MB: Even before I was a physician, storytelling helped me connect with my family. I’m a first generation immigrant and my grandparents' stories are so fascinating. You can read about my grandfather on Wikipedia. He was an important scientist. For a lot of my life, storytelling was the only opportunity I got to know about the people in my life. That's all I do when I stay with my parents or extended relatives – I sit and put on the Otter AI app, and I'm just like, “Let's hear some stories about when my dad first moved to Scotland from Pakistan with 200 Euro and had to spend eight of them on a cab ride because the person who was supposed to pick him up didn't show up to the airport.” This was 1976. So it’s a tool I discovered to learn about myself way later than I wanted to.

Looking back, there were so many times that I was doing performing arts, whether it was stand up comedy or spoken word or Moth storytelling, because I thought it was cool. But in reality, I was just desperately looking for other people to resonate with what I was saying. The Nocturnists is the exemplar of what that looks like for medicine, so when the opportunity came around to be a part of that, it was like, “Maybe there's something we can do to highlight the cool stuff we're doing down in Riverside.”

ES: You mentioned stand up comedy and Moth storytelling. Tell me more about that. Are you somebody who's super comfortable on stage? Or was that more of a reach for you? 

MB: The first time in college that I ever did stand up was a complete reach. My roommate signed me up for an open mic event. He knew that I was fascinated by stand up comedy and the people behind the comedy. He signed me up and was like, “Hey, you're going to do this.” I think that's another part – the accountability piece. There's somebody behind you lighting a fire. I tend to do some of my better work under pressure. It was a low stakes thing but it went really well. So I got to do more of it, even though it was never something that I was going to turn into anything real, and I didn't do much beyond college. It did show me that there’s a natural outlet I can use to express my creativity that I suppressed for a lot of reasons and only found out about by accident.

That pivoted into doing more spoken word and slam poetry. That’s something I identified a bit more with, you know, believing very deeply in overcoming inequalities and social justice. Stand up comedy people are very different from spoken word and slam poetry people. The Moth storytelling  event was a combination of those things. That was something I had set as a goal for myself, to go to a Moth event and put my name in the hat. This was my fourth year of medical school. I was in Michigan at the time, and there's a venue in Detroit called Cliff’s Bells that hosted The Moth. It happened to fall on a day that was personally important to me, the memorial of one of my friends who was killed when I was in college. Her name was Eve Carson, she was the student president of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I went to school. A couple of months before graduation she was abducted from her home and murdered. It was horrible. It was in the news for many years and one of the most deeply troubling events in my young life and at the time I didn't really understand the weight of it.

So years later on March 5th, which was that same day, there was an opportunity to do a Moth event. Months in advance I saw it and I was like, “I know I’m in the middle of rotations, applying for residency and all this stuff, but I'm going to put this on my schedule.” So I went and put my name in the hat, and they called me, and I did my story. It was great. I did well. They do the community scoring for the Moth events and I got a high score. It was validating to know that my story was valuable and worth sharing as a first gen immigrant or as a – I went to school in the Caribbean, which is often looked at as like a secondary pathway to becoming a physician. So when I first heard about The Nocturnists, I was like “It’s the Moth for physicians, it's the same idea.” And when the opportunity came across with the satellites, it seemed like a natural fit.

ES: The story that you told at The Moth – was it about Eve or your grandfather or something else entirely?

MB: It was about something else entirely. A story about a patient encounter that I had. A completely coincidental patient encounter. Somebody I took care of as a student in Michigan and then later ran into in Florida on a different rotation. Just the most fascinating example of how seeds that you plant months or years in advance, you never know. You know that quote from Hamilton? “Legacy is planting seeds in a garden you'll never get to see.” Then one day you reap those fruits and it's like, “Whoa, that is special.”  

For so much of my life I never shared those things. I went through medical school with very few people knowing that my grandfather was a Nobel Laureate in physics, or that what happened with Eve significantly changed my trajectory into teaching and public health. I never felt like what I was doing was worth ascribing to their honor. It was a mentor in medicine who helped me realize that the reason patients resonate with me isn't because of my clinical reasoning or knowledge or whatever, it's because I allow them to share with me, and when I do the same, it creates a synergy. More than just physics, my grandfather was a humanitarian. He did a lot of work to overcome science inequalities in developing countries. Many of the parts that make me who I am as a physician are because of my grandfather. Now I share that experience with other folks.

ES: You mentioned that your grandfather is on Wikipedia. What’s his name?

MB: His name is Abdus Salam. He is the first Pakistani to win the Nobel I think. Anwar Sadat won a year before as the president of Egypt for some of his work that he was doing in the Middle East. My grandfather was born in a village with no electricity and ended up discovering the physics behind what's called the grand unification theory, which is one of the more famous theories. He was a huge deal, and the idea that people like that can exist but without the right setup and then never get realized was the driving force of his life. He so desperately wanted to make sure that there were opportunities for people from around the world who because of political or financial reasons were not able to do that work. Using all the money from his Nobel Prize, he built a center for advanced science in physics study in Trieste, Italy, called the International Center for Theoretical Physics. This year is actually the 60th anniversary of him founding that center in 1964. He worked his whole life until it was tragically cut short by severe neurological disease. But now that is now the thing that I'm most proud of, within my communities identifying and fighting those same levels of injustice. 

