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Rico McDonald, a Ripley High School Graduate, earned many honors during his senior year including being an all-state running back. He went on to play college football at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS where he helped lead the team to the 2000 NCAA Division II National Championship. McDonald served as an assistant football coach at RHS from 2004 to 2020. During his tenure at Ripley High (2016), McDonald was inducted into the Delta State University Hall of Fame (see link below). McDonald left Ripley for a few years to assist at Lafayette, Amory and New Albany. He returned to Ripley last year (2024-2025) as the Tiger Defensive Coordinator. The fall of 2025 will mark McDonald's first head coaching position. The Tigers will play in a pre-season exhibition game called Tiger Pride Day on May 15, 2025. The Tigers will take on Tippah County neighbors, Falkner High SchoolDelta State University Hall of Fame Welcome to HEARD IT ON THE SHARK with your show host Melinda Marsalis and show sponsor, Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area. HEARD IT ON THE SHARK is a weekly interview show that airs every Tuesday at 11 am on the shark 102.3 FM radio station based in Ripley, MS and then is released as a podcast on all the major podcast platforms. You'll hear interviews with the movers and shakers in north Mississippi who are making things happen. Melinda talks with entrepreneurs, leaders of business, medicine, education, and the people behind all the amazing things happening in north Mississippi. When people ask you how did you know about that, you'll say, “I HEARD IT ON THE SHARK!” HEARD IT ON THE SHARK is brought to you by the Mississippi Hills National Heritage area. We want you to get out and discover the historic, cultural, natural, scenic and recreational treasures of the Mississippi Hills right in your backyard. And of course we want you to take the shark 102.3 FM along for the ride. Bounded by I-55 to the west and Highway 14 to the south, the Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area, created by the United States Congress in 2009 represents a distinctive cultural landscape shaped by the dynamic intersection of Appalachian and Delta cultures, an intersection which has produced a powerful concentration of national cultural icons from the King of Rock'n'Roll Elvis Presley, First Lady of Country Music Tammy Wynette, blues legend Howlin' Wolf, Civil Rights icons Ida B. Wells-Barnett and James Meredith, America's favorite playwright Tennessee Williams, and Nobel-Laureate William Faulkner. The stories of the Mississippi Hills are many and powerful, from music and literature, to Native American and African American heritage, to the Civil War. The Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area supports the local institutions that preserve and share North Mississippi's rich history. Begin your discovery of the historic, cultural, natural, scenic, and recreational treasures of the Mississippi Hills by visiting the Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area online at mississippihills.org. Musical Credit to: Garry Burnside - Guitar; Buddy Grisham - Guitar; Mike King - Drums/Percussion All content is copyright 2021 Sun Bear Studio Ripley MS LLC all rights reserved. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or used for any other purpose without express written consent of Sun Bear Studio Ripley MS LLC
We are continuing the theme of “amazing Mississippi women” this Women's History Month with today's guest. Marion Garrard Barnwell grew up in the Mississippi Delta, where her writing life began at age thirteen with a column in the town newspaper. For twenty-five years, she taught writing and literature classes at Delta State University, and her 2024 book, All the Things We Didn't Say, includes her grandmother's 1956 memoir (published for the first time), which Barnwell both reveres and laments, and which challenged her to write her own memoir. An educator, playwright, essayist and more, Marion joins us today to explain how special it is to be a female writer from the Magnolia State.Marshall Ramsey, a nationally recognized, Emmy award winning editorial cartoonist, shares his cartoons and travels the state as Mississippi Today's Editor-At-Large. He's also host of a "Now You're Talking" on MPB Think Radio and "Conversations" on MPB TV, and is the author of several books. Marshall is a graduate of the University of Tennessee and a 2019 recipient of the University of Tennessee Alumni Professional Achievement Award. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Matt Plitt, CEO of Valent, visited the Crop Doctors' Podcast studio on a recent visit to Mississippi. Matt is an alum of Delta State University and has been with Valent since 2010. Matt, Jason, and Tom discuss the impact of the new regulatory process for labeling products, other changes in the industry, and the place for biological products in production agriculture. Enjoy this episode and discover more on our website.
