Bridging the Gap Across Disciplines and Professions: Crossing Parallels by Dr Chris Stout

Welcome everyone. This is the studio version of Bridging the Gap across Disciplines and Professions. Crossing Parallels. My name is Chris Stout and I'm the keynote speaker for this talk. It's good to have you all here today and join me virtually. I'll be discussing ways to work across and with many disciplines, methods to stack your work in order to amplify it, ideas and examples you can mimic and adapt to your work. And please note, advice is hard. So if you are more so focused in one area or a specialty or a subspecialty, this may not be helpful to your interests. But I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I am a big fan of Buckminster Fuller. This is a picture of him and some kind of a variation on his geodesic tone. I want to use him for some experiences I've had with him, but also as a great exemplar of bridging and crossing parallel lines and working in a variety of different kinds of disciplines. When I was an undergraduate I had a psychology course, an independent studies psychology course, and I sort of had the gumption. I had come from a degree in undergrad degree in architecture and knew a lot about Fuller from that and had these ideas that seemed to start to cross from architecture to psychology. So I got the Gumption up with the support of my professor and wrote him a letter. And to my thrilled, going to the mailbox, he wrote me back, which I thought was just sort of amazing. And it sort of just continued on with this part of my career kind of overlapping with interests of his and activities. And I was honored to be asked to do the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences entry on him. So. And continue to. I just recently got. There's a new book out about him just recently got that, and that's on my nightstand. So again, one of the things that I learned from Bucky, as he liked to be called, is something called the precessional effect. And I think that applies a great deal to some of the things that we'll be talking about today. And basically, in my simple minded way to think about it, is that the precessional effect is that in the process of doing one thing, something else happens to it. And typically that's a beneficial kind of thing. So a simple example is that a bee goes to a flower to extract nectar from it. But the processional effect of that bee doing that is that when it goes to the next flower, it pollinates it. So it's beneficial and a very positive symbiotic kind of relationship. And I think again, what I'VE experienced in my career and what I hope to encourage you all and inspire you all with some of today's stories might be the same. And I guess for me too, my primary training is that of a psychologist. I've spent the primary focus 51% of my life doing things that are psychology related. And I guess that's part of is that psychology in my head is really kind of almost part of everything for me. It's been the connecting thread that kind of stitched together my career and my activities throughout my professional and personal life. Early on, just before I got my doctorate, I read this article called Patterns of Accomplishment amongst Psychologists by Richard and Gottfredson and man, did it really have an impact on me. One of the lists that I printed out, pardon me taking a quick sip, was this table that I really kind of used as a bit of a blueprint for my professional career. And I never had really thought about it as this fourth year graduate student thinking about well, what are all the kinds of things that a psychologist does? It's not just clinical, it's not just academic, it's not just research. And these are some of the things and I'm kind of tickled, you know, of using that as a bit of a roadmap but also then being able to use it as a look back and see that I was able to be engaged in a variety of these kinds of things. And again, if this is your interest, I would encourage you to consider go to the APA. There are 56, I think it is divisions. This is a sample of what they are. You can go to them if you're a member of the apa. In particular if you're a graduate student. I would highly recommend this because you can get reduced membership fees and things as a graduate student. And it's really I've been and continue to be been in a number of them over the years as interests peaked and waned, but then also continue to be active in a number of them to this day that I'm still engaged in similar kinds of work. And to me too this also kind of spoke to the fact that kind of no matter what area these are, psychologists really fundamentally are problem solvers depending upon what that is. And this is a sample of a talk that I gave specifically on that. In particular for me, this is again just a sampler of a variety of the different kinds of areas that I've had training that I've had experience in from small degrees and exposures to very deep involve kinds of endeavors. So for me I Sort of felt like, you know, my career is something that's been called a portfolio career. I wrote about that in LinkedIn, and it really has been this wonderful, again, stitched together by the thread of psychology kind of career in a variety of different kinds of areas. But it shouldn't really come as a surprise because this is how I started off, really, as being Batman. So in terms of crossing disciplines, like this keynote is focused on, one of the things that I wanted to emphasize was kind of my initial foray into that up until this point in time, the context of this is that I gave a talk in Cairo. And up until that point, I had really kind of talked to ourselves. I really kind of just given talks at psychological conferences and conventions and lecture to psychology only students, graduate students. And this was really me starting to get outside of my comfort zone. Some of the areas that I was looking at, primarily policy development. I wanted to hear the voices of others from other disciplines, from politics, from political science, from linguistics, kind of, you name it, sociology, anthropology. And I also wanted to hear it from different cultures, not just a North American or U.S. kind of based perspective as well, too, a jingoistic kind of aspect. So I submitted a paper to a conference and it was in Cairo, and it went very well. I got a lot of criticism that was super helpful, and it helped me kind of formulate my ideas. It also gave me an opportunity in this crossing of the disciplines and crossing across the Atlantic, an opportunity to start to branch out my network beyond just all the different kinds of shapes and flavors of psychologists. So I started to have this wonderful, neat network of academics and people that weren't just in psychology. And because as you'll see and get sick of it by the end of this talk, I like to write a lot. So a lot of the things that I put together, it's kind of a discipline, I guess it makes me have to think about my ideas in a very specific, concrete kind of way to be able to articulate them to others. It's like teaching, you know, you really have to have the material down to be able to teach it. So for me, I had already been doing a bit of writing, and not necessarily in these kinds of areas, but I had a publisher. This was with Prank. And in the context of that, I called it the Integration of Psychological Principles and Policy development. And we looked at it in a North American and as well as a global kind of perspective. I wrote a few chapters in it, I think, if memory serves, about three of them, and then included a number of my newfound friends and colleagues from that Cairo conversation. So this was it was very beneficial. And maybe I don't know if it's necessarily foundational, but it was certainly one of the things that kind of help me move into a variety of other areas. And this is the start of one of those parallels, as many of you may know. SPSSI Division 9, which I'll talk about, and the APA now, SPSSI first and APA secondarily, but now both of them together have non governmental, ngo, non governmental organization status with the United Nations. And this was something that I had wanted to do. I was always in awe and deep respect of what the United nations, the kind of work that they did. And in that context, then I was able to I was living in Chicago, but I made this arrangement with them that I would fly in on my own dime once a month to attend meetings and to participate there at the UN proper in New York. And that went really well. I worked on something called the Copenhagen Declaration that was had been published in 1996. I was there in 98, 99. The aspects of it that I looked at it was through the filter of psychology. What are the behavioral and interpersonal and substance abuse and clinical aspects that might be weaknesses or strengths vis a vis