1KHO 880: The Great Dopamine Extraction | Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Proof of the Impossible

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My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I just read a super intriguing book that's part memoir. It's really memoir about two almost very different things, which is like journey with AI and also surgeon. Dr. Jeremy Heffner wrote the book Proof of the Impossible. It is out now if you're listening to this. He is also the co-founder of Sir John, which is a social media company built for surgeons.
Jeremy, welcome.

**Jeremy Heffner** (1:29)
Welcome. Thank you so much. It is an absolute honor to be on the show.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:32)
And huge congrats on this book, Proof of the Impossible. I have got a lot of notes here, probably about 11 or 12 pages. This is such an intriguing story. And I love how you hop back, like one half of a chapter is about being a surgeon, and you tell all these different stories, different patients you have over the years. And then this journey with AI, these new chatbots that are fairly new to the general population. So I would love though if you would take us back a little further to your childhood. So you talk about being the smart kid, the smart kid that knows all the answers, you're doing algebra in the third grade, so people are kind of picking on you. And then overnight, which sometimes happens, especially I think for boys, it's like you grew to six foot six. So now you're like this strapping, this tall, no one's going to be picking on you anymore.
But you still have all the smarts, and so you go on to become a surgeon. So give us a little bit of background into your path to becoming a surgeon. And then I'm interested in how you ended up becoming super interested in AI as well.

**Jeremy Heffner** (2:37)
Well, yeah, so I mean, I grew up in Lima, Ohio, which is really blue collar. My family's, my father's fireman, my dad's cousins used to be firemen, my dad's uncle, like my uncle became fireman. They were all fire chiefs. So my family was fire chiefs in this town for like 25 of the last 30 years. And because of that, I grew up in a very kind of different rust belt feel, and went to one of the, considered one of the, let's say, lower ranked public schools in the state, and worked my way up from there to one of some of the top institutions in this country. And so that travel to the social economics of it all really lend me the opportunity to see the world from a lot of different perspectives as I moved through the systems. My dad being a fireman, he said, go do something else son, find something else that you don't want to do this job. And so from there, I was, I was the kid that got made fun of a lot, I was bullied a lot growing up, and I was always kind of the kid in the back of the class doing work that other people weren't doing yet, because the teacher was trying to find something for me to do. And that worked its way up, so I got an engineering, I got my degree in bioengineering from the University of Toledo.
It was, that was fun too, I was student body president, fraternity president, I figured out kind of who I was by that point, that's really the part of my life that was a transition. I went from the geeky nerdy kid to kind of a normal person that could take on some leadership roles, and then I go to medical school.