forum. My mom said, your brother wants you to go to the second show and come backstage and do the whole thing. I said, great. So I took all my buddies, was living in his guest house or above the garage at the time, taking care of his cat. and they took me back. They gave me the backstage pass. And I remember like, wow, this is, this is special.

38:43This is high life. This is, this is rock star, you know, because he had just made it. He went from playing backup to lover boy to all of a sudden they realized at that lover boy would sell 3000 t-shirts and quiet riot was selling 12 ,000 t-shirts and they were the opening act. And that's when they knew, Hey, they're coming to see you guys. And they broke off from lover boy and went on this international tour. Come in two months into this tour, play at the Forum. And I go back there and they go, your brother will be out in a minute. So I'm sitting there backstage and maybe 20 minutes before they're going to go on.

39:18I hadn't seen him yet. And he sees me and he's clearly coked out, but I didn't even think he was coked out. He was just in a great mood. He was very into cocaine. He sees me and goes, Toad! He used to call me Toad because there was a American graffiti movie, which you probably remember, who Harrison Ford starred in and sort of Richard Dreyfuss. There was a nerdy character named Terry the Toad. So my brother nicknamed me Toad, Terry the Toad. He goes, Toad! And he comes out and in a very intoxicating moment, it was just him and me backstage, the band, everything had been all set up already, just him and me, this giant backstage, behind the curtain and he puts his towel around me and he starts going how cool is this and he starts spinning me around and as he's spinning me around he takes his hand and opens up the curtain and you could see 18 ,000 lighters lit waiting for them to come out so it was like it was I remember like it was yesterday he gave me chills and he said this is what it's like he said to me.

40:31So that's what it was like. It was just intoxicating and incredible. And then when I went to the front row, my buddies and saw the concert, he was amazing. He was amazing. He can sing, but he can really sing. And I think singing is one of those talents where it's not like piano or flute. You can force yourself to become an adequate pianist or flutist, flautist, or even drummer, right? Even if you don't have very much talent, you can sort of get to a certain level, I don't think I could ever sing. No matter how hard I tried, I don't think I could ever carry a tune that anyone would want to hear, much less would have a number one album with.

41:07Yet he did it. He willed himself to become a rock and roll singer.

41:13Randall Kaplan:And like you said, that album called, I think, Metal Health. Metal Health. Was the first metal, heavy metal album ever on the Billboard to hit number one. And their number one song, which hit number five, they didn't have a number one hit but their their number one song was come and feel the noise come feel the noise which i didn't know until i did research for the show it's come c-u-m yes come feel the noise you never heard the song before no i love the song i used to sing it i think i knew the word by heart but i as a kid i'm not thinking about it right and there's a song called metal health with a bang your head metal health will drive you mad that was another huge they were the most played video on MTV in 1984.

41:55Randall Kaplan:Yeah. When MTV was MTV. Yeah. They were huge for five minutes. Yeah. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah. They were huge. Yeah. You know, that had a profound effect on me. I remember that. And he used to have David Lee Roth. Yes. Eddie Van Halen. Yes. By the pool with these naked girls. Yeah. So you're three years. So at this point you're in med school and Are you kind of walking around and staying by the pool with him and say, hey, what's up? So you never knew when he was going to come home. You always had to be on guard because he would just appear out of nowhere. You didn't know if he was on tour, if he was in town or what.

42:31And one night he comes home with Eddie Van Halen, David Lee Roth, David Coverdale from a band called White Snake. And they were playing pool. They were playing pool in the guest house. I mean, in the main house, playing pool. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you know, I have to get up, I have to be at my surgery rotation at like, you know, 430. So I'm just about to get up around 420 and about 410. I hear this screaming out there, toad, screaming for me. I look out and I see my brother and Eddie Van Halen, David Lee Roth. I go, my God, Eddie Van Halen, David Lee Roth, Jesus. And he goes, where's Larry?

