Hey, everybody. Welcome to My Guest Tonight. I'm Jeff Revilla, your host. I've
got an amazing guest. A global change agent, author, a
futurist with a focus on healthcare and a future on human
evolution. Let's hear today's theme song. He's been around the
globe. Go clinic, staff care 50 years of service he's been
everywhere Jeffrey Hardy's got a vision so bright
Talking about the future on My Guest Tonight. Peace ain't just a dream
It's a plan on fire Second evolution Time to rise higher
With Jeff Revilla at the mic, we're taking flight. Let's change the
world on My Guest Tonight.
Let's welcome Jeffrey Charles Hardy. Welcome to My Guest Tonight.
Hey. Cheers. A lot of the guests don't expect a.
A customized intro song. How'd you like it? I.
I kind of like that. I mean, that was pretty good. I'll have to steal
it. I'll have to use it, so. Thank you. I'll send it to you after
the show for sure. Where are you at right now? Where
do you call home? Well, California, Northern California, just
San Francisco area. Have you always lived in California? Is that where you were
originally born? It's originally born in New York and then moved to California
when I was a year and a half and then went to college in Sacramento
and then traveled all over the world, built hospitals all over the world, did all
sorts of stuff, had a lot of fun. The world is my home.
I'm a global citizen. Yes. Amen.
The healthcare industry, was that something you were drawn to at a
young age? Is that something you studied in college? Oh, well, I was also
recording a hospital corpsman in the United States coast
guard as a reserve, and I was a hospital corpsman
trainee during the Vietnam war. So I know I don't look that old,
but, you know, I must have been five years old or something. But at any
rate, I was taking care of guys, you know, who were coming back from the
war, and I just gravitated
towards helping people and caring for people. That's just.
That's what happened. Love it. When you
returned, were you able to go right into practicing or,
or, or administrative work? What was the, the focus when
you returned back home? Well, it all began delivering
bedpans. So I started from the bedpan up. Okay. And then
as I became more of a nurse, which is what a hospital
corpsman is, then I gave shots and dressings and
help do a bunch of things, saving lives, you name it. And
that progressed to the point where I was a low
paid Clerk in a Kaiser hospital in the Bay Area here.
And it progressed to the point where I was
a hospital consultant helping architects design
hospitals because I had worked in hospitals, I had worked in
the departments as an administrative staff person, a
clerk, an emergency clerk. I knew what, how
a emergency department should run because I'd
worked there. So most architects have not worked in
emergency department or they have not worked on a nursing unit
or in a laboratory or a pharmacy or radiology, you name it. So I
ended up really, really having a very wonderful
niche process in my
heart and I ended up starting my own company, I sold my company and
then I set up a non profit organization and I help
people build hospitals and clinics all over the world. So yeah,
it all began at the. Bed pan up
and to date it's over 120 hospitals.
Is, is that kind of the number you're looking at or is it higher than
that? I don't know. I mean that, that's, you know, I
say everything is a fiction until you find out the truth. So
that's y. I mean especially when I was working for Columbia
HCA and Kaiser
Catholic Healthcare West. I mean I worked for the top hospital
owners. And so yeah, you can throw a lot of
hospitals on that list because I ended up either
helping, you know, remodel or helping design a brand new hospital
or, or just moving
towards clinic development, health clinic development.
So that by the time I started my own non, non profit organization,
I was strictly into helping countries
like Myanmar design and build a community
development and health center. So it's a combination
of a health center and a community development,
business development, you name it, so that you could help people do
everything from stop smoking to
whether they needed to start a brand new
community program like growing plants and growing
trees or growing flowers or something.
It's kind of a consolidation approach to health care
and community development. So yeah,
that's where it all began. And you weren't joking about Global because we're
talking Hanoi, Vietnam, Kenya. You
mentioned Miramar. These are hospitals all over the place that you're
helping put together and establish roots inside communities.
Yes, absolutely. And as I say,
my secret was I said yes to anybody who asked me a question, hey Hardy,
do you know how to do this? And I say, well, I probably don't, but
I'll try. And I say yes to life. And so
I ended up saying yes to all these wonderful people who wanted me to help
them outside the country, including Nigeria, Kenyan and
yeah, Vietnam, you name it. So really,
really was a very fortunate person to
have ended up getting into a career that I
invented. And after,
you know, establishing these roots and helping establish hospitals in
these communities, did you start to see gaps in,
you know, what was needed to be served or how
medicine can be delivered to everybody? Was there
deficiencies in the system? I guess. Well, I would use
that as a segue question to what I ended up
doing eventually was move towards
the idea that maybe I could use my planning
tools that I used to plan a healthcare
facility to help the people in the world are trying to
plan what I call the second human evolution.