sustainable development that had been articulated in that Copenhagen Declaration. Also through that process and the same publisher, I was put in touch with a dear friend, a person who's a dear friend now, Harvey Langholz. And Harvey had worked at the United nations through the while his time in the Coast Guard under Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State at the time. And the result of that was a book that he wrote called or edited and wrote the Psychology of Peacekeeping. And Harvey and I, you know, had hit it off really well. He has since left the UN by the time that I wound up there. So I explained to him kind of what I was up to and what I was doing. And some of the people that I was meeting that were doing similar kinds of work, some psychologists, but not all. And he introduced me to a number of the diplomats that he had been working, none of which were psychologists. Harvey himself is a social psychologist. So this matchmaking from our publisher, she saw the proverbial writing on the wall or down on the page, and it turned into the book called the Psychology of Diplomacy. And we wound up doing some talks and presentations together. Some of the chapter contributors, we would do symposia and stuff at apa. And it was just really a wonderful time. So this is kind of what I mean by stacking. There can be a Certain kind of direction and certain kinds of things that are additive to one wanting to go out and give this talk. That talk led to more networking, that networking led to a book and that was great. Similar with the United Nations. It was an experience that I wanted to have. It was voluntary, I was adding and contributing. I hope it gave me opportunities to talk, give a presentation at the General assembly, which was terrifying. And it gave me opportunities to get to meet other people that were like minded but different nevertheless, and brought diversity to my thought and my thinking and to my work. Then was able to put these kinds of books together, symposia together, etc. So this is kind of more so with content in particular and projects, I guess if you want to include speaking, but also can involve travel and others. So I want to dive down and give you a few more examples. So I was teaching at graduate schools in clinical psychology at a number of Chicago based universities, professional schools, and I was teaching primarily ethics in some of the programs and then objective assessment and some of the others. And one of the things I was starting to kind of see with this was that in ethics, a lot of the ethics was around ethics in practice and appropriate boundaries, etc. And one of the things with assessment was no one really talked about, well, what's a CPT code for billing for a Rorschach or how do you bill for a Rorschach? Or do you bill by test or do you bill by reporting, etc. Etc. So all mechanics and then who do you bill and how much do you bill? What if it's a school, what if they have insurance, what if they don't have insurance, etc. Etc. And how do you do all this in a, you know, ethical kind of way that's appropriate and doesn't, you know, has a risk management flavor to it and doesn't get you in trouble with licensing boards and what are licensing boards and how does that work and what's appropriate marketing and how do you not get in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission, etc. So I found myself starting to structure my notes in that way for my lectures in both of these classes. On top of the traditional learning about APA ethics and traditional learning about how to score a test or how to administer a test and those kind of interstitial, additional augmenting kinds of notes, I found that I started giving lectures like the IPA annual meeting on things like that. People liked that. They gave me feedback and criticism, those turned into ideas and it gave me an opportunity to then pitch to another Publisher John Wiley and Sons. This book called Getting Started in Private Practice. And that my publisher there introduced me to Laurie Cope grand, who had done a lot more in marketing and had that kind of skill and expertise that I did not. So she was a wonderful compliment and a great addition to putting that together. One of the things that Wiley likes is series books. So we pitched it as I should also say, I've never written a book for any publisher until I've already got a contract, and that's a talk for another day. But I pitched the book and pitched it as a series because I knew that Wiley liked doing series. So that wound up turning into getting started in forensic practice as me as a series editor with Eric Mart being the author. Steve Fairley and I put together personal and professional coaching. Getting Started and then time passed. These were good sellers. They still are today, which is kind of nice. My publisher came to me and said, you know what, let's have a second edition. This is doing so well. And I said, you know what, if I go to Amazon and I see a first and second edition of a book, I'm never going to buy the first edition. Why would I? I'm going to presume it's, it's dated and, and the new edition's got all the new good stuff in it. So I said instead of. And a lot of the things I should say also, if you're not familiar with the getting started in private practice, is that it's evergreen content, it's evergreen material. Setting up a spreadsheet and putting together business operations and doing contracts and stuff doesn't really change a whole lot from year to year or what have you. So I didn't want to, you know, I still want people to learn that too. You really kind of get. Need to know the fundamentals before you could get better. So I said, let's call it that. Let's call it getting better at private practice. So again, this time instead of authoring or co authoring, I edited and co authored because there's a lot of stuff then that grew like I didn't really know about SEO and website search engine optimization, website construction. I didn't really know a whole lot about sports psychology at the time, time, etc. But I did know people who were experts in that and who were friends and that were good writers and could bring their voice to this book. So that then evolved into getting better at private practice. So again, these were all beneficial kinds of things where I could go to my network. It helped me get a book out. It helped them add to their CV and be able to contribute. And then they could use these, their books and their chapters to do the kinds of work that they wanted to do in terms of promotion, marketing, etc. So kind of back to the United nations and this is where I'm going to start showing this little goofy sign of kind of parallels crossing in that context. So remember I did the UN 98, 99 and around that same time Senator Alan Cranston was doing work called Abolition 2000. And some of you, if you're as old as I am, may know what that meant. That was looking to abolish any kind of nuclear arms, et cetera. So obviously we weren't successful, but the goal was to kind of have that in a hard stop to be able to accomplish that by the year 2000. But you know, we weren't able to. And again Division SPSSE was very involved in this and psychologist for Social responsibility. I became members in all of those as already a member in spssi. And that then led to other kinds of areas for me to then start talking about peace issues that then sort of segued into when I brought in the clinical work that I had done with kids that had been traumatized into what then would evolve to the psychology of terrorism projects and stuff. So this was kind of my initial was leaning into the peace side of it, but then it also involved evolved into the other aspects of that as well. I was connected by back to Prager with my publisher and she put me in touch with Mari fit stuff and she and I then started to do edit and write three volumes series looking at global conflicts and peace. So the same kinds of issues vis a vis warring issues, nuclear war issues, nuclear armament, as well as more guerrilla and terroristic kinds of things. So again, all these kinds of things start to overlap but are done through a voice of bringing in diverse perspectives. It is certainly not a West knows best perspective in any of these books that I've done or that we'll be talking about today and really bringing in these kinds of things so that people can, the authors also can have greater audience that isn't necessarily just within their own specialties. So really for me man, it is books, books, books. I do enjoy writing, I do enjoy editing. And again this is books over the course of a, you know, going on 40 year career. So they don't happen overnight, but they do happen with a little bit more ease when they are part and parcel of a variety of things. Most people in the profession write books about what