Delta State University in rural Mississippi eliminated it's highly regarded music department. It' also cut English, math, chemistry, and about a third of the courses that it used to teach.And Delta State's far from alone. Arkansas State, the University of North Carolina – Greensboro, Youngstown State in Ohio, West Virginia University have all made significant course cutbacks.That's a problem. People in rural America already have far less access to colleges and universities than people in cities and suburbs. Nearly 13 million people in the US already live in higher education desserts, places well beyond commuting distance to a college.But now many of the schools that exist to serve rural students are cutting programs and majors.We talk about this trend, and how it exacerbates the already wide economic, social and political divisions between many rural and urban Americans.
Whether you're at a PTA meeting, City Council meeting, or watching our legislature at work, you'll notice the Parliamentary Procedure that's used. These rules exists to facilitate the transaction of business and to promote cooperation and harmony. But it can be a foreign language or a dance you don't know the steps. To help us out we've got attorney Mary Largent Purvis, Director of Legal Analysis and Communication at Mississippi College School of Law.Delta State University has a cheat sheet you can download to learn about Robert's Rules of Order. And Project Guttenberg, an online library of free eBooks, is offering a link to download a free digital version of the updated original book by Henry M. Robert.The National Council of State Legislatures has an online set of classes for elected officials to help them learn parliamentary procedures. InsideHigherEd.com recently published an opinion article that suggests college students would be better advocates for promoting world peace if they learn parliamentary procedures and employed Talking and listening, rather than shouting down other views.Mississippi doesn't have the technology for online voter registration. And if you don't have a computer and printer at your house, you can just call your county courthouse, and they can mail you a voter registration form. Be sure to register by October 7th to vote in our next general election. The secretary of state's website sos.ms.gov Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode Eric interviews Jon Westfall from Delta State University in Cleveland, MS. This conversation delves into Jon's transformation from a tech enthusiast to a psychology professor at Delta State University, highlighting the vital role of education in addressing societal challenges. The discussion explores the intersections between psychology and technology, teaching methodologies, and the significance of adapting to students' needs in higher education. Note. Portions of the episode title and show notes were generated by Descript AI.
Dr. Em is a Delta State University Statesman/Fighting Okra through and through. She graduated with her undergraduate degree from Delta State University. She earned a Masters in Special Education emphasis in Emotional-Behavioral Disorders from the University of Southern Mississippi and a Masters in Philosophy from Walden University. In the fall of 2020, Dr. Em completed her Ph.D. journey in Education emphasis in Educational Policy, Leadership and Management. Dr. Em was a Physical Education Teacher and Coach at Lee Academy in Clarksdale, MS for three years. Afterward, she moved back to her hometown of Benton, MS, and began her journey as a Special Education Teacher. Dr. Em and her husband, Matt, have been married since 2005. They have two boys. Due to her husband's change in coaching jobs, they moved to Vicksburg, MS in the summer of 2011. After being a Lead Special Education Teacher for six years in the Vicksburg-Warren School District, Dr. Em followed God's calling to “step out of the boat”. This calling led to Dr. Em creating and developing Micah's Mission School, Inc. while researching during her Ph.D. coursework in 2017. In January 2020, Micah's became their own independent entity as a Mississippi Non-profit 501c3. Today, Dr. Em is the Executive Director of Micah's Mission and Licensed Local Pastor at Bradley's Chapel UMC. She will complete her M.Div Summer 2024 from Perkins Theological Seminary at Southern Methodist University. http://www.micahsmissionschool.orghttp://www.facebook.com/micahsmissionschool
My guest today is Todd Davis, a professor at the Delta State University down in the Mississippi Delta region. As an educator in an area with a very split population when it comes to racial and economic demographics, diversity, equity, and inclusion are topics that are at the forefront of Todd's work. In this episode, we are talking about cultural heritage and the outdoors, diversity and representation in outdoor recreation marketing, race inequality and allyship in a small Mississippi community, mental wellness, and so much more. Connect with Ricardo: https://www.foresteducator.com/ https://www.theforestboxforkids.com/ https://www.hawkcircle.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-sierra-5980931/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wolverineway/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RicardohawkSierra
Lauren Rhoades talks with C.T. Salazar, a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. Their debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, was published in 2022 with Acre Books. They also edited Mid/South Sonnets, a poetry anthology released this summer with Belle Point Press. C.T. is also the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry. He lives in Cleveland, Mississippi, where he is a Reference Instructional Services Librarian and Assistant Professor at Delta State University. If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, please consider contributing to MPB. https://donate.mpbfoundation.org/mspb/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of “The Journey of My Mother's Son” podcast, I sit down to talk with fellow author, Nicole Brown. Nicole is an author of 15 books and counting. She is a certified K-12 teacher in Louisiana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Mississippi. She holds certifications in the following subject areas: Chemistry, Physics, General Science, Early Childhood (PK-3), Vocal Music, and Reading. She is also a member of Zeta Phi Beta, Sorority Inc. She holds a B.S., in Chemistry Education from the University of Louisiana-Monroe, a MEd in Reading Education from Alcorn State University and an EdS in Educational Leadership from Delta State University. Nicole recently served an elementary music teacher for 9 years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2 years) and in Vicksburg, Mississippi (7 years). Nicole currently resides in her hometown, Monroe, Louisiana. To find out more about Nicole, check out her website at https://authornicolesbrown.yolasite.com/.
