MedImpact: Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Suneel Gupta Keynote Speech | Worldwide Speakers Group

I got to say, you sound really impressive. Yeah, most of that is actually made up. I cannot believe how many people are here the morning after St. Patty's Day without mimosas in your hand. This is great though. This is probably the first time we've ever done this, so you're going to have to bear with us a little bit. It's awkward already. It already feels we're going to learn things about each other in front of a live audience we didn't, and it's just slightly more awkward. Our parents are actually here in the audience. We weren't nervous at all except for the fact that our parents are here, and to top it all off, I'm going to make you applaud one more time. Yesterday, actually two days ago now, they celebrated their 48th anniversary. You know, it's funny because I think a lot of people obviously know them, having been married for a long time and having kids and four grandkids who are all here as well, but not many people know about how this all actually started. How they met. Can we tell the story? Yes? To see over the iPad, but you know, my parents, they're both immigrants, and I think the immigrant story is probably a story that a lot of us share in this room one way or another. My mom was living in Oklahoma going to school there, and this is the mid-1960s. She wore a sari every day to school, which I thought was remarkable because I think in Oklahoma today they still don't wear saris, so mid-1960s pretty remarkable. But she finished her degree in engineering and decided that she was going to go to a place where the jobs were, which was Michigan. She wanted to be an engineer. So she's driving across the state towards Dearborn, Michigan, on her way to becoming the first woman engineer hired at the Ford Motor Company, which was pretty remarkable in and of itself. But ironically, her car breaks down. Future first woman engineer's car breaks down. So again, it's the mid-1960s, your car breaks down, you're an immigrant from the other side of the world, it's a bit daunting, and you don't have any friends, you don't have much money, you just have a broken-down car. So what do you do? She decides to go to the phone booth because they had phone booths back then, and she tries to find any Indian-sounding name. You go back to your roots. So she finds a name, and what was it? Was it Patel? I think Patel is a pretty common name, so I think that's... the way I tell the story it's Ungerwall because it starts with a U, but you know, it could have been Patel, maybe Shaw, you can interchange. None of that matters though, because the person she was trying to call was not home, did not answer, but the guy's roommate answered the phone, who is our father. So the fact that Sanjay and I are here at all is a total fluke. Total fluke. Mr. Patel was out on the town, but my dad was also an engineer. And it's funny because we went back a couple of years ago because I wanted to see the exact spot where this happened, where the phone booth was. It's no longer there, and my dad added a part to the story which I did not know, maybe you don't know this either. From where my mom was, she calls and he answers the phone and she says, "My car is broken down." He asks where she is, and it turns out where she was was a place that he could actually see from his 13th floor apartment down. So he kind of looked down there and said, "Yeah, yeah, I'll be down there. I'll come help you." She was driving a '64 Nova, red. Somehow that's the first detail my dad still gives me on the story. I said, "What about the woman who was driving it?" No, it was a '64 Nova. Love that car. Well, we should start from the beginning. Here's what I'm thinking for this time. There's a lot of information out on Google about you and a lot of things that people can read, so why don't we talk a little bit about things that aren't easily discoverable and searchable on Google? How does that sound?

It's interesting because you talk about family a lot in the reporting that you do. You wrote a blog post recently, if people haven't checked it out it's a really good one, probably the most personal I've seen you get in a blog post, and you get pretty personal sometimes and you can bring your story into it. It was called "When Your Patients Are Your Family." You published it on Medium, and one of the lines that stuck out to me is that you talked about our family history and one of the things you said in there is, quote, "A doctor can change your life, but not the way that you live."

I like Twinkies. Hostess would have gone out of business about 10 years earlier had it not been for me. I was keeping him alive.

I'm glad we're going into such detail about this.

I think it's funny because you're watching this from a distance and it almost seems like a lab experiment, you know, what will happen if I replace this Twinkie with what's the reaction, oh interesting, taking notes. This is the development of young Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

One of the things that always strikes me about some of the articles and some of the things you share is that often times people get the care that they need, and oftentimes people in this room are involved with that care, but sometimes it happens at a moment that is unfortunate, that there's a trigger that they need to get to in order for that care to sort of set in. So part of what you do, I think, is to have a conversation with people before that moment.

Yeah, it's a conversation shifter. I think for me, probably one of the coolest moments I've had with regard to you doing the CNN stuff is I'm walking through Manhattan with my friends and all of a sudden we turn the corner and there's this monster billboard of you in Times Square. It's a pretty cool moment for a little brother. That's my big brother now. I think about this in a couple of different ways. Number one, it's just cool for me, but two, this is health, this is a conversation that I think 15, 20 years ago wasn't very sexy, and now it's on a billboard in Times Square. You've made a conversation, you've opened up a conversation with people about matters that previously weren't being discussed at least in a mainstream sort of way. At the same time, you have a lot of people on the healthcare side in the industry that are trying to have that type of conversation with patients directly. We're shifting now from a pure B2B space to something that's either direct to consumer or B2B2C, which means that ultimately we need to resonate directly with the patient. What have you learned?

Let's take a moment here and talk about the absurdity. By the way, can I just say something? You're really good at this. You're kind of like Oprah, you know that? I'm now going to flash a picture of Sanjay as a toddler and he's going to cry. People get nervous speaking in front. Public speaking is people's number one fear, did you know that?