they have experience and expertise in, or can edit and bring in other authors and collaborate in those as well too. So again, I encourage you to think about this with the projects and the work that you have going on currently. So again, this is me in my library. I just really enjoy books in a variety of ways and I would guess maybe at this point in my career this is kind of where it starts to get complicated. So back I had taught at Northwestern at the Family Institute. I had a faculty appointment at their Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and was doing work there with John Lyons and Michael o'. Mahoney. Kind of back in the day when there wasn't a whole lot being done in outcome studies in mental health and psychiatry and psychology. Sorry, just getting a sip. And it was really kind of the early halcyon days of that. I mean very people, very few people had interests in it, etc. And this is actually kind of my foray into getting, getting connected back with Wiley, etc. And God got my head into that. It then also when you have outcomes and you start to be able to make some generalizations about kind of what works well with who and what kind of situation, etc. Then you can start to put together guidelines, treatment guidelines. So back to Wiley, I got involved with another series set of books called the Practice Planners. I worked with Art Youngsma and a variety of other folks, depending upon what the book was, Cam Helkowski, etc. And did some of these, contributed to, co authored some of the continuum of care treatment planners. These were great. They got translated into quite a few languages. They were digital and part of a software program, etc. So hang on to that thought because you're going to see that as one of these crossing parallels again. So in that era and a little bit after doing those kinds of studies, technology started to come to mental health and behavioral health a little bit more full throatedly. We had computer programs that would start to score your assessment data and be able to write reports for you. We had electronic medical records that now could track your data and aggregate your data and give you access to data and let you sort your data and do statistical analyses with your data much more easily. We had statistical programs, we had spss and others that were starting to grow and become actually a little bit more user friendly, etc. So I really felt, and I wrote this article talking about, you know, looking at outcomes in computers was really this wonderful, you know, collaboration. And I think my editors added the happy marriage, that's not, not my voice there. And I really felt like as things started to get a little bit more confusing and a little bit more complicated that I would do this piece about how do you make it through that maze with an homage to RAT experimental and running rats vis a vis technology as a clinician, as an administrator, as a researcher, as a code writer, etc. And I'll tell you as a personal experience, one of the other things I started off actually in undergrad as a math major because there wasn't such a thing when dinosaurs walked the earth of computer science yet where I was at Purdue, so I had a Dec10, I had Fortran as a code, I had punch cards and you'd run them on a huge I don't know what it was in evac, I don't know what it was kind of computer, IBM something or other and hope that it ran the next by the next day when you went to go check on it. And by the time I got out of graduate school, things had gotten a little bit better with regard to that. But I was terrible in terms of computer power. But I was terrified that I was going to misdiagnose someone that had come to me with symptomatology of depression, when indeed what they had was an endocrine disorder, for example, because a lot of biological disorders certainly present with psychological kind of symptoms. So I put together a very simple, not at all sophisticated kind of program to help me sort that out and it generally, in a probabilistically probabilistic kind of way, you know, worked and it helped me a great deal. And I thought, you know, this wasn't so hard to do even, you know, because I wasn't leaning into my FORTRAN and punch cards anymore. So I actually wrote a program this is very meta that actually writing programs is an non programmer was not difficult and did an article on that and then did a number of presentations and series on that in parallel with that time. T as everyone probably knows, the T in TED is for technology entertainment. I always like to think of it as good education and then design. So you can see where I would certainly go bonkers with this with my interest in architecture and undergrad degree and interest in Buckminster Fuller and those kinds of things, all things engineering, etc. So I was fortunate to get invited to Teds 5 through 10. And then Richard Saul Wurman, who founded it, excuse me, stopped doing them after his 10th Ted and got into doing other kinds of things. But during that era he then did a book called he's written a great Deal but he around information architecture. He did A book called Understanding usa. And I was invited to be a participant in that. And this was kind of taking all that data in mental health, looking at it from an epidemiological and occurrence kind of thing. Not necessarily a little bit of outcomes, but more so prevalence rates and looking at it in the context of how does this work in the United States, what are the rates, what does this look like, what are the most common, common kinds of things. And that really was wonderful for me because I could, you know, be a data wonk and get this stuff to him. And it was probably also for me maybe the, the tippy toe starts of what we now call today, you know, data analytics and data representation kinds of things. So because if you take a look at this book, it's densely, densely graphically oriented. It's hard, there's a lot of words in it, but they're not in paragraphs, et cetera. Not kind of what you're used to in a regular traditional kind of book. So that was terrific. And also then Richard introduced me to Dean Kamen and Dean you may know of, he invented the Segway, similar technology to this IBOT chair that he designed. Dean also builds helicopters. He built the world's first portable dialysis machine. He is able to create pharmaceutical grade water out of sewage. He's just really kind of an incredible guy. And so Dean and I nerded out and hit it off. And then Dean invited me to be part of his US first robotics competitions. Kind of like a little bit of science fair meets science fiction I guess because you had these challenging kinds of things of robots and challenges and teams of kids working together with engineers. And it was just really a wonderful heady time to be able to be a part of that. And having been a high school, I think, gosh, junior, senior and freshman or sophomore science fair kid, I really did enjoy those kinds of things. And of course this same drum that I've been beating throughout this entire talk and will continue to. I wrote about those kinds of things. I actually got involved in ieee. If you're not sure what that is, take a look. It's pretty nerdy, but got involved in that area and wrote some things, got published in peer reviewed, their peer reviewed journal. Well that then kind of teed up for in that era getting involved with the dot com boom and the dot com bust. It also got me involved with doing a lot of consulting in a variety of different kinds of companies and areas. Startups and brick and mortar startups and tech startups and academia and a of variety of different kinds of things, which was just really kind of a heady time. So if you remember back, not a few, not too many slides back, I talked to you about the Continuum of Care Wiley series and that got picked up by a psychiatrist that was working in the Department of Human Services in the state of Illinois, in particular, what was called the Division of Mental Health. And he recruited me because he wanted to be able to do this as a consultant, to be able to do some training around multidisciplinary teams and looking at all these kinds of things, treatment planning, treatment guidelines, evidence based practice, evidence based medicine, et cetera, and do it across psychiatry, psychology, social work, consumer services, and gosh, I'm missing nursing. So I put together a team and we through the course of a year did that training. And then after that training was done, it was very nice. He invited me to come join and become the chief of psychology for the entire state of Illinois, in charge of all the state hospital programs in which there were 10 when I first started. So that was terrific. We continue to like to write. Obviously, doing the training resulted in this article and then subsequent articles. This is