#a couple of years ago I came across another radio program where they were interviewing various danish public personalities

[lintillaarchaeologist]

“America has effectively built a Green Zone in our cultural consciousness, replete with the obligatory Maccas. Our imaginations, memories, and selves have been well and truly occupied, and the schizoid psychic agony of mainlining our nation’s duel nightmares is, more often than not, excruciating.”

I Should Be Able to Mute America

wake up cunts new nobel prize for journalism just dropped

[tdatdroleplay]

Hank & Lux - From the Beginning

This story was originally posted in May of 2020 from the Twitter accounts of @HisTeenDream and @RookByTheBook. 

Lux: [She’d spent the last four years in Houston, attending Rice University. And it was at her graduation in May that her father let her in on a serious secret. He had lung cancer. And he was getting sicker despite the treatments. He didn’t want her to move home, but she didn’t feel right about staying in Houston like nothing was wrong. Besides, she’d graduated and could hopefully find herself a job in San Antonio. She’d spent the day at the hospital just...spending time with her father. She wished that things were different. She wished she had more time, that she hadn’t spent the past four years away from him. But it just wasn’t...in the cards. So instead, during his treatments, during the times when he was having serious issues, sickness and even depression, he stayed at the hospital. So she’d spend a decent amount of her days there too. In between, she tried to take care of the house and find herself a job. Which hadn’t been as easy as she hoped. On her way home, she decided to pick up a little takeout from Blanco Café. She went ahead and paid, got the bag, back in the car and headed to the house. Pulling up, she got her bags and headed to the door. She went to put her key in the lock and then paused when the door simply pushed open.] What…[She had a sinking feeling as she pushed the door open and saw all the lights on, the place ransacked, a lot was missing, and the window around the back of the house in the living room was busted out. She didn’t bother going inside any further just in case someone was still in there. Instead, she dug her cell phone out of her bag and called the police to report a break in.] 

Hank: [He walked out of the office of the San Antonio Police Department’s psychologist. It wasn’t because he had any issues with discipline, or a head case...it was just part of his career path. There were three examinations an officer had to pass after he completed an initial interview if there was an aspiration to be a SWAT team member. And that was all he could think about. The first was the psychological exam. Then that was followed by the fitness testing and the skills examination. One on the books, two to go. He’d spent the last three years working as a beat cop for the SAPD and he was damn proud of that, but he wanted bigger and he wanted better. He was made for more than this. In the year before the academy he went through an accelerated degree program where he snatched up a degree in Criminal Justice. He had plans to apply for this from the minute he graduated high school. He had already certified himself in counter-sniper tactics, helicopter and armored vehicle insertion and was hoping to get himself enrolled into explosives, rope skills and crowd control if he passed his exams of course. But...that was the goal. And as he walked back through the hall toward the little station where he sat to file his reports, when he heard the Sergeant call over to him. “Page, get your ass back to your car.” He chuckled and nodded and grabbed up his keys.] You got it, sir. [He blew out a breath and headed back out. He knew they were gonna break his balls over this. Leaving the team to join another, but it’s just what he wanted. He spent a good hour patrolling his normal runs when dispatch sent out a call. “Possible 10-35. Subject location unknown.” His brow lifted, but when he heard the address, he grabbed the radio and responded.] Unit 8 is 10-76. My 10-77 is about fifteen minutes. [He set the radio down, flipped his lights on but not the sirens. His brow was furrowed. That was an address he knew all too well. It was the childhood home of a friend of his. And it was a place he visited often enough. He went there to help her father. Fix what needed fixing. Take care of the lawn, the flash ice storms in the Texas winter. And even he had to admit that things just seemed to be getting a little more worse for the wear. But still, he wondered how the man called if he wasn’t in the house and that troubled him enough to drive a little faster than was allowed through a residential district. And he had to wonder why he didn’t just call his cell. He cleared his throat as he pulled up at the side of the house and grabbed his radio again.] Unit 8 is 10-06. Standby. [He stepped out of the car, closing the door as he started to walk up the side of the walkway, the back of a woman with long blonde hair coming into view.] Ma’am? 

Lux: [She was standing in the yard, arms wrapped around herself as she just stared at the house. How was she going to tell her dad that their house had been broken into, their things stolen? He would want to come home, and he needed to be in the hospital receiving his treatments. Her dark blue eyes were starting to water when she heard the sound of a man behind her. Turning around, she saw an officer.] Yes. Um...I haven’t been inside. [She looked back toward the house, but continued to speak.] The door was open when I got home. And I...just peeked inside. Didn’t see anybody, but the place is a mess. So I just called the police and waited out here in the yard. [Turning back toward the officer, she figured she needed to introduce herself.] I’m Lux Wilder. This is my father’s house. His name’s Eric Wilder.

Hank: [That was a shock he wasn’t expecting. There she was. Lux Wilder. The girl of his teenage dreams. They were friends then. And had a few classes together. But he was quiet. She was friendly. He kept to himself, she went to all the parties. She was smart and beautiful and he was skinny and pale and yeah. It was no wonder she didn’t know who the hell he was. He cleared his throat.] I’m familiar with who owns the house, Miss Wilder. I know your father well and...you for that matter. [He looked up at the house.] Wait here, I’ll go and check it out. [He started toward the house before he looked back at her again. She definitely grew up. Still just as beautiful. He walked up the steps and used his foot to push open the door as he pulled his black gloves on and opened the holster clasp before palming his weapon. It definitely was a damn mess. Someone did a number on it and that just pissed him off. He called out to anyone that may have still been in the house.] Police. If there’s anyone inside, come out now with your hands up. [He went from one room into the next. Where the hell was Mr. Wilder?] 

Lux: [Her brow furrowed as he said he knew who owned the home, knew her father, and knew her. How the hell did he know her? She was pretty sure she’d remember someone who looked like a strip-a-gram cop. She was still looking up at him when he told her to stay there.] Uh...yeah, OK. [She had to figure out who this guy was. She tried to see the name on his uniform before he walked away, but she only saw a P before he was walking past her. She stood in the yard, watching him head into the house. He was a pretty big man, but shouldn’t he have waited for back up or had a partner? She bit the corner of her lip as she waited for him to come back out.]

Hank: [He cleared the entire house. If someone had been there, they were long gone now. He holstered his weapon and secured the clasp before he came back out, he had his radio up at his mouth this time.] Dispatch this is 8. I have a 10-24 with PD. Can we get someone out here for collection? I’m 10-75 with the caller. [He left the radio go and heard the confirmation. “10-4 Officer Page. I’m sending someone now.” He looked back at her and raised a brow.] I’m gonna need some information from ya and I’m having someone come out to collect evidence and process it since there’s so much damage. We’ll file the report and I’ll check with the neighbors to see if anyone’s heard anything. Where’s Mr. Wilder? [His brow furrowed.]

Lux: [She was standing there, staring at him. The radio said Officer Page. Page. She went to high school with a couple of Pages, but...this guy didn’t look like any of them. She was still in thought when he came over to speak to her. And it took her a minute to answer him.] Uh...yeah, sure, that’s fine. I don’t know how much information I can give. Can I go inside and see what’s missing? I…[She shook her head.] How do you know my dad? How do you know me? [She looked up at him, dark blue eyes studying his face. She had to admit there was something familiar about his warm hazel eyes.] 

Hank: [He shook his head.] Not just yet, they need to clear it. I wouldn’t want some kind of evidence unknowingly get destroyed because we’re moving things around. [His brows lifted.] It’s me, Lux. Hank. [He moved his pen across his notepad before he looked back down at her.] I guess I do look a little different. [He smiled.] I...see him when I’m on patrol. This is my neighborhood. And obviously /he/ remembers me. But I haven’t seen him for a little while. Is he alright? 

Lux: [Her full lips were parted as she just stared up at him. That wasn’t Hank Page. And then he made a crack about her dad remembering him.] No, I remember Hank Page, but Hank Page didn’t look like that. [She gestured to him.] Or...you. Uh...shit, I mean, Hank was small...er than you. And…[She snapped her mouth closed and shook her head, smiling at him.] It’s only been four years. The glow up is real. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. How’ve you been? [She would’ve hugged him, but he was a police officer and that might’ve been frowned upon especially since he was on duty.] My dad’s...well, a few months ago, he came to my graduation and afterward, he and I were out at dinner. He wasn’t trying to ruin the occasion or anything, but a few days prior, he’d gotten a pretty serious diagnosis. Lung cancer. He’s been in and out of the hospital lately. A lot of chemo. A lot of...problems. So I moved back home to try to help him. Not that I’m a ton of help. Unfortunately. And now I get to tell him that all our stuff’s gone, and he’s going to worry that his little girl’s staying in an unsafe place. And that’s the last thing he needs to worry about right now.

Hank: [He was about to make a comment about her when she said that her father got one hell of a diagnosis and his eyes went a little wide and that made more sense. He’d noticed the change in Eric and it was obvious now, but it wasn’t then. He just figured it was taking him some time to bounce back from a cold. He shifted his weight and shook his head.] Man, Lux...I’m sorry, that’s…[He was gonna have to process that too. He’d gotten close to her dad in the years of her absence. And it was no wonder he didn’t tell him. He didn’t want him to make a damn fuss over things. With that bomb being dropped, a few techs showed up to do some processing and he pointed them in the right direction.] When they leave, we’ll see what’s missing, yeah? We’ve had a bunch of kids running around causing problems. Vandalizing cars and stores and things like that, but it hasn’t been anything serious. So this most likely isn’t going to be anything close to unsafe. But we’ll go back in and assess and get an idea. But maybe just give it a little while for him to rest up before you break the news about the break in. When’s he getting discharged? 

Lux: [She shook her head.] It’s been hard. But he’s having a hard time with the treatments, and he’s also getting depressed a lot lately. [She sighed softly.] Yeah, that’s fine. I just mean, he won’t want me staying in a place that’s been broken into. And I guess I don’t really want to either. [She pulled a face and her shoulders lifted a bit.] Maybe I’ll just stay at the hospital tonight. [She shook her head.] I don’t really know. When he goes in for treatments, they really take a toll. He usually stays for a few days afterward until he starts feeling a little better. 

Hank: [He shook his head. Dammit, Eric.] Would you feel better if there were an officer outside tonight? [His brows lifted.] How long have you been back? Are you planning on staying or are you just here for what’s going on with your dad? [He tapped his pen to the page.] That’s not for the report. That’s all me. Being nosy. 

Lux: [Her own brows lifted.] Oh, you guys...I mean I’m sure the police have better things to do than babysit a scaredy cat. I put the wheels in motion to move home as soon as daddy told me. I’d already graduated, so I just figured I’d move back here from Houston. Try to get a job. I’ve been back for almost two months I guess. And yeah, I’m gonna be staying. [She smiled when he said he was just being nosy, a soft laugh spilling out.] 

Hank: [He paused on the personal talk for a minute, getting information from her, what he needed for the report that he was going to have to fill out and enter later, but he was glad when the tech team gave them the go ahead and check inside. He turned with her.] Don’t be ridiculous. The police enjoy getting the chance to sit outside of a house all night. We don’t get called for anything. We just...relax. Listen to music. Do rounds. Trust me. It’s a shift the boys love to get. [He winked at her then turned around toward the house.] Two months? Damn, Lux. That’s a long time. Didn’t wonder about your old buddy Hank at all? [His brows lifted as he pushed the door open for her.] Take your time walking through. Let me know if something significant jumps out at you as missing. 

Lux: [She laughed.] Well, then if it’s a cakewalk, you should take it. I’ll, uh, give you…[She pulled a face.] can’t be beer cause you’re on the clock. So...lemonade? [She laughed a little and shook her head.] Alright, anyway...my good buddy Hank never even offered to come up to Houston and visit me. My good buddy Hank never even texted. Or emailed. Or anything. And you know what? Good buddy Hank...you should’ve. [She gave him a nudge with her hand and then stepped inside the house. She was dreading this. Seeing all the things that were taken.] Well, the television’s gone. Computers. [She headed toward the kitchen, seeing the drawers open.] Did they wanna steal the damn can opener?

Hank: [He chuckled and shook his head.] Hey, I won’t charge the city. I’ll take the beer and I’ll take it in a pair of jeans instead of the uniform. [He jotted down what she said was missing, getting types and how many.] Can opener? Are you serious? [He shook his head and then decided to full circle that conversation.] Well, how was I supposed to know you wanted to hear from your good buddy Hank? I mean, let’s be real here. The /only/ thing you were focused on besides getting out of town was Cameran Taylor. Quarterback. [He looked over at her and pulled a face.] Which...just in case you’re considering sending him a, “I’m back” text...just don’t. He’s doing three to five for armed burglary. Knocked off Mr. Henderson’s Hardware. [He grinned.] I had the pleasure of that collar. [He wet his lips. Might’ve said he resisted a few times during that arrest, but it was justified in his mind.] 

Lux: Let’s just say you get the beer, but keep the uniform on. [She nodded with a bit of a grin.] It’s...well, we’ll say it makes me feel safer. [Was she seriously flirting over a burglary scene? She sighed.] No, can opener’s here, but they did take the Ninja coffee maker and the Instapot. Who the hell takes an Instapot, Hank? Who robbed my dad’s house? Betty Crocker? [She sighed, shaking her head and moving into the garage. She pulled open the door and shook her head.] All my dad’s tools…[She shook her head with yet another sigh. When Hank brought up Cameran Taylor, she rolled her eyes.] I haven’t spoken to him since my freshman year. He...well, I found out he was pretty focused on my best friend Megan. Needless to say, we’re not friends anymore, and Cameran...well, he hasn’t been a thought in a long time. [Her brows raised.] Really? He’s in jail? [She laughed softly, shaking her head.] What an idiot.

Hank: Idiot is an accurate description. He was “armed” with a flare gun. That’s why it’s only three to five. [He shook his head.] Tweekers. They’re looking for anything that runs. Anything that can get a few dollars resale. But that also means they’re less likely to come back. [He knew it sucked to be missing all of those things, but her dad didn’t really use those tools anymore. He brought his own when he came out to the house to fix something.] Megan? Really? I don’t know who that is. [He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.] Oh, the uniform’ll cost extra. [He lifted both brows and then stopped to look out the back window that was broken.] There’s no way to get this fixed tonight, but I’ll sheet it up for you. So none of the central gets out and keeps the damn bugs out. 

Lux: [She couldn’t help but laugh at the flare gun bit.] He never was the brightest bulb in the shed. [She sighed when he said that it was more than likely tweekers looking for anything they might resale on the street.] Oh God…[She hurried out of the garage, making a beeline for her father’s bathroom. And sure enough, all of his medications were gone. She tried to remember them all so that Hank could list them.] And yes, Megan. Megan Calder. You remember her. If you remember me. [She shook her head with a smile as they moved out of her father’s bedroom, which...his .38 special was missing too.] What’ll it cost me? [She looked up at him and then pushed her own door open, her room still much like it had been when she left for college. Her laptop was gone. Obviously. Her television.] Thanks, I appreciate that. I…[She stopped, looking around frantically.] Wait...No…[She looked under her bed and everything. It was gone. She sat down on the edge of the bed and covered her face with her hands.] They took my cello. How’m I supposed to get a job here now? It was hard enough already. Now I can’t even audition.

‘Hank: I’m gonna need the permit information for the gun. I’m gonna have to make sure that’s specially noted in case it’s used in a crime. [He shook his head.] We’ll make sure to get the pharmacy to refill what he needs and...yeah…[He was gonna have do some work around here. Reinforcing doors, locks. Security system. If she was staying and bringing Eric home, they’d have to have something in place. When she bent down and then ended up on the bed, he crouched down in front of her, setting the notepad on the bed beside her. He remembered Megan. He just didn’t care about Megan. He put his hand on her knee.] In the basement...your old cello is down there. [He wet his lips. He moved it when Eric needed him to take a look at the furnace.] I know it’s probably not what you’re used to now, but it’s something, right? 

Lux: [She pulled her hands away from her face when she felt Hank’s hand against her knee. She wiped under her eyes and then nearly bowled him over as she hugged him.] It is!? [She felt like she could take a breath. Yeah, it wasn’t the cello she’d been playing for the last four years, but it would work. Until she could get a new one. Or by chance the police found their things. She was just...wait...how did Hank know what was in her basement? She pulled back.] Hey, uh...good buddy Hank...how do you know what’s in my basement? I’m pretty sure you never came over and hung out in the basement when we were in high school.

Hank: [He felt her hug him and damn if that didn’t take him back to when she left for college. He wet his lips and then nodded his head when she pulled back.] Yeah, it’s down there. [He stayed crouched down for the time being, his elbows resting against his knees.] Well...that’s kind of a long story. Why don’t you get your things and grab the paperwork on the gun. I’ll take you down to the station, get that filed. My shift’ll be over by then and I can bring ya home and help...put things together here with ya. Sound alright? [He stood back up and looked down at her. He turned, pulling a tissue from the stand and passing it to her for her eyes.] After you left, I still kicked around the neighborhood. And since it was just your old man here, I checked in on him since I was still here. I helped him around the house. Mowed the lawn. Fixed the furnace. Cleaned out the garage. Did you know...that man is a bit of a hoarder? He kept /all/ of your grade school artwork. It’s...a bit of a problem. 

Lux: [She nodded as he said he’d take her to the station and then back to the house to help with the broken window and making sure everything was OK in the house.] Yeah, that’s fine. [She took the tissue from his and dabbed beneath her eyes. When he stood up, she went ahead and did the same. She listened to him talk about how he knew the cello was in the basement.] That’s sweet. You were always a real good guy, Hank. [She smiled when he said her father had kept all her grade school artwork.] Yeah, I can believe that. Dad’s sentimental. [She blew out a breath, not wanting to cry again.] Let me put my dinner in the fridge. [She walked to the kitchen, sticking the bag from Blanco’s into the refrigerator before she went to search for the paperwork in her dad’s room.] 

Hank: [He resisted the urge to say not good enough. She had enough going on and he didn’t need to add the butthurt boy from high school to the mix. But he wasn’t that boy anymore either. He’d grown up. And he’d gained a sense of confidence he completely lacked so many years ago.] Well, he’s a good man. And I enjoyed getting to hang out with him. He wrote me a letter of recommendation for the academy. [He chuckled.] He didn’t need to, but I appreciated it. [He walked her toward the door.] Lock up what you can. I’ve got tools in my trunk. I’ll take a look at what I can tonight. And I’m gonna have to grab something to eat on the way back. Definitely Paolo’s Pizza. For old time’s sake. 

Lux: [She was digging in her dad’s closet, trying to find the permit information for the gun that was stolen, and it took her about fifteen minutes before she could find it. Once she had, she gave it over to Hank and walked with him to the door. Making sure the garage door was down, the inside door was locked, and then the front door was locked, she followed him outside.] Should I take my car? [She looked up at him when he mentioned the pizza place.] Yeah, I’ve missed that place. [She stopped in the driveway.] Hey, Hank...I’m sorry. I should’ve kept in contact with you. I just...I guess I was just selfish. You were always such a good friend to me. And when I left, it wasn’t that I left to get away from every part of my life. So why didn’t you ever...you know...text me or anything? I mean I know we weren’t like...super close or anything, but we were friends.

Hank: [He shook his head.] You can ride in the front with me. It’ll be alright. You’re coming down to file a report on a missing firearm. It’s not going to take long. [He walked over, opening the door for her and closing it once she was in. He blew out a breath as he walked around to get into the driver’s seat. This wasn’t the conversation he thought he’d be having today, but he wasn’t minding who he was having it with.] It’s alright, Lux. You were doing big things. You needed to go. [He started the car and shook his head, checking before he pulled out.] Honestly, I just thought...you were gonna make other friends. And some boy ya knew in high school just wasn’t up on that college level, ya know? My whole life, I had one dream. And I’m doing it. But that took me in one direction and you were in another. I just didn’t want to insert myself in the new life you were trying to carve out. And...I didn’t have much to offer then either. 

Lux: [She got into the front seat of the cruiser and then looked at him when he was in the driver’s seat.] I’ve never ridden in a police car before. [She smiled.] That isn’t true. You were a good guy. You were smart. And you were always the sweetest. I just thought maybe you didn’t wanna stay friends when I left. It’s hard to stay friends with someone who isn’t around, you know? But you could’ve come up and visited me at Rice. I had quite a few concerts too. I should’ve invited more people to those. [She laughed a little.] I did make friends. But...well, they’re not around now, are they? Nope. They were around for the fun stuff. Not the tough stuff like my dad having cancer. Dad never told me that you were around. Then again...I didn’t...talk...to him much while I was in school. I regret that now.

Hank: Hey, don’t regret it. You talked. Probably more than other people that went off to college spoke to their parents. [He shook his head.] I should’ve. You’re right. But then...you would’ve seriously missed out on the big reveal of your good buddy Hank. [He looked over at her with a smile.] There’s all different kinds of friends, Luxie. People that come into your life at the right time for a little while, people that come into your life at the wrong time for far too long and people that don’t ever really stay away, but come when they’re needed. But no, he didn’t say anything. Then again...he didn’t tell me about having cancer the last time I met with him. So he and I have a conversation coming. I also didn’t know you’ve been back this long. And that’s probably because these past few weeks I’ve been putting in for a promotion. I was gonna surprise the old man if I got good news and now I guess...yeah. Does he have a prognosis? [He looked over at her and shook his head.] I’m sorry. 

Lux: That’s true. I didn’t even /recognize/ you. You look great, by the way. Hair cut. Muscles cut. [She laughed and then shook her head.] I felt that bicep. That is one serious bicep. [She looked down at her hands when he called her Luxie. No one had called her that in a /long/ time. She nodded.] Yeah, I guess that’s true. You know dad. He’s tightlipped about that sorta thing. Doesn’t really wanna let on how serious it is I think. But I think they’ve...well, it isn’t like a six month prognosis or anything. So that’s good. And yeah, you need to rake him over the coals for not telling you. A promotion, huh? What’s that about?

Hank: Yeah, I traded in my spaghetti arms for /man/icotti. [He laughed at his own stupid joke, but he knew it would make Lux laugh too. He could always make her laugh. That much he enjoyed. And it didn’t matter what he looked like, she liked his sense of dad joke humor.] Well, you’ll have to feel the other one. It’s just not fair to only get the chance to touch one. [He looked over at her and smiled.] Oh, I’m gonna. I would’ve been there more if he told me. [He shook his head.] Yeah. I’ve got all my ducks in a row. I’m starting my exams in the next few weeks. I’m really hoping I get accepted into SWAT. 

Lux: [She laughed at his corny joke, thinking it was pretty clever.] That you did. [She nodded as he talked about feeling the other arm.] Yeah, I’ll definitely do that. But you know...that’s just gonna lead to more questions. Like...are there pecs and abs under that vest or...I mean...who knows what’s going on under there? [She smiled, shaking her head and looking out the window.] Well, you definitely are the one who changed more out of high school. I mean maybe...no, definitely. [She laughed, but then raised her brows.] SWAT? Wow, that’s serious. That’s pretty intense. But that’s awesome. I mean...living the dream, huh? That’s what you wanted to do. Law enforcement. I remember how crazy Shane thought you were. He said no way Hank’s gonna be a cop. And I always told him to stuff it. That if I could play the cello for a living, you could do whatever you wanted too.

Hank: [He looked over at her, with his brows raised. And that was a side of Lux that wasn’t ever there when they were kids. That flirty little smile, the way she wanted to know more about his body. Not that he was minding one bit. He was more than happy to let her see whatever she wanted. Once again...high school dream girl. And seeing her now, that didn’t seem to change. Well, maybe the girl part. He’d definitely replace that with woman.] Hey, you’re the one that wanted me in the uniform. I’d be /more/ than happy to let you do some investigating of your own. [He grinned and then shook his head.] Jesus...Shane. Yeah, he’s still doing alright. Wife and a kid now. Yeah...SWAT. I’ve worked my ass off to get the opportunity. And if I’m cleared, it’s back to training, but it’s worth it. 

Lux: Hank...you’re making me blush. [She laughed, her hand touching her warm cheek.] The uniform’s nice. Accentuates all the right...areas. [She lifted her brows and then looked out the front.] Pretty sure it’s totally inappropriate to be flirting with the officer who’s...you know...investigating...filing....working...this case. [She dragged her words out with a smile on her lips.] I’m sure you’re gonna be plenty busy training and all that.

Hank: Well, then I’m doing my job, ma’am. [He chuckled and looked over at her. It felt damn good to put a blush on her face for the right reasons.] Why’s that? I’m a man, Luxie. Who happens to be a cop. This would be inappropriate if I said, give me a kiss and I’ll let you out of a ticket. [He grinned over at her.] Got any tickets? [He bounced his brows before he started down the road to the station.] Well, it’s a lot of training, but unlike going through the police academy which was 30 weeks of in-house training, this is shorter and I’m not required to live on campus. So it’s more of a nine to five that I get paid to do. A stipend actually. 

Lux: [Oh, a man he definitely was. And she felt ridiculous for even entertaining that idea. She shook her head with a smile, that flirting just spilling out before she could even stop it.] Well no, but you could write me one, right? [She made a little eep sound and then laughed. She tried to focus on what he’d said about his job.] That’s good. You know, not having to live on campus. You can kind of continue with your regular life. So...Shane’s got a wife and kid? I didn’t see a ring so...or maybe you can’t wear a ring and do what you do? I don’t know. Are you...married? Engaged? Girlfriended? 

Hank: The point is to not write the ticket. The kisses get you /out/ of them, remember? We don’t want a papertrail. [He chuckled and then wet his lips.] Didn’t see a ring on Shane? Oh..you mean me? Yeah...no. I mean, if you’re married, you’re allowed to wear it. Most guys opt for the silicone bands now. But I’m not one of them. I’m not married. Or engaged. No girlfriend either. I just never know if they want me for me, or they’re just using me for a get out of jail free card. [He chuckled.] I’m just kidding. Not about the girlfriend. Or wife. Or fiancee. 

Lux: [Her brows raised as she stared at him.] Listen to you, Mr. Dirty Cop! [She laughed and then shoved his arm with her hand.] Oh...is that assaulting an officer? You may have to frisk and cuff me, Officer Page. [She ended up laughing and shaking her head.] No! Not Shane! [She pursed her lips and shook her head.] I’m sure they wouldn’t be looking for a get out of jail free card, unless...who are you dating? [She arched a brow and then smiled at him.] Well, I hope you get all the things you want. SWAT. And any other promotion or thing your heart desires. You deserve that. 

Hank: Yeah, that’s exactly what that means. I think I’ll bring the cuffs and use the night stick. [He chuckled and wet his lips again. He was gonna have to reel it in. You couldn’t hide much in a uniform.] Hey, you know I don’t like bad girls. [He grinned.] I’ve always been different. So those good girls, that get good grades and grow up to be hot cello players. [He grinned and nodded his head.] Well, there’s a lot of desire in my heart, but...we’ll get to that later. [He put the cruiser in park and pulled out the keys.] We’re here. [He chuckled and got out, walking over to open her door.]

Lux: The night stick? [She looked at him with raised brows.] Is that what you call your…[She covered her mouth as a laugh tumbled out.] I...wow, this conversation has gone completely off the rails. [She shook her head and then turned to look at him.] So...my good buddy Hank thinks I’m hot, huh? That’s cute. [She had to admit that she was curious about the desire he had in his heart, but they were at the police station. She wet her lips as he got out and came around to open her door. Getting out of the car, she looked around.] Lead the way, officer.

Hank: [He nodded his head.] Follow me, ma’am. [He winked at her.] And for the record...no. That’s not what I call it. [He grinned as he held the door open for her to walk through it.] Who needs rails? Cute? [He reached up and clutched his chest.] That’s the kiss of death right there. [He walked up to the front and pulled out the papers she’d given him.] Gimme a sec. [He walked around behind the glass and spoke with the Desk Sergeant. He was behind there about four or five minutes before he came back out.] Alright, they’re gonna get that in the system and you’ll need to sign it, get a copy. I’m gonna head down and change and grab my bag. Wait for me here, yeah? 