So you may be asking “What is a multipreneur”? Just listen to our guest, Anquida Adams, and find out. Anquida is an extremely multifaceted company that helps other companies and organizations grow, develop leaders and internal communities as well and create a sustainable model for the future. Anquida does all this and, as she will tell us, she has a neurodivergent brain. She has both dyslexia and dysgraphia. Not only does she have challenges in absorbing written material in the same way as we, but she also has challenges in communicating through her own writing. All the above aside, Anquida has built a successful company and as we learned today she is scaling and expanding it. Talk about unstoppable, that is by any standard Anquida Adams. About the Guest: Social Relations Coach, and Multipreneur, Anquida Adams is the Founder/ CEO of the A.L.A. Brand & Being Anquida Brand. She is a self-advocate and disability community advocate for creating a space of emotional and financial fulfillment to live a completely interdependent lifestyle. As a seasoned expert in her field with several years in education and personal hands experience behind her. She knows what truly drives self-awareness, confidence, trust, and communication intelligence that will promote outcome returns of more productive teams, better managers, confident direct reports towards management, a balanced workplace, interpersonal skill, growth in leadership, strategic strategy, analytical skills, and individual inner growth. Her passion for personal & professional empowerment ignited her current career path as the CEO and Founder of A.L.A. Brand and Being Anquida Brand. The A.L.A. Brand is an enterprise that consists of three companies, A.L.A. Consulting Firm, A.L.A. Event Planning & Management, & A.L.A. World Foundation. All divisions & subdivisions play a key role in building foundations & sustainable aligned systems w/in the human & organizational structure of the workspace culture and the bottom line of the lifecycle of businesses. Our services range from coaching, consulting, development, & implementing transformation for Leadership/Teams, Equity/Inclusion/Diversity+ SJ Development, Disability/Inclusion, Entrepreneurship/ Startup, and The Individual aspect as Personal/ Professional/Family Development, to the Hiring, Development, & Retaining of employees through our signature career fair or private career we host. About our main brand A.L.A. Consulting Firm: Is a Global Boutique Firm with expertise in Social Relations with a holistic human-center approach to seeing, developing, and implementing systems such as human & or organizational systems. We have an organized transitional flow w/in and between systems, which creates a learning environment for Organizations' Socio-Emtional/Psychological Development(corporations/ government/ non-profits), Equity, Inclusion, & Diversity (EID), Entrepreneurship/Startups, & Individuals (personal, professional, & the family.) to explore a Holistic/Human-Centered approach to developing skills of creating a higher awareness of Identity intelligence™️, Human Energetic Systems™️ , Human Emotional-Setpoint System™️ & other internal/external environmental stimuli to address next-generation personal and business challenges. Simply put, we help navigate our clients through times of personal & professional unpredictable circumstances by focusing on our core foundation of Mental self-investigation, Emotional Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence, and Physical/Mental/ Spiritual wellness! To learn more about our A.L.A. Consulting Firm Specific Sevices go over to our page to learn about our other services. Our Being Anquida Brand leading strategic boutique coaching and development practice in relationship systems. Our passion is empowering our clients to achieve a mindset of striving, thinking, and relating to how to navigate human relationships/experiences through transitions of success and failure across an individual's lifespan. Ways to connect with Anquida: A.L.A. Consulting Firm-https://linktr.ee/a.l.a.consultingfirm A.L.A. Entrepreneurship and Startup -https://linktr.ee/a.l.a.startup A.L.A. Event Planning and Management-https://linktr.ee/alaeventplanningandmanagement A.L.A. Disabilities Talent Recruiting/Consultancy Solutions-https://linktr.ee/aladisbilitiesrecruiting A.L.A. World Foundation-https://linktr.ee/a.l.a.worldfoundation ** Savvy Successful Black Business Women-https://linktr.ee/ssbbw Being Anquida Brand: Being Anquida -https://linktr.ee/beinganquida About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well, readings once again and welcome to another edition of unstoppable mindset today, we get to visit with Anquida Adams and quita among other things, describes herself as a multi printer. I want to get more information on that it is amazing how we always create these new terms, but I think it probably makes sense. She has the ALA brand and under that are a lot of different things. And she's going to tell us about that. So I'm not going to spoil any of her fun. Please not yet. We may try later, just for grins but for right now. Anquida seriously, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here. Anquida Adams ** 02:01 Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Michael. I am super excited about this actual interview today. I know that we've been talking for a little bit and I love your