And so what started
out as using tools to be able to design a hospital,
but really the tools to help people get together to
design a hospital. So I wasn't an architect, I wasn't an engineer,
I wasn't a doctor, I wasn't an administrator. I was the guy who, who
got these people together and said, okay, what are we going to do? We're
going to build something. Okay, what are we going to build? Why are we going
to build it? Who's going to be served by all this? And
it just really gave me an idea. I mean, here I am in
Yangon, Myanmar, or in Bangkok, Thailand,
talking to a group of people about planning health.
Well, why not be sitting in those cities talking about
planning the second human evolution? Because we are
not at the point in our human development
where we are able to design
our future. And that's what I'm talking about. I mean, the whole
first human evolution that began two and a half million years ago
to somewhere in the mid-50s, mid-60s, where we had
mutually assured destruction, we had conquered nature,
and we were at a point where
killing for peace that worked at got us here,
you know, but killing for peace is not really going
to work anymore. We've got to think about how we can care for peace
because we already know how to care for peace, for gosh sakes. When I
was hospital corpsman of the Coast Guard, I learned that wonderful feeling
that if I took care of these guys, by the end of the day,
these guys I had helped, they were sleeping like babies. They were happy. They said
thank you. They knew what it meant to have peace,
and I knew what it meant to have peace. And then I met all these
nurses all over the world and they already know what it means to care for
peace. So what we have to do as a global
community is we have to tap into our ability
to care for peace and design our
future. And that means it's not going to be status
quo. It's not going to be, we'll Just let
the future unfold in front of us. No, we actually have to do
some planning. And that's what happened to me while I was
planning hospitals and clinics. I would say, wait a minute, minute. We need the
tools to be able to plan the future of humanity.
And it begins with people like you.
It begins with what I call in my profession the
pre planning process. This is called pre planning.
It's where we talk about what it is that we want to do,
but we also have to talk about the approach to what it
is that we want to do. How are we going to start, who we're going
to call into this discussion? Is it just leaders, is
it just nations? Or is this going to be some
groundswell? Or is it a combination of
grassroots and brass roots? Was what I call, you know, the
top and the bottom, you know, get, get us all working together and talking and
planning together. Because the planning is a process. It's something that
you don't say, well, I'm going to go to the grocery store and get some
dinner. Yeah, you want something while I'm at the grocery store? You know
that. That's not planning. Planning is where you actually
plan ahead. You think, okay, what do we need? What's worked
in the past? What doesn't work? What would we
best to do in moving forward based on
what we have heard works in the past? And so
also you've got other organizations right now that are already doing great
planning projects. But I mean, I look at United Nations, I am
so proud to be a human right now because of the United
nations, because of the world health organizations, are not
proud of being a human because of all the
nasty stuff that's going on right now in the world where we're still killing
for peace. Why are we doing that? This Gaza stuff
and this Ukraine stuff in Sudan.
I am appalled at how our inabilities
are being exacerbated on the global scale. And we're
watching it on television every single night. This is not working.
Why don't we just recognize that the first human evolution is
dead? Those of us who are still dragging our feet
in the first human evolution have got to wake up and just
stop this killing for peace stuff. Because now we're in what I call
the suspended human evolution. The suspended
human evolution. It's where we as
a united humanity that
can remember history, who knows what works
and what doesn't work just because we've gone to school,
we've learned what history is all about. You know, I
mean, we are in a point now where we've got the brains, we've
got the experience, that we've got the tools to plan
the second human evolution. And you mentioned the three
stages of human evolution. We're in the suspended stage right now.
And you said, if we want to get out of this, people like me are
going to have to plan to get out of it. And I'm wondering, do you
think we're maybe suspended now? Because, you know, people like me, I'll take. I'll
take the fall for everybody. But people like me have traded
convenience and consumerism for ease of life. In exchange
for. We've given power, more power than we need to the government.
We've given more power to corporations. We're like, you guys
run things, you know, just keep things cheap. And me fed
and fat. And a lot of people have backed off and backed
out of the system and have let other people take over. But
if we want to get out of this, if we're just kind of stuck in
the cycle for 50 years where we consume, they make more
stuff, we buy more stuff, we gotta buy. We gotta keep the system running, but
we're not thinking about what's keeping the system running. And how do we
get beyond this. Is that maybe what's contributing
to the suspended state? Well, yeah, and I think that the
suspended state, I like you calling it that because it is
in existence. That's the state.