Lux: Don’t you dare call me ma’am. No? Well, it’d be a good name for it. Just saying. [She shook her head.] No, not cute like that. Not like a baby holding a puppy or something. So no...it isn’t a kiss of death, but you sure are bringing up the word kiss a lot tonight, aren’t you? [She smiled when he turned to look back at her.] What? I’m not objecting or anything. Just pointing it out. Must be your subconscious. [She nodded when he told her to give him a second. She stood out there and waited, and when he said that they were going to get her a copy and she’d need to sign it, she nodded again.] Alright. I’ll be here. 

[goodnightkisseu]

Ong Seongwoo - Courage

Requested By: Anon ^^ (When you are both idols and Seongwoo tries to confess to you before another idol does) 

Genre: Fluff

Note: Guess who’s back~! After an uncalled for hiatus because of work and also because of prep for Wanna One’s concert in San Jose, I am back! Fueled mostly by my after concert feels, but I do want to try being active again. So on that note, here’s a new scenario! This was from a request I received a bit ago. Sorry for the wait on this >< I hope that you all like it! I’ll be doing my best to post more frequently, so please do look forward to future ones as well. Enjoy~

- goodnightkisseu’s admin <3

At the time, his plan seemed foolproof. Having finally gotten the courage to tell you how he felt, he asked if the two of you could talk and led you to an empty dressing room. However, now that you were standing there, staring up at him with those pretty eyes of yours, the words he wanted to say wouldn’t come out. All of his confidence and bravery evaporated in that moment and he felt like a shy school boy again. Maybe he had been too impulsive with his actions? Ah seriously, how did he get himself into this situation?

Actually, Seongwoo knew exactly how it happened, and when it started. It started right after he had debuted as a member of Wanna One. It was an incredibly exciting time for him. After so many years he felt like he had finally achieved his dreams, that he was making something of himself. During their early days as a group, he and the other members were constantly working, going on variety shows, doing interviews, everything. It was an experience that was sometimes a bit tiring, but also exciting and new. He lived for all of these new experiences. Honestly, he really thought that debuting was going to be the most exciting thing that happened to him that year.

That was, until he met you.

Seongwoo knew very little about you to begin with. He had heard your music before and it was nice enough. The little that he knew about you at that point he had heard from Daehwi. You were part of a small idol group last year, comprised of only three girls and had mild success as a group. However, all three of you shone in different fields all on your own, whether it be in music, modeling or acting, and after much debate and only a year together, your company had decided to promote the three of you as three solo acts, profiting off of your individual skills. You had continued to do music and happened to be promoting at the same time as Wanna One.

The first time Seongwoo met you was when he was rushing out of the dressing room, looking for paper towels after his water bottle had slipped from his hands in the middle of trying to lighten up the atmosphere, making a mess of the floor. He almost ran right into you in his hurry and when he realized what he had almost done, he apologized profusely. He thought you would brush him off, but instead you asked him why he was in such a hurry. Shocked, but knowing not to leave you hanging, he explained about the spill in the dressing room, which only embarrassed him even more. He figured at that point you would have lost interest and walked away from the weird guy that couldn’t seem to even hold a water bottle, but instead you told him to wait. You disappeared into the women’s restroom that was just across the hall and returned with a handful of paper towels, telling him that this was a lot closer than the men’s restroom of the kitchenette. Seongwoo, at a loss for words, quickly found it in himself to tell you ‘thank you’ before he disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.

Later that week the two of you actually met again at a radio show, the program having brought both you and Wanna One on as guests. It took Seongwoo a good ten minutes to realize that the two of you had met and then a majority of the program to remember how it had happened. When the incident came flooding back to him, he tried not to show how embarrassed he was during the live radio broadcast, instead busying himself with trying to figure out a way to apologize to you when he wasn’t being asked questions. After the program ended, he cautiously approached you while you were speaking with the radio host and apologized for causing trouble. But, all you told him was to not worry about it and gave him the brightest smile before your manager called out to you and you had to rush out to your next schedule.

The two of you had a number of chance encounters like this over the months, and the more that the two of you bumped into each other, the more that he wanted to get to know you. He had even gone so far as to ask his old classmate, Heochan, who was part of the same company you were, a little more about you. His friend teased him a bit at first, joking that he might have a little crush, but then told Seongwoo about your situation. He filled Soeongwoo in on your group’s short-lived career and about how you had been promoting on your own since then, really only having the staff as friends.

“We talk every now and then when we run into each other, and I can’t pinpoint it, but she always seems a little lonely, you know? It’s hard promoting on your own…” Heochan had told him once when the pair went out to dinner.

And somehow, after that conversation, Seongwoo found him attitude towards you had changed. Hearing that you were having a hard time on your own, that you might have been lonely, it struck something in him. It wasn’t just about pleasantries anymore, but rather than he wanted to really get to know you as a person, to be that person you could depend on outside of your staff. Your conversations became friendlier and not just about work. He found himself wanting to make you smile, wanting to make you happy, and it didn’t occur to him until Daniel blatantly pointed it out at dinner once, that he might have had a little crush.

At first Seongwoo had dismissed it, but deep down, he knew that it was likely true. He had grown fond of you through your conversations. Whenever he knew that you were going to be at the same event he would go out of his way to go and talk to you. Every time you had a dress rehearsal after him, he would always try to dance just a little harder, to sing just a little better, because he knew you were watching. Every time he made your smile and laugh he’d feel a sense of accomplishment and a sudden boost of energy. Every time you told him that you were a little worn out his heart dropped. Every time you opted to tell him a little more about yourself he felt special. So yes, he definitely had a crush, whether he was willing to admit it or not.

Everyone was urging him to just tell you how he felt, but he couldn’t tell if it was just because all of the Wanna One members were getting a little tired of listening to him pine for you. He was hesitant though. If the two of you were just normal people, working normal jobs, he would have jumped at the opportunity to ask you out. Thing was, you weren’t normal people working normal jobs. You were celebrities, constantly being watched and scrutinized. Sometimes even the tiniest scandal could ruin your reputations and he didn’t want to put you through that. Of course he had heard of a lot of people that had managed to keep their relationships private, but it was no doubt difficult and having never gone through it himself, he didn’t want to screw up and ruin your career. He did like you though, and he had a feeling that you liked him too. He wanted to make it happen, but it was going to be hard…

As luck would have it, or rather would have it, he didn’t have a lot of time to ponder if he should or shouldn’t ask you out. A couple weeks later, Daehwi informed him that he had overheard another idol talking about you, and it sounded like he may have been interested in you. Seongwoo brushed it off as the younger male trying to play him, until he heard it for himself. He happened to walk past another group of idols gossiping with each other and heard that a member from one of the groups was rather interested in you and he was practically proclaiming his feelings of you for the world to hear. Before Seongwoo disappeared back into his dressing room, pretending that he wasn’t eavesdropping the entire time, he heard the male say that his band mate planned to ask you out, obviously not having the same reserve and concerns that Seongwoo did.

He looked visibly upset when he got back into the dressing room, and instantly the other boys knew that something was up. This wasn’t his usual state and they made him spill the beans. Again, the ten boys urged him to say something because, at this point, if he didn’t, missing his chance would be worse than being rejected.

Still, Seongwoo couldn’t quite bring himself to do it, no matter how much they were practically screaming at him to do it now. And he really thought he wasn’t going to say anything…until he saw you conversing with that idol. He must have said something funny because Seongwoo saw you smiling and laughing in that way that always made his heart skip a beat, and for once, instead of bringing him happiness, it brought him dread. Dread that, if he didn’t do anything, he wouldn’t get to see you smiling that brightly at him again, that he wouldn’t be able to make you happy from the silly things he did. His dread transformed in a sense of urgency. He not felt that he had to do something, or else he was really going to lose you.

So, not really thinking it through and operating on just pure adrenaline, Seongwoo showed up outside of your dressing room after a music show, sending you a message that he wanted to meet up. You agreed and when you stepped out, already changed out of your stage clothes, and wow did you look pretty in such simple clothes. He shook his head a bit and got himself back on track as he asked if you wouldn’t mind talking elsewhere before leading you into one of the empty dressing rooms. This is where the two of you were now, awkwardly standing across from each other, trying to figure out what to do.

You, for one were extremely confused, and rightfully so. You had gotten to know Seongwoo pretty well over the last half of a year, and from what you knew about him, this really didn’t seem like him at all. He was usually rather bright and happy, always trying to make you laugh, even if it meant that he would embarrass himself. Right now he was showing signs of nervousness, maybe even frustration. These were things he had never shown to you before. Was he upset over something? Was it work related? Did he want to talk about it? Or was it something else completely?

It was really hard to read him in that moment, and overall, you were just really bad at reading people in general. Maybe… maybe you had done something wrong? Honestly, you wouldn’t be surprised if you did. There were definitely times in the past where you had been oblivious to how your actions affected others. Not because you had done it intentionally, but because neither you nor that other person had been very open with each other. You had gotten better at it though, at least you had hoped.

“Seongwoo…” you started softly, deciding to finally break that awkward silence that had fallen between the two of you. “Is everything alright? You seem upset. Did I… did I maybe do something wrong? I’m really sorry if I did…”

His eyes widened at your sudden apology. Wait, was that what this looked like? Well, he could see why. This wasn’t usually how your interactions with each other were. Ugh, why was nothing going his way today… “It’s not that at all, I promise! You haven’t done anything wrong,” he said quickly, practically blurting out the words. Wow, smooth Seongwoo, smooth.

“O-oh,” you said, a bit surprised by his response. “Then is it something else? You’re acting a little… strange…”

Great, now he was strange, but he supposed that he deserved that one. His sense of urgency was causing him to act in a way that he didn’t usually act. Why couldn’t he just be cooler about all of this? Why did he have to worry so much about it? It really was making him out to be strange…

Taking a moment to just reset, letting go of all of the concerns and worries that he had, and trying to act like his usual self, he took a deep breath. He just had to say what was on his mind. After all, the worse that could happen is that you would reject him, right? But it was be far worse if he said nothing at all.

“Look… I know that I’m acting weird, and I’m really sorry about that. I can reassure you though, that you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s really just me being… myself,” he started, his hand reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “I really don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it. I really like you. I’m not saying it as a friend. I really do mean that I like you… a lot. Getting to know you these past months has really made me happy. It’s all sounding super cheesy, but it’s true,” he admitted.

“I didn’t want to rush into anything because I thought we were still trying to get to know each other. But then… I… I heard that someone else was interested in you too, and I just felt like I had to do something? I’ll admit that this isn’t very smooth and my confession makes me sound like a lovesick high school boy, but it’s how I feel…” he added. This really felt like it was coming straight out of a teen movie, but… it had to be done.

A light shade of pink crept across your cheeks as you listened to his confession. You had to admit, he was right. You never thought that he would be like this if he were to confess to someone. You really thought he would have been smoother about it all, but there was something that was really endearing about his confession, about his honesty with you that you really liked. Yes, you felt things towards him too, and it was becoming apparent to your staff that would tease you about it. And boy were you glad that he said something first because you probably would have made an even bigger fool out of yourself if you confessed first.

“You’re silly,” you said through a stifled giggle as Seongwoo looked at you with wide eyes. “You could have just told me. You made such a big commotion by being so serious and pulling me into this room it felt like I got called to the CEO’s office because I screwed up.”

“I-it’s because I didn’t know what else to do, okay? I really didn’t think it was going to end up like this. It went a lot smoother in my head,” he retorted, getting even more embarrassed as you continued to giggle at him. “And I had a hard time reading you too. You just always look so happy talking with everyone. I couldn’t tell if you felt differently about me than others…”

“Well, would it help if I told you that I liked you too, Seongwoo?” you asked when you managed to stop giggling for a split second. You lightly grasped his hands in yours as you brought yourself closer to him. “I like you a lot.”

“Yeah, that helps…” he replied softly as he leaned down for a kiss, glad that he got the courage to finally say what was on his mind…

[musicmixtapes]

Halloween Mix (October 31 ‘18)

Happy Halloween to all my favorite witches, vampires and ghouls--This week's mix is pretty self explanatory but I had so much fun making it and think that it can be listened to even when it's not Halloween because we all have spooky hearts year round

Listen on Spotify

1. Witch by the bird and the bee - The beginning of this song with the xylophone sounds already sets us up for some interesting tones and makes it all the more spooky vibed throughout, which was automatically very ear catching when I first listened to it. But other than that, the entire love-lust-desire themed song of a witch entrapping someone in their spell and taking names without mercy is such a great trope for female empowered music. There are so many references to the "spells" "biddings" "conjurings" "hauntings" in this piece which makes it a classic halloween song. But I didn't find this during witching season, in fact, I discovered it over the summer which goes to show that it holds the test of time and can be enjoyed not just on this specific day (although I highly recommend it going on your own Halloween mix for sure). There is also another really cool instrumental segment in the mid part of the song where an electric guitar or string instrument of some sort is introduced followed by the step down chords of the synthesized creepy piano/string sound that is recurring in this piece. 

2. Ungodly Fruit by Wax Tailor - This artist, who I have featured one other time on a previous mixtape, produces some of the the smartest and most unique pieces that I have had the pleasure of hearing with unworthy ears. There are not many words in this piece and in Wax Tailor true character, the words in the song are samples from different films. The first lyrics heard are Sampled from Professor Alexander Siletsky in the 1942 film To Be or Not to Be. The second portion of lyric is sampled from the 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Listening to the extravagant horns throughout the piece along with the interesting harp and assorted strings woven through create a vintage love/horror movie vibe that perfectly aligns with the samples of the movie lines that are showcased. 

3. Black Magic Woman by Fleetwood Mac - Please for the love of halloween and all things magical, do not try and tell me that this is a cover of Santana's song because it is the other way around actually. His much popularized cover is quite fantastic, I agree, but there is something special and essential Fleetwood Mac about this piece that sets up the vibe of the band from very early on in the metamorphosis of the group. Now, if you are only familiar with the more recent group, you would be confused by this track because it sounds different and queen Stevie Nicks is not anywhere to be found. The group used to consist of Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and Jeremy Spencer before the grouping was changed to what we know now. Honestly, this song is just a prediction about the queen witch that would later grace the band, but also a desire song about a mystifying woman.

4. Monster Mash by Bobby Boris Pickett & The Crypt Kickers - If you have been living under a rock for every October since you were born, then you don't know this awesomely spooky hit. Otherwise, I'm absolutely sure you've sung, you've danced, you've enjoyed this graveyard smash of a song that has created a rippling effect over halloweens for over fifty years. I remember being in kindergarten at my Halloween parade and walking around showing off my angel costume to this song, so yes, it has had a lasting effect on me for sure. Lou Simon, senior director of music programming at SiriusXM Radio, says, “‘Monster Mash’ has timeless appeal. The generations who grew up with it have fond memories of the song from the ’60s and again from its ’70s renaissance. The familiar arrangement is uncomplicated and delightful. It’s just one of those records that wears well and makes people happy.”

5. The Boy With The Thorn In His Side by The Smiths - Ok starting this one off with a literary definition, just in case you don't know exactly what Morrissey is referring to... To have a thorn in one's side is to have something or someone that continually causes problems for you; my definition of this is when someone will not quit pissing you off and making life hell even if they are unaware of doing so, we all have one of these and they are utterly unshakeable such is the way of life. When asked if this song was inspired by Oscar Wilde in an interview, Morrissey replied: "No, that’s not true. The thorn is the music industry and all those people who never believed anything I said, tried to get rid of me and wouldn’t play the records. So I think we’ve reached a stage where we feel: if they don’t believe me now, will they ever believe me? What more can a poor boy do?" 

6. Leave Me Be by Beau - This is one of two songs on this week's mix that does not exactly conform to theme I laid out but there was no way I was going to leave it out because the sounds and emotions included in this piece is perfectly in line with the general feeling of the playlist. The singer's voice is so weird and unique, I have not heard anything like it before, but it definitely reminds me a bit of Lene Lovich's (80s singer) voice when she does those big jumps in range and pitch in the chorus of the song. I guess the voyeuristic image of someone bothering the speaker of the song and pestering her like an impetuous ghost following one around does conform to the theme of ghoulish natures and general halloween-ness. My favourite line from the song is the repeated phrase "All I ever wanted was just to be left alone/All I ever wanted was something to call my own" because me too... me too. 

7. The Piano Duet by Danny Elfman (Corpse Bride) - Sitting in the piano room of my college dorm in the East Village on a Monday night a couple of weeks ago, I was exhausted of studying statistics and needed something to bring me to a peaceful state of mind. At first, I tried playing other pieces of music, but they proved too complex for my muddle mind at the time. Then I came across this simple and wonderful piece hailing from the classic animated king of Halloween, Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. I was fascinated by the wandering notes that can be played with literally one finger which turns into this complex two handed piano piece that takes more time than I had to learn in its entirety. Danny Elfman has composed a lot of music for Burton which has become well loved and renowned but this short piece is striking and emotional for me. If you have the chance and a piano, you should play around with it because I think it is so satisfying to play. 8. Agony by Yung Lean - Originally I found this song in another version, one that was done by the alternative band Beach Fossils and I was hesitant not to put that version on the mix, but in the end decided the original needed to be heard and loved more. Coming from the Swedish hip hop/rap/emo/etc performed and artist Yung Lean, this vulnerable piece of music which describes how it feels to become unraveled is unrivalled by a lot of other songs about chaos that traps you in your own mind. What's more is that the song comes from a place of truth because the artist, Jonatan Hastard's (Yung Lean), spent time in a psychiatric facility due to mental health issues which were making him unable to live successfully. I think that it is so important that mental illness be represented in the music industry because it shows not only that having illness is okay, but that you can deal with it and get through it. So, thank you for showing us yourself, Hastard, and encouraging us to do the same. 

9. Skeletons (Acoustic) by Yeah Yeah Yeahs - How fitting for this celebratory day with none other than the queen of being spooky and distorted. In this track, the speaker asks her lover to basically tear her apart, to destroy her by any means necessary because she has already been destroyed by the love she has experienced. Now, one of the most important things to remember about a song that has very few lyrics is that the ones that are there, are there for a particular reason. The phrase "frost or flame" returns more than once, and it is due to the reference to the poem by Robert Frost "Fire and Ice" in which he details which way the world ending would be better. The speaker relates this to the way that her lover can destroy her: either by burning her or icing her out. I am going to include the poem because I love it so much: Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice/From what I’ve tasted of desire/I hold with those who favor fire/But if it had to perish twice/I think I know enough of hate/To say that for destruction ice/Is also great/And would suffice.

10. Femme Fatale by The Velvet Underground - I'm sure you've heard of this phrase before, but do you know why and when is became such an iconic phrase? No? I didn't either until I heard this wonderful song. This phrase has actually been around since the turn of the 19th century with the mass popularization of the gothic type of novel, but it resurfaced with this song in the 60s and has stayed relevant to this day. What I didn't know about the 'femme fatale' is what I found from contributors on Genius music (I use this all the time for insightful explanations): "Edie Sedgwick was an American socialite, actress, and model that came from a very wealthy and prestigious family. She was a part of Andy Warhol’s “factory” crew, and became one his closest friends and muses as Warhol brought her to fame." I think that this tribute to a friend and inspiration makes for the perfect song and gives a deeper meaning to a tale of a heartbreaker and 'take no prisoners' woman that is depicted here. 11. I Put A Spell On You by Annie Lennox - Classic. Breathtaking. Magical. Three words that describe this song and specifically the Lennox cover of this song. Something about the way the high chords of the keyboard are struck in the beginning of the piece is so gratifying, I just knew I would be in love with listening to this in the first few seconds. Honestly, and I never thought I would be saying this but, I have to thank whoever put together the 50 Shades of Grey film because that is the reason the cover of this song exists, which is kind of annoying. Nonetheless, it thankfully exists, and tells about a man who cannot be faithful to the woman who is telling the story in the song. So, she puts a spell over the man so he will not leave her and remains faithful to her instead. Despite having such amazing music to go behind it, this is such a wicked sentiment and fits perfectly with the season. 

12. Found Love In A Graveyard by Veronica Falls - This song is really, really sad. And I wasn't sure I was going to include it because it is really striking and makes me feel very emotional due to the intense meaning behind it. But, I think that music is, yes, supposed to uplift you and put you in a good mood, but not always. Sometimes, songs have a power to touch the things deep and dark inside of us that are untouchable by anything else, and this is a beautiful concept; sad, but still beautiful. The minor and eerie chords and drumbeat that start the song off with the discordant "ooohs" let us know this is not going to be one of those sunny, uplifting songs, but one of the darker ones. This piece can very well be about the literal sense of finding love in a graveyard with someone who is no longer alive, but I think it's about finding love in someone who is not present in one's life and wanting them so much but not being able to have them anymore. Listen with caution if you are already in your feelings. 

13. Zombie by The Cranberries - Let me paint a picture for you: it was summertime five years ago. A thirteen year old girl who was just discovering her musical genre for singing and listening alike stepped onto an outdoor stage in mid-June. The heavy guitar of a somber rock song come on and she begins to sing; surprise, the song is this one, and the girl is also this one who is writing to you. This song particularly has had more influence over my own writing and singing style than any other in this mix, both because it is beautifully metaphorical and because it is truthful to the point of tears in some respects. The song tells about the Troubles which occurred in Northern Ireland between the unionists and nationalists, the tensions and violence which spanned over decades and literally tore families apart. Dolores O'Riordan, the writer and singer of this song said, "This song is our cry against man’s inhumanity to man, inhumanity to child."

14. Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Not going to lie, I first heard this song and saw the scene performed when I was 12 and discovered the wonderful television program that is Glee. After that, though, I further investigated the chaotic goodness that is the Rocky Horror Picture Show and became enamoured with the explicit messages of open sexuality, breaking social norms and utter weirdness that makes up the show. This song is the most recognisable from the show, but by no means diminishes the other pieces that are performed. If possible, I really suggest either seeing a live performance or watching one online because all of the different characters, which you can hear in the recording are produced on the stage; the visuals make all the difference in the holistic experience of listening and I think in this instance, enhances the value you will hold with the song particularly the ever shifting point of views and voice sounds exhibited.

15. Werewolves Of London by Warren Zevon - First and foremost, all credits for this song being in my life go to my father because I have been listening to this with him since before I could write, much less write about music on a blog for my friends and family. Because it was such an integral part of my music experience from a young age, I enjoy examining not just what it means, but what it means to me.  The song is based on the 1953 film "Werewolf Of London" and if you haven't seen it, I recommend the viewing of this, because it's a really good movie, but either way you can enjoy the song separately because it stands on it's own. It describes and details a werewolf doing all normal human behaviour and a man meeting him and being like "wow this is really strange". Even just the first line of the song depicting a werewolf getting chinese food at the store is so funny and strange, and then talks about in the next lines a woman being mutilated by werewolves. I love the contrasting images outlined in this piece with such a simple 3-chord progression that is so catchy. 

16. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix - The distortion of the guitar in the intro for this track is so awesome, I cannot get enough of it and it is quintessential Jimi Hendrix  classic rock. Hendrix's gruff and raw rock voice comes through amazingly in this song and tells us a story about psychedelic experience of exaggeration with voodoo practice that was popularized especially during the 1960s and 1970s. The image of chopping a mountain down with the edge of one's hand presented in the first verse suggests that this is a drug induced experience in which the narrator is having an out of body vision of this happening, or so we can assume (I don't think Jimi chopped down a mountain, but who knows). As for the much iconic phrase 'voodoo child', I attributed this notion to the feeling of some of the African heritage and cultural spirituality that centers around practice of voodoo which has traced back through centuries. The intervention of God given to shamans or mediums, the servants of the spirits, results in a magic of spiritual nature. 

17. Blood In The Bathtub by Bonny Doon - I think the only scary thing pertaining to this song is the title and matching phrase that is repeated in the chorus of this low key song, but otherwise it is really of a loving, sensitive nature for year round enjoyment. Again, the guitar in this song is so present and the riffs included are indicative of some blues inspiration which is really nice and adds a lot of colour. As for the meaning, I ascertained that the speaker feels bad about his actions towards the end of his and the subject's relationship and is trying to explain his feelings about their demise. The aspect I appreciate about this song is that the speaker isn't trying to get back or win the affection of the subject, but instead agree that they have the right to leave and be lost or confused, which is a really valid feeling. The blood can be many things, but I like to see it as an impurity where the goodness (water) of the relationship was supposed to be. 

18. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) by David Bowie - I often find that this spectacularly strange man can describe feelings that we all have in surreal ways no one would think to, yet do it so precisely we can't help but love it. This is a description I found online for the piece that I think is really perfect and I couldn't say it better myself: "The song title was inspired by a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes ad campaign: “Scary Monsters and Super Heroes”. It describes the feelings of an obsessive man when he gets a shy girlfriend. Though his influence on her initially works out well for the relationship, it becomes too much for her. She soon becomes a recluse, leaves the man, and descends into madness, seeing all strangers as ‘scary monsters’." I love this thought of being terrified of strangers and can relate on days in the city when I don't feel like talking to anyone.

19. Monster by ALASKALASKA - A new song for this mix, which was hard because surprisingly, not many artists cater to the halloween aesthetic genre of songs. I impose the thought that we need some bands/artists that only write for this holiday and season because I want more halloween music, not just the same old same old. This song is not about making someone else the monster, but the other way around of someone making you out to be a monster in order to place blame and flip the script. If you've ever been in a relationship where someone uses an ugly aspect of you in and twists the conversation to make you look bad, you can definitely relate to this song. The electro indie sounds in this song which are discordant and not so pretty go perfectly in line with the songwriter's intentions of meaning, in my opinion. 

20. Which Witch by Florence + The Machine - A bonus track and a demo from the How Big How Blue How Beautiful album and quite possibly my favourite song from the album at the same time. This song makes so much sense coming from Welch because she exudes the witchy nature in every way and writes about pagan nature and deity folklore a lot in her music which is so outside the realm of regular music that we are used to, which makes her so likeable and a force in the music industry. This track describes a two fold witch trial: one in the realistic and historical sense of witches being put on trial for having sinister ways and doing unexpected things for women for their time period. The other is her having her heart put on trial for loving in a way that was not desirable from her lover, even though she never tried to hide what she was. Now that she is escaping from the relationship, she explains she has no regret for what has happened, no matter what the man says in retaliation to her opinions. 

Thanks for listening and reading!

See you next week,

Julia

[paleorecipecookbook]

RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy

In this episode, we discuss:

Burnout among healthcare practitioners

How common the problem is

The results of widespread physician burnout

The difference between burnout and moral injury

How technology is contributing to the problem, not alleviating it

How to fight physician burnout

Show notes:

The Paleovedic Diet by Dr. Akil Palanisamy

The Sutter Health Institute for Health & Healing in San Francisco

Unconventional Medicine by Chris Kresser

1440 Multiversity retreat for healthcare professionals

Akil Palanisamy’s website, DoctorAkil.com

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2MsScI1" title="RHR - How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy " artist="Chris Kresser" ]

Chris Kresser:  Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week we’re going to be talking to Dr. Akil Palanisamy, who is a friend and colleague in the Functional Medicine space. And I’ve known him for several years. He is the author of The Paleovedic Diet, a really interesting book combining Paleo and Ayurveda, a traditional Indian medicine which is an interest of his. And he also runs the Paleo Symposium that’s put on by the Institute for Health & Healing at UCSF every year, that I’ve been a featured speaker at since it started.

But today actually, we’re going to be talking about something different, which is burnout amongst healthcare practitioners. It’s a really important topic that has pretty significant implications not only in terms of the effect on individual clinicians, but on patients and their access to care, things like medical errors and just the healthcare system overall.

So if you’re not familiar with Akil, he’s an integrative medicine physician who blends his medical training with Functional Medicine in Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India. He studied biochemistry at Harvard and received his medical degree from UCSF and completed his residency at Stanford. Dr. Akil also completed a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona. He sees patients at the Sutter Health Institute for Health & Healing in San Francisco, where he also serves as physician director for community education. He’s been a consultant with the medical board of California for many years and as I mentioned, he’s the author of The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease.