43:10Who's the cat? And that was my only job. I didn't know where the cat was. The one time I don't know where the stupid cat is, he's not sleeping with me. And so I run down there and talk to them and I can't find the cat. And he goes, you can't find Larry. You can't find, you know where Larry is. You can't find Larry. And I remember Eddie going, dude, it's cool. It's cool. He'll find the cat. But I had to go. I left. I got home the next day. He was gone. He was already flown away out to her. And my mom calls me. He goes, hey, he wants you to move out. He kicked me out.

43:39Randall Kaplan:And I think he had come home at 3.48 in the morning. Yeah. And you're getting ready to... Yeah, to go to school. To head out. So those things happen all at the same time. The lesson there is you got to be a better cat watcher or better dog watcher. Yeah. The cat was in the main house sleeping. So, yeah, he kicked me out and I moved in with my best friend. So let's fast forward. You go to Yale. You're doing kind of pre-med graduate studies. That's right. That's right. You go to UCLA med school. That's right. And then it's your second year and you're in this spellbounding lectures by Malcolm Lessefoy who walked in with some cowboy boots.

44:17Randall Kaplan:What happened next? The professor, when you're in your second year of med school, you intermittently have a lecture from various professors who are in various specialties just to give you a taste of what the specialty is like. So this one, this was sort of the plastic surgeon was going to come in. And so this guy comes in, Dr. Mal Lesavoy, who is, I mean, he looked like Mel Gibson. Extremely handsome, blue-eyed guy, about 6 '3", with cowboy boots. Very just charismatic. He says, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And he goes, all right, turn down the lights. He was like, just very casual and in command.

44:53They turn on the lights and he starts showing pictures. He goes, let me tell you about the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery. He had this very deep sort of cool voice. He goes, plastic surgery encompasses the entire field of medicine, head to toe. We do it all. He goes, we do gunshot wounds. He's showing us gunshot wounds. We do cancer reconstruction. We do cleft lips, cleft palates. We put fingers back on, microsurgery. We do cosmetic surgery. But he said, but who cares about that? We do this. It was all just about what studly surgery plastic surgeons do. And this went on for about an hour before and afters and talking about it.

45:37And lights go back on it. And everybody just looks at each other in the class of 86 UCLA School of Medicine. Everyone went, okay, like we all want to be plastic surgeons. This is, it was the coolest thing I've ever seen. It was like having Tom Brady come talk to you about being an NFL quarterback. He goes, all right, you guys, good luck. Take care. And then he walks out and I said, screw this. I go chase him. And he's walking down the hallway and I walk up to him. I go, Dr. Lesbow, I'm Terry Dubrow. He goes, nice to meet you. And I go, do you do research? Because, you know, being an academic surgeon is all about publishing papers.

46:12And he goes, I have a lab. And I go, you do? He goes, I'm going there right now. Come with me. He was that kind of guy. Takes me to his lab. Within five minutes, I'm working in his lab. I'm taking over his lab and I published 23 papers with him in major surgical journals that I wrote.

46:28Randall Kaplan:The first one, I believe, was something about medical flaps or something. I think it was called management of large scalp defects with local pedicle flaps. Yes. What on earth does that mean? He was a real cowboy. One thing plastic and reconstructive surgeons do besides cosmetic surgery is when you have a giant hole in the body that won't heal. with organs exposed or blood vessels, you need to cover it. And that's one of the things reconstructive surgeons do. We take tissue from one part of the body with its blood supply intact and move it over to cover a hole to protect critical parts of the body.

47:07And that's called myocutaneous myomy muscle, cutaneous flap, skin, myocutaneous flap surgery. He was really good at it. He could take someone whose cancer had eaten half their stomach and their organs are exposed, and he could rotate the latissimus dorsi with the overlying skin and the blood supply he attacked and rotate it over and cover up that area and get it to heal, and they'd go home. He was a master at that. I wrote up everything he did. I basically wrote up his surgical experience for him, and we published all these papers.