ES: Now seems like a good moment to pivot and talk about the community in Riverside. Can you describe it?

MB: The Inland Empire, which is the name for the Riverside and San Bernardino counties, is a huge area. We cover from Orange County to the border of Arizona and Nevada. Just a massive area. As somebody who's from the East Coast, it's bizarre to have a county that's the size of New Jersey but with the budget of a county. It’s exceptionally hard. Driving from Los Angeles to Palm Desert, you're gonna pass through some flat areas, a little bit of mountains, and then you're going to be in desert, and then low desert, and then absolute desert and then back to some more mountains again. We're sort of in the middle of that, right smack dab between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, which is in Riverside County. I practice in a town called Moreno Valley which is adjacent to Riverside. San Bernardino is part of our communities as well, and has fallen victim to the same economic pressures. We are now America’s shopping cart. I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but we have more square mileage of warehouses in our two counties and probably anywhere, certainly in California, and I would guess probably the United States. My clinic in Moreno Valley is bounded on three sides by warehouses.

ES: This is Amazon type warehouses? 

MB: Everything. Amazon, Target, Sealy mattress, you name it. There's an 80% chance if you buy something online, at some point it's traversed the square footage of Inland Empire warehouses, which wasn't the case 20 years ago. The good news is because of the community that I'm in, there's been a lot of movement against those developments from continuing. The Inland Empire has a good mass of activists. But that's what you see when you drive. On my drive from my apartment to my clinic, it used to be suburban sprawl with some desert and beautiful mountains. Now those are obscured by these monstrous warehouses and the train. The back roads are all busy with diesel trucks and semi trucks. It's very loud, it's very noisy, in a way that it was not when I came out here for residency.

A lot of my patients can only find jobs now in these horrible conditions in these warehouses. It’s backbreaking work for very meager pay. They set up these ridiculous systems where they can’t actually get benefits because everyone is scrambling for these part time – you know, logging my hours, capping out at 30 hours a week. These very insidious, horrible practices which set up our patients for such poor opportunities financially, and then also health related. I've signed more disability paperwork in the last three years than ever combined in seven years before that. 

These are the types of things that drive me to anger. Where our community comes in is helping me take that anger and put it into action. That's something that I'm grateful for. They want to be part of that movement that says, “What can we do to make things better for our patients?” That community isn't just physicians, it's people from the Center for Healthy Communities, which is an amazing organization that's under the umbrella of the department of public health. It's run by Mark Wolfson and Michelle Burroughs who are public health professionals. It's an opportunity for people in academic spaces to connect with community organizations that are doing this work, whether that's getting grant funding, doing projects. UC Riverside is a community-based medical school. I often joke that nobody's sending postcards from Moreno Valley, but people are there for a reason. They're there because they care deeply about these issues and they want to be a part of change. Primary care in America is very hard. You gotta have something beyond just the love of the game of medicine to stay in it. 

ES: Can you speak a bit to your vision for this event? 

MB: We had our first planning meeting and even without sharing my vision, a similar thread came out: an intimate audience where people are sharing deeply personal stories that resonate with everyone in the room, whether they can identify with all parts of it. There's something there that clicks. The people who make up our community, physicians, patients, the community health workers sharing all the things that in a conversation you may get into, but in a much more sort of sacred space – a space that's made for sharing. That was the impetus for me applying for this. That accountability piece. How can I put my money where my mouth is and turn this event into something where people can come and hopefully have a regular opportunity, not just a one-off.

I was listening to a Nocturnists episode a few months ago when I was on inpatient. You were interviewing a palliative care doctor, Jessica Zitter. I was having so many a-ha moments about the siloing of palliative care. The idea that you have to have a specialization in palliative care to have an end of life discussion drives me insane. I want that for people from the community perspective. The difference when it's a live story is you have an a-ha moment and share your own story and get this beautiful connection. It just seems magical to me. It’s the antidote to anger. 

It’s also an opportunity to showcase what that looks like for the people in Riverside, San Bernardino County – which again is the neglected midwest of California. I grew up in Detroit. Talk about being an afterthought of America. The heartbeat of World War II and infrastructure for fifty years. We're sort of left for dead after many years of economic injustice. Those parts of your identity never really go away but you're able to transform them into something meaningful and useful. My grandfather is an example of that. The title of his biography is Cosmic Anger. Reading it as a kid, I didn't really understand what that meant. But now, I get it very much. 

For him the isolation never went away because he never got to return to Pakistan for political reasons. That broke his heart. For me, doing that work within the community that I have come to grow and love – I'm not from this area at all, I never set foot in Riverside before I came for my residency interview – but I knew instantly this is the place that I wanted to come. Hopefully, I'll convince some of the people here to share their stories. That's my goal. I'm just really excited about seeing where it goes.

ES: I am too. Thanks for sharing those stories about your family background and your journey in the arts. It was really great to chat.

MB: Thanks, and a shout out to you for all your work.