So I’m really excited to dive into this conversation with Akil. I think you’ll find it interesting, even if you’re not a healthcare practitioner that’s experiencing burnout, because we talk about a lot of issues that are relevant to anybody doing any kind of work, really. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Let’s dive in. Akil, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so glad to have you here.

Akil Palanisamy:  Thank you, Chris. Pleasure to be here.

Burnout among healthcare practitioners

Chris Kresser:  So today we’re going to talk about a really important topic that I don't think gets enough attention, and this is physician burnout. So, and I would extend it to burnout for any healthcare practitioners. We might be focusing a little bit on physicians because this is where most of the statistics are available, but it’s certainly a problem across the entire healthcare world whether we’re talking about:

Nurses

Nurse practitioners

Occupational therapists

Chiropractors

Acupuncturists

Anybody working in the care profession

In my book Unconventional Medicine, I talked a lot about how this is one of the major challenges within medicine in general, not just conventional medicine, but also integrative medicine and Functional Medicine. And it's something that we need to develop a sensible approach to if we’re going to meet our goals in terms of preventing and reversing disease. So this is something that Akil has thought deeply about and has been involved in a number of different initiatives from his work at Sutter to working with medical students and other physicians to address this problem. So I'm really looking forward to having this conversation. So why don’t we start a little bit with the stats on burnout, Akil?

Ask yourself: Does medicine still feel like your calling? If daily stress and exhaustion are turning you away from the profession, you might be headed toward physician burnout. Find out what causes burnout and learn how to rediscover your sense of purpose.

How common the problem is

Akil Palanisamy:  Sure, yeah, I think it's really rampant, and most studies report around 50 percent or higher of physicians report some significant burnout. And that's up from about 40 percent just five years ago. So, I think the numbers are really scary and also this is a global problem. So this is across the board. Many countries throughout the world and also regardless of the stage of training. So medical students, residents, physicians, even the number of years of practice has no impact.

Chris Kresser:  Wow.

Akil Palanisamy:  I will check on this number, so, I mean, I know because I did my medical training 20 years ago, and it was like, I would say, a soul-crushing and exhausting process.

Chris Kresser:  Right, right.

Akil Palanisamy:  So I started early in this topic, and that’s why I’m so passionate about it.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. That’s really revealing in some ways. If medical students are as burned out as people who've been in the profession for 10 or 20 years, that's an indication that something’s already going wrong, even at that very early stage.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right. I came across a really fascinating study. They interviewed almost 3,000 medical students about burnout and 53 percent of them reported feeling burnt out. About 15 percent were depressed, about 5 percent had seriously considered suicide. But the interesting thing was 100 percent of the students, every single one reported feeling humiliated at some point, demeaned, disrespected as part of their training. And that had huge effects on their performance and judgment, and that was my experience too. It’s part of the culture of training doctors.

Chris Kresser:  It really is, isn’t it? It’s almost like fraternity hazing or something. I've heard for residents that it's … and it seems to be perpetuated for some of the same reasons, like this, “I went through this, so you have to go through it,” type of mentality. And I've even read the studies that support that.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, right. When I started my residency, I was super thrilled because they had just passed a law limiting the work hours, continuous work hours to 24 hours in a row. That was like a huge drop.

Chris Kresser:  That’s a big development.

Akil Palanisamy:  And I was like, “Wow, this is fantastic. I only have to work 24 hours in a row, like, every week.” And people thought that would solve the problem of burnout. But it hasn’t because that’s just one of many factors.

The results of widespread physician burnout

Chris Kresser:  Right, and so we know that there’s a huge problem with the shortage of primary care physicians. I don't remember the exact number from the study I shared in my book, but it's something like, predicted to be a shortage of around 50,000 primary care providers by the year 2025, which is not very far off in the future. And yet one of the costs of burnout, as you said, is that two-thirds of physicians know a doctor who is likely to stop practicing medicine or at least to reduce their access to patients, switch to concierge model, or something like that within the next five years as a result of burnout. So this is a real problem that's really kind of having an outsize effect on our healthcare system.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it is genuinely a public health crisis. And I think that that word is increasingly being used in the literature because this really does impact not just individual physicians but patients, healthcare organizations, the entire healthcare system in our country and other countries around the world. So I think the scope of the effects and the impact of burnout is being recognized now and it's huge in terms of not just the individual level, but medical errors as well. So, recent studies have shown that there’s a strong relationship between physician burnout and medical errors. And already medical errors are one of the major leading causes of death in the United States. And so I think as we get more burned out physicians and higher rates of medical errors, I think that's one of the big issues in terms of the costs of this problem.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, this is critical, and I highlighted this in my book. But if you go to a site like CDC or a general website and you search for the top 10 causes of death, let’s see what happens if we do that right now. Cardiovascular disease is still holding at number one, and then you’ve got lung cancer or you’ve got other diseases that come shortly after that. The data is often changing. Cancer continues to go up the list. But you’re not going to see medical errors on these lists, right?

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  There was a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2016, just a couple of years ago, and then another one by Barbara Starfield, who’s since passed away, back in 2000 in JAMA. And both of those found the same thing, that medical errors are actually the third-leading cause of death. And since only 5 to 15 percent of the atherogenic events are even reported, Dr. Starfield actually speculated that medical errors could be the number one cause of death if all of the atherogenic events were reported. So this is something you don't see on the typical list, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, exactly. Yeah, because when you experience burnout, the impaired judgment, lack of attention to detail, communication breakdown, all the things, the depression, that just greatly increases the risk of medical errors.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So this is a, it's a common problem, it's a problem that has not only effects on individual practitioners and their health and their lifespan, their feelings about their work, but also to patients and their safety and their ability to get the care that they need, and then to society as a whole. The healthcare crisis continues to deepen, and we need more doctors, rather than fewer. The fact that 50 … that two-thirds of physicians know a doctor who’s likely to stop practicing medicine in five years is exactly the opposite direction that we need to be going in here.

The difference between burnout and moral injury

So let's talk … so, we’ve been throwing this term “burnout” around, and I'm sure that means different things to different people. But you actually emailed me before the show with a really interesting distinction that I want to highlight—the difference between burnout and moral injury. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. So traditionally, burnout is defined as a work-related syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, a cynical feeling, and feeling like you're ineffective on the job. But this concept of burnout really doesn't resonate with doctors. I can tell you from talking to many of them that they really don't connect with this concept of burnout because the problem is you're pointing the finger at doctors. And you’re saying, “You’re burned out, you need to start doing yoga and eat granola, and just like change your lifestyle.” But you know, these are some of the most resilient people out there.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely.

Akil Palanisamy:  Medicine, I mean we’ve survived decades of intense training, sleep deprivation, the training process itself is incredibly stressful, the work demands. So these are some of the most resilient and resourceful people out there. And so I think the problem is really,  a big part of it is the system. But the distinction that you mentioned between moral injury and burnout, the concept of moral injury actually was first used to describe how soldiers responded to what they did during war and when they came back, having to do things that went against their morals.

In healthcare, it refers to physicians being unable to provide the high-quality care that they would really like to, essentially, not being able to be true to themselves. So I think the problem is not that physicians are burned out and so we don't care. The problem is that we care very deeply.

Chris Kresser:  Care too much.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Not too much, but it’s the care that’s causing the problem, yeah.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right and then as a result, in our current healthcare system, it's so hard to consistently meet patients’ needs and provide the kind of care that we envisioned we would going into medicine. Because most doctors think of medicine as a calling, and so that failure and inability to meet needs of patients in the way that we really envision, that is hugely damaging, and I think that has a huge effect on physician well-being. And so that's the concept of moral injury. So I think that it's really much broader than just pointing the finger at doctors.

Chris Kresser:  I think that’s really, really important to understand, and I've always made it clear that when I'm criticizing conventional medicine and its shortcomings, I'm not criticizing individual doctors. Of course, I might be criticizing some individual doctors, but not as a group because the vast majority of doctors that I have met are people that genuinely want to help their patients. They went into medicine for all the right reasons and they do recognize that they're not having the impact that they would like to have, and it's painful for them. But there's, they feel like their hands are tied because of the way that the system is set up. And they’re just as much victims of the system as the average patient is.

And I think this is a good example of how that plays out where we all want to have meaningful and rewarding work. We all want to get to the end of the day and feel like we really made a difference. And doctors, I think, especially. That's the path they chose. They didn't go into private equity. They didn't choose to go into a career that was really not about helping people, but more about making money or enriching their own lives. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. They willingly chose to go through a very arduous path that involves many, many years of schooling and as you said, rigorous training with residency, working 24 hours straight, often graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I mean, it’s an enormous risk to take, an enormous amount of investment of money and time and energy to become a physician.

So you don't make it through that generally, unless you really have a guiding moral compass that is pushing you through it. And so it's really, I think, even more important and critical that we figure out a way to, where we create a path forward for doctors and other healthcare practitioners that really do want to have that feeling at the end of the day. Because that's the antidote to burnout, where when you really do feel like you're transforming the lives of the people that you're working with, and you're having a huge impact. Because in that situation it doesn't mean you won't get tired and it doesn't mean you won't occasionally feel, “Geez, I need a vacation.” But you're not going to have that moral injury, and that’s what makes all the difference in the world.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I know, exactly. And I think that the rates of suicide among physicians is a real wake-up call because it’s twice that of I think active duty military, and then there was a report from the UK that there was a young junior doctor who, she took her own life by walking into the sea.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s not, yeah.

Akil Palanisamy:  Statistically, women physicians are a significantly higher risk of completed suicide than matched females in other professions. So it’s not uncommon, unfortunately, and I think that, yeah, exactly what you said about that moral compass that physicians have, I think being able to feel like you're true to yourself. That's a basic need that all of us have, and I think especially those who go into medicine, we feel that pretty intensely.

How technology is contributing to the problem, not alleviating it

Chris Kresser:  Right. And there may be lots of choices every day that they have to make that are, don't feel true to themselves because of the way that the system is set up. And I know from my own research and I know you and I have talked about this, one of the influences in terms of burnout has been the rise of electronic medical records or electronic health records, EMRs and EHRs. Initially these were hailed as, that this is going to dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork that doctors would have to do and they were going to be great time-saving and productivity devices, and they were going to be doctors’ best friends. But the reality has not quite lived up to that, has it?

Akil Palanisamy:  No, no. Yeah, I would, I think that studies show that about like half of the average physician’s workday is spent entering data or doing other clerical work in the EHR. So the amount of time actually spent with patients is less than a third, and for me I think it's a bit of a double-edged sword. Because it does make it easier to respond to patient messages rather than playing phone tag with patients. But on a typical day, I might get 50 to 60 electronic messages in addition to charting visit notes for each patient, and each of these questions or patient calls, etc., requires some thought.

And increasingly we’re being measured on how quickly we can respond to these messages because the priority is patient satisfaction, and that's eventually going to be tied to financial compensation and that kind of thing. So I think this EHR, it takes up so much time, and it really hasn’t translated to the reduced workload and that sort of thing. And when we deal with insurance in my practice, I think that's a huge benefit for patients because it improves access, and for Functional Medicine and integrative medicine, I think we need to move in that direction where insurance covers services. And so we offer that, but then it creates a whole universe of responsibilities in terms of the paperwork, the criteria for each progress note when we’re billing insurance, the forms, the prior authorizations, the other kind of paperwork. So it just adds another layer of paperwork to everything else that we’re dealing with in terms of the EHR every day.

Chris Kresser:  Yes. And then there’s another issue of when you're actually in the room with the patient, that connection that you're trying to make with the patient is now being mediated by a computer screen and having to type into the computer. And we’ve all seen, I've heard many stories of people going to doctors and complaining that their doctor was hardly even looking at them because they were working on the computer the entire time, and this is especially true with younger doctors from what I've heard, who never operated without an EHR.

So they never had the experience of being in a visit with the patient without the computer being part of that. And I think with all the data that we now have in terms of how important the physician-patient relationship is to the outcomes in care and the research on the placebo effect, and just the, in Carl Rogers's words, the unconditional positive regard and the type of connection that is made just is therapeutic in its own right. And I think the EHR can compromise that in some ways.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. And I'm always torn because I want to maintain good eye contact and really be present with each patient, but then if I don’t touch the EHR at all, then at the end of the day I’m like, this one’s like …

Chris Kresser:  You’ve got eight more hours of work.

Akil Palanisamy:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  It’s really challenging, and, I mean, my solution to that, which is not possible for everybody because of the model I work independently, so I’m able to just kind of set things up how I want. But I have a nurse practitioner that's by my side at every appointment, and she takes the notes. So I'm able to just maintain eye contact with my patient and not really look at the computer. And I recognize that's not a viable solution for most practitioners, but it's something that I felt compelled to do because I, like you, didn't want to get home and do four hours of data entry into the EHR after a full day of seeing patients. And but I didn't also want to sacrifice the connection with the patient.

So I think the other thing that's also not always in an individual physician’s control is the quality of the EHR or the EMR system. So many of them are just completely bloated and full of functions that they'll never use, and just really difficult to navigate, and they’re a nightmare in terms of software development. They’ve been just sort of cobbled together and put on top of each other, and it’s, for anyone who likes software and technology, EMR software is not going to be particularly inspiring for the most part.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yes, yeah. No, I think you’re right on that. And the point about having additional support for progress notes, I think, is a good one because studies show that having some type of help with the charting actually reduces burnout, and it's obvious, right? And I think at Sutter Health where I work, they really take burnout quite seriously. And so they’ve supported having scribes, which is the same thing. They take notes and they kind of do everything, and you just have to sign the note.

So I think it’s really, it’s a shared issue with burnout between individuals and healthcare systems and organizations. So I think it’s very important that all of these systems realize they have an important role to play, and I think Sutter Health is a really great example of that. They've supported a lot of these changes, and like this example of scribes and with our EHR, which is Epic, just helping us to use it in the most efficient way possible. So I think systemic changes are really a huge part of the solution as well.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, and this is a recurring theme in this conversation. It's that individual physicians can only do so much when they're employed in a larger organization, and they’re not free to just do whatever they want. And so we have to continue to work to raise awareness institutionally about these issues so that the institutions themselves can make the changes, and then individual physicians will benefit from those.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

How to fight physician burnout

Chris Kresser:  So let's talk a little bit about some of the work you've done in the past with medical students and other doctors at Sutter on burnout. What kind of things have you done to approach this?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think for me during medical school, it was really a survival mechanism. Because I was pretty burned out and the training, yes, I absolutely had that being belittled and demeaned when I was on the wards in my rotations. And so I really got interested in the certain classes that were offered on finding meaning in medicine and really connecting with your purpose or actually reconnecting with why you went into medicine, and keeping that front and center. And also developing tools for maintaining well-being like mindfulness.

So mindfulness is one thing that has been studied. There’s actually been about 14 studies looking at physician burnout and mindfulness, and nine of them have shown positive outcome in terms of:

Reducing burnout

Improving well-being

Improving mood

Improving resiliency

So I think, I don't think that's the entire solution, but the more tools you have in your toolkit, the better. And we don't really get any training in general in terms of how to deal with stress and how to manage emotions during our healthcare training. And so I think I got into mindfulness very early, studied MBSR, developed a daily meditation practice, became involved in educational programs teaching people about mindfulness. And then since … then during residency and now practice, after that I've been very interested in workshops and events that kind of focus on that aspect of meaning and really reconnecting with a sense of purpose, a sense of direction. Kind of helping people be true to themselves.

And so I think small group exercises and workshops where people are getting out of their left brain and reconnecting with their right brain, using art and things like that, have been really effective. So for me, I've benefited as much as I’ve helped anybody in this work, and it's been just partly for my own gains, but I think you teach what you have to learn. And for me, being involved in burnout and teaching people about it has been a lifesaver.

Chris Kresser:  That’s so great. I think all of those are fantastic tools for kind of exploring the causes of burnout on an individual level and helping people respond in a way that will reduce the risk of moral injury, if we will. And I know for me, one of the ways that I've approached this personally and also with people that I've worked with and that I’ve trained is just to make sure that I feel like the work I'm doing is having a big impact on my patient’s lives. Because that’s one of the reasons I really love that distinction that you make between burnout and moral injury. Because if I look at it that way, I think, “Okay, well, that's the biggest risk is just getting to the end of the day and feeling like I'm not making a difference. Feeling like all of my efforts are for naught really. Or they’re not really having the impact that I would like them to have.” And to me, that's the greatest risk in terms of burning out. When I know that my work is making a difference, my endurance and stamina are considerable.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Use Functional Medicine to prevent it

Chris Kresser:  But when I don't feel that way, it doesn't take much to make me feel tired and like what I'm doing is not worth it. So this is, I think, where a Functional Medicine approach has a lot to offer, not just as a treatment modality, but as a means of really actually making a difference in the patients’ lives. Like getting to the root cause of the problem and actually addressing the problem and helping the patient to recover and feel better without the use of unnecessary drugs and surgery. For me that was one of the most appealing things about Functional Medicine, and I think it's one of the less talked about but most important gifts that it has to offer to individual physicians who shift their practice in that direction.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think that's what motivated me to go into Functional Medicine as well, just to get that sense of fulfillment and satisfaction when you help someone really get a permanent solution to something and by uncovering the root causes and taking that holistic approach. So I think that's what drew me to Functional Medicine as well.

Schedule a retreat

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So another area where I know, or a kind of antidote to burnout that I know that you and I are both passionate about is a retreat. So I've been a big believer in retreat. I’ve done annual retreats myself for many years. I’ve done meditation retreats for about 25 years and I just can't really imagine my life without that opportunity to step away from my day-to-day life and experience and to get a different perspective, to slow down, to have more spacious existence for a few days were the busyness of life is not overtaking me and where I can just hear myself think and feel my body, and just look at things from a fresh perspective. It's just crucial for me. And I've always felt like my wish has been that others can experience this. That we can, because I really believe in its transformative power.

Connect with colleagues

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. I do as well, and I’ve had a number of retreats over the years in terms of individual retreats and also group retreats. And especially in the professional setting, I find that ability to connect with other colleagues and professionals in that informal, nonwork setting is so powerful because in healthcare there's so much isolation. There are so many individual silos.

Everybody's just doing their thing trying to get through the day, and you rarely have a chance to step back and step out of that situation to just really deeply connect with people who are in the same boat and really understand what they're going through, share their story, listen to their stories, and really deepen your connection and solve problems together.

So I think that sort of deep connection is so important because that's like a huge need for all human beings, and especially in such an isolating profession like in healthcare. I think it's essential.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, yeah. So many clinicians can just spend, we spend most of our time in a room with patients and we’re interacting with patients, but we’re not, we’re interacting with them in a certain way. We’re playing a certain role. We’re the clinician, they’re the patient, and those can be rich and rewarding interactions. But it's not the same as connecting with other colleagues and being able to talk about the issues that we face professionally and share together. So yeah I think that group experience is really powerful. And I’ve been writing about this recently.

I’ve been sharing some book recommendations, and Akil and I have actually teamed up to offer a retreat for healthcare practitioners at 1440 Multiversity in October. It’s from October 5th to 7th this year. And so it starts on Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and it goes through Sunday midday. And the retreat’s called “From Burnout to Brilliance: Rediscover Your Passion and Purpose, Reclaim Your Health, and Create a Practice You Love.” So the intention of this retreat is to address the issues that we've been talking about in the show and to help healthcare professionals explore their own situation, help them rediscover their passion for medicine and healthcare, and reconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose in their work to take some practical steps. Break those down into really doable actionable steps that they can take to reclaim their health and well-being. Rediscover parts of themselves that are not typically expressed in the course of their day-to-day work and just kind of cultivate a sense of energy and vitality that they may have been missing for many years.

And I'm really excited about doing this. I’m excited about doing this with Akil, who I've known for several years now and I really respect, and I'm excited about doing it at 1440. It's an incredible new retreat center, which I think you did a retreat there with Michelle Tam with Nom Nom Paleo last year, Akil?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yes, yes beautiful, beautiful place. Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  So this is, and for those of you who are not familiar, it's in Santa Cruz Mountains, right?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, it’s surrounded by redwood trees and there's all these amazing hiking trails. And yeah, a beautiful place.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I haven't actually been there yet, but I know several people who’ve taught there and who’ve been there. And if you go to 1440.org, click on the stay button and check out some of the pictures. It's an absolutely beautiful campus. Really nice accommodations, gorgeous dining hall with lots of different food options. They've got daily yoga classes and massage, and a spa and other health offerings there. And they’ve got, of course, gorgeous hiking trails because it's in the redwood forest there. It just looks to me like they're really doing it right. I've been to a lot of retreat centers. I actually lived at a retreat center in Big Sur called the Esalen Institute …

Akil Palanisamy:  Oh. sure.

Chris Kresser:  … and many people may be familiar with. When I was still really sick and dealing with my health issues, I got to a point where I just decided, I kind of reached the end of the line of supplements and diets, and medications, and I decided that I would explore the psychological, emotional, psycho-spiritual aspects of what was going on for me. So I moved to Esalen and lived there for a couple of years. So I'm very familiar with retreat centers. I've been to many others around the country, both for Buddhist meditation retreats and other retreats, and I have, they're all great in many ways. But they’re, I can see that 1440 is bringing it to a different level.

So I'm excited to be a part of that. I'm excited to get together with a group of professionals that are all wanting to cultivate more meaning in their work and to find that work/life balance that can be so elusive. And I just can't wait to get together and support each other and share because that's, I mean, we all have so much to offer, and I think when we come together with a similar purpose, it's really powerful.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah. I am also really excited about the upcoming event, and I think for anyone who feels like they're not being true to themselves in their work or as to themselves as they would want to be, I think this is a great opportunity to really reflect. And I think our vision for that weekend is that it's going to be a very introspective weekend and really focused in small groups and interactive elements. So it’s not going to be just mostly didactic.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. It’s not going to be Akil and I standing in front of the room talking at you the whole time. Definitely going to be the opposite of that.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, exactly, yeah. Because I think that this work is really about looking within and then sharing and connecting with other people. And so that's the focus of the weekend, is really building that sense of community with whoever comes and really learning to deepen your own sense of meaning and purpose in work, and look within to reconnect with that vision for what drew you to this work initially. Because I think that's the ultimate goal is having that feeling like you're really being true to yourself at the end of the day and having the kind of practice that you envision.

Don’t be afraid to make changes

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. I shared the story of Sheri in my book Unconventional Medicine, who is a clinician that was working in the VA. And she's a doctor and was mostly seeing patients with diabetes. That's the most common health challenge for veterans. And it was, she was counting the days until retirement. It was just really a factory-medicine type of situation. She often didn’t even have time to go to the bathroom during the day because she was just that busy from appointment to appointment. And as we've discussed, there was a real risk of moral injury because she didn't feel like she was making a difference. She was just handing out medications to these people and she wasn't, she knew as an athlete herself who tried to pay attention to her diet, she knew that wasn’t the best way to go about it. But what else could she do in the amount of time that she had?

And she moved into kind of a more, started incorporating more of a functional approach in her work, and then eventually left and started her own Functional Medicine practice. But for her, it was just a total game changer. She went from counting the days to retirement, to not ever being able to imagine retiring. And that's the kind of shift that’s possible, I think, when you really address the root causes of burnout and take the opportunity to step out of your current system, your current day-to-day, and really give yourself the chance to discover something new. And even if that’s maybe moving in a different direction entirely, or maybe staying in your current situation but just making a series of small changes that collectively can have a big impact.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think for me, my whole approach has been in terms of incremental change because I know that for many people, they have gone out of the insurance model and set up their own Functional Medicine practice, and that can be fantastic. But my work is really just building change within the system. Because if the people within the system leave and do their own thing, then the system itself is going to not be changed. And so I think that a big part of this is also figuring out solutions within systems and incremental steps we can take, and I think that'll hopefully be part of what we talk about as well. Just if you do belong to a system, how you can take a leadership role and effect change within that system as well.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. That's why Akil and I are a good team, because I’m outside the system and he’s inside of the system, and we have different perspectives. So that's another reason I'm happy to team up with him. I mentioned this in the beginning, but I'll throw it out there again. You need not be an MD to participate in this workshop. It's really for all healthcare practitioners and providers who are experiencing burnout. And so this could be anyone from a health coach to a nutritionist to a dietitian to an occupational therapist to a chiropractor, a naturopath in addition to MDs, and DOs, and MPs, and PAs, and all of the other abbreviations and acronyms. Anyone working in healthcare really would be welcome. And we’re not even limiting it to people working in healthcare. We don't want to exclude people here, so if you're not working in healthcare and the things we've been talking about resonate with you, maybe you work in emergency services or something else, you are absolutely welcome to come.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, and I would add that even if you're not feeling burned out, I think that prevention is really the best medicine.

Chris Kresser:  That’s true.

Akil Palanisamy:  So I think learning about the research and the science, because we know how to prevent it, and it's much better to prevent burnout than treat it once it happens.

Chris Kresser:  That is a very good point. Yeah, and I guess if the statistics are any indication, we know that even if you’re not feeling burnout now, chances are statistically you will at some point.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  Especially without any intervention. It’s kind of like the diabetes example I used before. If you’ve got high normal blood sugar, now’s the time to get it under control rather than waiting until it turns into diabetes.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  Great, well, thank you so much, Akil, for being with us. It’s a fascinating and important topic, and I’m really looking forward to leading this workshop with you. Again, in the retreat, you can go to 1440, it’s 1-4-4-0 dot o-r-g, and when you get there on the website, you just hover over Learn, and then under programs click on Professional Development. And if you scroll down there, you’ll see our program, which, again, is on the first weekend of October, October 5th to 7th, it’s a Friday through a Sunday.

And there’s a tuition for the program, and then there’s several different accommodation options available there. It’s really neat. I like what they've done with that. Everything from a private room to a suite to a really cool bunk style, kind of modern bunk-style accommodation that's much more affordable. I don’t know if you saw those last time.

Akil Palanisamy:  I did, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Check the pictures out, they look pretty cool. They call them pods.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, yeah, yeah. They’re pretty comfy. I’ve seen them.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah, it looks great. So lots of different accommodation options. If you’ve never been to this part of the world, the Santa Cruz Mountains are a beautiful, beautiful area, gorgeous redwood forests. You can head down to the beach before or after in Santa Cruz there. It’s a funky, cool little town. Great, great part of the world. So I hope you can make it. Those of you who have been listening to this and resonating with it, we’d love to meet you in person and have a chance to explore these topics with you.

And then Akil, is also, we haven’t talked much about his other work, but he’s also an author in addition to being a clinician. And he organizes the Paleo Symposium every year that I've been fortunate enough to be a speaker at. So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit more about your work and where they can find out more about your work.

Akil Palanisamy:  Oh sure, yeah. So I practice integrative medicine and I combine Functional Medicine with the Paleo approach and Ayurveda, which is the traditional medicine of India. And still that has led to my book which is called The Paleovedic Diet, combining Paleo and Ayurvedic medicine. And the best way to connect with me would be through my website, which is DoctorAkil.com. Just doctor spelled out, A-k-i-l dot com. And yeah, I wanted to thank you, as well, Chris, for having me on the podcast. I’m very excited to be working on this event with you, and it was really a pleasure to talk today.

Chris Kresser:  Pleasure is mine, Akil. And I'm sure we’ll be in touch before October, but I look forward to seeing you then and anyone else who's listening, who wants to join us. So 1440.org, and thanks for listening, everybody. Keep sending your questions in. I know I haven’t answered many of them recently. We’ve been doing a lot more interviews lately. But I do see that I have a few Q&A episodes coming up, and we do read all of your questions, and we also consider them for writing articles or emails.

So even if we’re not able to answer them on the show, it helps me to understand what you're thinking about and what you want me to write about and talk about. So please do keep sending them in. That’s ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And thanks, everyone, for listening. And thank you, Akil, and we’ll see you next time.