excitement. And I love what you're doing and what you're continuing to do for people with disabilities within our space. So I'm really excited to be here and I thank you for having me. And I guess going to the question that you had given me around like molto printer printer. Michael Hingson ** 02:30 Yeah, well, first, first, first of all, what is your disability? Anquida Adams ** 02:35 Okay, so yeah, so I am neurodivergent have a I'm dyslexic. And then I've, I have dysgraphia. So for me, it's more of like, how do I navigate the big role of like having a business and then having being dyslexic and having dysgraphia is kind of sorta like, that's a big thing to have, which owning all the businesses that only on the things that I do so it's kind of Michael Hingson ** 03:07 Yeah, discrepancy is what this graph Anquida Adams ** 03:09 yet it's more of writing. So like for me, with my dysgraphia, I really leave that articles when I'm writing. So yeah. That's how, so it's pretty much. So dyslexia is around reading, and then this graph is around writing. Michael Hingson ** 03:30 Uh huh. So you, you deal with writing challenges, and you deal with input challenges from reading with dyslexia? Anquida Adams ** 03:38 Yeah, so like, it's not like I cannot read, but it's like, my brain can go within spaces of different levels of it. So if I read something for me, okay, it can go several different ways that for my dyslexia, I don't know about everybody else. I think everybody else, everybody's different. So for me, like, it can go in many different ways for me, like, oh, they may be talking about this right here. Is that that or just depending on like, if everything I always have to how I put it, I always have to, like clarify. Like, hey, let me clarify the meaning of what this mean. What did you mean by XYZ? Michael Hingson ** 04:17 Uh huh. Well, so when did you learn that you had dyslexia and dysgraphia? Anquida Adams ** 04:24 Um, so I guess my story starts out with my mom and I and my brother, my younger brother, we moved to California, Oakland when I was younger, kindergarten pretty much and I did okay in school because I still have my report cards from when I was little. I got from my mom a long time ago, but I moved we moved back to California like our my second or third grade year, and moving from California to Mississippi. I'm the The learning styles are so totally different. Where I was, it was kind of hard for me to actually navigate it. So my teacher put me in special needs classes. And when I got into special needs classes, my, my new teacher said, you're not supposed to be in here. It's just you need help in other areas of teaching you how to actually navigate, I think, because I stayed in those. She didn't, she told me she was going to help me get out. And so I stayed in for a year and a half. And then I got out like, like, maybe two years. And so they usually put you a year a year behind. So I got finished with school, um, and was in regular classes, but until I got into college, that's how I learned that I had dysgraphia. dyslexia and dysgraphia. So yeah. Michael Hingson ** 05:50 Did you suspect there was something different ahead of time? I mean, so they put you in special needs classes, and they said, You didn't really belong there. But yeah, nobody was really diagnosing or figuring out what was going on with you or what Anquida Adams ** 06:04 I will, because I was a child, and that's why we'll talk about that later. That's why I want to advocate for parents, and making sure that kids understand the journey, because I think where I was because my mom, my mom used to surprise my mom all the time, she'd say, I was like a kid in an adult's body. And so it was kind of weird, because, but she did not explain, they didn't explain to me all the processes, some adults did, some of those didn't. But I think if along the way of if I would have been told the process, I could have taught them how to navigate me from that time. And I think that if I would have gotten a lot more help, I could have like an n plus Mississippi. I'm not not not to be funny, but like, their I guess, the way that we're taught, especially in public schools, because I went to a public school, I went to a private school in my college years. And public schools there. It's kind of sort of, I don't know, like most schools in United States, they prep you for to take the tests, and is always about testing. And so it wasn't really about like, how do you learn, but we were always prepped in my mind, remembering we're always prepped for the test. Michael Hingson ** 07:22 Yeah, and the result is that you really didn't get the education that you needed as such. Yeah. And no one diagnosed what was going on. And that happens. So often, I've talked to a number of people here on unstoppable mindset who said they were, for example, on the Autism Autism spectrum. And they didn't know it, or even people who said that they discovered they were dyslexic, or neurodivergent, in some other way. And they didn't discover it until their 30s and 40s. And some of them figured it out themselves. Anquida Adams ** 07:59 Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it takes a while. Because, again, when you're in a mode of like, exploring of who you are, it takes the time for you to like, kind of figure it out, like, Okay, well, you know, most of us, especially most people who are