just a sampler. I think maybe we did about close to half a dozen over the tenure that I was there, looking at multidisciplinary teams, etc. And being able to publish on that and talk about the kinds of things that we were interested in doing and were able to do. That also begat issues of leadership. I can't tell you the types and odd challenges and things that one faces when you deal with working in government with very limited budget budgets and politics and changes of governors, both sides of the aisles and everything else that went around it. We were also interested. One of the people I reported to is a fellow named Dan Lukens, who is a University of Chicago psychiatrist and kind of oversaw our department. And he had written a thing about leadership in psychiatric administration. And I was very much interested and continue to be within my early era of being interested in complex adaptive systems. And I took that kind of perspective and applied it to an article that he had written so in this same journal. So again, kind of taking the new stuff, adding it to what I've read, and then thinking about ideas and then trying to articulate them into some kind of cogent way. And again, taking that and paralleling it with giving talks. I'd done a keynote over at Loyola about leadership. So just great fun and really enjoyed all those kinds of things and all the people I got to work with. So in parallel with that, at the same time, I was actually also taking a sip here, kind of the psychologist voice at the health department in Lake County. There's a board of health that I was part of, and they formally had a psychiatrist who basically retired. And I'd done some things with Lake county before with some consultative aspects, and they invited me to join the board. And I worked on the board for 10 years until I moved out of Lake county and therefore, you know, could not be a member. But it was really a wonderful experience. Great people. The former director is now the chairman of my board for my nonprofit. It was just. Just really a. Again, a great parallel time working with other disciplines, but under the rubric of public health. And my bias is no surprise is that I feel like a lot of behavioral change. And what they would have is like programs like Healthy People 2000, Healthy People 2010, Every 10 Years, Healthy People 2020, and Google them and take a look at them. And I will challenge you that at least 50%, if not 80% of those, those aspects of achieving those 10 goals over the course of a decade, those top 10 things have some kind of behavioral, psychological aspect to them. One of the other benefits of being part of this was that they subsidized tuition and I was able to get a fellowship. We had a fellowship year that we could do in Leadership in Public Health through the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois, which was just wonderful. And then that also led me to some other kinds of aspects there in terms of shifting over to being then a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, also at the University of Illinois. So Department of Psychiatry versus Psychology is actually in the school housed in the School of Medicine. And that was kind of cool because that is also that half of the campus, as people consider it, was also where public health was and nursing and what have you. So that then also kind of closed the circle for me of starting out way back at Northwestern, doing outcome studies and whatnot, and then doing treatment guidelines and the practice books kinds of thing to doing a book while I was at the state and then also with U of I, with some of the other faculty there of this book called Evidence Based Practice that was published by Wiley. So again, just really that then begat. I got to talking actually with a fellow named Tim Erickson, who was very involved. He was a emergency medicine doc, toxicology specialist, and he was interested in global health. And they knew that I had an interest in global health prior to that. Earlier in this, my tenure, I was starting a nonprofit in the late 2000s called center for Global Health that I'LL end up with. And he was starting the center for Global Health there at the College of Medicine and invited me to give a talk. That was great. I really enjoyed it. And then he invited me to be an advisor and I got very involved with him. He's now at the Harvard Humanitarian Institute and Initiative, and he was replaced by Steven Wine, who I'd also been working with from the Department of Psychology, coincidentally enough, and had done a lot of talks and travel with as well. So again, during that time was the harbinger of what would become my center, my nonprofit 501c3, which I'll talk more about in a second. And then also since I'm giving talks about global health and working in a center for global health, did a book where I did my chapters and edited it and brought in other colleagues to do the book, why Global Health Matters. Jodi Williams, who that name may sound familiar, she and I both gave we were at the share the dais at that public health or global health talk there at University of Illinois, and Jody is the 1999 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with landmine eradication, and she was very kind to write the forward to my book. So parallel to that, on other days when I wasn't doing those things, I was invited to become part of the World Economic Forum. And again, that gave me visibility to opportunity, maybe it's a better word, to get to meet with just some amazing, amazing folks and I'm proud to call friends to this day. I've had them recently as guests on my podcast. And that also gave me an opportunity to get to learn that some of them were deeply involved with nonprofits and I could kind of pick their brain and learn how they did what it was that they did. Then kind of career shift out of all that, I was recruited into working at ATI Physical Therapy. And people are saying, you know, what in the what in the world? And my joke was that a linear regression is a linear regression. Data are data. They don't necessarily distinguish between if a person has a degree in psychology or a degree in physical therapy or orthopedic medicine or what have you. So I got recruited there to actually develop their very first department of clinical research and Data analytics, which was great. I went from a position in in the research that I was doing of being tickled after a year's worth of data collection, if I had an n of 100 and probably fairly limited generalizability to at the time When I left ATI, we had a throughput of of 23,000 patient visits a day. So I had databases at the time that I left that were in the like, you know, 2 million, 3 million. It was just really a heady, wonderful time. I was using a variety of different kinds of new statistics to me, and linear regressions and predictive analytics, et cetera. It was just really terrific. I really, really enjoyed it. I had such an abundance of data and because of kind of of the stuff I like to nerd out on, we created two patient registries. Here they are, I think they still exist. And even that I've left, I think they're continued to be managed by my, the folks that were in my department and in clinicaltrials.gov they one specifically on like sports medicine and preventive services, and the other is looking at treatment outcomes within a variety of different kinds of orthopedic issues. And again, this kind of got me into learning a lot of how you do harness big data and how you then take that and make probabilistic kinds of assumptions about outcomes, about what kind of clinician works well with what kind of patient, with what kind of circumstance. And I started getting invited to giving talks in a variety of areas, but more so to the intellect or to the information sciences kinds of things, which I really, really enjoyed and enjoyed the conversation with those folks. So in addition to these books and articles that I've been harping about, you know, I've given a lot of talks and a lot of presentations. A lot of these are available. I have a YouTube channel if you're interested in looking at them, or you can certainly Google and kind of see what's what. So as if that was enough, parallel and crossing disciplines with enough. I also like to climb when I could have that free time. One of my goals is to climb the seven summits. I was able to do three of them and then probably going to stall out at that. But I've also climbed Whitney and Rainier and Adams Peak in Sri Lanka, Pikes Peak with my daughter in Colorado, etc. This is me with a climbing pal in doing Whitney, which is the tallest in California, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. And one of the things I found with climbing and the preparation of it, certainly when you climb, you climb with other people. You're part of an expedition