Akil Palanisamy:  Thank you, Chris.

The post RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com August 23, 2018 at 02:07AM

[max-morris]

21 Questions with PhD Student Max Morris

By Raven Bowen

Q: So, what do you do?

A: I’m a sociologist of sexualities and most of my research is about gay, bisexual and queer youth, but at the moment I’m writing up my PhD at Durham University based on 50 interviews with young men who have accepted money for sex online, which is something I call ‘incidental sex work.’ Basically, these guys did not advertise themselves as selling sex and most of them didn’t identify as sex workers. So selling sex is a form of sexual exploration or economic opportunism, and most often it was a one-time thing. So it challenges some of the assumptions about who sells sex and their motivations and the diversity of experiences people have about selling sex. What I want to do is to challenge some of our conventions around identity politics and sex work. I also managed to get a survey of 1,500 Grindr users and through that I found that 14.6% admitted to engaging in some form of commercial sex, with 8.2% of those doing incidental sex work or webcamming. So, it’s a lot more common among gay and bisexual men than we might realize.

Q: And your favourite colour?

A: Floral pink, because I’m a gay stereotype!!!

Q: What are you most proud of?

A: So, last year I was diagnosed with HIV and it came as a total shock to me, but I was quite proud that I was able to turn this unexpected event into an opportunity to learn from other people and educate other people. Within a couple of months of my diagnosis I had begun giving public lectures at universities and to HIV charities and I did some radio and television interviews. And they were all about the revolutionary changes in medication over the years, like PrEP as a form of prevention. I’ve been very vocal about that. I became HIV positive in a very good context with the new drugs and the normal life expectancy, and now it’s impossible to transmit the virus when you’re on effective mediation. So I want to see us move away from that stigmatized view we have of the virus from the 1980’s. Q: The death sentence idea. A: Yes, and that needs to be gone now. And this impacts my sex industry research because HIV is an intersectional issue that affects not just gay men, but trans women, migrants, sex workers. It also angers me…recently seeing prohibitionist feminists going after Amnesty International, UNAIDS and other charities because they endorse decrim as an effective way to reduce HIV infection. So that affects my life and my research in lots of different ways. Q: Amazing how your life experience now expands your scholarship and activism! A: Yes and it’s given me a feeling of solidarity for a lot of different groups with the intersections of HIV, sexual identity and feminism it definitely expanded my horizons intellectually and as an activist.

Q: What drew you to sex industry related work? What was the call for you?

A: Looking back, on the street that I was raised on, just after I left home for university, there was a ‘gay brothel’ that was raided from the Vice Squad in my home city of Bristol and my mom sent me a news clipping of the story. So, these were basically my neighbours who’d been arrested in a crackdown on drugs and prostitution in my city. Often times the laws cracking down on brothels are often policing people who are working together for safety. So it’s an excuse, so that the police can be seen as being tough on immorality. Also, when I was 16 I was on the BBC program, the Big Questions. So that was 9 years ago now and they were talking about if brothels should be legalized and I spoke up and I said that I supported decriminalization in solidarity with the two women speakers, and one of them was from the International Union of Sex Workers. The responses were moralist, right-wing. I ended up bumping into one of the speakers at the end of my street and I stopped her and said ‘hey you were on the Big Questions’ and I really remember the look of terror on her face. She thought I was going to stigmatize her or attack her for being an open sex worker. And I said, no I was one of the people how supported you. So basically, the poor diverse neighborhood where I grew up in the Southwest of England, sex workers were my friends and neighbors, they weren’t this ‘other’ identity. So, for me I took that forward when I went into university and I began my academic career looking at why we have this binary between them and us. People who sell sex are exactly the same as us. We are all sex workers in a sense. We are all selling services. My peers are engaging in incidental sex work, and that blurs the boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us.’

Q: The last thing you laughed about?

A: I have a game that’s called Top2Bottom, which is the gay version of ‘Cards Against Humanity.’ It’s really fun. There is this one card I always laugh at. The answer card is ‘AIDS Face’ and I’m in stitches about it. When I was diagnosed, my doctor made that face at me and he said ‘don’t worry, people don’t get this face [makes face] any more because the medications have improved things so much.’ So, that card always makes me laugh.

Q: What’s your favourite food?

A: Olives, especially in a dirty martini. Q: That’s a bloody condiment!

Q: Your current project or pursuit?

A: At the moment I’m working on an article looking at the legal implications of new HIV meds for a special edition on consent in the journal of criminal law. So, looking into whether someone can consent to having bareback sex with someone who is positive, in light of the research that says that if you’re on medication you can’t transmit it, so why do we keep the legislation around transmission. My partner and I are participants in the PARTNER study, and they found zero cases of HIV transmission across 58,000 acts of condomless sex between serodiscordant couples. There is a debate within NHS about funding PrEP as well. It has big implications for sex workers as well. So much advocacy has been around gay and bisexual men but these issues are really important for sex workers.

Q: What’s your biggest regret?

A: I wish that I had been more of an ally to sex workers, trans people, migrants, people of color, people living with HIV, when I was younger. I wish I had been more active in challenging stigma before it hit me personally. The message I’d like to send is that if you have privilege and you’re not in these groups that are stigmatized, it can so easily be you or someone you know and actually these are people who you should care about. They are your friends and neighbours.

Q: Facebook or Twitter?

A: Well I went to a lecture last month by sociologist Bev Skeggs and she was talking about how Facebook collects user information, and basically sells high-end consumer goods to ‘high value’ users but sells debt to ‘low value’ users. It reinforces class inequality. And they are even tracking you when you’re not on the App. So I uninstalled the Facebook App and now I only use Twitter. Q: You don’t use Whatsapp? Facebook bought Whatsapp. A: Really!? Q: Yeah, it’s now part of their ‘family of companies’…data harvesters! A: And every website that has the Facebook logo is tracking you. Q: So, Twitter then [laughter]?

Q: What challenges you the most about your sex work or related work?

A: Being raised by a single mom on benefits, I’ve always been a feminist and class conscious, but at the same time as a man I’ve benefited from male privilege and patriarchy, so the difficulty comes in balancing my critique of sex worker and trans exclusionary feminisms with my belief in giving women a greater platform. So, that’s often an intellectual challenge I come up against. For me the best solution for that has been to use queer theory and understanding as a vocal queer person I experience some of the same patriarchy and heterosexism, so goals are intersecting and unified. Homophobia and misogyny are two sides of the same coin, especially when it comes to toxic masculinity and issues of suppressing marginalized people. That’s how I square the circle as a feminist man. Q: Yes, and no need to square the circle, we need circles, but your level of introspection outstrips most humans!

Q: Favourite Movie?

A: Alien, I absolutely love Sigourney Weaver. She was amazing in it.

Q: And the last time you cried?

A: The last time I had an argument with my boyfriend. Relationships can be hard at times.

Q: Cat or dog person?

A: I love all animals but I’m allergic to cats. I’m definitely a dog person. Me and my boyfriend dog sat for Alex Feis-Bryce who you interviewed a few weeks ago!

Q: Who understands you?

A: My boyfriend.

Q: What’s the last book or article you read?

A: I actually borrowed this from Alex: ‘Sex workers unite: a history of the movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk.’ Q: Does he know you have it, or is he going to find out here on the blog? A: Yeah he knows. Q: Oh, too bad [Laughter].

Q: Childhood Fear?

A: I used to be a surfer kid and would go down to Cornwall every summer and even though there’s nothing that can kill you in the oceans around Britain, I used to be afraid of sharks while I was on my surfboard. Which is funny because I love sharks now and I use it as a symbol for irrational fears, like those around HIV transmission. You’re more likely to get hit by a car on the way to the beach than get bitten by a shark! Q: Interesting. Let me guess, you watched Jaws as a kid, right? A: Yeah! Another great movie.

Q: What did your last text message say?

A: It was to my mom ‘Thank you for the lovely text a few days ago [mom’s name]. Happy Birthday! We are dog-sitting. Can’t wait to see more of your art exhibit.’

Q: One thing that your work or existence is aimed to do for the sex industry?

A: I think the main thing I’m interest in doing is breaking down binaries and challenging the dichotomies between us and them. The idea that sex workers are some stereotypical other…a marginalized and victimized group. There are issues of victimization and problems that the community experiences, but we need to stop thinking in such binary terms. So, feminist and queer theories are great at breaking those things down. They are more like us than we realize. Q: Yeah, ‘they’ are us!

Q: The meaning of life in one word?

A: So, part of me wants to reject the premise of your question. Q: Of course you do. Damn academics [laughter]! A: There is no objective meaning of life, but for me it’s Pleasure!

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?

A: I’ve always liked the idea of becoming an elected member of parliament, if only to queer the House of Commons by attending important votes in full drag. I’ve said so many controversial things publicly now that I don’t think that I would ever be qualified for that, but there’s too many men in suits and it doesn’t really represent the population.

Q: Three portable items that you would have with you while stranded on a desert island?

A: How long am I on the island for? Q: Well you’re stranded. Between you and Rosie I’m starting to regret adding this question. A: [Laughter] Okay, well I’ll definitely take

(1) a sex toy, like a vibrator or a dildo or something like that, because a boy’s got needs.

(2) Then I would take a full medical kit with my insulin and HIV meds, and plasters if I cut myself on a rock. So that’s sex and health covered.

And I’d take (3) a truck full of wine!

This interview was first posted on the Sex Work Research Hub website, available here: https://sexworkresearchhub.org/2017/11/30/21-questions-with-phd-student-max-morris/

#SexWork #HIV #Research #Activism

[actutrends]

How UT Austin is modernizing its video game design program

The video game industry changes all of the time, and so universities that are trying to teach video game design have to do that as well. That’s what the University of Texas at Austin is learning as it modernizes its video game program.

Creating relevant classes for game design is hard in part because the field is young and it is driven by technology that changes all of the time. Students have to learn all kinds of disciplines, including game design, game engine programming, art, and sound — particularly if they want to be independent game developers who make their own games in full.

UT Austin started its game design program seven years ago, as a collaboration of the college of communications, computer science, and the college of fine arts. Doreen Lorenzo, a veteran of innovative product design studio Frog Design, joined the school 3.5 years ago to teach design. Then, 2.5 years ago, she helped create the school of Design and Creative Technologies, which she now leads. The school includes arts and entertainment technologies, which houses the game program now.

And now UT Austin is looking for someone to lead that games and immersive art program. I talked with Lorenzo about this, and learned  some things about the way that modern game design is taught.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Doreen Lorenzo, assistant dean for the School of Design and Creative Technologies at UT Austin.

Image Credit: UT Austin

Doreen Lorenzo: The University of Texas, obviously, has been around for a long time. It’s a very big school. Since 1992, they’ve had a design department, which was in the school of art and art history in the college of fine arts. For many years they’ve had a very progressive, visionary dean, Doug Dempster, in the college of fine arts who realized that they had to change the trajectory of fine arts, because they had declining enrollment for 20 years. He started to experiment with different programs.

The city of Austin actually came to him and the computer science chair and said, “UT needs to be doing something in gaming.” They got a games program up and running seven years ago. That was with video, TV, and film, the college of communications, computer science, and the college of fine arts. They got together to form this program, and it eventually became a bachelor of science in arts and entertainment technology. Arts and entertainment technology included gaming and interactivity, animation, these creative technologies. It had these different factions.

Three and a half years ago I was recruited to the university to teach design. I started an undergraduate certificate program called the Center for Integrated Design, which integrated human-centered design, design methodologies, design thinking into the whole undergraduate program at UT. This is in parallel with what was happening in gaming. I came in working part time to get this off the ground, and it took off.

In the meantime I saw all these overlapping things going on in the college of fine arts. We had this arts and entertainment program that had a lot of interest. So many students wanted to take it. We had the design program that wasn’t quite taking off, but we had this Center for Integrated Design that was going gangbusters. The new medical school had opened and they had started something called the Design Institute for Health. They were appointed in the school of design, but nobody was really working with them.

About a year, year and a half after I got there, the dean and the provost said they wanted to form a whole new school. The kind of thing I was talking about was really this whole college to career — how do you take all of these creative skills and creative technologies and give students the skills to be employed? Typically, if you say you’re going into fine arts, it usually means you’re going to live in a dumpster or be a barista. Your parents cry. To have careers where students will be really capable and be in demand to get work was something they wanted to go after.

Two and a half years ago we started the school of Design and Creative Technologies, which is what I now lead. It has these two departments. It has design, and we brought in a new chair of the design department. That’s growing by leaps and bounds. The master’s program is doing really well. Then it has something called arts and entertainment technologies, which houses the game program, but now, as we dive into this, it’s not just about gaming. It’s not just about studying games and working at a game company. As you know, all this technology is being used in so many other areas.

We’re not only working with our students to learn all about game design and development, but also how they can use those skills to perhaps work with an architecture firm, or work in the health industry. All these other areas that are starting to use Unreal and Unity. We’re helping them know that there’s a wider landscape out there for them.

In two and a half years we have become the largest undergraduate school in the college of fine arts, and we’re still growing. The gentleman that was the chair of the department retired, and now I’m looking for the new chair. We’re looking for someone who understands games and immersive design and where the world is moving with all of this stuff.

Above: “Dealing With Gamers Across the Decades” with Raph Koster, Veteran Game Designer, Creative Executive & Author and moderated by Amy Jo Kim, CEO, Startup Coach & Best Selling Author – Details – Hero Stage

Image Credit: GamesBeat

GamesBeat: Was there ever a consideration of just calling it something like the school of games, or is that a little too focused?

Lorenzo: Yeah, I think it’s a bit too focused. If you begin to look at the creative technologies and what people are doing with that, it becomes broader. I’m sure you’ve had these conversations with Epic and Unity, about how they’re expanding the horizons of where this is going. It’s more around the creative technologies.

Games are an important part, no doubt. Our students come in here and they want to work in games. We want to give them the opportunity to do that, and they’re getting jobs in that industry. But we also want to expose them to so much more. If you look at The Lion King, it’s a big video game. They’re using the technology to do so much more. We want to expose the students to that and let them explore their options.

GamesBeat: How much does the university have to be concerned about as far as the job placement aspect?

Lorenzo: We’re very concerned, yeah. We have, in our program, a full-time person, Patti Burke. She’s an industry veteran who came out of Imagineering and Lucasfilm and Dreamworks. Her whole thing, with a couple of people, is to go out there and make those connections. Not just to place people, but to understand — this is the difference about our program. I call it a reactive curriculum, which is very different in higher education. We want to understand, where are we going in four or five years? That’s the stuff that we need to be teaching our students. Where is the industry moving?

We’re talking to all these companies out there, learning about where things are moving, and we want to make sure that the students are positioned to understand that. We’re very committed to placement. I want to get 100 percent placement out of my school. I believe that the way we’re teaching our students, whether it’s in design or in the master’s program we’re doing or in arts and entertainment, these students are going to be in high demand.

GamesBeat: What makes sense as far as the proximity of one major for students next to another one and what to group together? My daughter, who’s working in digital arts at USC–when she’s working on the film part, she has to recruit student actors, special effects and lighting people, and make sure she can shoot what she needs to create for a project. It makes sense that these other disciplines are nearby and easily accessible.

Lorenzo: That’s part of the reason we partnered with computer science and the TV and film program. We have a similar program. They’re doing immersive video. They’re learning about what we call gaming for film. It’s becoming really prevalent. A lot of the production companies are using Unreal now. It’s changing, and we need to be — as educators, we need to be on the cutting edge doing that. I don’t believe that, given the industry we’re in, we can sit by and be passive, or teach something from 10 years ago. We need to be forward-thinking in everything we do.

Above: Designing with Magic Leap

Image Credit: Magic Leap

GamesBeat: The one thing that’s new to me is that design people are not so far away from the video game people. A Frog Design person isn’t that different from someone who’s designing games.

Lorenzo: No, and they’re becoming — you see all the product placement stuff people are doing games, right? It’s all becoming more and more real. We’re also putting together foundation courses so our design students and our gaming students will be doing their foundation courses together. Color theory, light, all that stuff that you learn, they need to be learning this.

GamesBeat: Do you see students mixing a lot of classes from different disciplines to learn about what they want to do or need to be ready for?

Lorenzo: That’s the important part of — if you want to go more technical, you can go down the computer science path and start taking more classes there. They have a minor you can take, and a lot of our game students take that minor. If you want to go more cinematic, more into storytelling, you can look at what they’re doing in radio, TV, and film and take classes there. We’re carving out pathways for our students.

We just did a giant assessment of all the classes we teach, looking at how we can put them together for outcomes. You take this group of classes — two from computer science, two from radio, TV, and film, two from AET — and this is what you get. It’s interesting, because in general, universities are not supposed to be interdisciplinary. Making that happen is fun.

GamesBeat: How many students are graduating from your program each year now?

Lorenzo: We will have 89 graduates in May from the AET program, and about 50 from design. Those are our first students going out the door. This year we’re taking in about 100 students. We’re keeping the program at its current size, because we’re simply out of room. We’re in the middle of working with the university to build out more spaces for us, but we’re physically out of space. Our applications to the program have grown — they almost doubled this year.

The post How UT Austin is modernizing its video game design program appeared first on Actu Trends.

[topicprinter]

Back in the early 2010s, when I was still an active songwriter and radio jingle/ads producer, I lived remote enough that it was hard for me to find local session musicians for hire when I needed live instrumentation or a certain vocal type. Through Craigslist, other classified ads and Mylene who is our co-founder and back then managed touring musicians, I put together a small team of essential session players. We pretty much communicated by email, phone, dropbox and the likes. Since that was rather time consuming and not very efficient, we more or less hacked together a collaboration tool. Since I knew other songwriters I told them how I create my music and they asked me if I can help them as well and that’s when Tunedly became a business. That was in 2015 and we officially incorporated in 2016 making a run at it.How much we invested initially is hard to quantify because it's not like we moved funds from one account to another account and decided it would be our "startup fund" or the likes. I left a well paid job as a manager to work full time on Tunedly, without having any reliable income from Tunedly at that point. So, we lived partially from savings. Then, once we noticed this is going somewhere, we permanently immigrated from Europe to Canada so that we can fundraise in the U.S. and Canada, attend accelerators in the U.S. and live in North America full time. Going through the immigration process, as you can imagine, wasn't cheap. If I have to guesstimate how much we invested initially prior to our first outside investment, I would say somewhere around $20,000.What does Tunedly do?When we started, we were a pure collaboration tool, connecting songwriters to vetted session musicians. By now, we are more of a music publisher. We still operate the collaboration platform, but that really only serves as our source of content. We noticed this: On our platform, there are thousands of new songs being created every year. Songs nobody has ever heard and we get a first pass at them. So, when we come across a song that sparks our interest and could be commercially viable, we make an exclusive publishing offer to the songwriter and then try to place the song in film, TV, ads, media or with established artists, which generates sync license fees and royalties for us and the songwriter.For this company, it was a gradual decision to start. I mean, myself and Mylene were already entrepreneurs prior to working on Tunedly so it wasn’t like we just decided to be self employed. However, the way Tunedly developed and became a company was gradual. I was really just trying to find a way to be more efficient for my own songs and noticed by helping me, we’re actually creating something of value to the music industry.How did you get your first three clients?By talking to other songwriters. It really was that. I was in touch with a number of other writers through online forums where I shared music to get feedback, they shared music to get feedback and at the end of the day, I was asked often enough “how do work with your musicians?” and that’s how we found our first three “clients”. Funny enough, our very first client, when Tunedly wasn’t even called Tunedly yet - we didn’t have a name at that point, is still with us today. He has been with us for so long, it almost feels like he’s part of the company. He really experienced the growing pains as much, if not even more severe as we did as founders. He got so used to just talking to one person, being myself, when getting his songs done. As we grew and added more staff, at times I couldn’t be involved in music production projects due to travel, fundraising, presentations, etc. so he had to deal with staff and at first he wasn’t all too happy about this, but at the end of the day, he is still with us because the quality of session musicians and production quality at our rate is impossible to get elsewhere.When we had that “oh, this could be a business” moment, we put up some ads on Google, bought a few banner ads on songwriters forums and things like that just to see if we can attract songwriters who we don’t personally speak to. Sure enough we could.I have been into music since I was nine years old. I learned how to play the piano and then in college I picked up songwriting and music production, so I had experience in the area.Have you raised any money? How much?We have raised some angel funding. After we validated the market, we went through two accelerator programs, StartFast in New York State and then Capital Innovators in St. Louis. The funds they invested plus the exposure they gave us to other investors in their network enabled us to raise a total of about $500,000.The initial idea was funded by personal savings.How do you attract clients?In the early days, we worked a lot with paid advertising on Google and Facebook. Nowadays our blog is generating most of our traffic, plus we get into news articles every now and then which keeps us on top of songwriter’s minds.Our target audience are songwriters. If you had asked me this question a year ago, before we really got into the publishing side of things, the answer to this question would have been much longer, but today, we really just want to make sure we’re working with songwriters who either want to create great sounding songs, or already have great sounding songs which we can sign to a publishing deal.What is the funniest/most strange request you have received from a client/prospective client?There are so many funny and strange requests, I’d really have to think hard about which one tops the list. I think the funniest and strangest song we ever worked on was a Psychedelic song about a purple house, written and composed by a talented songwriter in India. Other requests that were strange at first was when people who are not songwriters came by asking us to write a song for them for a special occasion or a birthday. I mean, we were always very clear about the fact that the platform is for songwriters but since this request came up repeatedly, we actually launched a service under a different brand at Bring My Song To Life to cater to those requests.Where did you meet your founding team?Mylene and I met about two years before we founded Tunedly while we both lived in Dublin, Ireland and actually became a couple. We met Marc, who joined us shortly after we founded Tunedly as the CTO, in New York while we were in the StartFast accelerator program. Neither Mylene nor I have a technical background. I could fumble around with html enough to put something rough together but as we grew, we knew we needed something solid and were looking for someone who can write code.What is the most common service you offer?The most common service we offer is the full production of a song from just a lyric sheet and a rough tape.What motivates you when things go wrong? What is the end goal?First of all, in a startup, things go wrong all the time. Not necessarily gravely wrong, but small things go wrong all the time here and there. The way I stay motivated is by knowing that our clients need what we’re building, our employees and contractors rely on the income they’re generating by working for us, our investors put their trust in us, expecting a return and by looking at how far we’ve come despite all the other things that went wrong prior to the latest thing that is going wrong. As an entrepreneur you better learn how to get up after you fall quickly.Do you have any advice for someone just starting out?Do it! If you’re an entrepreneur type of person and you have an idea, just do it. Don’t wait until tomorrow, or until the economy is doing this, or the next presidential election or until the wind is coming from the south. Just do it. We will find a million reasons to not do something. Yes, your idea might now work out, but you’ll never know unless you try. And even if the original idea doesn’t work out, maybe you stumble upon something else you can pivot to and create something that solves a problem we didn’t even know we had.What is stopping you from being 3x the size you are now?Time. The day only has 24 hours. Employees have families, friends, social lives so they can’t, and shouldn’t, spend all their time working. It’s close to midnight and I’m answering these interview questions in my “break” because my to-do list for today is still only halfway done. So yeah, time is what is holding us, and pretty much any business, back at the moment.What apps could your business not run without?Our top apps we’re using are, well, obviously our own platform. Our staff and contractors use our collaboration tool to communicate with songwriters, session musicians and even with each other simply because we spend most of our day on the platform in the first place. Another tool we heavily use is Slack, mostly for internal communication, sharing of non-music related files and quick messages. I personally am not too into the next one since I mostly work with the musician staff directly on Tunedly, but I know Mylene likes using Trello to organize tasks for the non-musician staff and to get a good overview of what’s done and what’s not.Are there any new services you’re working on?Just recently we launched Bring My Song To Life under the Tunedly umbrella which allows virtually anyone to create a song for a loved one or a special occasion. You don’t need any songwriting or music composing skills. For example, your wife’s birthday is coming up and you’re looking for a special, very customized gift, you can tell our songwriters the story you want to convey, and they will write customized lyrics, compose and produce a song with your message and story. Other use cases we come across a lot are sport teams and companies wanting their own special anthem or graduating high school classes their own unique graduation song.Would you ever sell the company?Well, we raised funds so in a way, we already did sell part of it. Would we ever exit and fully sell it, of course we would for the right amount and the right acquirer. Mylene and I will always be the founders of Tunedly, but if someone makes a good offer and that someone has the capacity and ability to scale and grow Tunedly faster than we can, I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t want to sell.If you enjoyed this post, there's more here.

[729renegades]

UP CLOSE & PERSONAL – BEN TREHARNE-FOOSE

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Up Close & Personal. Today’s guest is a well-travelled entrepreneur, I think it’s safe to say. I first met this guy 2 years ago in a networking event and we’ve done a little bit of business together, but we’ve become great friends to boot as well. I’m looking forward to you hearing his story because it does pan the globe. From a small town in rural Illinois, to the depths of Japan and back to where he now calls home, in the deepest darkest valleys of the beautiful South Wales. Like most people who stay, or end up in Wales, it’s not just because they love the scenery and the country. It’s normally for love, and in this case, it’s for the love of a good woman. This guy started in graphic design and has helped loads of charities and is passionate about helping others. What started out in the charity sector, now sees him dealing with the vultures of the business world, in his business Webfibre. They specialise in app development and DRM lead generation campaigns. Without further ado, I think I need to introduce him. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Duke of Direct Response and the Lord of Leads… Ben Treharne-Foose. Ben how are you Buddy?

Ben Treharne-Foose: I’m very good, thank you Steve.

Steve Matthews: I’ve given you a big build up there Ben.

BTF: You have yea, and I have to say it’s all true.

SM: So, are you going to put that on your business card? The Duke of Direct Response, that would be quite good.

BTF: It is good.

SM: I’ve given you the big build up as I’ve said, so how come, with that fantastic American accent that we all love here in the UK, from rural Illinois, which I guess is Obama state isn’t it?

BTF: It is yea, he was Senator for us for a while.

SM: It’s actually a beautiful day today and the scenery is pretty good, but how did you end up here?

BTF: I wasn’t planning to end up in South Wales… I left the States in 2004. I was working for the Boy Scouts of America, recruiting for members to join different Cub Scout Groups and Boy Scout Groups, and training and working with volunteers so that they could start groups of their own. I was loving that, but I’d never really lived more than 2 hours from where I was born, it’s Illinois so everything looks the same no matter how long you drive, it’s just corn fields.

SM: Is it flat?

BTF: It’s extremely flat, yea… I thought I hadn’t seen much of the world, I’m getting into a career now, mortgages and cars, family and kids were all moving on the horizon and I thought, I hadn’t had an adventure yet. So, I asked my boss if I could go and have an adventure for a year. I said, I want to go and teach English somewhere abroad and when I come back, will you still give me a job, and can I start this career back up again. And he said, “Yep, no problem, if I don’t have anything for you, I’ll find something for you in the organisation”. Boy Scouts, of course go across all of the States, it was a win/win. I could go and have my adventure and still come back to a career. So, I made some applications, I got into a program in Japan, flew to Japan, and within 2 weeks I’d met Gemma who ended up becoming my wife. She was on the same program that I went over on, but obviously she went from Wales, and I haven’t been back… I’ve been back to visit but I haven’t lived in the States since 2014. So, I had 3 years in Japan teaching English, started a charity there to raise money for students who wanted to study English abroad. That was mainly out of boredom because we had so much free time on our hands as teachers, that I started a charity and organised fundraising events just to pass the time really. And then we moved to Wales in 2007, so that my wife could do a Master’s Degree. And at the time it was purely just for a year to do a Master’s Degree, because she had a scholarship to do it in the UK for free and at the school she applied to in the States, it would have cost $50,000. It was a no brainer, so we just moved to the UK. My Grandmother was English, she’s from Northamptonshire. She told me all these stories about life in the UK in the 40’s. I’d always wanted to live in the UK, so that was my chance to have another adventure, and the adventure has not stopped in the 11 years that I’ve now been in the UK.