undiagnosed or just navigating through dyslexia, or whatever type of disabilities, most of the time, like, you're, you're working with it, and you're like, okay, you don't even think that it's a disability, because you're just pushing through. And so when you do get tested, you're like, Oh, I didn't know that. You know, I was I just thought it was a good thing that everyone else has. And I'm just learning how to, like, navigate through that, that that, that that thing that everyone I'm thinking in my head, my story that everyone else had? Michael Hingson ** 08:47 Yeah. And it really wasn't that way at all. But it took you a long time to discover that. Yes. But you at least you eventually did. That had to be some sort of a relief, or give you some satisfaction to figure out what was really going on that, in reality made you different. Anquida Adams ** 09:05 Yeah. So even even in college, what it was, it was more of like, how do I help you? How do we help you with navigating this space, so there was a lot of like, teaching me how to like, read it in a way where it's like, so my brain is how my brain work and reading. So I would have to go through because my brain works so fast. I had to go through with my hands once and then the next time highlight everything except the articles and then take an actual piece of paper and with like four and a half and then go go up my brain was scan the words really fast throughout the actual book or paper, whatever. And that's how I literally am able to retain some stuff. So that's how I began to learn how to read like to make sure that I comprehend or I got everything down because it was too much. It's like reading it. So I had to play Deus. It takes a long time. But it helps me out. And I can, you know, I can I get it there. Michael Hingson ** 10:09 Yeah. But as I said it had to certainly be a relief. And did you? Did you feel like once you figured all this out, you started to make a whole lot more progress in terms of being able to do things and moving forward with your life? Anquida Adams ** 10:24 Well, I mean, so I didn't. So in high school, I learned how to like, especially in our writing class, I had one teacher, I remember her she was like, if you don't know how to spell a word, and I think that's her, well, that's big to words worse. She's like, if you're not Asheville word, create a sentence that describe the word. And I think that's pretty much I've had teachers along the way, too. And that's to give kids like that, or other tips to kind of help out with, you know, writing or with, you know, our reading or whatever. So I think that we, people who have dyslexia, we've given we've given all these tips, but it does not help us when we're until we learn how to navigate ourselves. It doesn't help us until we're actually in the situation. And those tips, some sometimes don't work, because again, you have to learn how to navigate it. At that particular time. I think I had a conversation with a person a year ago, and I was trying to ask him to help me with a project that I'm doing. And he was like, Well, my child, I paid a lot for my child to go to a school. And they teach him a lot of how to like, learn through, you know, his disabilities. And I looked at my said, I'm a product of that. I was like, they can give us tricks and trades and stuff like that. But if, if the, if the spaces that I'm supposed to be in a workforce are not equipped to work with me, those tricks in whatever tricks and trades don't work. So I think that there's a deeper conversation when it comes to disabilities, and then also disability and inclusion within the workforce. Michael Hingson ** 12:07 It sounds like just the way you're describing it, that they sort of suspected that you happen to be a person with dyslexia, but they weren't talking to you about it, or really addressing the issue. Anquida Adams ** 12:19 Yes, all the help that I've gotten, they weren't addressing the issue, they were just given me things to get around it, or to just survive. Michael Hingson ** 12:30 So they kind of knew it was there, but they weren't telling you or helping you with it. Anquida Adams ** 12:36 They didn't give me the tools and resources that will that's particularly a mentors router problem. They just tried to like do the surface level, put a bandaid on it? And like, Okay, this is the best way I can teach you to survive in the world go out there to do your best. Michael Hingson ** 12:57 Do you think they actually figured out that you had that you were a person with dyslexia, though? Anquida Adams ** 13:04 I mean, again, I because I was a kid. And because I didn't, I knew certain parts, and I didn't know every part of it, I just I advocate Now, sure, it's abilities that parents make sure that their child has a pardon to it, even if they don't know the language, because the language is more more bigger. It's like a big vocabulary for them. At least they know like what it is. And then also like, unless they know a definition of like, what it is, and then they're able to make it applicable in their lives to like, be able to, like, you know, navigate it, like who say, difference if I have this word dyslexia, and I don't, and then and I know, that's what I am. So let me help me to figure out what type of other community people that um, that I can be a part of this like me, that can help me out. And then when you do have tests, you