It's the existence where, yeah, I gotta fill my car up with
gas. Yeah, I gotta go grocery shopping. I mean, there's a certain amount of stuff
that we have to do just to stay alive. So that's part of being
in the suspended state. But while we are in this
suspended state, this period of
existential living, we need to be able to
talk, discuss. Okay, where are we at now? And
that's what you're doing. You know, Jeff, you're, you're in the
driver's seat for the process
that has to occur. And this is the pre planning
process because it's discussed. Okay, what. What do we do? You, you talk to
a whole bunch of different people all the time. Well, now so do I. But
most, most of the people I talk about are
in healthcare. But you talk about to people all
over. And so you need to be able to ask these questions and get
answers from different people who can share
what they think are some of the tools that
we need to get to the point where we can plan the second human
evolution. Because we're not there yet. We. If you said to me,
okay, Hardy, you're in charge of planning the second Human evolution. They said, well,
number one, no, that's not what I'm going to do. I
will help start the discussion, which is the pre
planning discussion, because you don't just
do what some of the hospital people did when I get called
and they'd say, hardy, we want a brand new hospital. And I'd walk into a
place that did not need a new hospital at all. They had not done
their homework. They didn't even know how to plan. Oh well, we went on and
out and we got some Bay Area government organizations
to do an assessment of our area and
determine whether we need a hospital here. And of course the answer was
yes. And they said, well, based on the people who are here, we
should probably build a 300 bed hospital. And I'm sitting
there looking at, you know, I'm looking at the information. No, you don't need a
300 bed hospital because the number of people you have in your community
are already going to a whole bunch of different health maintenance organizations
and there's very few people who are using individual
doctors. So you know, you've got to be able
to get to the point where you know how to plan.
And then you look at what the best tools are to plan whatever it is
you're going to need. Because it's not the old tools,
it's new tools. And how do you think we find
the momentum or find the right people to lead
us to the plan? Like how, how do we get out of this,
like this suspended state where we're day by day life?
There's, is there, will there be a catalyst event? Will there be
somebody who we just know like and trust that rises up and says, hey listen,
we got to start planning here or we're not, we're not going to do too
well. I think it's an evolution. I think that the
process is the solution. And that's what on the
bottom of my book I've got. The process is the
solution. Because you have to, you
have to be. Start down the road
together with the rest of the world. And that's what you
and I are doing right now. We are starting a very, in a very small
way, which is great because you got to start small. You gotta
talk and talk. This gotta take a lot of talk, take a lot
of dialogue and then little by little
the answers will come. I don't, I don't think that you
don't get to the point where you know that
what you're going to do until you really looked at what other
people have done. If you look at your own expense, your own mistakes.
Look at all the failure all over the world. You know, I can't tell you
how many places that I would go where they want to build a brand
new hospital. And just the fact that they got to that point, they're setting themselves
up for failure. And so you just have to
know that the process is laborious,
it's time consuming. But I will tell you, I have had nothing
but an enjoyable life and being able to help
countries, entire countries plan a healthcare system
or help a whole corporation plan how
they're going to deal in their own health maintenance organization. That was with
Kaiser. And so I think, think that what we're
doing right now is just, it's laying the ground groundwork.
That's what we're doing. We're saying, okay, let's talk about this, because
there aren't any answers. What we have to do is discover what
the process is. Little by little we are, because the academia
is very, very in tune with all sorts of ways
and means to move this ball forward.
And so, and we have done lots of
work in management, engineering and how
to change the world that we have now.
So there's a lot going on right now that I am
so proud to be an American, very proud to be
a member of the world. I think that we're moving in the right direction.
And with you,
when I was doing. The research for this interview and
you're to care for peace organization, there's a saying in
Mexico that has been popped up through the headlines. And I started thinking, well,
maybe that's the entryway for us to start having
this conversation. They say for the common good, first the
poor. And if we could learn to take care of each
other and not try to grab what's ours and get ahead
of the Joneses. If we could take care of our neighbors and see
the plight of our neighbors and people who are struggling in our own community
and see that when they're taken care of, our whole community
rises up a little bit. We, we get better as a people just
taking care of each other. And that's. I don't know how many of us have
that perspective right now. I think that we could
move towards caring for peace. And when I say
peace, I don't mean the space between two wars. I don't mean
sitting on top of a mountain, you know, with their legs crossed, your arms crossed,
you know, while the people down below are dying, you know, the people in
the villages are, you know, suffering. And, and they're not.