SM: Grandmother English… We don’t hold that against you here in Wales. But don’t tell everybody that in Wales mind, you know that don’t you.

BTF: I do keep it under my hat.

SM: Actually, that’s a little bit unfair, we don’t dislike English people here in Wales, we love English people. The only English people that we dislike, are the 15 blokes that wear white and play against Wales. That’s it, the 15 English men, everybody else is cool, they’re alright. It’s just those 15 people in rugby, that’s all it is.

BTF: It’s funny, I’ve now adopted that same hatred for those 15 men in white. Granted, I am technically a quarter English.

SM: No, you’re Welsh, and actually it shows how Welsh you are because didn’t you do your citizenship or whatever it’s called?

BTF: I recently became a citizen a couple of months ago. I finally got my British citizenship.

SM: But if I’m not mistaken, you were going to read it in Welsh.

BTF: I was going to and then I chickened out. My wife is a Welsh speaker and my daughter goes to a Welsh speaking school, so there’s a lot of Welsh being spoken around the house. I’m not too shabby, I understand a lot of what they’re saying but I struggle to put sentences together. But that’s in English as well.

SM: Well, I’m a Welsh boy who’s lived here for 46 years and I can’t speak any Welsh, so you’re already one up on me. So, you can actually speak American, English, you also have Japanese, can you speak any Japanese?

BTF: I do yea, I can get by in a conversation as long there’s beer involved.

SM: And obviously you can speak Welsh, so you’re multi lingual.

BTF: Barely, but yea, I’ll accept it.

SM: I struggle with English but that’s another thing… I think there’s a massive thing there already about you and your charity work. I know that when you first started, when you came to Wales, you started up a charity organisation didn’t you? Was it in Penrhys?

BTF: Yes, so my first job in Wales was working for a mental health charity called MIND, then I went and worked for a local authority in Bridgend helping with employment support. So, helping people do their C.V.’s and apply for jobs and from there I went on to working with a small community charity up in the Rhondda Valleys. I set up a social enterprise called Big Click, which was a web site and app development social enterprise. It was a way for us to create some income for the charity, but then also help small businesses and community groups get the most out of technology. So, we built apps for a community radio station and we built quite a few Welsh language apps to be honest, because at the time, there weren’t any. We were the first company to create a Welsh language app for the Apple launch when it came out. It was all about promoting community activism through technology, in a way that technology could support that. And we did that through a lot of apps. So, that charitable aspect has been a big driver for me. The incentive for me to work harder, is how am I improving things for someone else. Either an individual or an organisation, or a business, whoever it may be. So, including the work I did with the Boy Scouts and obviously working with the schools in Japan, I spent nearly 15 years working in a charitable aspect of what I was doing, not working for a private company. My first job out of University was for a private company as a Graphic Designer and I ran the art department for a small print company in Illinois. And I have to say, it really soured me on private enterprise, because the guy I worked for…

SM: Go on, you have to tell everybody his name.

BTF: Ironically, the very first boss I had after University, his name was Dave Dean from Illinois and now of course I work with the wonderful Dave Dean… and they couldn’t be more different. So, I really got soured on the private sector and I found a nice little cosy home in working for charities and government organisations and felt well looked after. Amazing annual leave packages, I could call in sick whenever I wanted to, and nobody cared, and it was very cushy, I have to say. The salaries weren’t amazing, but it was good. I really enjoyed the work. But then in 2016, the charity I was working for in the Rhondda was struggling financially and I could see the writing on the wall. I knew that, although what I was doing, and my team were successful, we had a lot of orders coming in and we were making ends meet; the actual parent organisation was crumbling beneath us. So, I started putting some feelers out and stumbled across Dave Dean and Darren James, and we started working together in 2016…

Listen to the rest of the interview at 729Renegades.com/podcast

from Blog | 729renegades http://bit.ly/2UUv7Cy

[shapesnnsizes]

RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy

In this episode, we discuss:

Burnout among healthcare practitioners

How common the problem is

The results of widespread physician burnout

The difference between burnout and moral injury

How technology is contributing to the problem, not alleviating it

How to fight physician burnout

Show notes:

The Paleovedic Diet by Dr. Akil Palanisamy

The Sutter Health Institute for Health & Healing in San Francisco

Unconventional Medicine by Chris Kresser

1440 Multiversity retreat for healthcare professionals

Akil Palanisamy’s website, DoctorAkil.com

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Chris Kresser:  Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week we’re going to be talking to Dr. Akil Palanisamy, who is a friend and colleague in the Functional Medicine space. And I’ve known him for several years. He is the author of The Paleovedic Diet, a really interesting book combining Paleo and Ayurveda, a traditional Indian medicine which is an interest of his. And he also runs the Paleo Symposium that’s put on by the Institute for Health & Healing at UCSF every year, that I’ve been a featured speaker at since it started.

But today actually, we’re going to be talking about something different, which is burnout amongst healthcare practitioners. It’s a really important topic that has pretty significant implications not only in terms of the effect on individual clinicians, but on patients and their access to care, things like medical errors and just the healthcare system overall.

So if you’re not familiar with Akil, he’s an integrative medicine physician who blends his medical training with Functional Medicine in Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India. He studied biochemistry at Harvard and received his medical degree from UCSF and completed his residency at Stanford. Dr. Akil also completed a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona. He sees patients at the Sutter Health Institute for Health & Healing in San Francisco, where he also serves as physician director for community education. He’s been a consultant with the medical board of California for many years and as I mentioned, he’s the author of The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease.

So I’m really excited to dive into this conversation with Akil. I think you’ll find it interesting, even if you’re not a healthcare practitioner that’s experiencing burnout, because we talk about a lot of issues that are relevant to anybody doing any kind of work, really. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Let’s dive in. Akil, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so glad to have you here.

Akil Palanisamy:  Thank you, Chris. Pleasure to be here.

Burnout among healthcare practitioners

Chris Kresser:  So today we’re going to talk about a really important topic that I don't think gets enough attention, and this is physician burnout. So, and I would extend it to burnout for any healthcare practitioners. We might be focusing a little bit on physicians because this is where most of the statistics are available, but it’s certainly a problem across the entire healthcare world whether we’re talking about:

Nurses

Nurse practitioners

Occupational therapists

Chiropractors

Acupuncturists

Anybody working in the care profession

In my book Unconventional Medicine, I talked a lot about how this is one of the major challenges within medicine in general, not just conventional medicine, but also integrative medicine and Functional Medicine. And it's something that we need to develop a sensible approach to if we’re going to meet our goals in terms of preventing and reversing disease. So this is something that Akil has thought deeply about and has been involved in a number of different initiatives from his work at Sutter to working with medical students and other physicians to address this problem. So I'm really looking forward to having this conversation. So why don’t we start a little bit with the stats on burnout, Akil?

Ask yourself: Does medicine still feel like your calling? If daily stress and exhaustion are turning you away from the profession, you might be headed toward physician burnout. Find out what causes burnout and learn how to rediscover your sense of purpose.

How common the problem is

Akil Palanisamy:  Sure, yeah, I think it's really rampant, and most studies report around 50 percent or higher of physicians report some significant burnout. And that's up from about 40 percent just five years ago. So, I think the numbers are really scary and also this is a global problem. So this is across the board. Many countries throughout the world and also regardless of the stage of training. So medical students, residents, physicians, even the number of years of practice has no impact.

Chris Kresser:  Wow.

Akil Palanisamy:  I will check on this number, so, I mean, I know because I did my medical training 20 years ago, and it was like, I would say, a soul-crushing and exhausting process.

Chris Kresser:  Right, right.

Akil Palanisamy:  So I started early in this topic, and that’s why I’m so passionate about it.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. That’s really revealing in some ways. If medical students are as burned out as people who've been in the profession for 10 or 20 years, that's an indication that something’s already going wrong, even at that very early stage.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right. I came across a really fascinating study. They interviewed almost 3,000 medical students about burnout and 53 percent of them reported feeling burnt out. About 15 percent were depressed, about 5 percent had seriously considered suicide. But the interesting thing was 100 percent of the students, every single one reported feeling humiliated at some point, demeaned, disrespected as part of their training. And that had huge effects on their performance and judgment, and that was my experience too. It’s part of the culture of training doctors.

Chris Kresser:  It really is, isn’t it? It’s almost like fraternity hazing or something. I've heard for residents that it's … and it seems to be perpetuated for some of the same reasons, like this, “I went through this, so you have to go through it,” type of mentality. And I've even read the studies that support that.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, right. When I started my residency, I was super thrilled because they had just passed a law limiting the work hours, continuous work hours to 24 hours in a row. That was like a huge drop.

Chris Kresser:  That’s a big development.

Akil Palanisamy:  And I was like, “Wow, this is fantastic. I only have to work 24 hours in a row, like, every week.” And people thought that would solve the problem of burnout. But it hasn’t because that’s just one of many factors.

The results of widespread physician burnout

Chris Kresser:  Right, and so we know that there’s a huge problem with the shortage of primary care physicians. I don't remember the exact number from the study I shared in my book, but it's something like, predicted to be a shortage of around 50,000 primary care providers by the year 2025, which is not very far off in the future. And yet one of the costs of burnout, as you said, is that two-thirds of physicians know a doctor who is likely to stop practicing medicine or at least to reduce their access to patients, switch to concierge model, or something like that within the next five years as a result of burnout. So this is a real problem that's really kind of having an outsize effect on our healthcare system.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it is genuinely a public health crisis. And I think that that word is increasingly being used in the literature because this really does impact not just individual physicians but patients, healthcare organizations, the entire healthcare system in our country and other countries around the world. So I think the scope of the effects and the impact of burnout is being recognized now and it's huge in terms of not just the individual level, but medical errors as well. So, recent studies have shown that there’s a strong relationship between physician burnout and medical errors. And already medical errors are one of the major leading causes of death in the United States. And so I think as we get more burned out physicians and higher rates of medical errors, I think that's one of the big issues in terms of the costs of this problem.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, this is critical, and I highlighted this in my book. But if you go to a site like CDC or a general website and you search for the top 10 causes of death, let’s see what happens if we do that right now. Cardiovascular disease is still holding at number one, and then you’ve got lung cancer or you’ve got other diseases that come shortly after that. The data is often changing. Cancer continues to go up the list. But you’re not going to see medical errors on these lists, right?

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  There was a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2016, just a couple of years ago, and then another one by Barbara Starfield, who’s since passed away, back in 2000 in JAMA. And both of those found the same thing, that medical errors are actually the third-leading cause of death. And since only 5 to 15 percent of the atherogenic events are even reported, Dr. Starfield actually speculated that medical errors could be the number one cause of death if all of the atherogenic events were reported. So this is something you don't see on the typical list, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, exactly. Yeah, because when you experience burnout, the impaired judgment, lack of attention to detail, communication breakdown, all the things, the depression, that just greatly increases the risk of medical errors.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So this is a, it's a common problem, it's a problem that has not only effects on individual practitioners and their health and their lifespan, their feelings about their work, but also to patients and their safety and their ability to get the care that they need, and then to society as a whole. The healthcare crisis continues to deepen, and we need more doctors, rather than fewer. The fact that 50 … that two-thirds of physicians know a doctor who’s likely to stop practicing medicine in five years is exactly the opposite direction that we need to be going in here.

The difference between burnout and moral injury

So let's talk … so, we’ve been throwing this term “burnout” around, and I'm sure that means different things to different people. But you actually emailed me before the show with a really interesting distinction that I want to highlight—the difference between burnout and moral injury. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. So traditionally, burnout is defined as a work-related syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, a cynical feeling, and feeling like you're ineffective on the job. But this concept of burnout really doesn't resonate with doctors. I can tell you from talking to many of them that they really don't connect with this concept of burnout because the problem is you're pointing the finger at doctors. And you’re saying, “You’re burned out, you need to start doing yoga and eat granola, and just like change your lifestyle.” But you know, these are some of the most resilient people out there.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely.

Akil Palanisamy:  Medicine, I mean we’ve survived decades of intense training, sleep deprivation, the training process itself is incredibly stressful, the work demands. So these are some of the most resilient and resourceful people out there. And so I think the problem is really,  a big part of it is the system. But the distinction that you mentioned between moral injury and burnout, the concept of moral injury actually was first used to describe how soldiers responded to what they did during war and when they came back, having to do things that went against their morals.

In healthcare, it refers to physicians being unable to provide the high-quality care that they would really like to, essentially, not being able to be true to themselves. So I think the problem is not that physicians are burned out and so we don't care. The problem is that we care very deeply.

Chris Kresser:  Care too much.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Not too much, but it’s the care that’s causing the problem, yeah.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right and then as a result, in our current healthcare system, it's so hard to consistently meet patients’ needs and provide the kind of care that we envisioned we would going into medicine. Because most doctors think of medicine as a calling, and so that failure and inability to meet needs of patients in the way that we really envision, that is hugely damaging, and I think that has a huge effect on physician well-being. And so that's the concept of moral injury. So I think that it's really much broader than just pointing the finger at doctors.

Chris Kresser:  I think that’s really, really important to understand, and I've always made it clear that when I'm criticizing conventional medicine and its shortcomings, I'm not criticizing individual doctors. Of course, I might be criticizing some individual doctors, but not as a group because the vast majority of doctors that I have met are people that genuinely want to help their patients. They went into medicine for all the right reasons and they do recognize that they're not having the impact that they would like to have, and it's painful for them. But there's, they feel like their hands are tied because of the way that the system is set up. And they’re just as much victims of the system as the average patient is.

And I think this is a good example of how that plays out where we all want to have meaningful and rewarding work. We all want to get to the end of the day and feel like we really made a difference. And doctors, I think, especially. That's the path they chose. They didn't go into private equity. They didn't choose to go into a career that was really not about helping people, but more about making money or enriching their own lives. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. They willingly chose to go through a very arduous path that involves many, many years of schooling and as you said, rigorous training with residency, working 24 hours straight, often graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I mean, it’s an enormous risk to take, an enormous amount of investment of money and time and energy to become a physician.

So you don't make it through that generally, unless you really have a guiding moral compass that is pushing you through it. And so it's really, I think, even more important and critical that we figure out a way to, where we create a path forward for doctors and other healthcare practitioners that really do want to have that feeling at the end of the day. Because that's the antidote to burnout, where when you really do feel like you're transforming the lives of the people that you're working with, and you're having a huge impact. Because in that situation it doesn't mean you won't get tired and it doesn't mean you won't occasionally feel, “Geez, I need a vacation.” But you're not going to have that moral injury, and that’s what makes all the difference in the world.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I know, exactly. And I think that the rates of suicide among physicians is a real wake-up call because it’s twice that of I think active duty military, and then there was a report from the UK that there was a young junior doctor who, she took her own life by walking into the sea.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s not, yeah.

Akil Palanisamy:  Statistically, women physicians are a significantly higher risk of completed suicide than matched females in other professions. So it’s not uncommon, unfortunately, and I think that, yeah, exactly what you said about that moral compass that physicians have, I think being able to feel like you're true to yourself. That's a basic need that all of us have, and I think especially those who go into medicine, we feel that pretty intensely.

How technology is contributing to the problem, not alleviating it

Chris Kresser:  Right. And there may be lots of choices every day that they have to make that are, don't feel true to themselves because of the way that the system is set up. And I know from my own research and I know you and I have talked about this, one of the influences in terms of burnout has been the rise of electronic medical records or electronic health records, EMRs and EHRs. Initially these were hailed as, that this is going to dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork that doctors would have to do and they were going to be great time-saving and productivity devices, and they were going to be doctors’ best friends. But the reality has not quite lived up to that, has it?

Akil Palanisamy:  No, no. Yeah, I would, I think that studies show that about like half of the average physician’s workday is spent entering data or doing other clerical work in the EHR. So the amount of time actually spent with patients is less than a third, and for me I think it's a bit of a double-edged sword. Because it does make it easier to respond to patient messages rather than playing phone tag with patients. But on a typical day, I might get 50 to 60 electronic messages in addition to charting visit notes for each patient, and each of these questions or patient calls, etc., requires some thought.

And increasingly we’re being measured on how quickly we can respond to these messages because the priority is patient satisfaction, and that's eventually going to be tied to financial compensation and that kind of thing. So I think this EHR, it takes up so much time, and it really hasn’t translated to the reduced workload and that sort of thing. And when we deal with insurance in my practice, I think that's a huge benefit for patients because it improves access, and for Functional Medicine and integrative medicine, I think we need to move in that direction where insurance covers services. And so we offer that, but then it creates a whole universe of responsibilities in terms of the paperwork, the criteria for each progress note when we’re billing insurance, the forms, the prior authorizations, the other kind of paperwork. So it just adds another layer of paperwork to everything else that we’re dealing with in terms of the EHR every day.

Chris Kresser:  Yes. And then there’s another issue of when you're actually in the room with the patient, that connection that you're trying to make with the patient is now being mediated by a computer screen and having to type into the computer. And we’ve all seen, I've heard many stories of people going to doctors and complaining that their doctor was hardly even looking at them because they were working on the computer the entire time, and this is especially true with younger doctors from what I've heard, who never operated without an EHR.

So they never had the experience of being in a visit with the patient without the computer being part of that. And I think with all the data that we now have in terms of how important the physician-patient relationship is to the outcomes in care and the research on the placebo effect, and just the, in Carl Rogers's words, the unconditional positive regard and the type of connection that is made just is therapeutic in its own right. And I think the EHR can compromise that in some ways.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. And I'm always torn because I want to maintain good eye contact and really be present with each patient, but then if I don’t touch the EHR at all, then at the end of the day I’m like, this one’s like …

Chris Kresser:  You’ve got eight more hours of work.

Akil Palanisamy:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  It’s really challenging, and, I mean, my solution to that, which is not possible for everybody because of the model I work independently, so I’m able to just kind of set things up how I want. But I have a nurse practitioner that's by my side at every appointment, and she takes the notes. So I'm able to just maintain eye contact with my patient and not really look at the computer. And I recognize that's not a viable solution for most practitioners, but it's something that I felt compelled to do because I, like you, didn't want to get home and do four hours of data entry into the EHR after a full day of seeing patients. And but I didn't also want to sacrifice the connection with the patient.

So I think the other thing that's also not always in an individual physician’s control is the quality of the EHR or the EMR system. So many of them are just completely bloated and full of functions that they'll never use, and just really difficult to navigate, and they’re a nightmare in terms of software development. They’ve been just sort of cobbled together and put on top of each other, and it’s, for anyone who likes software and technology, EMR software is not going to be particularly inspiring for the most part.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yes, yeah. No, I think you’re right on that. And the point about having additional support for progress notes, I think, is a good one because studies show that having some type of help with the charting actually reduces burnout, and it's obvious, right? And I think at Sutter Health where I work, they really take burnout quite seriously. And so they’ve supported having scribes, which is the same thing. They take notes and they kind of do everything, and you just have to sign the note.

So I think it’s really, it’s a shared issue with burnout between individuals and healthcare systems and organizations. So I think it’s very important that all of these systems realize they have an important role to play, and I think Sutter Health is a really great example of that. They've supported a lot of these changes, and like this example of scribes and with our EHR, which is Epic, just helping us to use it in the most efficient way possible. So I think systemic changes are really a huge part of the solution as well.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, and this is a recurring theme in this conversation. It's that individual physicians can only do so much when they're employed in a larger organization, and they’re not free to just do whatever they want. And so we have to continue to work to raise awareness institutionally about these issues so that the institutions themselves can make the changes, and then individual physicians will benefit from those.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

How to fight physician burnout

Chris Kresser:  So let's talk a little bit about some of the work you've done in the past with medical students and other doctors at Sutter on burnout. What kind of things have you done to approach this?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think for me during medical school, it was really a survival mechanism. Because I was pretty burned out and the training, yes, I absolutely had that being belittled and demeaned when I was on the wards in my rotations. And so I really got interested in the certain classes that were offered on finding meaning in medicine and really connecting with your purpose or actually reconnecting with why you went into medicine, and keeping that front and center. And also developing tools for maintaining well-being like mindfulness.

So mindfulness is one thing that has been studied. There’s actually been about 14 studies looking at physician burnout and mindfulness, and nine of them have shown positive outcome in terms of:

Reducing burnout

Improving well-being

Improving mood

Improving resiliency

So I think, I don't think that's the entire solution, but the more tools you have in your toolkit, the better. And we don't really get any training in general in terms of how to deal with stress and how to manage emotions during our healthcare training. And so I think I got into mindfulness very early, studied MBSR, developed a daily meditation practice, became involved in educational programs teaching people about mindfulness. And then since … then during residency and now practice, after that I've been very interested in workshops and events that kind of focus on that aspect of meaning and really reconnecting with a sense of purpose, a sense of direction. Kind of helping people be true to themselves.

And so I think small group exercises and workshops where people are getting out of their left brain and reconnecting with their right brain, using art and things like that, have been really effective. So for me, I've benefited as much as I’ve helped anybody in this work, and it's been just partly for my own gains, but I think you teach what you have to learn. And for me, being involved in burnout and teaching people about it has been a lifesaver.

Chris Kresser:  That’s so great. I think all of those are fantastic tools for kind of exploring the causes of burnout on an individual level and helping people respond in a way that will reduce the risk of moral injury, if we will. And I know for me, one of the ways that I've approached this personally and also with people that I've worked with and that I’ve trained is just to make sure that I feel like the work I'm doing is having a big impact on my patient’s lives. Because that’s one of the reasons I really love that distinction that you make between burnout and moral injury. Because if I look at it that way, I think, “Okay, well, that's the biggest risk is just getting to the end of the day and feeling like I'm not making a difference. Feeling like all of my efforts are for naught really. Or they’re not really having the impact that I would like them to have.” And to me, that's the greatest risk in terms of burning out. When I know that my work is making a difference, my endurance and stamina are considerable.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Use Functional Medicine to prevent it

Chris Kresser:  But when I don't feel that way, it doesn't take much to make me feel tired and like what I'm doing is not worth it. So this is, I think, where a Functional Medicine approach has a lot to offer, not just as a treatment modality, but as a means of really actually making a difference in the patients’ lives. Like getting to the root cause of the problem and actually addressing the problem and helping the patient to recover and feel better without the use of unnecessary drugs and surgery. For me that was one of the most appealing things about Functional Medicine, and I think it's one of the less talked about but most important gifts that it has to offer to individual physicians who shift their practice in that direction.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think that's what motivated me to go into Functional Medicine as well, just to get that sense of fulfillment and satisfaction when you help someone really get a permanent solution to something and by uncovering the root causes and taking that holistic approach. So I think that's what drew me to Functional Medicine as well.

Schedule a retreat

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So another area where I know, or a kind of antidote to burnout that I know that you and I are both passionate about is a retreat. So I've been a big believer in retreat. I’ve done annual retreats myself for many years. I’ve done meditation retreats for about 25 years and I just can't really imagine my life without that opportunity to step away from my day-to-day life and experience and to get a different perspective, to slow down, to have more spacious existence for a few days were the busyness of life is not overtaking me and where I can just hear myself think and feel my body, and just look at things from a fresh perspective. It's just crucial for me. And I've always felt like my wish has been that others can experience this. That we can, because I really believe in its transformative power.

Connect with colleagues

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. I do as well, and I’ve had a number of retreats over the years in terms of individual retreats and also group retreats. And especially in the professional setting, I find that ability to connect with other colleagues and professionals in that informal, nonwork setting is so powerful because in healthcare there's so much isolation. There are so many individual silos.

Everybody's just doing their thing trying to get through the day, and you rarely have a chance to step back and step out of that situation to just really deeply connect with people who are in the same boat and really understand what they're going through, share their story, listen to their stories, and really deepen your connection and solve problems together.

So I think that sort of deep connection is so important because that's like a huge need for all human beings, and especially in such an isolating profession like in healthcare. I think it's essential.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, yeah. So many clinicians can just spend, we spend most of our time in a room with patients and we’re interacting with patients, but we’re not, we’re interacting with them in a certain way. We’re playing a certain role. We’re the clinician, they’re the patient, and those can be rich and rewarding interactions. But it's not the same as connecting with other colleagues and being able to talk about the issues that we face professionally and share together. So yeah I think that group experience is really powerful. And I’ve been writing about this recently.

I’ve been sharing some book recommendations, and Akil and I have actually teamed up to offer a retreat for healthcare practitioners at 1440 Multiversity in October. It’s from October 5th to 7th this year. And so it starts on Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and it goes through Sunday midday. And the retreat’s called “From Burnout to Brilliance: Rediscover Your Passion and Purpose, Reclaim Your Health, and Create a Practice You Love.” So the intention of this retreat is to address the issues that we've been talking about in the show and to help healthcare professionals explore their own situation, help them rediscover their passion for medicine and healthcare, and reconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose in their work to take some practical steps. Break those down into really doable actionable steps that they can take to reclaim their health and well-being. Rediscover parts of themselves that are not typically expressed in the course of their day-to-day work and just kind of cultivate a sense of energy and vitality that they may have been missing for many years.

And I'm really excited about doing this. I’m excited about doing this with Akil, who I've known for several years now and I really respect, and I'm excited about doing it at 1440. It's an incredible new retreat center, which I think you did a retreat there with Michelle Tam with Nom Nom Paleo last year, Akil?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yes, yes beautiful, beautiful place. Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  So this is, and for those of you who are not familiar, it's in Santa Cruz Mountains, right?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, it’s surrounded by redwood trees and there's all these amazing hiking trails. And yeah, a beautiful place.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I haven't actually been there yet, but I know several people who’ve taught there and who’ve been there. And if you go to 1440.org, click on the stay button and check out some of the pictures. It's an absolutely beautiful campus. Really nice accommodations, gorgeous dining hall with lots of different food options. They've got daily yoga classes and massage, and a spa and other health offerings there. And they’ve got, of course, gorgeous hiking trails because it's in the redwood forest there. It just looks to me like they're really doing it right. I've been to a lot of retreat centers. I actually lived at a retreat center in Big Sur called the Esalen Institute …

Akil Palanisamy:  Oh. sure.

Chris Kresser:  … and many people may be familiar with. When I was still really sick and dealing with my health issues, I got to a point where I just decided, I kind of reached the end of the line of supplements and diets, and medications, and I decided that I would explore the psychological, emotional, psycho-spiritual aspects of what was going on for me. So I moved to Esalen and lived there for a couple of years. So I'm very familiar with retreat centers. I've been to many others around the country, both for Buddhist meditation retreats and other retreats, and I have, they're all great in many ways. But they’re, I can see that 1440 is bringing it to a different level.

So I'm excited to be a part of that. I'm excited to get together with a group of professionals that are all wanting to cultivate more meaning in their work and to find that work/life balance that can be so elusive. And I just can't wait to get together and support each other and share because that's, I mean, we all have so much to offer, and I think when we come together with a similar purpose, it's really powerful.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah. I am also really excited about the upcoming event, and I think for anyone who feels like they're not being true to themselves in their work or as to themselves as they would want to be, I think this is a great opportunity to really reflect. And I think our vision for that weekend is that it's going to be a very introspective weekend and really focused in small groups and interactive elements. So it’s not going to be just mostly didactic.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. It’s not going to be Akil and I standing in front of the room talking at you the whole time. Definitely going to be the opposite of that.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, exactly, yeah. Because I think that this work is really about looking within and then sharing and connecting with other people. And so that's the focus of the weekend, is really building that sense of community with whoever comes and really learning to deepen your own sense of meaning and purpose in work, and look within to reconnect with that vision for what drew you to this work initially. Because I think that's the ultimate goal is having that feeling like you're really being true to yourself at the end of the day and having the kind of practice that you envision.