or a team, depending upon what it is you're climbing. But it's kind of a solitary sport, if you will. I don't even know if it's a sport activity. And I felt like I wanted to kind of have something to give back around that. So I developed something called Summits for Others. So every time I would go for a climb, I would do it better, would sponsor some type of nonprofit mission works, Warchild, once I started my nonprofit, then sponsoring Summits for Others or, pardon me, center for Global Initiatives and some of the projects in Tanzania and other things that we were doing then. So keep that in mind. I like to climb. So now here's a travel stacking example, since I like to climb. This is the tallest peak in Australia. And there was an opportunity. Again, remember, I like nerdy techie kinds of things, TED conferences and Buckminster Fuller and writing code, etc. So the Santa Fe Institute, and I was interested in complex Systems and Leadership, etc. Had a talk, had a conference that you could submit a paper for peer review to give us a talk in Auckland at a conference that they were holding there, Auckland, New Zealand. So I submitted a paper, the paper got accepted, I flew out to Auckland, gave my talk, had a wonderful time. Again, great criticism, super helpful kinds of things, expanded my network, got to see a little bit of New Zealand, etc. And then while I was there, I had made plans prior to. Because getting to Austin, getting between Australia and Austin and New Zealand isn't so bad, but getting to either one of those from Chicago takes a while. So since I thought, well, here I am, I had trained, I kept running, etc. Etc. I was kind of in a good position to be able to take this on. So I made arrangements to climb Kosciuszko, which is the tallest mountain on the Australian continent. So I gave my time in New Zealand, flew to Sydney, rented a car, drove to where Kosciusko is, climbed it. And I'd also gotten scuba certified during that prior to that time and had done some Dove the Blue Hole and Dove with sharks and night dives and whatnot. And I'd always, of course, wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef. That's one of the reasons, I think a lot of times people even get the scuba certified. So I then drove from Kosciusko after having done that climb to the area to hop on a boat and go out and do diving. So for me, that entire trip, it was like, great. I got to get another climb in. I got to go see the Great Barrier Reef and dive it. I got to give this talk and make some new connections. So again, taking one opportunity, but being able to expand it into doing these other kinds of things. Things as well. So again, parallel to that volunteering, also, towards the tail end of the 90s, I got involved with Flying Doctors. And I kind of said this is really kind of the harbinger of what I refer to as and have written about in LinkedIn. Becoming an accidental humanitarian. I should also say that, like, when you see something entitled like My Best mistake as a LinkedIn influencer, you're required to write a certain number of articles on certain topical issues. And this was one of their topics back then. So I put it together around what I call and like to even go by Becoming an accidental Humanitarian. I didn't take courses in this. It wasn't a career strategy or trajectory. It just sort of happened by my experiences. So my first volunteer trip with Flying Doctors was here. This is Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, where in the Gulf of Tonkin, where it's considered the Vietnam conflict started. And this is our commute with some of our in country indigenous folks. And you can see one of the docs there in her scrubs taking a picture. And because I. My clinical work was as a child and family therapist. I got connected with the pediatricians, although I don't speak Vietnamese. And we weren't there to do psychotherapy because I am pretty good with numbers and getting things organized. I was volunteered to put together the formulary for the donated medications and things that we had. So that was great. It was wonderful. I did that on a number of other trips in a number of other areas. This is actually a shot of me in Bolivia doing that at a men's prison where we were volunteering. So just really, again, kind of a great experience, taking the skills that I had, getting able to, to expand and work with that. But back to the climbing. So one of the climbs that. One of the first major ones that I had done was Kilimanjaro. It's not a walk in the park, but it's also not, you know, it's not Mount Everest by any stretch. And in the process of doing that, I met a fellow here. His name's Eloise Uru. He was a porter when I first met him in 1992. This is him now as a priest. And he was working his way through seminary. And he and I kept together, kept in touch, pen pals, literally ink and stamps back in the day and now continue to do so, more technologically sophisticated with email. But he and I were able to meet through that climb and be able to put together a kindergarten, which just was great. And we've continued to be helpful with them. Give you a couple more stories about that in just a second. But would have never met him. I would have Never gotten involved with my center in this project. Had I not just, you know, met him just somewhat randomly on a to Tanzania when I was first doing helpful work with him at his request. Not my pushing it, because that's not anything that I've ever done or that the center's ever done. One of my mentors said, you need to create a 501C3. He put me in touch touch with his wife. He and his wife both are attorneys and they gave me a lot of advice and support on how to be able to go through all the legal processes of that, the incorporation processes of that, the governmental process process with the IRS and Department of treasury to get to become a legitimate bona fide 501. And we've been been able to do that for since 2007, which has just been great. I was very much influenced. I had read the book by William Easterly, the White Man's Burden. And through that kind of. The title's an homage to Rudyard Kipling's similar title, but the Power of the Small Project. And a lot of what William Easterly talks about, he's an economist, is the fact that a lot of times organizations get to a point of being so big that their primary funding goes to maintaining their organization rather than necessarily doing the funding to the missions that they had initially been put together for. And so for us, the idea was that trying to do good shouldn't be so freaking hard. Being able to be helpful to others shouldn't be so complicated. So that's kind of what we've tried to be able to do with our look at humanitarian intervention. And basically we found that when people came to us, they kind of broke down into two categories. Two categories. Some people wanted to do their own nonprofit or ngo, create an organization. So we help them do that. We teach them how to, we give them the resources, etc, etc, and answer questions, you name it, we do it. Try or try to do it. And others who said, you know, I don't want to go through the effort of building a board, building a website, going through the irs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the, you know, the nuts and bolts that you need to do to be legitimate, do all that you still have to report, you know, do taxes, etc. So we just want to do the work. We just want a specific project. We want to help dig a well. We want to help create a road. We want to help, you know, whatever those things are. It's kind of a one and done project. And we help people do that too. We can do that being fiscally intermediaries or helping connect them as well. And we like to call that do it yourself or DIY here humanitarianism. We really feel, I really feel this is kind of, you know, certainly how I consider it is that it's a lot about tools. A lot of the things that we've put together on our website, you can go there right now, free of charge, all the time. No paywalls. There's a variety of things in the areas of free medical and healthcare guides. We've got a lot of work that we've done with the Hesperian Society, which is just amazing. They have all these books, a book for midwives book where there is no health care worker, etc. That are just fantastic to use and be applied or to use in trainings. There's also. We've got links to the Hesperian Wiki and you can get resources by language. We've got links there to APA's Division on International Resource or, pardon me, research, database resources, etc. Links to charity, how to an organization that I really am fond of and have used a great deal in my work with the center is fly for good. If you're doing humanitarian, international humanitarian work, you can't use it locally in the States, but if it's international, there's