47:41Randall Kaplan:When I was in law school, the billionaire Robert Pritzker came to Northwestern Law School, J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. He and Trump are best friends, as you know. He's also Gutfeld's favorite person. I don't know if you watch Gutfeld or not, but there's a picture of J.B. every night on Gutfeld. Right, right. I'm aware of that. Prime target. So there's a U.S. Supreme Court case regarding something known as the business judgment rule, which means if you're a board member of a public company, essentially you are not liable except if you commit fraud or gross negligence or something like that.

48:15Randall Kaplan:Pritzker's owned the company. Part of that case, Robert Pritzker came in. I wore a suit that day and I thought, okay, I was this young kid and wanted to work in business. I said, oh gosh, you know, the Pritzkers are, you know, coming. And I didn't even know who the Pritzkers were. I remember first year of law school, standing at the copy machine, which no one younger will even know what that is. I mean, they've heard of it. They've seen a picture of it. And JB and I are sitting there talking and And we would both line up with a registrar because we want to take all the business classes that we could take and max out on that.

48:48Randall Kaplan:So our registrar, her name was Christina Jones. I don't even know how I remember the name, but we would sit there and there was no, you couldn't do it online. I mean, no one had, I mean, we had a computer, but it was nothing like, you know, you sign up today. So we'd stand in line, we became friends. And then, you know, he tells me one day, I said, you know, why did you come to Northwestern? And he said, well, I got into Harvard without applying to Harvard. I'm like, oh, God. You know, JB is very mellow, non-assuming looking at all. I don't know if you've ever seen a picture where he's not like the best dress guy.

49:22Randall Kaplan:And if he were sitting here, I mean, he knows it. Yeah. And I'm thinking, oh, God, like, do I ask or do I not ask? I said, all right, I'm going to ask. I said, well, how is that possible you get into Harvard Law School without applying? He said, well, my family gave a lot of money. And so now I'm thinking, okay, well, am I going to keep going with the question and humor the question? And he wasn't bragging, by the way. It was very just nonchalant. Matter of fact, I said, how much money did I give? And he said,$50 million. Wow. I said,$50 million? Yeah, last year. Wow. I'm thinking, oh, okay. So who are the Pritzkers?

49:58Randall Kaplan:So that predated him coming to the school. I got dressed out. He was done talking. I followed him out in a suit, looking good. He said, come take a walk with me, Robert Pritzker, who lived on Lakeshore Drive. Ten-minute walk, went up to his apartment, sat, talked around for an hour. He drove me back to law school in a Ford Taurus with an AM radio. Really? Only. It was just a fascinating, fascinating conversation. The lesson, which is similar to your lesson, is go get it. Oh, yeah. You followed him right out of the lab. And what did you say to him? And what's your advice to everybody else who's afraid to do that?

50:37Randall Kaplan:They're not going out. They don't go after what they want. And it's so easy. All you got to do is go up to someone, be earnest, and ask. Yeah, take the first step. Be enthusiastic. Be humble. Be authentic. Everyone loves to be interested in. Everyone loves when you take an interest in them. And I took an interest in him. And I took an interest in what he was doing. And he also happened to be the greatest human being and became my mentor and still is. And a great friend. But go for it. You know, you've got to be bold. Be bold. It's more important. I always say to my kid, it's not so important to be smart, but it's important to be clever and bold.

51:13You lean into those two things, you'll get very far. So, you know, and what do you have to lose?

51:19Randall Kaplan:Nothing. Nothing and everything to gain. So it's interesting because he took me to his lab and I immediately realized it was all about the currency in medicine and medical school, besides grades, But the real currency to getting like the superstar residencies is publishing. If you can publish as a medical student or a resident, that's the ultimate because that's your you're pushing your professor's careers forward. He was an assistant professor at the time. And it's it's worth much more than an A in a class or high score on a test. And I somehow realized that right away. I became very, very adept at identifying topics to write up, send off to the major surgical journals.