Don’t be afraid to make changes

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. I shared the story of Sheri in my book Unconventional Medicine, who is a clinician that was working in the VA. And she's a doctor and was mostly seeing patients with diabetes. That's the most common health challenge for veterans. And it was, she was counting the days until retirement. It was just really a factory-medicine type of situation. She often didn’t even have time to go to the bathroom during the day because she was just that busy from appointment to appointment. And as we've discussed, there was a real risk of moral injury because she didn't feel like she was making a difference. She was just handing out medications to these people and she wasn't, she knew as an athlete herself who tried to pay attention to her diet, she knew that wasn’t the best way to go about it. But what else could she do in the amount of time that she had?

And she moved into kind of a more, started incorporating more of a functional approach in her work, and then eventually left and started her own Functional Medicine practice. But for her, it was just a total game changer. She went from counting the days to retirement, to not ever being able to imagine retiring. And that's the kind of shift that’s possible, I think, when you really address the root causes of burnout and take the opportunity to step out of your current system, your current day-to-day, and really give yourself the chance to discover something new. And even if that’s maybe moving in a different direction entirely, or maybe staying in your current situation but just making a series of small changes that collectively can have a big impact.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think for me, my whole approach has been in terms of incremental change because I know that for many people, they have gone out of the insurance model and set up their own Functional Medicine practice, and that can be fantastic. But my work is really just building change within the system. Because if the people within the system leave and do their own thing, then the system itself is going to not be changed. And so I think that a big part of this is also figuring out solutions within systems and incremental steps we can take, and I think that'll hopefully be part of what we talk about as well. Just if you do belong to a system, how you can take a leadership role and effect change within that system as well.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. That's why Akil and I are a good team, because I’m outside the system and he’s inside of the system, and we have different perspectives. So that's another reason I'm happy to team up with him. I mentioned this in the beginning, but I'll throw it out there again. You need not be an MD to participate in this workshop. It's really for all healthcare practitioners and providers who are experiencing burnout. And so this could be anyone from a health coach to a nutritionist to a dietitian to an occupational therapist to a chiropractor, a naturopath in addition to MDs, and DOs, and MPs, and PAs, and all of the other abbreviations and acronyms. Anyone working in healthcare really would be welcome. And we’re not even limiting it to people working in healthcare. We don't want to exclude people here, so if you're not working in healthcare and the things we've been talking about resonate with you, maybe you work in emergency services or something else, you are absolutely welcome to come.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, and I would add that even if you're not feeling burned out, I think that prevention is really the best medicine.

Chris Kresser:  That’s true.

Akil Palanisamy:  So I think learning about the research and the science, because we know how to prevent it, and it's much better to prevent burnout than treat it once it happens.

Chris Kresser:  That is a very good point. Yeah, and I guess if the statistics are any indication, we know that even if you’re not feeling burnout now, chances are statistically you will at some point.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  Especially without any intervention. It’s kind of like the diabetes example I used before. If you’ve got high normal blood sugar, now’s the time to get it under control rather than waiting until it turns into diabetes.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  Great, well, thank you so much, Akil, for being with us. It’s a fascinating and important topic, and I’m really looking forward to leading this workshop with you. Again, in the retreat, you can go to 1440, it’s 1-4-4-0 dot o-r-g, and when you get there on the website, you just hover over Learn, and then under programs click on Professional Development. And if you scroll down there, you’ll see our program, which, again, is on the first weekend of October, October 5th to 7th, it’s a Friday through a Sunday.

And there’s a tuition for the program, and then there’s several different accommodation options available there. It’s really neat. I like what they've done with that. Everything from a private room to a suite to a really cool bunk style, kind of modern bunk-style accommodation that's much more affordable. I don’t know if you saw those last time.

Akil Palanisamy:  I did, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Check the pictures out, they look pretty cool. They call them pods.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, yeah, yeah. They’re pretty comfy. I’ve seen them.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah, it looks great. So lots of different accommodation options. If you’ve never been to this part of the world, the Santa Cruz Mountains are a beautiful, beautiful area, gorgeous redwood forests. You can head down to the beach before or after in Santa Cruz there. It’s a funky, cool little town. Great, great part of the world. So I hope you can make it. Those of you who have been listening to this and resonating with it, we’d love to meet you in person and have a chance to explore these topics with you.

And then Akil, is also, we haven’t talked much about his other work, but he’s also an author in addition to being a clinician. And he organizes the Paleo Symposium every year that I've been fortunate enough to be a speaker at. So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit more about your work and where they can find out more about your work.

Akil Palanisamy:  Oh sure, yeah. So I practice integrative medicine and I combine Functional Medicine with the Paleo approach and Ayurveda, which is the traditional medicine of India. And still that has led to my book which is called The Paleovedic Diet, combining Paleo and Ayurvedic medicine. And the best way to connect with me would be through my website, which is DoctorAkil.com. Just doctor spelled out, A-k-i-l dot com. And yeah, I wanted to thank you, as well, Chris, for having me on the podcast. I’m very excited to be working on this event with you, and it was really a pleasure to talk today.

Chris Kresser:  Pleasure is mine, Akil. And I'm sure we’ll be in touch before October, but I look forward to seeing you then and anyone else who's listening, who wants to join us. So 1440.org, and thanks for listening, everybody. Keep sending your questions in. I know I haven’t answered many of them recently. We’ve been doing a lot more interviews lately. But I do see that I have a few Q&A episodes coming up, and we do read all of your questions, and we also consider them for writing articles or emails.

So even if we’re not able to answer them on the show, it helps me to understand what you're thinking about and what you want me to write about and talk about. So please do keep sending them in. That’s ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And thanks, everyone, for listening. And thank you, Akil, and we’ll see you next time.

Akil Palanisamy:  Thank you, Chris.

The post RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy appeared first on Chris Kresser.

[denisalvney]

RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy

In this episode, we discuss:

Burnout among healthcare practitioners

How common the problem is

The results of widespread physician burnout

The difference between burnout and moral injury

How technology is contributing to the problem, not alleviating it

How to fight physician burnout

Show notes:

The Paleovedic Diet by Dr. Akil Palanisamy

The Sutter Health Institute for Health & Healing in San Francisco

Unconventional Medicine by Chris Kresser

1440 Multiversity retreat for healthcare professionals

Akil Palanisamy’s website, DoctorAkil.com

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Chris Kresser:  Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week we’re going to be talking to Dr. Akil Palanisamy, who is a friend and colleague in the Functional Medicine space. And I’ve known him for several years. He is the author of The Paleovedic Diet, a really interesting book combining Paleo and Ayurveda, a traditional Indian medicine which is an interest of his. And he also runs the Paleo Symposium that’s put on by the Institute for Health & Healing at UCSF every year, that I’ve been a featured speaker at since it started.

But today actually, we’re going to be talking about something different, which is burnout amongst healthcare practitioners. It’s a really important topic that has pretty significant implications not only in terms of the effect on individual clinicians, but on patients and their access to care, things like medical errors and just the healthcare system overall.

So if you’re not familiar with Akil, he’s an integrative medicine physician who blends his medical training with Functional Medicine in Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India. He studied biochemistry at Harvard and received his medical degree from UCSF and completed his residency at Stanford. Dr. Akil also completed a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona. He sees patients at the Sutter Health Institute for Health & Healing in San Francisco, where he also serves as physician director for community education. He’s been a consultant with the medical board of California for many years and as I mentioned, he’s the author of The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease.

So I’m really excited to dive into this conversation with Akil. I think you’ll find it interesting, even if you’re not a healthcare practitioner that’s experiencing burnout, because we talk about a lot of issues that are relevant to anybody doing any kind of work, really. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Let’s dive in. Akil, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so glad to have you here.

Akil Palanisamy:  Thank you, Chris. Pleasure to be here.

Burnout among healthcare practitioners

Chris Kresser:  So today we’re going to talk about a really important topic that I don't think gets enough attention, and this is physician burnout. So, and I would extend it to burnout for any healthcare practitioners. We might be focusing a little bit on physicians because this is where most of the statistics are available, but it’s certainly a problem across the entire healthcare world whether we’re talking about:

Nurses

Nurse practitioners

Occupational therapists

Chiropractors

Acupuncturists

Anybody working in the care profession

In my book Unconventional Medicine, I talked a lot about how this is one of the major challenges within medicine in general, not just conventional medicine, but also integrative medicine and Functional Medicine. And it's something that we need to develop a sensible approach to if we’re going to meet our goals in terms of preventing and reversing disease. So this is something that Akil has thought deeply about and has been involved in a number of different initiatives from his work at Sutter to working with medical students and other physicians to address this problem. So I'm really looking forward to having this conversation. So why don’t we start a little bit with the stats on burnout, Akil?

Ask yourself: Does medicine still feel like your calling? If daily stress and exhaustion are turning you away from the profession, you might be headed toward physician burnout. Find out what causes burnout and learn how to rediscover your sense of purpose.

How common the problem is

Akil Palanisamy:  Sure, yeah, I think it's really rampant, and most studies report around 50 percent or higher of physicians report some significant burnout. And that's up from about 40 percent just five years ago. So, I think the numbers are really scary and also this is a global problem. So this is across the board. Many countries throughout the world and also regardless of the stage of training. So medical students, residents, physicians, even the number of years of practice has no impact.

Chris Kresser:  Wow.

Akil Palanisamy:  I will check on this number, so, I mean, I know because I did my medical training 20 years ago, and it was like, I would say, a soul-crushing and exhausting process.

Chris Kresser:  Right, right.

Akil Palanisamy:  So I started early in this topic, and that’s why I’m so passionate about it.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. That’s really revealing in some ways. If medical students are as burned out as people who've been in the profession for 10 or 20 years, that's an indication that something’s already going wrong, even at that very early stage.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right. I came across a really fascinating study. They interviewed almost 3,000 medical students about burnout and 53 percent of them reported feeling burnt out. About 15 percent were depressed, about 5 percent had seriously considered suicide. But the interesting thing was 100 percent of the students, every single one reported feeling humiliated at some point, demeaned, disrespected as part of their training. And that had huge effects on their performance and judgment, and that was my experience too. It’s part of the culture of training doctors.

Chris Kresser:  It really is, isn’t it? It’s almost like fraternity hazing or something. I've heard for residents that it's … and it seems to be perpetuated for some of the same reasons, like this, “I went through this, so you have to go through it,” type of mentality. And I've even read the studies that support that.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, right. When I started my residency, I was super thrilled because they had just passed a law limiting the work hours, continuous work hours to 24 hours in a row. That was like a huge drop.

Chris Kresser:  That’s a big development.

Akil Palanisamy:  And I was like, “Wow, this is fantastic. I only have to work 24 hours in a row, like, every week.” And people thought that would solve the problem of burnout. But it hasn’t because that’s just one of many factors.

The results of widespread physician burnout

Chris Kresser:  Right, and so we know that there’s a huge problem with the shortage of primary care physicians. I don't remember the exact number from the study I shared in my book, but it's something like, predicted to be a shortage of around 50,000 primary care providers by the year 2025, which is not very far off in the future. And yet one of the costs of burnout, as you said, is that two-thirds of physicians know a doctor who is likely to stop practicing medicine or at least to reduce their access to patients, switch to concierge model, or something like that within the next five years as a result of burnout. So this is a real problem that's really kind of having an outsize effect on our healthcare system.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it is genuinely a public health crisis. And I think that that word is increasingly being used in the literature because this really does impact not just individual physicians but patients, healthcare organizations, the entire healthcare system in our country and other countries around the world. So I think the scope of the effects and the impact of burnout is being recognized now and it's huge in terms of not just the individual level, but medical errors as well. So, recent studies have shown that there’s a strong relationship between physician burnout and medical errors. And already medical errors are one of the major leading causes of death in the United States. And so I think as we get more burned out physicians and higher rates of medical errors, I think that's one of the big issues in terms of the costs of this problem.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, this is critical, and I highlighted this in my book. But if you go to a site like CDC or a general website and you search for the top 10 causes of death, let’s see what happens if we do that right now. Cardiovascular disease is still holding at number one, and then you’ve got lung cancer or you’ve got other diseases that come shortly after that. The data is often changing. Cancer continues to go up the list. But you’re not going to see medical errors on these lists, right?

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  There was a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2016, just a couple of years ago, and then another one by Barbara Starfield, who’s since passed away, back in 2000 in JAMA. And both of those found the same thing, that medical errors are actually the third-leading cause of death. And since only 5 to 15 percent of the atherogenic events are even reported, Dr. Starfield actually speculated that medical errors could be the number one cause of death if all of the atherogenic events were reported. So this is something you don't see on the typical list, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, exactly. Yeah, because when you experience burnout, the impaired judgment, lack of attention to detail, communication breakdown, all the things, the depression, that just greatly increases the risk of medical errors.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So this is a, it's a common problem, it's a problem that has not only effects on individual practitioners and their health and their lifespan, their feelings about their work, but also to patients and their safety and their ability to get the care that they need, and then to society as a whole. The healthcare crisis continues to deepen, and we need more doctors, rather than fewer. The fact that 50 … that two-thirds of physicians know a doctor who’s likely to stop practicing medicine in five years is exactly the opposite direction that we need to be going in here.

The difference between burnout and moral injury

So let's talk … so, we’ve been throwing this term “burnout” around, and I'm sure that means different things to different people. But you actually emailed me before the show with a really interesting distinction that I want to highlight—the difference between burnout and moral injury. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. So traditionally, burnout is defined as a work-related syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, a cynical feeling, and feeling like you're ineffective on the job. But this concept of burnout really doesn't resonate with doctors. I can tell you from talking to many of them that they really don't connect with this concept of burnout because the problem is you're pointing the finger at doctors. And you’re saying, “You’re burned out, you need to start doing yoga and eat granola, and just like change your lifestyle.” But you know, these are some of the most resilient people out there.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely.

Akil Palanisamy:  Medicine, I mean we’ve survived decades of intense training, sleep deprivation, the training process itself is incredibly stressful, the work demands. So these are some of the most resilient and resourceful people out there. And so I think the problem is really,  a big part of it is the system. But the distinction that you mentioned between moral injury and burnout, the concept of moral injury actually was first used to describe how soldiers responded to what they did during war and when they came back, having to do things that went against their morals.

In healthcare, it refers to physicians being unable to provide the high-quality care that they would really like to, essentially, not being able to be true to themselves. So I think the problem is not that physicians are burned out and so we don't care. The problem is that we care very deeply.

Chris Kresser:  Care too much.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Not too much, but it’s the care that’s causing the problem, yeah.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right and then as a result, in our current healthcare system, it's so hard to consistently meet patients’ needs and provide the kind of care that we envisioned we would going into medicine. Because most doctors think of medicine as a calling, and so that failure and inability to meet needs of patients in the way that we really envision, that is hugely damaging, and I think that has a huge effect on physician well-being. And so that's the concept of moral injury. So I think that it's really much broader than just pointing the finger at doctors.

Chris Kresser:  I think that’s really, really important to understand, and I've always made it clear that when I'm criticizing conventional medicine and its shortcomings, I'm not criticizing individual doctors. Of course, I might be criticizing some individual doctors, but not as a group because the vast majority of doctors that I have met are people that genuinely want to help their patients. They went into medicine for all the right reasons and they do recognize that they're not having the impact that they would like to have, and it's painful for them. But there's, they feel like their hands are tied because of the way that the system is set up. And they’re just as much victims of the system as the average patient is.

And I think this is a good example of how that plays out where we all want to have meaningful and rewarding work. We all want to get to the end of the day and feel like we really made a difference. And doctors, I think, especially. That's the path they chose. They didn't go into private equity. They didn't choose to go into a career that was really not about helping people, but more about making money or enriching their own lives. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. They willingly chose to go through a very arduous path that involves many, many years of schooling and as you said, rigorous training with residency, working 24 hours straight, often graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I mean, it’s an enormous risk to take, an enormous amount of investment of money and time and energy to become a physician.

So you don't make it through that generally, unless you really have a guiding moral compass that is pushing you through it. And so it's really, I think, even more important and critical that we figure out a way to, where we create a path forward for doctors and other healthcare practitioners that really do want to have that feeling at the end of the day. Because that's the antidote to burnout, where when you really do feel like you're transforming the lives of the people that you're working with, and you're having a huge impact. Because in that situation it doesn't mean you won't get tired and it doesn't mean you won't occasionally feel, “Geez, I need a vacation.” But you're not going to have that moral injury, and that’s what makes all the difference in the world.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I know, exactly. And I think that the rates of suicide among physicians is a real wake-up call because it’s twice that of I think active duty military, and then there was a report from the UK that there was a young junior doctor who, she took her own life by walking into the sea.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s not, yeah.

Akil Palanisamy:  Statistically, women physicians are a significantly higher risk of completed suicide than matched females in other professions. So it’s not uncommon, unfortunately, and I think that, yeah, exactly what you said about that moral compass that physicians have, I think being able to feel like you're true to yourself. That's a basic need that all of us have, and I think especially those who go into medicine, we feel that pretty intensely.

How technology is contributing to the problem, not alleviating it

Chris Kresser:  Right. And there may be lots of choices every day that they have to make that are, don't feel true to themselves because of the way that the system is set up. And I know from my own research and I know you and I have talked about this, one of the influences in terms of burnout has been the rise of electronic medical records or electronic health records, EMRs and EHRs. Initially these were hailed as, that this is going to dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork that doctors would have to do and they were going to be great time-saving and productivity devices, and they were going to be doctors’ best friends. But the reality has not quite lived up to that, has it?

Akil Palanisamy:  No, no. Yeah, I would, I think that studies show that about like half of the average physician’s workday is spent entering data or doing other clerical work in the EHR. So the amount of time actually spent with patients is less than a third, and for me I think it's a bit of a double-edged sword. Because it does make it easier to respond to patient messages rather than playing phone tag with patients. But on a typical day, I might get 50 to 60 electronic messages in addition to charting visit notes for each patient, and each of these questions or patient calls, etc., requires some thought.

And increasingly we’re being measured on how quickly we can respond to these messages because the priority is patient satisfaction, and that's eventually going to be tied to financial compensation and that kind of thing. So I think this EHR, it takes up so much time, and it really hasn’t translated to the reduced workload and that sort of thing. And when we deal with insurance in my practice, I think that's a huge benefit for patients because it improves access, and for Functional Medicine and integrative medicine, I think we need to move in that direction where insurance covers services. And so we offer that, but then it creates a whole universe of responsibilities in terms of the paperwork, the criteria for each progress note when we’re billing insurance, the forms, the prior authorizations, the other kind of paperwork. So it just adds another layer of paperwork to everything else that we’re dealing with in terms of the EHR every day.

Chris Kresser:  Yes. And then there’s another issue of when you're actually in the room with the patient, that connection that you're trying to make with the patient is now being mediated by a computer screen and having to type into the computer. And we’ve all seen, I've heard many stories of people going to doctors and complaining that their doctor was hardly even looking at them because they were working on the computer the entire time, and this is especially true with younger doctors from what I've heard, who never operated without an EHR.

So they never had the experience of being in a visit with the patient without the computer being part of that. And I think with all the data that we now have in terms of how important the physician-patient relationship is to the outcomes in care and the research on the placebo effect, and just the, in Carl Rogers's words, the unconditional positive regard and the type of connection that is made just is therapeutic in its own right. And I think the EHR can compromise that in some ways.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. And I'm always torn because I want to maintain good eye contact and really be present with each patient, but then if I don’t touch the EHR at all, then at the end of the day I’m like, this one’s like …

Chris Kresser:  You’ve got eight more hours of work.

Akil Palanisamy:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  It’s really challenging, and, I mean, my solution to that, which is not possible for everybody because of the model I work independently, so I’m able to just kind of set things up how I want. But I have a nurse practitioner that's by my side at every appointment, and she takes the notes. So I'm able to just maintain eye contact with my patient and not really look at the computer. And I recognize that's not a viable solution for most practitioners, but it's something that I felt compelled to do because I, like you, didn't want to get home and do four hours of data entry into the EHR after a full day of seeing patients. And but I didn't also want to sacrifice the connection with the patient.

So I think the other thing that's also not always in an individual physician’s control is the quality of the EHR or the EMR system. So many of them are just completely bloated and full of functions that they'll never use, and just really difficult to navigate, and they’re a nightmare in terms of software development. They’ve been just sort of cobbled together and put on top of each other, and it’s, for anyone who likes software and technology, EMR software is not going to be particularly inspiring for the most part.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yes, yeah. No, I think you’re right on that. And the point about having additional support for progress notes, I think, is a good one because studies show that having some type of help with the charting actually reduces burnout, and it's obvious, right? And I think at Sutter Health where I work, they really take burnout quite seriously. And so they’ve supported having scribes, which is the same thing. They take notes and they kind of do everything, and you just have to sign the note.

So I think it’s really, it’s a shared issue with burnout between individuals and healthcare systems and organizations. So I think it’s very important that all of these systems realize they have an important role to play, and I think Sutter Health is a really great example of that. They've supported a lot of these changes, and like this example of scribes and with our EHR, which is Epic, just helping us to use it in the most efficient way possible. So I think systemic changes are really a huge part of the solution as well.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, and this is a recurring theme in this conversation. It's that individual physicians can only do so much when they're employed in a larger organization, and they’re not free to just do whatever they want. And so we have to continue to work to raise awareness institutionally about these issues so that the institutions themselves can make the changes, and then individual physicians will benefit from those.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

How to fight physician burnout

Chris Kresser:  So let's talk a little bit about some of the work you've done in the past with medical students and other doctors at Sutter on burnout. What kind of things have you done to approach this?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think for me during medical school, it was really a survival mechanism. Because I was pretty burned out and the training, yes, I absolutely had that being belittled and demeaned when I was on the wards in my rotations. And so I really got interested in the certain classes that were offered on finding meaning in medicine and really connecting with your purpose or actually reconnecting with why you went into medicine, and keeping that front and center. And also developing tools for maintaining well-being like mindfulness.

So mindfulness is one thing that has been studied. There’s actually been about 14 studies looking at physician burnout and mindfulness, and nine of them have shown positive outcome in terms of:

Reducing burnout

Improving well-being

Improving mood

Improving resiliency

So I think, I don't think that's the entire solution, but the more tools you have in your toolkit, the better. And we don't really get any training in general in terms of how to deal with stress and how to manage emotions during our healthcare training. And so I think I got into mindfulness very early, studied MBSR, developed a daily meditation practice, became involved in educational programs teaching people about mindfulness. And then since … then during residency and now practice, after that I've been very interested in workshops and events that kind of focus on that aspect of meaning and really reconnecting with a sense of purpose, a sense of direction. Kind of helping people be true to themselves.

And so I think small group exercises and workshops where people are getting out of their left brain and reconnecting with their right brain, using art and things like that, have been really effective. So for me, I've benefited as much as I’ve helped anybody in this work, and it's been just partly for my own gains, but I think you teach what you have to learn. And for me, being involved in burnout and teaching people about it has been a lifesaver.

Chris Kresser:  That’s so great. I think all of those are fantastic tools for kind of exploring the causes of burnout on an individual level and helping people respond in a way that will reduce the risk of moral injury, if we will. And I know for me, one of the ways that I've approached this personally and also with people that I've worked with and that I’ve trained is just to make sure that I feel like the work I'm doing is having a big impact on my patient’s lives. Because that’s one of the reasons I really love that distinction that you make between burnout and moral injury. Because if I look at it that way, I think, “Okay, well, that's the biggest risk is just getting to the end of the day and feeling like I'm not making a difference. Feeling like all of my efforts are for naught really. Or they’re not really having the impact that I would like them to have.” And to me, that's the greatest risk in terms of burning out. When I know that my work is making a difference, my endurance and stamina are considerable.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Use Functional Medicine to prevent it

Chris Kresser:  But when I don't feel that way, it doesn't take much to make me feel tired and like what I'm doing is not worth it. So this is, I think, where a Functional Medicine approach has a lot to offer, not just as a treatment modality, but as a means of really actually making a difference in the patients’ lives. Like getting to the root cause of the problem and actually addressing the problem and helping the patient to recover and feel better without the use of unnecessary drugs and surgery. For me that was one of the most appealing things about Functional Medicine, and I think it's one of the less talked about but most important gifts that it has to offer to individual physicians who shift their practice in that direction.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think that's what motivated me to go into Functional Medicine as well, just to get that sense of fulfillment and satisfaction when you help someone really get a permanent solution to something and by uncovering the root causes and taking that holistic approach. So I think that's what drew me to Functional Medicine as well.

Schedule a retreat

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So another area where I know, or a kind of antidote to burnout that I know that you and I are both passionate about is a retreat. So I've been a big believer in retreat. I’ve done annual retreats myself for many years. I’ve done meditation retreats for about 25 years and I just can't really imagine my life without that opportunity to step away from my day-to-day life and experience and to get a different perspective, to slow down, to have more spacious existence for a few days were the busyness of life is not overtaking me and where I can just hear myself think and feel my body, and just look at things from a fresh perspective. It's just crucial for me. And I've always felt like my wish has been that others can experience this. That we can, because I really believe in its transformative power.

Connect with colleagues

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, absolutely. I do as well, and I’ve had a number of retreats over the years in terms of individual retreats and also group retreats. And especially in the professional setting, I find that ability to connect with other colleagues and professionals in that informal, nonwork setting is so powerful because in healthcare there's so much isolation. There are so many individual silos.

Everybody's just doing their thing trying to get through the day, and you rarely have a chance to step back and step out of that situation to just really deeply connect with people who are in the same boat and really understand what they're going through, share their story, listen to their stories, and really deepen your connection and solve problems together.

So I think that sort of deep connection is so important because that's like a huge need for all human beings, and especially in such an isolating profession like in healthcare. I think it's essential.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, yeah. So many clinicians can just spend, we spend most of our time in a room with patients and we’re interacting with patients, but we’re not, we’re interacting with them in a certain way. We’re playing a certain role. We’re the clinician, they’re the patient, and those can be rich and rewarding interactions. But it's not the same as connecting with other colleagues and being able to talk about the issues that we face professionally and share together. So yeah I think that group experience is really powerful. And I’ve been writing about this recently.

I’ve been sharing some book recommendations, and Akil and I have actually teamed up to offer a retreat for healthcare practitioners at 1440 Multiversity in October. It’s from October 5th to 7th this year. And so it starts on Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and it goes through Sunday midday. And the retreat’s called “From Burnout to Brilliance: Rediscover Your Passion and Purpose, Reclaim Your Health, and Create a Practice You Love.” So the intention of this retreat is to address the issues that we've been talking about in the show and to help healthcare professionals explore their own situation, help them rediscover their passion for medicine and healthcare, and reconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose in their work to take some practical steps. Break those down into really doable actionable steps that they can take to reclaim their health and well-being. Rediscover parts of themselves that are not typically expressed in the course of their day-to-day work and just kind of cultivate a sense of energy and vitality that they may have been missing for many years.

And I'm really excited about doing this. I’m excited about doing this with Akil, who I've known for several years now and I really respect, and I'm excited about doing it at 1440. It's an incredible new retreat center, which I think you did a retreat there with Michelle Tam with Nom Nom Paleo last year, Akil?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yes, yes beautiful, beautiful place. Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  So this is, and for those of you who are not familiar, it's in Santa Cruz Mountains, right?

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, it’s surrounded by redwood trees and there's all these amazing hiking trails. And yeah, a beautiful place.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I haven't actually been there yet, but I know several people who’ve taught there and who’ve been there. And if you go to 1440.org, click on the stay button and check out some of the pictures. It's an absolutely beautiful campus. Really nice accommodations, gorgeous dining hall with lots of different food options. They've got daily yoga classes and massage, and a spa and other health offerings there. And they’ve got, of course, gorgeous hiking trails because it's in the redwood forest there. It just looks to me like they're really doing it right. I've been to a lot of retreat centers. I actually lived at a retreat center in Big Sur called the Esalen Institute …

Akil Palanisamy:  Oh. sure.