No, no. The link is Very simple.
Care is the link to
peace. So through care, we can attain
peace. And that's what we've got to bring to the table,
and we've got to recognize it in the people that we're working with. Because
all I have to do is pull people in, in the healthcare facility. It's easy
for me because I got nurses sitting at the table, doctors, people
who understand what it means to care for peace. Okay, Hardy, let's
get on with it. They've got. That's the
core. That's what they have. They know what it means to
care for peace. So I go to Myanmar. I'm working with Aung San SUU Kyi's
government before the coup, and saying, care for
peace. That's a bargain. We need to care for
your people, and then the. The
people will have peace, and so will the governors, and
the people who govern the country will have peace. It's a. It's a. It's a
bargain. It's a quid pro quo. You know, it's not just a nice feeling and,
you know, evolving with a peaceful feeling, you know,
caring and people. It's. It's a process that.
That has a. A real grab to
it. It's. It's something that you can. You could grab. You can hold on to
it, you know, you know what care for Peace is? Look at a nurse and
say, what does it mean to care for peace? That's which I. By the way,
I'll do a little round roundtable before
my meetings and say, okay, let's have a
icebreaker conversation. What does it mean to care for peace?
You know, and you could do that with what you're doing, and you'd be surprised
at the commonalities that you're going to get from every single person
that you ask that question to. With the
foundation, the Care for Peace foundation, what are. What are some
things people can reach out to you for? What are some services they might find
through the foundation? Well, thanks for asking that
question. The foundation is alive
because the book is alive. And I'm doing a lot of things to promote
the book. But we. We had to
stop our process in Myanmar
when the military junta came and over
overthrew the government. I mean, Auntsu Kyi is still in
home arrest. It probably will be until the day she dies.
And the people that we work with, the Minister of Health, the Minister
of Education, the Minister of Finance, all the top people in the government,
that they were either house arrest
or they were jailed, or they got lucky and got smart and took
A train out to Thailand or somewhere. You know, I mean,
it's like, what do we do? Well, we had
built a prototype community development and health center right in,
in one of the most deep rural places in Myanmar. And
we had a partner, a country partner in country partner named
the People's Health foundation. And they have proceeded to
take our prototype that we did together. They helped
us, we helped them design and build this prototype.
So they built 22 of these already. They've already built
more of these in this horrible environment
that the military is in charge. And so we
didn't, we left, but we didn't
leave the tools.
Excuse me. We shared the tools so that the people who were there could use
the tools and continue to do what it was that we did.
That's really what we have to do. So I mean, the foundation
answering your question, there's nothing that it's doing
or nothing that we're doing to even promote it because
at some point we will be able to. And is my
belief that at some point we'll get another country
to be able to do this and we'll be able to discuss
this whole process of community development
because once Ukraine hopefully
has, you know, gets back to where they could rebuild and same thing
with Gaza, the rebuild and Syria, you know, all these places that could rebuild
once we get to the point where they want to rebuild. Why like to
rebuild the way we started to do in Myanmar, you start
at a community level, at a village level, and
you use the people who are trained in
health to build their
villages and their countries from the bottom up.
And you gave us a sneak peek at the book. To care for peace
is part of what came from the foundation in this book and
kind of laying the blueprint for, you know, how you see this
proceeding, how you see the planning going. Is it, is it kind of a road
map to get to the next phase? Yeah,
I wrote this book. Mostly the, the audience of
this book was my, my board and it's, my board
is both an American board of very highly
high level doctors, nurses, administrators, and also
very high level people in Myanmar because, and,
and the People's Health foundation and some of the government people who were there.
So that's who I wrote the book for. It was a, it was the closure,
Dakota to our work because when the
military coup came along, I couldn't even fly to
the country. And in fact, I was very careful to even
sending emails to the country because I didn't want to get somebody picked up by,
you know, somebody in the government saying, oh, okay, this is somebody
Hardy's talking to. Let's go arrest them and throw them in jail. So, you know,
I, I have to be very, very careful. So the client of the
book was. Is the board, but
it now is you. The client of the book is anybody
who wants to really understand what it means to care for peace. And
what. What is this first human evolution? What's the suspended
human evolution? What. How do we design
something like the second human evolution, which I have
four templates in the book, and these templates
are tools that can be used during this pre
planning process because
they direct the discussion. And that's what we need
right now. We need, okay, how do we direct this
discussion to get to the point
where we can start thinking about
planning the second human evolution? And
so, yeah, I mean, that's what the book is. The book is here. It's more
of the what and it's less
the how, because the how is something we've got to develop
together. And there's a lot of.
Of how that people are going to bring to the
conversation. I want to make sure that it's not my how. I want to make
sure that it's our how. I want to make sure that it's something
that people can coalesce
with their own words, their own
language that will be part of my language.
So it's. It's a very selfless process and
it's, you know, you. But you got to start by pushing back
and, you know, standing back and looking at the world,
looking at humanity and where
we've been, because if you don't recognize that we
can't kill for peace anymore, that cannot work, then
there's not a whole lot we're going to be able to do from that point
on. We've got to recognize that
we are in a place where we
have to do something, and to do something, that means that
we need to plan it. I've seen your numerous TV appearances and your
podcast appearances. Do you have anything coming up?
Where will you be appearing? Somewhere or conferences? How do you
continue to promote the message? Well, I guess
the key was to start the snowball rolling from the top of the
hill, you know, because then it gets bigger and bigger, just by itself,
rolling down the hill. So that's. That's what I've done.
And because of that, I'm getting invited to all
sorts of video events, broadcast
television, podcast like this.
Just that that's really what I want to do now. I,
I'm not so sure that I want to pick up any
speed and make this into any, anything bigger than
it is right now. Because it's, it's, you know, you and I have got to
be promoting this pre planning process.
And you don't do that standing on a stage and pretending that
you're Tyler Swift or Taylor Swift. You know, and, you know, with
the commencement address that she gave, which is
phenomenal. Commencement address, I could
do that. You know, I'm not looking at being, you know, Mr.
Hero with any stretch of the imagination. I'm a process
guy. You know, I'm here to get this ball rolling. The snowball at the top
of the hill. That's it. So, yeah, no,
I'm very, very, very satisfied with
how it's going. I mean, there's major news articles about what I've done now,
so it's cool. MSN Network, Yahoo,
some of the other ones. I can't. One of my favorite ones was recently
in December. It was Los Angeles Tribune
wrote a phenomenal article about what I've been doing.
So, yeah, I mean, I, I want to see this
snowball pick up more snow. And to do that, you gotta
allow the snowball to keep rolling. Well, if people
want to reach out to you or just get the book, what's the best way
to find you or get in contact with you? Call the
book is to care for peace. So you can go to Amazon,
you can get it on Amazon. So, and then
to get a hold of me, they could email me at our
website, which is Jeff, that's B, J, E, f,
f@careforpeace.com or careforpeace.org
it doesn't matter. And so I really always
appreciate it if somebody could pick up a keyboard and type out
a little message or, you know, use your thumbs, you know,
send me a message about what it is you, what, what you would think
about how to move ahead in this process. I don't need,
I'm not looking for. This is a great
idea. I'm looking at, okay, how do we move this? How to.
How can I be part of this process? So, and I'm getting a lot
of feedb. That is, how can I get,
you know, how can I be part of this process? How do I help start
this concept conversation? I didn't even know about this idea
of, you know, three levels of stages of human
evolution. And oh, you know, people are going like,
well, aren't you talking about the Holocene? Aren't you talking about the
Anthropocene? I'm saying, no, the three stages of human evolution
are specifically about humans, not our pets, not
our zoos, not the trees in the forest. It's just us. It's
what we have done in the two and a half billion years up to this
point, where we are now and where we need to go. No, this is not
geological. This is, you know, that's the holocene,
you know, and how that relates
to all other previous
scenes. So, you know. No, this is the human
epic. That's what we're looking at. So, yeah, I'd
like people to be able to email me
jeffrepeace.org and how do you want to start? What can
I do to help you? Awesome, Jeff. This was amazing.
You've certainly opened this Jeff's mind. So we've got a lot of work
ahead of us, and this is very, very important. And
people walking away from this. Check out the book. Check
out what you think you can do, even start locally. Right. You don't have
to change the world tomorrow, but you could change your
neighborhood or your community center. Right? Right. And always
know that change is a wonderful idea.
But keep talking about the idea. That's
very, very important. It's not something that you do with your hands. It's something
that you better start up here. Sounds good. Let's go
back to that theme song. He's been around the globe Bill clinics
that care 50 years of service he's been everywhere Jeffrey
Hardy's got a vision so bright Talking about the future on My
Guest Tonight Peace ain't just a dream It's a plan on fire
Second evolution time to rise higher With Jeff Revilla at the mic
we're taking flight let's change the world I'm a guest tonight
Just tonight Night Just tonight
Just tonight.