chances are it's sort of like a humanitarian Expedia or something that they can get you a discounted rate. I have used it primarily with Air France doing projects in Africa. I. I had one trip that really went sideways and had a variety of different kinds of problems. And they were able to get me refunds, they were able to get me rebooked. One of the other nice things about them, not just a decrease in your airfare cost, but also they can get you a plus one bag, usually internationally. You might be able to get two bags for free or one bag for free. Whatever it is, for whatever airline, they can always add another, which is great if you're bringing books or materials, etc. So links to connect with them or you can just, you know, check them out yourselves. If you have your own nonprofit, you can do that as well too. A lot of my talks and lectures and webinars and things also appear on that site. And then we have a Facebook group welcome to join it pretty much take all comers and post anything that's kind of trending and newsy. So this, this was a recent USAID and Harvard Humanitarian initiative posting that we do. And you can post in there as well too and comment because it's Facebook. We have a monthly newsletter on LinkedIn. You're welcome to freely subscribe to that. I think as the latest count we have over 127,000 subscribers, which I'm tickled about. It drops the first Wednesday of every month. And I also write in the area a lot of my influencer articles that I'm required to do when I can be open and do whatever topic I want. I tend to look into the area of humanitarian intervention and what I like to call open sourcing intervention. So I got a lot of articles there. There's the accidental humanitarian again, but there's a bunch there. They're all available once you get into one of them. Probably a lot of the links at the the bottom are there, so just Feel free to LinkedIn or take a look at that. I should also say that this PowerPoint is available as a PDF on issue and I'll have a link to that by the time we get to the end of these slides. So we also developed a podcast. We're currently, as I speak, in our fifth season and we really cross a lot of disciplines with cool people doing really interesting things, kinds of work in a variety of different kinds of areas. So if you're into podcasts, you know, please do check us out. We're on 35 different platforms, we've got a YouTube channel, etc. So chances are wherever however you consume podcasts, hopefully we are there. If if we're not, let me know and I'll see if we can get on there. But real happy about the RSS feeds and and YouTube and podcast podcast platforms that we're on. Certainly APA is a huge toolkit. I was part of SERP, the Committee on International Relations and Psychology and co chaired that committee for one of my three year terms. And we did books, there's book freely available downloadable PDFs there on doing international work, etc. So again, my focus tends to be more so international. If that's something you have an interest in, then take a look. Look at it. They've got grants two years like out in my early career I got grants to give in and help cover my cost to do international talks, etc. There's just a plethora of information there that I think more people need to know about. And of course big fanboy of Division 52 International Psychology. I think I know most everybody that's a member in past presidents and things like that, but just really they do an awesome, awesome job and very proud to be a part of that. Get their journal get their newsletter published in it, etc. So please consider the same. I also, when I did a postdoc at Harvard Med, and I specifically focused in neurodevelopmental behavioral pediatrics, and that was housed out of Boston's Children's Hospital, where I worked with T. Barry Brazelton and some other just amazing folks. One of the things that they've subsequently done, which I think is really cool on the global health side of things, is that they have a free, no paywall available. Boston Children's Hospital Health Map. So again, just in terms of tools, if this is an area you're working in, it's amazing. The filters and the functionality of it, and tip of the hat, it's free. Back to you, University of Illinois College of Medicine center for Global Health. One of the things I was always kind of frustrated with is that, like, I gave a talk at the Rotary years back after I'd just done a project in the Amazon, and this one guy said, oh, we were just in the Amazon, I just got back last week. And it's sort of like whoever you're working with, obviously the Amazon's humongous. This was Ecuador, but it's sort of like there's no coordination, you know, here Stateside. So when someone comes down, you know, us west knows best, you know, folks coming in like Mr. Magoo to try and, you know, be helpful or something where maybe where we've been asked or not been asked, you know, can create atrogenic issues and create more harm than good in the. In the long run. So I always felt there should be sort of like this one stop shopping to see is something else already going on here. If it is, then I don't need to help. Or if I've got resources, I'll give my resources to them and they can take care of it. And I don't need to, you know, to go down and muddy the waters, etc. So this is the start of something along those lines. I hope someone takes it and builds it out to be even more sophisticated and robust. But basically it's like a little project map and there's little codes for those little push pin symbols represent different things, but it's sort of like, hey, if you're going to go to Brazil or to Africa or to wherever, let's maybe click on this and check and see who's doing something there already. So this is one of the hospitals we're working with now with our partner there. And we have a program called Thrive. So in those respects, then people can Say, oh, there's already this going on. I'm getting ready to go to pardon me, Tanzania. Maybe I should contact this Chris Stout at the center for Global Initiatives. That center for Global Initiatives Blue writing there is hypertexts. So then you can be able to click on that and then see what we're up to there. We also big homage back to thinking about outcomes. How we started this talk is that we measure our outcomes with our key project partner, my friend Deloise in Tanzania, we started helped establish this kindergarten. We sent materials, let them know, you know, that the weaknesses of it in the sense of being couched in certain Western thought. Ask them to bring their cultural perspectives and make proper edits where we've got things wrong and make it theirs. That was accepted by the Tanzanian Ministry of Education, which I am just over the moon and one of the highlights of my career. I just think that's one of the best things in the world. We also, like I said, we got involved with this hospital that you just saw on the map. My friend is now chaplain at this and another hospital there. And 3ish years ago, through one of our volunteers, we were able to actually get them a Toyota SUV and it functions as their ambulance, which is really kind of kind of cool and amazing. I don't know how she did it, but she did and it's just really you know, kind of kind of cool. One of the things and we never, I should also say we never ever ask or we never ever tell them what we will do. We always ask what they need help with. And one year the hospitals were besieged with a malaria outbreak. Of course treated bed nets are the best thing, but once someone has malaria, the bed net doesn't do them any good. So we were able to do a campaign through summits for others and other fundraising and get the them funds there where they could buy in country the medications that they needed. And this is a sample of what that was. I also worked with Charlie Bressler with the Life youe Can Save and Peter Singer around the philosophy. I've got a podcast and just published an article, two articles actually on it on LinkedIn around effective altruism and the fact that your dollar US dollar can go so much further in a foreign country, especially Tanzania, than what you could do here and buying it here and shipping it there, etc. And this is a great example of it. So after this had happened, we found that they treated over 4,100 patients and the cost basically parsed out to for an entire protocol of care to be about 43 cents a life, 43 cents a protocol, which is just really amazing. So of course I had to write that up. If you want to get the details of that, check out LinkedIn. We've got an article for it there. From that too. And from my experiences primarily working with other international NGOs and being on faculties at two medical schools, I found that a lot of times when people are doing grants, people are wanting to do collaborative work, crossing disciplines, working with others in other kinds of educational settings, international settings, NGO settings, academic and non academic applied, etc. Was that there's a lot of help we can do, but it's hard to know who, how to find them, where to go, who's okay, you know, who's, who's solid, who's got a great reputation, etc. Without again spending a whole lot of time. I should also say too, everything that's on our website, other than some of the things that I've written, are publicly available. But the idea of coming to our website is that, you know, I've spent years putting all that together and organizing it. You can do the same, but you don't have to because you can come to our website and do that. So similar to this, kind of a cousin of it is the Consortium for Humanitarian Intervention. And if you have been in the Chicago School in Chicago, some of these folks and some of these images might look familiar because that's where this shot was taken at our inaugural meeting. We wrote it up, of course, and published it in Division 52's newspaper letter. So if you want to get a copy of that, it might be an academia research gate. If not, you know, be happy to. You can probably Google it and get it for free. It's not, I don't think there's any journal or paywall fees for that. If not, you just ping me, I'll be happy to send it to you. And then also, so we are growing. We've just added another entity to this, another training program, Prevail Academy to it and others. We have memorandums of agreement with these entities and continue to grow that for the consortium. So to start to get to the tail end of this long studio version is something I like to talk about, the new humanitarians. So again, this is really quite a set of parallels. The parallels to this was that. And a great example of stacking was that my publisher, Prager, I picked up the idea, they liked it. The idea grew. Whereas Wiley likes Ceres, Prager likes multiple volumes. So that conflict one with Mari Fitzsteph was Three volumes. The Psychology of Terrorism was four volumes. The New Humanitarian is three volumes. There are three separate standing volumes of books that are simultaneously published with different ISBN numbers. But every chapter is different other than the introduction. So the first one looks at global health inequities, the second education and relief, and the third sustainable development and social justice. And it's I think total about 45 different chapters. So the parallel is that I want to learn how to have a successful non governmental organization, a successful nonprofit, because I was building mine when this started. I wanted to learn from the folks I had met, met at the World Economic Forum, who had done really amazing work, how they built theirs. So I started to put this together and again the idea was just pitched as one book. But as I got into it, and I should also say mechanically, the mechanics of the book is that each chapter is a standalone chapter for an ngo. Some amazing ones that have been long standing like Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty and International Southern Poverty Law center. Others that were more not household words and startups and whatnot. I wound up putting, you know, my ideas about the new about CGI in it. So as it started to grow and started to get put together, I thought, well, there's a lot more out there than I can do and I don't want this book to be like 800 pages long. So it morphed into, you know, two volumes and then three. And then because I had day, you know, my day jobs, I went to Adler University and I know they had, I'd worked with some of their students, they had a practicum that people would do in social justice kinds of issues. So they worked in my non profit and I would get usually like a student trimester. But I, so I went back to the folks that managed that and I said, hey, I have this opportunity for a program project and long story short, I got four students, graduate students that came to work with me, explained to them what the project was and so they had informed consent like they wanted to be a part of this and said to them, you know, if you author the entire chapter yourself, after interviewing the, you know, the founder, the current CEO, whoever that might be, then you can be the author of that chapter. I'm not going to co author it with you unless I write it with you. And I didn't co author any of the chapters. I don't think memory serves. So they got to have standalone publications and a book, book chapter to their 100%, you know, credit that they could put on their CVS before they even graduated. They also got to have. They got to pick what company or what organizations and entities that they wanted to interview and talk with. So if someone really was nuts about XYZ nonprofits, you know, they got to be the ones to do the interviews and then they could develop relationships with those folks, see if they in the future could continue to work with them, keep in touch with them, etc. So it was sort of like this. I couldn't have done three volumes by myself in the time I could have, I guess, you know, it had been not fun for me and it would have taken years and years to do, but this turned out much more fun for me. I developed great relationships with these graduate students. It was really fun to do this. And I think likewise that they had an nice experience with the people that they got to do the interviews with. They got to author and co author. Some people wanted to be co authors of their chapters, the founders or whatever, if they also legitimately contributed to the chapter, which was fine, besides just being interviewed. So everything was done within appropriate kinds of ethical parameters for publishing, etc. And it was just really kind of a heady, fun project that I think is a nice example of parallels me learning kind of from reading about others and interviewing others to help myself with the foundation and formulation and growth of my center, but also then opportunities for other students and being able to have this kind of content stacking where we could build that. And obviously then I've given a lot of talks in this area. So one real quick example that I hope will serve as an inspiration and an example that you might consider as well. Well, one of the folks I had met lord knows where over the years was a guy named Bill Rosenblatt. He's an anesthesiologist at Harvard or at Yale New Haven Hospital. And one of the things he learned as an anesthesiologist in the OR was that a lot of medical equipment and kits would be open just for a few of the tools in those kits and then discarded. And he felt like, like, you know, holy cow, this is, you know, such a waste. So he kind of talked with the hospital and said, you know, hey, can I have the other materials that have never been touched, never been used on a patient, never been touched by anyone in the or, and, you know, get those to other places where they're needed. Primarily for him, it was Nicaragua. He had connections there and contacts there. And they said, you know, okay, but this is still considered medical waste. And I don't know if you know this audience, but medical waste has a whole different set of waste management kinds of rules around it. And those are things like that stuff has to be incinerated or stuff has to be, you know, dealt with it rather different than how you deal with your banana peels and coffee grounds. They have to be, you know, managed in a certain kind of way. And hospitals have to pay extra for that too, as you can imagine, because there's much more labor to it, etc. Etc. Etc. So if something has to go to, to a special landfill, that's not good for the environment. If something has to be incinerated, that's certainly not good for the environment. Hospitals overhead and costs, you know, certainly get, you know, trickled down to whatever, lower salaries for staff or more costs for patients or whatever. They don't just eat it. So there's all these other kinds of problems that sort of cascade along with a simple issue of medical waste of sutures and scalpels, etc. So Bill had to actually petition. He's not a political scientist, he's not a politician, but he was able to get the law changed there in Connecticut, where there can be exceptions and exemptions to being able to not have to incinerate medical waste that really wasn't waste. And long story short, he then got a number of medical students and residents, etc. To be volunteers. So there was no cost. And you can see them sorting stuff up there. He then got volunteers to give him warehouse space to be able to package these, which you see sort of in that mid shot with the black boxes and then being able to take that packaging and ship those kits off to his colleagues in Nicaragua. And at the time that he was in our, he's one of