Chris Kresser:  … and many people may be familiar with. When I was still really sick and dealing with my health issues, I got to a point where I just decided, I kind of reached the end of the line of supplements and diets, and medications, and I decided that I would explore the psychological, emotional, psycho-spiritual aspects of what was going on for me. So I moved to Esalen and lived there for a couple of years. So I'm very familiar with retreat centers. I've been to many others around the country, both for Buddhist meditation retreats and other retreats, and I have, they're all great in many ways. But they’re, I can see that 1440 is bringing it to a different level.

So I'm excited to be a part of that. I'm excited to get together with a group of professionals that are all wanting to cultivate more meaning in their work and to find that work/life balance that can be so elusive. And I just can't wait to get together and support each other and share because that's, I mean, we all have so much to offer, and I think when we come together with a similar purpose, it's really powerful.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah. I am also really excited about the upcoming event, and I think for anyone who feels like they're not being true to themselves in their work or as to themselves as they would want to be, I think this is a great opportunity to really reflect. And I think our vision for that weekend is that it's going to be a very introspective weekend and really focused in small groups and interactive elements. So it’s not going to be just mostly didactic.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. It’s not going to be Akil and I standing in front of the room talking at you the whole time. Definitely going to be the opposite of that.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, exactly, yeah. Because I think that this work is really about looking within and then sharing and connecting with other people. And so that's the focus of the weekend, is really building that sense of community with whoever comes and really learning to deepen your own sense of meaning and purpose in work, and look within to reconnect with that vision for what drew you to this work initially. Because I think that's the ultimate goal is having that feeling like you're really being true to yourself at the end of the day and having the kind of practice that you envision.

Don’t be afraid to make changes

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. I shared the story of Sheri in my book Unconventional Medicine, who is a clinician that was working in the VA. And she's a doctor and was mostly seeing patients with diabetes. That's the most common health challenge for veterans. And it was, she was counting the days until retirement. It was just really a factory-medicine type of situation. She often didn’t even have time to go to the bathroom during the day because she was just that busy from appointment to appointment. And as we've discussed, there was a real risk of moral injury because she didn't feel like she was making a difference. She was just handing out medications to these people and she wasn't, she knew as an athlete herself who tried to pay attention to her diet, she knew that wasn’t the best way to go about it. But what else could she do in the amount of time that she had?

And she moved into kind of a more, started incorporating more of a functional approach in her work, and then eventually left and started her own Functional Medicine practice. But for her, it was just a total game changer. She went from counting the days to retirement, to not ever being able to imagine retiring. And that's the kind of shift that’s possible, I think, when you really address the root causes of burnout and take the opportunity to step out of your current system, your current day-to-day, and really give yourself the chance to discover something new. And even if that’s maybe moving in a different direction entirely, or maybe staying in your current situation but just making a series of small changes that collectively can have a big impact.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, I think for me, my whole approach has been in terms of incremental change because I know that for many people, they have gone out of the insurance model and set up their own Functional Medicine practice, and that can be fantastic. But my work is really just building change within the system. Because if the people within the system leave and do their own thing, then the system itself is going to not be changed. And so I think that a big part of this is also figuring out solutions within systems and incremental steps we can take, and I think that'll hopefully be part of what we talk about as well. Just if you do belong to a system, how you can take a leadership role and effect change within that system as well.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. That's why Akil and I are a good team, because I’m outside the system and he’s inside of the system, and we have different perspectives. So that's another reason I'm happy to team up with him. I mentioned this in the beginning, but I'll throw it out there again. You need not be an MD to participate in this workshop. It's really for all healthcare practitioners and providers who are experiencing burnout. And so this could be anyone from a health coach to a nutritionist to a dietitian to an occupational therapist to a chiropractor, a naturopath in addition to MDs, and DOs, and MPs, and PAs, and all of the other abbreviations and acronyms. Anyone working in healthcare really would be welcome. And we’re not even limiting it to people working in healthcare. We don't want to exclude people here, so if you're not working in healthcare and the things we've been talking about resonate with you, maybe you work in emergency services or something else, you are absolutely welcome to come.

Akil Palanisamy:  Yeah, and I would add that even if you're not feeling burned out, I think that prevention is really the best medicine.

Chris Kresser:  That’s true.

Akil Palanisamy:  So I think learning about the research and the science, because we know how to prevent it, and it's much better to prevent burnout than treat it once it happens.

Chris Kresser:  That is a very good point. Yeah, and I guess if the statistics are any indication, we know that even if you’re not feeling burnout now, chances are statistically you will at some point.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  Especially without any intervention. It’s kind of like the diabetes example I used before. If you’ve got high normal blood sugar, now’s the time to get it under control rather than waiting until it turns into diabetes.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  Great, well, thank you so much, Akil, for being with us. It’s a fascinating and important topic, and I’m really looking forward to leading this workshop with you. Again, in the retreat, you can go to 1440, it’s 1-4-4-0 dot o-r-g, and when you get there on the website, you just hover over Learn, and then under programs click on Professional Development. And if you scroll down there, you’ll see our program, which, again, is on the first weekend of October, October 5th to 7th, it’s a Friday through a Sunday.

And there’s a tuition for the program, and then there’s several different accommodation options available there. It’s really neat. I like what they've done with that. Everything from a private room to a suite to a really cool bunk style, kind of modern bunk-style accommodation that's much more affordable. I don’t know if you saw those last time.

Akil Palanisamy:  I did, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Check the pictures out, they look pretty cool. They call them pods.

Akil Palanisamy:  Right, yeah, yeah. They’re pretty comfy. I’ve seen them.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah, it looks great. So lots of different accommodation options. If you’ve never been to this part of the world, the Santa Cruz Mountains are a beautiful, beautiful area, gorgeous redwood forests. You can head down to the beach before or after in Santa Cruz there. It’s a funky, cool little town. Great, great part of the world. So I hope you can make it. Those of you who have been listening to this and resonating with it, we’d love to meet you in person and have a chance to explore these topics with you.

And then Akil, is also, we haven’t talked much about his other work, but he’s also an author in addition to being a clinician. And he organizes the Paleo Symposium every year that I've been fortunate enough to be a speaker at. So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit more about your work and where they can find out more about your work.

Akil Palanisamy:  Oh sure, yeah. So I practice integrative medicine and I combine Functional Medicine with the Paleo approach and Ayurveda, which is the traditional medicine of India. And still that has led to my book which is called The Paleovedic Diet, combining Paleo and Ayurvedic medicine. And the best way to connect with me would be through my website, which is DoctorAkil.com. Just doctor spelled out, A-k-i-l dot com. And yeah, I wanted to thank you, as well, Chris, for having me on the podcast. I’m very excited to be working on this event with you, and it was really a pleasure to talk today.

Chris Kresser:  Pleasure is mine, Akil. And I'm sure we’ll be in touch before October, but I look forward to seeing you then and anyone else who's listening, who wants to join us. So 1440.org, and thanks for listening, everybody. Keep sending your questions in. I know I haven’t answered many of them recently. We’ve been doing a lot more interviews lately. But I do see that I have a few Q&A episodes coming up, and we do read all of your questions, and we also consider them for writing articles or emails.

So even if we’re not able to answer them on the show, it helps me to understand what you're thinking about and what you want me to write about and talk about. So please do keep sending them in. That’s ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And thanks, everyone, for listening. And thank you, Akil, and we’ll see you next time.

Akil Palanisamy:  Thank you, Chris.

The post RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy appeared first on Chris Kresser.

RHR: How to Fight Practitioner Burnout with Dr. Akil Palanisamy published first on https://chriskresser.com

[evnoweb]

An Interview with Stephen Hurley

Stephen Hurley is one of the reasons why I love Twitter and the concept of creating a Personal Learning Network.  I’ve learned so much from him, I’ve driven by his community so many times, and yet we’ve never met face to face.  Yet, I feel like I know him so well.

Stephen is an educator, creator, and above all a thinker whose work and efforts have really pushed my thinking for so long.  For that, I’m so grateful.

Doug:  We’ve certainly never met face to face but we’ve been connected for so long.  Do you recall when our paths first crossed online?

Stephen: It has seemed like close to forever! I believe that we first encountered each other virtually when I began my journey into Internet broadcasting through #ds106radio. That would have been after the very first Unplugged gathering that Rodd Lucier et al convened at the Northern Edge of Algonquin Park. That event led me to Andy Forgrave and so many others.

Doug: One of the areas where you’ve pushed me is in using more than blogs and text has been in the area of multimedia, specifically audio. This certainly has ties to your years in the classroom. Can you share a bit of your background?

Stephen: You know how to get me talking! I realized that I wanted a career in radio when I was in grade 4. It was the mid-60’s, just after the release of the Hall-Dennis Report here in Ontario. Things were changing. I was in an open concept classroom that year and the teacher recognized something about me that led her to hand me a microphone and cassette tape recorder. I recall being allowed to sit in an area of the classroom for hours at a time (well, it seemed like hours) creating my own “broadcasts”. My bedroom at home became my studio. Radio Shack eventually became a second church and I spent years nurturing an appreciation for the sound of the human voice (not just my own). In high school, I listened to talk radio, applied to become a summer reporter with CFRB and wanted desperately to go to Ryerson for Radio and Television Arts (I still long to enrol in that program). At the time, Ryerson was a Polytechnic Institute, and my parents wouldn’t have anything to do with the idea. This, of course, made my passion for this stuff even stronger.

When I finally began a career in education, the love of audio continued to influence how I taught, and how I spent my time preparing for lessons. I used to spend hours during the year and entire days during the summer months at our District AV/Tech facility, looking for multi-media resources, using their technology to create my own resources and imagining how sound, music and video could be combined to create powerful learning experiences. My assignments and projects would always include a multi-media option and I was always excited when students got excited about exploring the tools and technology available to them for creation.

My love and appreciation for media and, in particular, radio has only become stronger and I’m excited that, today, students and teachers have so many more ways to bring a sense of voice to their work!

Doug: You’re very active with the Canadian Education Association. Can you give us an example of some of the things that you contribute there?

Stephen: I encountered the CEA for the first time when I attended one of their annual symposia in Montreal back at the turn of the century. I knew immediately that this was an organization that I wanted to work with at some point in my career, but it wasn’t until a few years later that the opportunity presented itself. I started blogging for Edutopia in 2008 and it was through that work that Max Cooke, communication director for the CEA got in touch with me to do some writing for their magazine, Education Canada. I took that as an opportunity to reconnect with the organization and submitted a proposal to begin a series of podcasts under the banner, Teaching Out Loud. The idea was to raise the voices and stories of educators right across the country. Well, one thing led to another, and I soon found myself working with the CEA on some fairly robust research and facilitation pieces, including Teaching the Way You Aspire to Teach; The Challenge to Change and, most recently, the EdCan Network Regional Exchanges. Each of these projects has allowed me to move across the country and talk to education shareholders at various levels, listening to their aspirational stories and, in a very real sense, help the organization keep its ear to the ground across the country.

Doug: What prompted you to take the leap into voiceEd Radio?

Stephen: Leap is the right word to use. It’s a great description for most things that I do. Sometimes I make it across the moat, and sometimes I don’t! Back in December, I was reading The Age of Discovery by Chris Kutarna. It’s all about how we’re living in a period of Renaissance and there was one line, in particular, that caught my attention and imagination. It had to do with the idea that, in a period of renaissance, the lines between creator and consumer are blurred. Internet radio is one way that the lines between listener and broadcaster have been blurred.

I thought of my foray into the world of Internet Radio a few years ago with #ds106radio. Something clicked and I quickly began to connect some possibilities.

5 years ago, I started voicEd.ca—a multi-author blogspace dedicated to deepening and broadening some of the conversations that we have about education. It wasn’t a great leap to begin to imagine how that writing space could be transformed by the addition of a radio space.

Within 24 hours, I found myself owning a radio station!

Doug: I was pleased when you asked me to do a regular bit on there and talk about some of the blog posts that I feature on my regular Friday “This Week in Ontario Edublogs”. What made you think of inviting me?

Stephen: That was easy! I had been reading your This Week in Ontario Edublogs feature for a long time and, as I tried to imagine the type of content that we could bring to life on voicEd Radio, you were one of the first people that came to mind. Why couldn’t we use the radio to deepen the story around your featured blogs, their impact and the people behind them. We’ve never met face-to-face, but the weekly conversation make it seem like we’ve known each other for a long time.

Doug: I recall my first attempt at getting connected; I needed to really think about the gear on my end. I had the wrong browser, a microphone that didn’t give the results that you wanted, a reminder to close the door and keep external noises out, and so more including turning the fan off on hot summer days. Now that we have a routine, it’s pretty simple. Just the correct browser and my noise cancelling headphones and I’m good to go. But, things are far more sophisticated on your end. Can you share what’s in your studio to make it work?

Stephen: I broadcast from “the cave” in Milton and it is pretty simple. I have an iMac computer with a 27” screen. That gives me enough visual real estate to keep everything in front of me from a software perpsective.

I also have a PreSonus Firepod that allows me to plug in up to 8 mics. This connects to a simple piece of software called NiceCast. That drives the live broadcasts.

In terms of gathering guests in the room, I use Zencastr as a type of virtual “kitchen table”.

In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to integrate my electronic music software into the mix in order to create some original intro and outro music for broadcasts.

I’m just starting to gather the resources to allow voicEd Radio to head out on the road. At the beginning of November, we’ll be broadcasting live from 3 separate events, and we’re pretty excited about that!

Doug: The results certainly are very professional and I enjoy digging into the archived programs available on the voiceEd site. As I write this, I’m listening to your interview with Paul McGuire. We’ve chatted and you indicate that this is a personal project of yours. All of the setup is totally funded by you?

Stephen: voicEd Radio is a non-commerical/non-monetized project. Currently, it’s completely self-funded. I’m spending the first year playing with concepts and ideas in an effort to create a sense of value in the community. After our first year anniversary, I will begin looking for alternative structures, some funding models and some governance structures that work for us.

I’m actually looking for folks that might have some interest in helping me imagine how BlockChain technology might allow us to create a different metaphor for funding and value.

Doug: So, it’s a project that’s just gone wild! I do recall a conversation that we had once about the music on voiceEd. Many, including me, might guess that you just take license with YouTube but you go the whole distance with licensing. Can you tell us how and why it’s so important to you?

Stephen: I believe in attribution, but I also believe in making sure that I’m contributing to the livelihood of those artists whose work we use. My work on the Board of Directors for Access Copyright has attuned me to some of the copyright issues that are “out there” in the content ecosystem. It’s very important to me that I’m respecting those conversations, as well as the laws currently in place.

From the very start, we’ve had a non-interactive music license with SOCAN. Under our license, 80% of our station content can be music. We play very little music, with the exception of the work of some education-related singer/songwriters. But we also use music clips for intros and outros.

I’m not sure whether we’re in full compliance, but I’m working to explore with SOCAN what all of this means for us and our podcasters/broadcasters.

Doug: Recently, in looking for new blog posts, I fell into the blog area on voiceEd Radio and recognized some of the names there and found a few new names. What does it take to become a voiceEd Radio blogger?

Stephen: Simply a desire to share your thoughts and ideas in a respectful way. Currently we have contributions from some of our radio personalities, and some folks who would just like to write. I’m working on nurturing the blogging side of things in the months to come.

Doug: You even now have a Community Manager. Can you tell us about her and what her duties are?

Stephen: So, Sarah Lalonde is in the second year of her teacher preparation program at the University of Ottawa. She has been involved with voicEd Radio right from the start and has been instrumental in supporting its development.

Sarah has enthusiastically agreed to be our Community Manager. Sarah has embraced our social media presence, creating promotional materials for a variety of platforms, ensuring that social media announcements are up-to-date and helping me program the live stream each day. She is also a great sounding board for some of the crazy ideas that I sometimes have!

But Sarah is also a wonderful contributor to the voicEd community. She hosts her own podcast, is an active participant in others and is a great advocate for voicEd Radio.

Doug: voiceEd Radio continues to grow and you’ve given us an indication that it will expand again in November. What should be on our radar?

Stephen: As I’m writing this, we have so many exciting projects coming on to voicEd Radio. We have a 4-week series coming up with writer Ann Douglas, a six-week series with an Australian-born parent, Lois Letchford. We’re working with the Ontario Ministry of Education to launch season two of our mathematics exploration with Cathy Fosnot. Nancy Angevine-Sands is coming on to do some work on Parent Engagement and, in November, we’re launching the voicEd Radio Mobile—live broadcasting from events around the province and, eventually, around the world.

But those initiatives don’t tell the whole story. What started as a personal project has turned into a community and voicEd Radio is taking on a life of its own. It’s quickly becoming the open-space environment that I hoped it would become. And, as that happens, my name will fade a little more into the background and others will begin to emerge!

Doug: I am excited that we will actually meet. Plans are for us to do an episode of This Week in Ontario Edublogs live at the Minds on Media event at the Bring IT, Together Conference. It’s one thing to use your home studio but how will you take all this “on the road:?

Stephen: So, we’re looking to use the sound facilities already in place at conferences in events. A small USB interface will allow us to take sound right from the mixing board and feed it into a laptop computer. Then, hopefully, we have a live broadcast. I’m excited to explore, take some video of the process and share that with others.

My dream is to create a cadre of people across the country who would be available to do similar things at events in their areas. If I’m able to get some funding for this, we’ll be able to provide some of that equipment for people.

Doug: Recently, you had a Radio-a-thon at Voiced Radio. What was the inspiration for this? How did it go?

Stephen: Ah, 15 hours straight of live radio. What could be better? This was one of those ideas that came up in conversation over the summer. Several of us were thinking about back-to-school and how we might leverage the excitement of this time of the year to gain some traction for voicEd Radio. We actually had to expand our original plan for 12 hours as the requests to participate kept coming in! So, we began at 9:00 am and held the stream for 15 straight hours. It really solidified the community feel for this place, and we look forward to having more of these events in the future.

Doug: Even though you’ve left formal education, family life keeps you well grounded in the day to day education routine. Here’s a chance to brag about your family that you bring into our show regularly.

Stephen: It is a real gift for me to remain connected to the education system through my two boys, Luke and Liam. They are so different in the way that they approach the world that they’re allowing me to see their school experience from two totally different perspectives. Liam has a really vivid imagination and plans each and every day in his head before it even begins. Luke, on the other hand, is a puzzler—he loves codes, puzzles, intellectual challenges and the like. Both of the boys push the capacity of the system in different ways and it has been interesting to watch them grow from children into students. My wife, Zoe, is a middle school visual arts teacher and allows me to stay connected with the day-to-day life a practicing teacher. I love to think at the 30 000 foot level. My family keeps me close to the ground for at least a few hours a day.

Doug: Do you see a time where voiceEd radio gets too big for you and your Community Manager to manage? What happens then?

Stephen: That’s already started to happen. So, I’m starting to rely more on the community to offer ideas, advice and support. We’re just about to launch a request for voicEd Radio folks to contribute to a series of online tutorials under the “PodCamp” banner. We want to be able to gather together to support people that may want to become part of our radio team, but may be reluctant. Technical support, interviewing skills, bringing ideas to life, etc—these will all be part of what we hope will be a dynamic and vivid set of resources!

I’m also on the lookout for an effective way to grow the infrastructure, so that it continues to draw educators, parents, researchers and community members to this space. Lots of work to do, and lots of thinking to do. But I believe that we’re off to a great start!

Doug: Thank you so much for taking the time to share these details with folks, Stephen. I really appreciate it and I hope that people take the time to listen and perhaps even get involved with voiceEd Radio.

Stephen: I appreciate the opportunity to think out loud about all of this. I would encourage people who want to know more, or who have specific ideas about how they might become involved to reach out. Our tagline at voicEd Radio is: Your voice is RIGHT here!

You can connect with Stephen in these ways:

On Twitter, @Stephen_Hurley and @voicEdcanada Stephen’s personal website: http://ift.tt/2goSuAX voiceEd Radio: https://voiced.ca The voiceEd blog: http://ift.tt/2yvnhTi

An Interview with Stephen Hurley published first on http://ift.tt/2gZRS4X

[hottytoddynews]

Jeff McManus. Photo courtesy of jeffmcmanusspeaking.com

Jeff McManus has just released his exciting new book “Growing Weeders Into Leaders. The guru of Ole Miss landscaping is now revealing his many secrets of how he put Ole Miss on the national map in terms of natural beauty and breathtaking landscaping scenes. A man truly of all seasons! HottyToddy.com: Jeff, before we review the book with you, for those readers unfamiliar with your Ole Miss history, please give us a brief synopsis.

Jeff:  I came to Ole Miss in the year 2000 because of the vision of then Chancellor Robert C. Khayat.  He envisioned Ole Miss as having one of the most beautiful campuses in America.  He understood that first impressions mattered and by making Ole Miss the best it could be, we could help set the stage for more greatness in the classrooms and beyond. HottyToddy.com: A successful man is only as great as the family supporting him. Tell us about yours.

Jeff: Suzanne and I have been married since 1994, 23 years, we have 4 wonderful children, Sam 21, Nathan 20, Joshua, 19 and Mark 16.  Suzanne grew up in Va. Beach, Va. and graduated college with two degrees in Business Management and American Studies at University of South Florida in Tampa, FL.  Sam & Nathan are in school at Auburn University, Joshua is in school at Mississippi State and Mark is in the 11th grade at Oxford High School. At the baseball game recently my wife said she identified most with the umpire… having to continually sweep home plate after it was messed up.

McManus and his family

HottyToddy.com: Robert Khayat apparently had a great deal of influence with you, how so?

Jeff:  Dr. Khayat is a wonderful leader who taps into achieving a big vision with a team philosophy.  He challenged me to think bigger and beyond just doing work with excellence, but doing it for a bigger purpose.

One day when I saw him pulling up a weed on campus, I asked him, “what are you doing,” he said, “I am weeding by example.”  That is the kind of leader he is. HottyToddy.com: Every time we look up, Ole Miss is either winning or being recognized with another national accolade thanks to you and your staff. Can you bring us up to date on a few of the more recent ones?

Jeff: We like to call the national accolades, national championships.  We have 5 national championships that I know about, most recently was 2016 USA Today as the most beautiful campus.  Princeton Review, Newsweek and 2 more from Professional Grounds Managers Society.   In our truck shed on campus we hang banners from the rafters like you would see in a coliseum to remind our team they are national champions. HottyToddy.com: Your new book is already receiving some rave reviews.

Jeff: It’s fun to see the positive reaction to the book.  I had some great people helping me along the way with the book, too many to list here. It excites me most to hear how people are using it to grow their teams.

HottyToddy.com: Jeff, you always give credit to others when discussing your successes. Tell us about your staff.

Jeff: We have the best staff in the world.  We really do.  These folks do things that most people today just can’t  or will not do.  Working early morning in hot and cold temperatures.  Rain, sleet or snow, they are doing tough outdoor work and bringing such joy to our community.   We created a Landscape Creed a few years ago that brought our core values into clear focus.  As new employees come on board, they quickly hear our culture, and then they experience it.  We are blessed to have great leaders in Dr. Vitter and Larry Sparks, both who embrace the value of outdoor beauty. HottyToddy.com: What inspired you to write “Growing Weeders Into Leaders”?

Jeff: There are a couple of reasons.  I wanted to share the story of how when given the opportunity people really do their best with incredible pride and belief in why and what they do. I also wanted share a few insights I found to be successful in creating a national championship program. We have people come to Ole Miss from all across the country to see how we do things. We host an annual Landscape University training program to share our ideas.    HottyToddy.com: The degree of your success is now legendary. How has making great hiring choices impacted this?

Jeff: Hiring the right people is very important; learning how to interview is a science and art. One of my tasks is to make sure everyone understands our department’s role within the University.  Everyone is expected to pick up trash, me included.  No one is too good or graduates from hands on work:  to serve, get dirty and “weed by example.”  Dr. Khayat taught us that.

HottyToddy.com: For those of us who will be acquiring and reading the book, provide us a few insights as to what we will come away with.

Jeff: If you try great things, failure is part of the process.  Whether building a championship program or winning in life, you have to plant a culture of resiliency.  We don’t find excuses, we find ways to adapt and overcome.  There are opportunities if you look for them; they usually look like problems first.   

HottyToddy.com: Turning to the campus, how would you describe it to someone who has never been here?

Jeff: Majestic. Ole Miss is special. The Fredick Law Olmstead family and William Nichols laid out the space on campus in a unique way to create environments for learning – both inside and outside.  When you drive onto the Ole Miss campus, you sense it is a well developed space ready for you to grow your personal seeds of greatness. HottyToddy.com: I have heard on numerous occasions from faculty and other university leaders that the beauty of the campus is paramount in student decisions coming to Ole Miss. This has got you make feel most proud.

Jeff: 62% of prospective college students will make their decision to attend a college or university in the first few minutes of a campus visit.  We regularly hear from parents, students and faculty how the look and feel of the Ole Miss campus connected with them.  It has very little to do with me, but a lot to do with those ahead of me in history and those today that develop the master plans. Ian Banner who continues to see the value in the master plan and unique green spaces makes it an exciting place to work. HottyToddy.com: The Landscaping Camp of 2017 was another huge success. Tell us about a few of the highlights.

Jeff: The camp was a huge success because of the work of Rosie Vassallo.  She had the vision to invite people from all across the region to be part of the 3-day camp.  We had some great people in Oxford like Diane and Dickie Scruggs, Sam and Mary Haskell who allowed us to tour their beautiful yards.  That was a wonderful treat.   I look forward to Landscape Camp 2018.   HottyToddy.com: With all of the beautiful trees on campus, talk about the most famous one adjacent to the Student Union that is protected by the security fencing.

Jeff: Ole Miss has some great trees on the campus, including some State Champion trees.  The Northern Catalpa tree between the Union and Bryant hall is the largest one in the state. Its trunk is 22’ in circumference and I estimate it was planted around 1848-1900.  Several years ago, we had a straight-line wind hit the campus and this tree pretty hard.  The tree’s soft wood split in several places and we knew in a matter of time we were going to lose this grand old tree.  We took steps to keep the tree on life support for as long as we can.  It has such a history and unique value.  The fence was added to keep people safe in the event a limb does fall and we knew construction was coming at the Union and the fence would provide some protection.

HottyToddy.com: Where can “Growing Weeders Into Leaders” be purchased?

Jeff: It is available at your local book store and at Square Books here http://ift.tt/2gL9rBU

HottyToddy.com: Jeff, we forgot to mention your many speaking appearances. Where are you headed next?

Jeff: I am speaking in Orlando, Florida September 14th to professional landscapers.  Then I will be speaking to the Mississippi Society Certified Accounts later in September.  I love speaking to groups that see the value in growing the people they work with – whatever the profession, leadership is a culture and a team effort.  

Steve Vassallo is a HottyToddy.com contributor. Steve writes on Ole Miss athletics, Oxford business, politics and other subjects. He is an Ole Miss grad and former radio announcer for the basketball team. Currently, Steve is a highly successful leader in the real estate business who lives in Oxford with his wife Rosie. You can contact Steve at sovassallo@gmail.com or call him at 985-852-7745.

The post Jeff McManus Discusses New Book “Growing Weeders Into Leaders” appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

[zerowastehome]

Zero Waste Talks and Bulk (…lots of it!)

I often feel as if I am pedaling against the wind, but giving talks about the zero waste lifestyle during the holiday season feels more like pedaling in a hurricane

My carry-on packed (with my whole wardrobe),

   I set out to undertake my fifth international tour: 20 events over 10 days.

http://ift.tt/2tOikDe

  First stop upon landing was a place close to my heart, DaybyDay in Lille. Three years ago, Alice was inspired by my book to open a bulk store. Last time I came to the store was for the opening: I cried like a baby and could barely deliver the inauguration speech that I had prepared (Canal+ filmed the whole thing!).  So this time, we celebrated our reunion with a live Facebook event.

  While they were setting up, I took pictures of the store for you: 700 products in bulk -that’s way way more than is available to me!…

    That night I also gave two talks, including one at the Catholic University of Lille -And for the first time, I spoke about how zero waste has reaffirmed my faith (it even made me teary!)

