SHOW NOTES
"Dr. J," who goes by the Car Wash Doc online, is an internal medicine physician and former Kaiser hospitalist who spent eight years working in San Diego after training at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in the Inland Empire. At the peak of running both his medical career and a growing car wash business, he was working roughly 100-hour weeks, night shifts at the hospital combined with hands-on days managing his sites, and experienced significant burnout before leaving Kaiser in December 2025.
In this conversation, he and Dr. Civelli cover:
- How he used SBA loans, starting with a $250,000 minimum, to acquire and turn around underperforming car washes, scaling to 21 locations worth an estimated $60 million with roughly $6 million invested
- The choice he ultimately had to make between medicine, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle, and why leaving medicine became the easier path
- His advocacy for subscription-based business models, tax strategy, and replacing earned medical income with scalable business income
- Why physician skills, empathy, diagnostic thinking, critical thinking, communication, translate directly into running and scaling a business
- Building wellness centers of his own and the irony of being "unwell in a wellness industry"
- His wife's parallel career as a nurse anesthetist and YouTube content creator, and how they built their business and family life around each other
- The burnout culture in medicine: insurance red tape, prior authorizations, and the feeling of being a "paper pusher" rather than a critical thinker
- His personal health turnaround since leaving Kaiser: consistent gym time, better meals at home, red light therapy, saunas, and cold plunges
- His own biological age testing through True Diagnostic, which returned a result of 55 shortly after residency during his highest-stress period, and the work since to bring that number down closer to his real age
- His closing message to physicians: you are not defined by your degree, and it's never too late to start over