52:06And I always had my paper accepted the first go around at the major surgical journals. I had one paper when I was a general surgery resident that got accepted that changed the way blunt trauma, blunt cardiac trauma was treated. And I presented at the most prestigious organization, general surgery, called the Society of University Surgeons, which a resident has never presented there. And it was just one of these things where I was able to sort of identify what the currency was and really focus on it and just apply all the intensity and passion that anybody could to that one thing. And I did that almost in my spare time while I was learning medicine.

52:47Randall Kaplan:And it's such an important point, by the way. I do a lot of mentoring. I do a lot of professional coaching. And I tell everyone there's a difference about being reactive and proactive. So what you did to proactively come up with these topics and do things that no one asks you to do, so critical to all of our careers. Don't just be order taker, be proactive and create value wherever you go. And anybody in the world who creates value, who adds value to something that no one asked for and is proactive and thinking like a team member, it's going to work 100 % of the time. No question. By the way, this is exactly how we ended up on The Real Housewives of Orange County.

53:29Don't tell the story. I won't, but in a very similar way. I mean, not exactly the same story, but a very similar narrative or theme is how that happened.

53:38Randall Kaplan:Let's go back to Mal. Can I call him Mal? Please. Dr. Last of all, does he go by doctor or does he go by Mal? He'd say Dr. Last of all, he'd go call me Mal. That's why, by the way, I don't know if you ever watch Botch. Yeah. But I'm Dr. Nassif. When do I come out? Hi, I'm Terry. Terry DeBrow, nice to meet you. It's so weird that you say that, I'm so glad that we're bringing it up. It's, you know, you go to a doctor's office, even a dentist's office. You say, hi, I'm, you know, I'm Dr. Kaplan and I'm Randy. I'm like, who's, it's like, what's up with that? Right. We're not calling each other by our first names.

54:16Randall Kaplan:Are we that formal that, you know, you're a graduate degree? I mean, you know, no one's calling me Esquire either. Right, exactly. So that's, yeah, Mal taught me how to be a doctor. by the way you know i learned very early the value and i know you know this and you are this of mentorship yeah if you can identify a mentor early on in your life and many mentors potentially but he was my main mentor that's like the greatest gift you can give yourself in terms of success i think it's huge and it's helped me make my career and i've devoted a lot of my life to mentoring people. And I had mentors, but I think it's really important.

54:55Randall Kaplan:We should talk about this. I have almost maxed out on friends on LinkedIn. And I know maybe a thousand people on LinkedIn. And I think you max out at 30 ,000. And I used to accept everybody. And I 20 times a day, I get emails or messages. Hey, you have a cup of coffee? Are you free? I'm in the venture capital world. I'm an entrepreneur. And it just doesn't work that way. You have to earn mentors, You have to earn your time in the door. So what's your best advice? What's a way that some med student today could walk up to you in Beverly Hills on the street and say, they'll say, Dr. Dubrow, because they're going to be polite.

55:34Randall Kaplan:You'll say, call me Terry. How can you be somebody's mentor today? Some random dude walking up to you. They would have to engage me in a way that was authentic. doesn't seem sort of perfunctory or in a way that let me know that they really were interested in something that I could potentially help them with rather than just, hey, I want to be a famous plastic surgeon on TV. Can I talk to you? That wouldn't work for me. But if they came up to me and said and appealed to what got me, what gets us all interested in the field to begin with, the fundamentals. Hey, I, I love physiology and I love the way the body works.

56:23It's always fascinated me with the body, you know, as if they research me, I always say the body tells you, tells you a story as it's trying to get through trauma or healing. And you have to listen to that story to help it along and nurture it so that it will heal. If you don't, if you go against that story it's not going to end the way you want it to end and so if somebody showed genuine interest and appreciation for my particular approach to something and told me about that and they appreciated that I say well that's a person who authentically knows something about me like you could do it because look look how much research you've done in this you know everything there is to know about me I've never had an interview where you know so much about I mean I've had thousands of these interviews, you know, they're like, you're the botch doctor.

57:11What's it like? But anyway, you know, do your home, do your research, do your homework and figure out how you can come resonate with them.

57:19Randall Kaplan:Yeah. One of the things that I find as well that people should do is they should research you and we'll talk about preparation in a little while, but they should find out what are you interested in and how can I add value to what you're doing? For example, I don't know if you have a LinkedIn page, but there's a lot of information out there about what you do nonprofit wise. And we'll talk about that at the end of the show as well. It's very important to get back, but you could easily say, hi, I like to volunteer. How can I help your nonprofit or how can I organize this event? Why nobody does that, which is exactly why you should, you have to stand out.

57:55Randall Kaplan:You have to do something different. You have to send someone a five page single space letter about every job they've ever had. That's what I did. Right. And if someone writes me, I mean, I talk about my letter writing campaign. I was a loser lawyer. I had three jobs in eight months when I moved to Los Angeles, lost two jobs in six months, three jobs in eight months. And then I said, I'm going to write letters to CEO, no Google, nothing like that. LexisNexis, which you probably know. Yeah. Research tool, our law firm had one, over 300 letters. Wow. Michael Eisner, some of the read, so I got 80 meetings.

58:27Randall Kaplan:Wow. It took five hours to write and it was, it had a cellophane cover, a quote they had given. It was tabbed, transcripts, letters of recommendation. I take every letter that I get like the one that I wrote. Why? Because I can tell when someone's telling me my dog's name. By the way, you come in for a meeting with me and you know my dog's name, Karma, meeting's over. Why? Because it's on my bio on my website. And if you can't spend 20 seconds reading my bio on my website. See you later. But if you list things about my podcast, about the Joe DeSena podcast or the Damon West podcast, or Dana White being chased up by the mob, and he talked about that, I'm going to meet with everybody.

59:06Randall Kaplan:You got to earn it. Yeah. Well, it's on your t-shirt, isn't it? No, I think you're right. Absolutely. And then the other piece of advice, if it's even possible, and it may be, and this is a slippery slope because you can seem disingenuous, but if you can appeal to something that pulls on my heartstrings, that really will pull me in. I get DM'd all day long. I delete them all. I barely read them. But if someone puts a cat on there who is in need of help, or obviously they're talking to me about their struggles with the LGBTQ community, obviously that's going to pull on my heartstrings a little bit because of my family but uh four kids and three of them are part of the community yeah yeah yeah and we spend a lot of time with that community trying to help the families of those kids and so on so that's a big part of our charity i'm not gonna give people too much advice on how to get this a meeting but if they were really creative they'd find a plushie of a cat and build a little garage and with a sign you're always welcome here yeah right exactly that that would that would work.

1:00:15Randall Kaplan:Right. So let's get back to the practice. You stay seven years in the lab. Well, while I was doing general surgery. While you're doing general surgery. But the two of you are doing surgeries at the same time, I think, right? You were one of, you was on the left side of the body and the other one was on the right side of the body. Is that what was happening there? Well, when you're in training, you never get to the right side of the body initially. You're always on the left. You're the assistant. Okay. Because you stand on the right side. So if you're laying down and you're standing on the right side of the body facing the head, why do you want to be on the right side of the body?

1:00:47Because most surgeons are right-handed.

1:00:51Randall Kaplan:Okay. And we've pretty much, it's just almost convention. You could start on the left side of the body. Well, so I did the, the old traditional track, which was go to med school, do full blown general surgery, start to finish where I was chief resident in general surgery, seven years, and then went on to plastic surgery. Now they have these much shorter hybrid things where you do five years, a couple of years of general surgery, and then three years of plastics. But I was, I did the full old fashioned way where before you could apply for cardiac surgery or plastic surgery, which is the, I was deciding between those two.

1:01:33Ultimately you had to finish general surgery and graduate. It was a pyramidal program where you started with 30 interns and only four people graduate.

1:01:42Randall Kaplan:You graduate, you go into private practice, ultimately move down to Newport with your mom. Did you just say, I'm going to open up my own practice? How are you getting patients at that point? So when I first went into practice, I had a lot of offers in Beverly Hills and I figured I'd be a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and stay and do research at UCLA and have part academic, part private practice. I don't have that many friends, but I have one very, very close friend named Dr. Scott Foreman, who's a very gifted orthopedic surgeon, who weirdly his other best friend is Dr. Mehmet Oz. I don't know why he became friends with like the two TV doctors, but...

1:02:21Randall Kaplan:You guys were nicknamed like the something brothers. The dude brothers, yeah. So when I went to UCLA med school, I got there. He's the first guy I met in the class during the microscope fair two weeks before class started. And I go, you in the class of 86? And he looks at me, he was like Spicoli on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He was the lifeguard at the rec center up there. He goes, yes, I am, dude. Like that. And we just like kitted off. He was a California guy, great swimmer, all American swimmer in college. Anyway, we became best friends and we hung out and we were the dude brothers. So we were always together through all four years of med school.

1:02:56And our big thing is people would walk by, we go, hey, dude, hey, dude, hey, dude. They call us the dude brothers. We're very outgoing and very friendly. We had to us, med school was hilarious and fun. We laughed our way through med school. Everybody else struggled. We thought it was the most amusing thing and everything to us was just funny. From anatomy, it just was all weirdly silly, weird. That was our approach to stress. We thought it was funny. So I graduate, we graduate he goes off to do orthopedic surgery at columbia in new york and i stay to do general surgery here and he gets there and his best friend the first guy he meets there is terry dubrow there is memet oz as an intern in general surgery at columbia i stay here we graduate he graduates before me because orthopedics is only six years mine was longer because of plastics and orthopedic and general.

1:03:49Long story short, I graduate. He's in Newport Beach because he's from Long Beach OC area. He'd already established a practice in Newport Beach. And he goes, so where are you going to open up your practice? I go, I think I'm going to join this guy who was doing a lot of celebrities and he loved me and he wanted me to join him in the celebrity plastic surgery practice in Beverly Hills and the Valley. He had a couple of practices and he goes, you you should come down to Newport Beach. I go, what is Newport Beach? I'd never been there in my life. He goes, just come down. So I came down and I thought, okay, it's kind of pretty.

1:04:23Seems kind of boring. And then I get down there and my buddy was the kind of guy, everything works for this guy. Wherever he goes, the red carpet just magically is rolled out for him. Like if you, I remember going to a movie in Westwood and there were two lines going in. One was medium long. One was sort of longer and he gets in the longer one. I go, dude, I'm going to go in the medium one, the shorter one. He goes, okay. His just went right in and mine, like I'm like 25 people deep and he's eating popcorn at the seat already. He says to me, he goes, you should practice plastic surgery in Newport Beach.

1:04:59I go, I'm going to be a Beverly Hills plastic surgery. He goes, well, and then he takes me down the hall from his orthopedic office. And there's a corner office where someone just moved out. And he walks in and it was pink and it was some OBGYN's office. He goes, wouldn't this be a good plastic surgeon's office? I go, yeah, probably. It was kind of an ocean view. He goes, here's the lease. Let's hang out. And it was like, uh... And I thought, Scott Foreman, everything works for Scott Foreman. And when you're with him, everything works for you. And I went, uh... He goes, just sign it. That's how stupid I am.

1:05:33And I just sign it. So I open up a practice in Newport Beach while I'm working in this guy's celebrities practice, operating on celebrities here. At the same time, I'm driving back and forth, living in Santa Monica. He goes crazy. He's best friends with these guys who do Top Gun, these producers. He's doing massive coke. He stops paying me. I have to leave him because he's just gone. He has to go into rehab and shut down the practice. And I go, well, there I am now. I just go down to Newport Beach and I'm in Newport Beach full time. And that's how I ended up in Orange County.

1:06:03Randall Kaplan:Interesting. Weird. Love you.