  The next morning, I took a train to Luxembourg for a speech at the European Union (Court of Auditors) – wearing a wrinkled silk top

  Then, it was onto a stop at the United Nations in Geneva, for a talk…

  and book signings.

  -And yes, I do realize that I am extremely blessed to have being given the opportunity to share my lifestyle there -especially given that I had take a 2 hr, 565 euros Uber ride to make it there on time because of train strikes! (ah France, will you even change?)

  That same day, I went to Munich for a gathering and book signings of the German version of my book, at Ohne. It was a delight meeting the founders of this beautiful bulk store, especially since Hannah (on my left) told me that its reading my book that inspired them to open it!

photo credit: Conny Mirbach

  But wait! there is more to the portrait above than meets the eye…  let’s take a closer look:

  To stay true to my book’s philosophy, they made the store as plastic-free as possible. Carlo designed the dispensers himself, out of glass, metal and wood.

  These are truly genius. If you plan on opening an un-packaged store, I highly recommend that you check out his website and get in touch with him. He’ll custom-make them for you!

  They also use metal containers throughout the store, like these cans:

  These liquid dispensers:

  and this peanut butter grinder:

  Carlo even made this nifty bulk bar -I wish my husband were this crafty!

  The next day, I took a train to Prague. I gave a radio interview upon my arrival.

  And then headed to a Live Facebook event organized by my publisher and Bezobalu,

photo credit: Nikola Bruncova

  … for the launch of the Czech version of my book!

http://ift.tt/2tOqagi

  and book signings of course.

photo credit: Nikola Bruncova

  On my way out of town, I was reminded that bulk is everywhere, i.e, even at the Prague train station!

  In Berlin I spoke in two locations, one hosted by Original Unverpackt, the other by Markishe Grundshule, a French-German school, where my talk was translated from French to German and then German to sign language.

    What I did not expect to take away from my visit to Berlin, is the beautiful story behind the recent publication of the German translation of my book… After reading the french version of Zero Waste Home, Marie Delapierre decided to open Unverpackt Kiel, Germany’s first bulk store. Last year, she contacted me to have me come to Kiel for a speech and I gladly accepted. In the meantime, a 12 yr old girl was writing a school report on plastic pollution… When she found out that I was coming to her town for a talk, she asked her dad to bring her. But the night of the event, the dad was exhausted from work and told his daughter that it would not be possible. She insisted, finally dragging him to the event. The dad ended up loving my speech and was surprised to find out that my book had not yet been translated to German. He happened to be a publisher… and a year later, he would publish Glucklich Leben Ohne Mull! 

    The following morning, I took a long train ride for Warsaw (my first time in Poland!). I gave a talk and attended a panel organized by Little Greenfinity. The unforeseen size and enthusiasm of my audience -random people jumped into our selfie ;-), showed that the zero waste lifestyle is about to take over the country!

  Back in Switzerland the next day, I made a stop for book signings at a very special store. Remember the couple that was inspired by my book to open Chez Mamie, in Switzerland? Well, they’ve now become a franchise! These two moms opened a branch in Lausanne, and Christelle (on my left) confided in me that my segment on Les Maternelles (on French TV program) is what inspired her to open the store!

  That night, I also took part in a talk show at La Dimension Mobiliere (my segment starts at 59’45”)

  I give them kuddos for the zero waste buffet that followed the event: All was served in reusables, which included these nifty bamboo trays.

  In the morning, I made a stop at a high school (Ecole de Culture Générale Henry Dunant) in Geneva, 

  and then in Arbaz,(right across the valley from Nax, where I spoke last June). Waking up to this is something I could get used… I can’t get enough of this scenery so I’ll be back in the region in March for another talk!

  Then I had a full day of book signings in three different bulk stores.

A Tout Vrac

  La Portion Magique

  And another recently launched branch of Chez Mamie, in Bagnes

  As you’ll find looking at these pictures, a background in Interior Design has been most useful in creating a fantasy land of bulk: If these displays don’t draw you into buying unpackaged, I don’t know what will!

  I went from one fantasy to another that day, ending my day in Bern, with a talk here:

  I preach about the zero waste lifestyle all over the world, but I never expected to do so in an actual church! 

  Walking to my train’s platform the next morning, I was again reminded that bulk is everywhere -and Bern’s main station is no exception.

  Oh, and being in Switzerland, there is loose chocolate everywhere…

  even sheets of it!

  A beautiful winterland unfolded from my train window,

  as I enjoyed my tea and sandwich on the last leg of my tour.

  What I did not know is that I’d be about to face one of my most delicate refusals yet. That night, at the end of my talk in Sollies-Pont, the mayor came to the microphone. As he reached in his pocket, I knew that he was about to hand me a something. I quickly jumped in to say that I do not accept material gifts. This is not the first time that I refuse a gift in public, but the tough part here was making a top elected official uncomfortable in front of his people, and turning something down that’s considered a sign of honor in a political setting. 

(the medal reads: Warm thank you’s from the mayor of Sollies Pont to Bea Johnson, international ambassador of the zero waste movement)

  I went on to explain that my gift is “to be able to share my lifestyle in such a beautiful part of the world; that no material gift could possibly be better”.

What made this tour so special are the stories I collected, the people I met, the work of the those that organized my talks, translated and published my book, opened bulk stores… moments.

I now realize that the awkward situation made for the perfect conclusion to my tour, for the essence of the message that I try to convey through my work, travels and speaking engagements, is this: what makes life rich are not the things that surrounded us, but the simple pleasures and the human connections that fill our living hours… moments.

So may you enjoy a holiday season and a new year, filled with… moments.

Cheers!

from Zero Waste Talks and Bulk (…lots of it!)

[thelondonfilmschool]

MEET THE PROFESSIONALS - Brian Dunnigan (Head of Screenwriting)

Photo Credit: Chi Yu

In the final of our MEET THE PROFESSIONALS series, interviewing LFS staff, lecturers and tutors for an insight into the working professionals that are the heartbeat of The London Film School, the spotlight falls on Brian Dunnigan, Head of Screenwriting.

Younger than its Filmmaking sibling, the MA Screenwriting programme has been under the careful watch of Dunnigan for 12 years as he built it up from scratch.  As it continues to grow, branching out into areas such as writing for TV, animation and video games, Dunnigan took a moment to reflect on how his passion for film and writing developed while travelling the world and how a background in Sociology gradually brought him into the role of teacher.

Sophie McVeigh (S.M): Could you describe your role at LFS and your involvement in the teaching of the different courses? Brian Dunnigan (B.D): My title is Head of Screenwriting, which means I’m responsible for supporting the development of writing and scripts across the school, although as course leader of the MA in Screenwriting, my main responsibility and most of my time is taken up with managing and teaching on the MA Screenwriting course. 

I think one of the developments that I’ll be exploring with Gisli [Snaer] now that we have a new Head of Academic Studies is looking at ways in which we can increase the relationship between the two courses, but currently there’s a number of things I do on the Filmmaking program. One is I have a team of tutors, some of whom also teach on Screenwriting, and they run a series of script workshops for the film makers. They get four in terms 2, 3 and 4. 

I’m also available on a one-to-one basis to talk to filmmakers about their scripts as they develop them. I run two or three classes every term – an introduction to scriptwriting for [the] first term, and I do a script to screen, where we look at an early and a later draft and then the actual film for a term 4 project. Beyond that I attend the end of term screenings, which is pretty much a whole week of comments on the films that have been made during the term. There’s often anywhere between 50 and 60 films.  My responsibilities, though, are principally as course leader of the MA Screenwriting, which has a whole set of tasks and responsibilities attached to it. 

S.M: You set up the MA in Screenwriting 12 years ago. Could you talk about the process behind it and the decision to do that? 

B.D: I had been practising as a freelance writer and supporting myself in different ways in order to continue to write for a good number of years before I came to The London Film School. I started running workshops before I came here at a number of universities around the south of England and some in international workshops. I first developed a program up in Leeds at The Northern Film School, and when I came back to London I was very much part time at the LFS for two or three years, really from about 2000. Alan Bernstein, the previous Head of Studies, brought me in. So I was running script workshops just for the filmmakers, because that was the only program. And historically that has been pretty much the only program that the London Film School has had. I happened to be on site when the school decided it needed to reimagine itself for the 21st Century. They brought in a new director – a producer called Ben Gibson – and it was decided that one of the changes that we ought to introduce to the school would be to have a writing program that insinuated its way into the Filmmaking course. I happened to be on site at that point as someone who had, not only experience of teaching, but also as a practitioner and had designed and redesigned the course up in Leeds. So I was asked if I would take that on and design that course, which I duly did. I had a template from Skillset, which included certain things that had to be included in the course, touching on the craft skills, the personal voice, the career context and so on. I also researched other courses in the UK, in the States and Europe. I talked to a number of script people and on that basis I began to design the program. It was based on my own experience, on research into other programs, along with input from Alan Bernstein and Ben Gibson at the time. We arrived at a design for the course which was then validated by the university that we had set up a relationship with at the time, which was London Metropolitan University.   

S.M: How has the course changed over the last 12 years? 

B.D: It’s just got better, of course! It’s the twelfth draft. Some changes are incremental. We’ve built the team that delivers the course. The core of that team has been around a while and they have a lot of experience. The management of the course has obviously also got better at responding to feedback from students over the years and refining what we’ve been doing. Since the course was set up, TV series writing has become a very exciting place for writers and directors to work in, and so we’ve introduced a strand into the Screenwriting program on that. We’ve also addressed the reality that when people go out there to try and write for the screen there are many more screens to write for. So we do run classes on writing for animation, video games, web series … We don’t go deeply into these but we give people a set of references and an idea about how they can take the story telling skills they’re learning on the program into other arenas.   

Also, over the years, the relationship between the Screenwriting program and the Film Making program has been built up so that there are a number of formal points where there’s a crossover, particularly the script editing of the Filmmaking scripts, which often then leads on to relationships where the writers are working with the film makers on graduation films. 

S.M: You’ve brought in some really interesting people to talk this term. How do you go about choosing and finding them?

B.D: By being charming. These are transferrable skills that you’ll be practising on the course! Networking is one way. If you’ve been around as long as I have you’ve got friends and contemporaries that you were at film school with or that you’ve met in the process of working who have become quite established and successful. So that’s one way. Another way is that you keep your eyes and ears open for the right kinds of people. Not every writer or director is good at communicating what they do, either. So I attend conferences and film festivals, I go to industry events, I’ve got a social life where I meet people from the industry. So I will encounter people and invite them in through that networking. It is absolutely a skill that you would hope a good course leader would have – attracting people onto the course – and that does require being interested and passionate and being able to communicate that and be able to know where to go and where to meet people. 

S.M: You mentioned that you also do some work internationally. 

B.D: Over the years I’ve run workshops in Ghana, Cuba and Norway. I’ve been invited out to Taiwan, currently, for a month to run a workshop. They’re all different depending on their requirements. I design something that is appropriate to their needs, the stage that they’re at, the kinds of writers they are, the culture and so on. That is very good for my teaching, and it also extends my set of experiences and references by exposing me to different cultures and different ways that people approach making films and telling stories. And sometimes story is not the most important thing.   

S.M: What was your background before teaching and what led you into education? 

B.D: I was at university in the 60s that tips into the 70s, so I was very much a child of that generation. I did Sociology and that gave me a real intellectual grasp of theory, and so one of my abiding interests is the relationship between theory and practice, the way in which I think you can be a better writer if you’re an intelligent one. That’s one of the qualities that we try and insinuate into the way we teach. We draw on a range of the Humanities and we believe that having a deeper understanding of who we are and where we are will inform your writing.   

So, coming from a sociological background, it really opened my eyes and got me very excited intellectually. When I was at university I edited the student newspaper. I wrote poems, I’ve always written over the years. After that I went travelling for a couple of years in North America with my guitar, and I was doing all the usual On the Road type of jobs – I was picking tobacco and I was a roofer. Before that, I made money by emptying garbage, I was a road sweeper and I was a department store Santa Claus. I was in America for two years, wandering around and travelling and having adventures and writing a bit about that. Then I came back to Edinburgh, where I was from, and I set myself up as a freelance writer. I had an idea for a history book, which became a book for school kids. I still get returns on it from Germany, actually! And then I used that material to set up a publishing company; I published maps and broadsheets out of copyright. Then I turned it into a dramatized life in the 17th century for educational radio, and that got me into radio. Radio’s a great medium for a writer. One minute you’d be talking in the pub about an idea, the next you’d be in the studio with a couple of coconuts and Robbie Coltrane back in 18th century Edinburgh. The idea for the book, which took me two years to research and was published, opened up an avenue into radio. My writing in radio was right across the range, to a point where I had a short story on Radio 3, my book had just been published and I was working with a filmmaker in Scotland who told me about film school.   

So, my life changed dramatically. I came down to London and I was at the National Film School, I wrote and directed a number of award-winning short films. Then I went out into the world and I was paid to develop and write feature scripts. Often they don’t get made, but I was in the swim and I was learning a lot, making contacts and building relationships. I started, as one way of supporting and contributing to the writing, doing workshops and maybe teaching one day a week. I suppose storytelling and writing and teaching all share a kind of urge to communicate. So that was always there, and of course on the teaching side you need to have performance skills. Not unlike a director, as well. These skills are all related and they all feed back into each other. If you talk to any of the tutors on the programme who are continuing to practice, they say that they just love coming in for a day or a half-day because it really reminds them how much they know, and they take it all back to their own work, refreshed somehow. So teaching’s always attracted me. It’s a two-way communication as well. ‘I teach, I learn’, says Pablo Casals. You learn a lot from encounters with other humans, who challenge what you are saying and offer a different angle on how you see things. And ultimately, what all this about, is an interest in who we are and where we are. It’s a portal into exploring our reality, and it’s exciting. I’ve always been curious, I’ve always read across the range of philosophy and psychology and art history and I find that all of that broad learning, which is very much a Scottish kind of approach to education.  I find film and storytelling is a perfect arena in which to bring these things all to bear because what else are we doing but trying to create humans in action, and to understand what they might be doing and why they might be pursuing what they’re pursuing? It’s a never ending study. So teaching was always there for me. It was in that direct line that fed my curiosity about life. 

Photo Credit: Chi Yu

S.M: Had an interest in film always been a constant in your life? 

B.D: It had been but I hadn’t always been fully aware of it. Remember, this is an era before TV. I grew up in a family without television until I was about ten, and then there was only one channel. Famously, people will tell you from my generation about the encounter with foreign film on tiny little black and white sets, extraordinary other worlds opening up. So they were always around for me, but growing up in a small country like Scotland where there was no film school, there was no particular film course, it wasn’t something you did. It was something they did in America, in Hollywood.   

So my encounter with the film maker, over a major exhibition that we devised which ended up being an official exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival called Scotch Myths, this man Murray Grigor, he told me about this film school in London. And I’d always fancied coming to London but I didn’t want to come unless I had something specific to do. And I thought, yes. I could take my skills in storytelling, my ability to work with people, and take it into writing and directing. So, that’s what took me to London and film making. Film had always been an interest but once I went to film school it really opened my mind. Film became a passion and I got interested in a deep way. 

S.M: What would you say is unique about the program at LFS? B.D: Clearly, what makes it distinctive compared to many courses is that it takes place in the context of a film school, not a university. Our strap line that we steal from Jean-Claude Carrière is that Screenwriting is Filmmaking. That is something that we put into practice here, because we are a film school where we make about 60 films every 12 weeks and the writers can’t help but be touched by that reality, that screenwriting is just a step towards making a film. It’s a process. So that’s one thing.   

I think the intensity of the course is another – it’s only really 10 months and we pack a lot into that time. A lot of writing, a lot of transferrable skills. I think the sense of community that we establish amongst the writers is certainly one of the things that I think’s important and that we achieve. The mentoring program is not something you find everywhere, and in fact you get a lot of one to one, small group feedback. And I think the responsiveness and the quality of the team of tutors that we have also adds to its quality. We believe that you’ll be a better writer if you’re an intelligent one, so whilst the emphasis is on the practice of writing, there is also a critical journal that we ask you to write, that is an account of what you’re learning. We do this in the belief that thinking about what you’re learning makes you someone who not only knows what the right choice is when you’re writing, but why. It makes you much more able to defend your work and your writing as you move out into the world.   

Another thing that is certainly singular on this course is the quality of written feedback that you get on all the work that you submit, sometimes 3 or 4 pages of detailed notes at every major stage of your development. This, both the work and research journal and the critical feedback from the assessors, is much admired and often talked about by the external examiners. 

S.M: There’s a huge variety of backgrounds amongst the students on the course. Is there anything in particular that you’re looking for when you interview potential students? B.D: You’re looking for people who have got a body of work related to screenwriting or filmmaking – that’s the entry level. But you’re looking for people who are open and curious as well, and who are ready to learn. That’s what it’s about. The course is very much about creating a space where people figure out what it is they need to learn to do what they want to do, rather than telling people so much. So it’s very much about questions rather than answers. Of course, there are a few answers – it’s great when you discover three act structure, but then it’s also a nightmare because it suddenly constrains your imagination. How do you play with that? That’s what you have to figure out through your practice. So we’re looking for people who are curious and open, and who have a passion for, and some knowledge of, film. People who can work with other people. Their ability to communicate. We’re looking for people who’ve got a kind of storytelling gene or some sense of the dramatic. It’s not something that you can necessarily teach, as such. People who are able to listen and pay attention. Having responsive, thoughtful people in the room is what builds the community and the trust and what accelerates everybody’s development.  Not everyone’s got all of these in the moment but these are some of the boxes you’ve got to tick, that’s what we’re looking for. 

S.M: Once someone has been accepted, what advice would you give them to best prepare themselves for their experience here. 

B.D: Enjoy the moment. There are a few moments in life that are really joyful and that are resonant with possibility and change, and getting into a post-graduate programme like this is very exciting. Then, follow up on the homework that I send. Have a look at the screenwriting books, but also at the other references that have nothing to do with screenwriting as such, to deepen and widen their film references. Go to websites and start reading feature screenplays so you get a sense of it, because it’s a very particular form. It’s not unlike a sonnet, or a haiku, or twelve-bar blues. It’s something that can be studied and it has a set of rules and certain principles that you can play off against once you understand what they are. And, of course, continue to write as a daily practice.

To read the complete MEET THE PROFESSIONALS series, visit our Tumblr website.

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Davis Baer of OneUp, a software for scheduling your social media posts.Some stats:Product: Social media scheduling toolRevenue/mo: $1,500Started: January 2017Location: Pittsburgh, PAFounders: 2Employees: 2Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Davis Baer, and I am the co-founder of OneUp, a social media scheduling tool that helps business make more money and automates time consuming tasks.OneUp differs from tools like Buffer and Hootsuite because we allow for post to be set to automatically repeat at set intervals, such as daily, weekly, monthly, every 3 months, 6 months, or annually.Our customers consist of startup founders, e-commerce store owners, small business owners, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and social media managers - basically any kind of business, or even people who are just building their personal brand.Here are a few examples of how some of our customers use OneUp:We have an ecommerce store owner that has a whole bunch of posts, each highlighting a different product he sells. He has them scheduled out to post one per day. However, once it gets through all the posts, those posts will automatically repeat. Before, he was taking the time to do all of this manually. Now, he has an automated way of consistently driving traffic back to his site and those products.We have a radio station that used to manually copy and paste the same social media posts about certain programs starting at various times of the day, every Monday through Friday. Now with OneUp, they just set those post to repeat, freeing hours of tedious labor every week.We have real estate agents that have weekly repeating posts of the houses they are trying to sell. Once the house sells, they stop the post. Then they start it again with the next batch of houses they are trying to sell.We have bloggers who create evergreen blog posts (meaning those posts will still be relevant months and years down the road). Before, they would share it once on social media, then just hope that SEO would bring them ongoing traffic. Now, they set their blog posts to repeat every few months, resurfacing the content for anyone who missed it before, and giving it another chance to be shared and take off.OneUp is currently making over $1500 in monthly recurring revenue, growing from $250 MRR just a couple months ago.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?In 2012, I graduated from a small school in Pennsylvania called Grove City College, where I got my degree in finance. After graduating, I worked a few jobs in corporate finance and absolutely hated it. The sad part was that almost everyone I worked with also hated their jobs, and would trudge through their misery week after week, motivated only by the promise of a weekend off, or those glorious 2–3 weeks of vacation each year. The golden handcuffs are a very real thing.A few years ago, I had the opportunity to leave the corporate finance world and join a startup that a former classmate from college was starting. I came on board to help with marketing, but took a pretty substantial pay cut from what I was making before, as the founder of that company had only raised a small friends-and-family seed round to get things up and running.That ultimately didn’t end up working out, as we ran through the money faster than projected — the development of the site and mobile app was being outsourced to freelancers, and, fun fact, those development costs never really end. However, that role gave me great experience, and made me realize that it’s possible to actually enjoy work. Prior to that, I had never felt that my contributions actually made a difference in the large organizations I was working for.After spending a little time doing some freelance marketing and working on a few no-code side projects, I joined my co-founder Vishal Kumar at OneUp. We created OneUp to help increase visibility of content on social media.Whenever you share something on social media, it is typically only seen by roughly 5% of your followers. Despite this, most people put crazy amounts time and effort into creating social media posts and share it just once across their social media channels, guaranteeing that most of their followers will never see that post.OneUp helps these people by automatically driving traffic and engagement to the content that they have worked so hard on producing.Take us through the process of building the product.OneUp started in 2017 as a side-project for Vishal, which he worked on over nights and weekends while working at his day job.He is the technical co-founder, and has built everything himself using the domain expertise he picked up during an internship at a social media management company a few years ago.The original product started as a very minimal MVP, and went through many different iterations in terms of landing page copy, UI, onboarding process, flow, and functionality, all in search of product-market fit.The product was ultimately too complicated and confusing, so we decided to strip it down and aim for an extremely easy and intuitive experience, so that first-time users can jump in and immediately understand how to use OneUpDescribe the process of launching the business.Vishal originally launched OneUp on Product Hunt, where it did pretty well and attracted some of the first paying customers. This was a major form of validation, because you never really know if you have a good product unless someone is willing to pay you for it. We did, however have some validation going in from some of our competitors, like Hootsuite and Buffer, who do millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue.The initial launch provided the opportunity to talk to customers, work out the bugs, make improvements, and see what kind of features users are looking for.Virtually everything we build is the direct result of customer feedback. For example, Hacker Noon, one of the largest publications on Medium, was looking for a way to automatically post to their social media page every time they published a new blog post – and also have each post repeat again once a month for the next 3 months on social media.We could definitely build this, but we wanted to be sure that we were building something that customers actually value enough that they are willing to pay for it. So we worked out a custom pricing agreement and secured payment before ever working on this feature.A week later, OneUp made it easy to import any blog, podcast, or YouTube RSS feed, and have posts from those feeds automatically shared at your preferred intervals across your social media accounts.Most recently, we launched OneUp 2.0 on Product Hunt in September of 2018, and finished fourth for the day with over 550 upvotes. This led to over 1400 visitors on launch day and the following couple days.While the Product Hunt performance provides great social proof and will probably serve as a small source of traffic moving forward, it is not a long term plan for success as many people on Product Hunt aren’t in our target market.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?10x contentI was listening to Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, on a podcast recently and he talked about how he consistently gets his content to rank near the top of Google for his target keywords.The answer: Create something 10x better than what currently exists.I decided to take this approach for OneUp.When you Google "social media scheduling tools", you find lists of the "Top 10 Social Media Management Tools". How could I make something 10x better?Create a spreadsheet of EVERY single social media scheduling tool.So I took the time to compare the free plan (if any), starting price, and social networks of 90 different scheduling tools and put them in a Google Sheet.I shared this spreadsheet to a few Facebook Groups and subreddits centered around social media marketing, and these are the types of comments I would get:It has kind of caught fire and has received consistent traffic:Because OneUp is frozen to the top row of the sheet, it has brought in a respectable amount of quality traffic and signups in the first couple weeks of its existence:...and also led to many visits on the blog post version of this list that I created and linked at the top of the Google Sheet.I believe this has helped with the “SEO juice” of the blog post, because it now ranks near the top of Google for the search term “Social media scheduling tools”, which gets 880 searches per month and would cost nearly $20 per click if we wanted to pay Google for an ad placement – something we can’t really afford at this time.QuoraWe have also found that Quora has been a great source of quality traffic.There are tons of questions with people asking for recommendations on different types of social media tools, so we are working hard to get OneUp near the top of the answers. Almost everyone coming from Quora represents a high-quality potential user, because they are actively seeking out a solution to their problem.Manually monitoring Facebook groups and subredditsOther more manual efforts have led to paying customers as well, such as actively monitoring relevant Facebook Groups and subreddits for people asking for solutions to their problems:It turns out our image scheduling Chrome extension was the perfect fit for what this redditor was looking for, and has since become a paying customer.Same for this person in a Facebook Group:How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Through our content marketing efforts, we are acquiring new paying customers almost every day. Our current pricing starts at $5 per month (or $3 per month if paid annually) for up to 10 social media profiles, which is much lower than the competition.The commonly heard refrain in SaaS is always “raise your prices”, which has a lot of merit to it. However, we have decided to use our price as a differentiating factor, and have seen conversions go up dramatically since lowering our price from $10 per month.Our customer acquisition cost is $0. We have been able to find customers using free methods, so we plan on continuing that and seeing how far we can get before we explore paid advertising options.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Yes! I wanted to take advantage of being small and, as Paul Graham has famously said, “do things that don’t scale” by really wow-ing the users during the onboarding experience.First, I tried sending a personal email to each person after they signed up. That failed miserably. Maybe it was the copy I used, or maybe I didn’t personalize it enough, but I got virtually zero responses from it. I believe most people thought it was just another automated email.So I started thinking about different ways I could make it 100% clear that this a personalized message from the co-founder. My idea: I would record a short personal video using Loom, introducing myself and thanking them by name for signing up.This made a huge difference! You can’t really fake or automate this, which has led to almost a much higher response rate to these welcome videos. People are normally taken aback by the fact that someone took the time to record a personal video message for them.There are 3 great things about this:It starts the relationship on a great note, and let’s the user see that there is a real person behind the company.It makes getting feedback much easier. You’ve already opened up a conversation channel, and built at least some rapport. I’ve had people take the time to let me know that they will not be using the service, when they would normally just leave without notice. This has given us the opportunity to figure out what went wrong, or what features they were looking for that we didn’t have.Some people are so wowed by the personal touch that they’ve shared it on Twitter.Here are some of the responses I have received:Recording each video only takes about 15 seconds, so while it may not scale forever, there is no reason why we can’t continue it into at least the near future.This personalization helped us land Nir Eyal as a paying customer. For those that are unfamiliar, Nir is the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which is co-written by Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover.It helped that I already owned his book and was holding it in the personal video I sent him. He was really blown away by the personal touch, and agreed to give a testimonial that we added to our landing page:What platform/tools do you use for your business?Loom for personalized videosCrisp for customer supportSlack for internal communicationTrello for product roadmap and task trackingMixpanel, Google Analytics, and Hotjar for analyticsOneUp for social media :)What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?The Indie Hackers podcast is probably my favorite podcast. Courtland Allen does a great job at finding successful founders that share amazing insights into how they grew their company. I am always inspired or have a “light-bulb” moment after listening to an Indie Hackers podcast.For anyone trying to improve their SEO, I would highly recommend Brian Dean’s blog and YouTube videos. If you need landing page help, Julian Shapiro’s Growth Guide is an amazing resource.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Just start something, and set a minimum length of time that you will work on it. So many people start something, whether it be a blog, podcast, or website, but then don’t have the willpower to keep pushing forward after the the early excitement wears off, and once you enter the infamous “trough of sorrow”.For example, if you are starting a podcast, that might mean promising yourself to record and publish 20 episodes before you consider giving up.Consistency is the key to success for so many things.Where can we go to learn more?You can check out OneUp at oneupapp.io, and you can find me on Twitter at @daviswbaer.Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM