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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

290: Give Me a Sink Plunger and I'll Save the World

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Society & Culture, History

4.839.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2022

⏱️ 73 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Inventor and bloody do-gooder, Arthur Lih is on a mission to save a million people from choking with his LifeVac device. It’s a quixotic quest that began at age 20 when he watched his best friend die in his arms.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Well, hello there. It's episode number 290 of the way I heard it. This one is called Give Me a Sink Plunger.

0:11.0

And I'll save the world. Maybe not the world, Chuck, but more than a few people for sure.

0:18.0

Absolutely. Our guest today is a guy named Arthur Lee and he's the inventor of a very unique product

0:26.0

that is saving a lot of people's lives. We don't normally do this, but there's just so much about the story that I love.

0:35.0

First of all, the way it came to me, it was just a recommendation from Brian Kilmead,

0:40.0

whose show I was on a not long ago and he told me about this guy who he's known as Whole Life,

0:46.0

who was a trucker, built a trucking company, retired early, and then decided he wanted to make a very, very, very simple

0:55.0

but effective alternative to the Heimlich maneuver, really, something to help people who were choking.

1:01.0

The rest is just like McGyver meets Forest Gump. The guy goes into his garage, he goes to a home depot

1:07.0

and just with these very, very simple rudimentary ingredients, a plunger, a valve,

1:14.0

he puts this thing together and my god, the Odyssey, like he didn't go on Shark Tank or anything,

1:21.0

but he did everything he could to get a medical product out there and that is not easy.

1:28.0

But he did it and now when you see this guy, I mean Chuck, he's sitting there in front of hundreds of photos of children

1:37.0

and older people and some in between whose lives were saved by this device. It's pretty amazing.

1:44.0

Yeah, they have a wall of saves basically and it's pictures of all the people whose lives continued

1:52.0

because someone around them had this device when they started choking.

1:58.0

And you've seen the footage on Inside Edition, it's on YouTube, these nanny cams that show

2:05.0

these harrowing experiences where people are freaking out, but woman in a restaurant with a baby

2:11.0

and some guy goes out to his car and comes back with this device and saves this baby's life.

2:17.0

It's amazing to watch and hard to, it always has a happy ending, but it's really, really harrowing and nerve-wracking to see.

2:26.0

Part of my objective full disclosure is to encourage you to get one of these things

2:31.0

because I think I know it could save a life, there's just no doubt about it.

...

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