the new humanitarians in putting his chapter together. He and I were chatting and he said that he felt that he was probably responsible for 80% of the non durable medical equipment that was being used in Nicaragua. And I think he was probably being humble and modest when he said that. I'm guessing it was probably higher. So two points. One is Bill wins the award for the worst acronym ever for a non profit. I love the name remedy, but it's somehow being able to get Remedy out of recovered medical equipment for the developing world I think is quite creative on his part in the sense of the lettering of it. The other thing to Bill's credit is that, and that I'm using as an inspiration for you guys is that Bill saw a problem. Bill didn't say, you know what, I'm not in the waste management business, I'm not in politics. I'M not in global health. I'm trained as a anesthesiologist. I'm going to stay in my lane and just go, well, that's how it is. Bill's not the kind of person to do that. My guess is if you're watching this, you're probably not the kind of person that's that way either. So maybe take a look at the kinds of things that you're exposed to that maybe you see as a problem. And again, you know, I think psychologists are great problem solvers, that maybe there's ways that you can start to put a dent in it. Maybe you can't solve the whole thing, but maybe you can start to have an iterative process to be able to do that. Again, Bill's full time anesthesiologist and doing this as his nonprofit is kind of his passion project that he does when, when he can get it done. So in wrapping up, first of all, thanks for being a part of this. I hope you've stayed to the end of this. It. And it's just, it's been a hoot for me to put this together and I hope you've enjoyed it. I would encourage you to pursue, pursue what you might see as tangential interests. They also may be opportunities, and I bet they are additive and augmenting to maybe the work that you're already doing or the primary focus that you see is your job or your activities. See where there are opportunities, you know, volunteer. That's how I got started in a lot of these kinds of things with flying doctors and World Economic Forum, etc. Etc. Be open again. If Bill would have stayed in his lane, you wouldn't ever have gotten where he's gotten now with remedy. Be open to what possibilities there are. Be creative about it. Don't let one little hiccup or speed bump derail, you know, what you might be able to do with it. Always my feeling is, you know, be helpful where you can be helpful. Be an advocate, not an expert adversary, and bring, you know, psychology to the table in a very respectful kind of way. Even if there's other psychologists there like Harvey and I. I'm clinical, he's social. But, you know, bringing psychology to the diplomatic table for us in our experience, I think, hopefully I think and hope was a positive kind. Again, my bias maybe not a good fit for you, but at least think if you can't write like a journalist, but if you can just even start to try and write like a journalist, explore things, that's really what the new humanitarians is about other than the chapter I wrote myself about my own projects. But, you know, explore. And that's what I do. I try to be like a journalist when I'm doing the podcast and learning about what it is a person's done, their background, their origin story, etc. Or think and write like a scientist, investigate things, overturn stones, have theories and hypothesis that you try to disprove, etc. Or think and write like an essayist, tell stories they don't necessarily have to have a chi square in them someplace, they don't necessarily need to have 500 APA style references, etc. So maybe just think and write like a journalist or a scientist or an essayist. And if you're a psychologist, it's my belief that you have a responsibility to share what you've learned. And it's just, it's helpful for everybody and it's a good discipline to kind of articulate, you know, kind of what's what for you. And I think that can be done via writing. They don't have to be, you know, big treatises, they can be short little blurbs in a blog by giving speeches, by teaching a class, etc. These kinds of things just really help amplify the work that you're doing and hopefully inspire others as well. For me, because of my age and kind of where I'm at, I had the very nice opportunity to contribute my majority of my body of work. There's still a few things I'm still working on to a Smithsonian affiliate at the University of Akron, which is the museum for the History of psychology. I did this last year and it was really kind of fun. If you ever get to Akron, you know, be sure to check it out. It's really kind of a neat place there to be able. It's managed by a library scientist and psychologist who's just fantastic. And the displays and the things, you know, change over time and it's just always really kind of a neat, fascinating place. So as your career develops or if you're in the tail end of it, you know, do contact them. They probably would have an interest in being able to take a look at your body of work as well. So I'm going to end with pop quiz. That's the academic in me. Since I can't see anybody raise their hands or you can't answer this question I would have asked. I will ask in the live version. You know, who is this? Some people will know that it's Roger Bannister. My next question would be anyone? Anyone? What is he famous for? He's famous for the first person in the world to break the four minute mile. Now I'm a runner, I'm a bad runner, I'm a slow runner, but that I think is just really sort of amazing. But as a scientist, if you read a journal prior to Bannister breaking the four minute mile, there are physiology journals, biomechanic journals that were saying things like the human body is not made to be able to run a four minute mile. It's just impossible. That's it. Period, full stop. And it wasn't possible until Roger did it. So I'm, you know, that's always amazing. But the thing that I think is even cooler that just a month later John Landy alse shaved almost two seconds off Bannister's four minute mile. And after that, over the course of just a few years, 19 others ran sub 4 minute miles. 19. It just boggles my mind. So I just want to challenge you. Think about what took so long for this to happen. You may have your thoughts and I hope you do. My theory is maybe its limiting beliefs. Sometimes we get told you can't do this, you can't do that, you know, whatever, you're too young, you're too old, you're too this, you're too that. And sometimes we incorporate those. Sometimes you say this myself, you know, I can't do this. I'm, you know, I'm not skilled enough, I'm not whatever enough. But sometimes, you know, we need to get beyond those limiting beliefs and to experiment and to try. I've also found sometimes this co occurs with like what I call the pox of the untils. And that is that sometimes we wait until and it's like I'm gonna wait until I graduate, I'm gonna wait until I get my first job, I'm gonna wait until I get a house, I'm gonna wait until. Until. Until until. And then all of a sudden you're in your 70s or 80s and it's too late and getting that, you know, secondary degree or getting going off to Africa to work for the Peace Corps or whatever those other kinds of things are, it's really kind of too late in, the clock has run out. So I really encourage you to avoid the pox of the untils, which I kind of think of the way to do that is to try to work now for what it is that you want to do. Start planting the seeds for what you want to harvest in the future to avoid any kind of future forward regrets. So as a quick recap. Like I said, advice is hard. There's really no set fix rules around this, no specific kind of path that you have to follow or that you have to avoid. I've given you mine as just a simpler about it. And like I said, it's really a lot about tools. Everything that I've talked about today I have on my websites. So in the there's another this talk. You know, obviously you're watching it on YouTube so you already know about it. There's a companion set of PDF of the slides if you want to take a look at those. That's in this issue link down here. So do please you know, check out any of these kinds of things. Being more than happy to be of help if I can. So thanks for having me. Thanks for paying attention and being a part of this. Do feel free to reach out. This is my personal email, DrChris Stoutmail, and I wish you to go do great things. If you were in the live version, I'd be fielding questions now, but I'm happy to answer any. If you want to write them in the comments section or if you're too shy or they're more specific, feel free to send them directly to my email. Again, thanks and I appreciate you watching this. Take care. Of.