want to tell me everything about the test, let me know at my capacity of where I'm at as a child, where I'm at and then also where you guys are wanting to take me because I think I think they I think like the education institution and also the teachers and also the parents do not allow that child to have I don't want to executive like however this they don't allow the child to have like some type of executive like Michael Hingson ** 14:34 they don't want you to be your your own advocate or Yeah, but again, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but am I interpreting it right though that they probably really knew that you had dyslexia but they weren't okay. And and that's so unfortunate. You know, and I know and so many people with disabilities who get in involved in advocacy when we're talking about The end device Individualized Education Plan, the IEP and so on. Yeah, they don't want the kids to be involved in that. And the kids are the first ones who should be involved. Because if we don't learn to advocate for ourselves, then how are we going to truly learn and understand? And also recognize that we're okay. Yes. Anquida Adams ** 15:21 And that is why I do the work that I do and lead first with self advocacy in whatever manner that I'm connecting with. Because I want to make sure that most people, like understand like, hey, once you understand yourself and navigate yourself, it's easy to navigate yourself in the world around you. And that's why I am like this is it's very important for the parents to allow the kids to be a part of the process. I think with you, I know, like you, you, you have lived with your body and I have moved my body this whole time. So we kind of know what's going on. Oh, we probably don't know how to overpower didn't know how to articulate at that time, but at least we could, like, if we got hints to explain, we will probably be able to actually tell our parents like this is what I need it? Well, Michael Hingson ** 16:09 I think I was fortunate because my parents were very open and honest about me being blind. Anquida Adams ** 16:17 That's another story. That's another type of disability. Yeah, Michael Hingson ** 16:19 it's a different issue. And I appreciate that. But I think they were very upfront. And they were perfectly willing for me to explore and, and sometimes take risks, and they took risk by letting me do that. But that is a different story than what you were having to address and deal with. And no one was really helping you and being upfront and so unfortunate that they didn't do that. But yeah, that happened. Anquida Adams ** 16:50 Yes, I got I got a chance to have other risk in my life where my parents allowed me to, because so I was dyslexic, or I had a decision, I have a disability. But at the same time, I was wise, you know, I told you earlier, my mom said that I was an adult in a kid's body. So they weren't helpful. It wasn't that much help on that side. But I was really wise. And I, I had I was I had wisdom, and then street smarts, both of you, if you would, like, put it together. So it kind of helped me out a lot. Michael Hingson ** 17:29 But it also sounds like your parents probably didn't know what to do. And they weren't getting help either. Which is so unfortunate. But I'm, I'm glad you turned out the way you did and that you really appreciate your parents, which is of course part of the whole process. Yes. So you moved by you were in California, then you move back to MIT or to Mississippi. And where did you go to college? Anquida Adams ** 17:55 So I actually went, this is this is this is that dyslexia and that mindset of like trying to find who I am or whatever. So my first year and a half I went to I went to Oakwood University, and that was a historically black school. And that's why I knew I had enough I had a space where they took their time and they helped me out with, you know, understanding enough for me to get it so I can actually move with my actual dyslexia. They gave me tools, similar to my my dyslexia, but that was a school where literally, I learned like all types of leadership skills there. While I was there, I was part of several choirs. I was a part of an ensemble, I was a a chaplains assistant, or we had to like during Chaplain time, do the whole program. And then also the different buildings were assigned to for like chapel for the different residents, presidential individuals that are on campus. So I got a chance to do a lot. I was a part of the actual president, Ambassador space where we were the first when emotional intelligence came out first came out our president for our ambassador space, like I made sure that we had, like, classes with I mean, we did classes on emotional intelligence. So I'm saying like that because it helped that later on some of the stuff that I do. So I learned a lot at that first school that I went to and then I stayed there for two years. It got really expensive. And so I went to you ah, for a semester because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, which is University of Huntsville, Alabama. Okay, so the school Oakwood University is in Huntsville, Alabama. So historical black school for seventh Adventist. Got it? Yes. And so I went to UNH first semester ah, Um, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And at that time, my, my major was, um, physical therapy because my high school year of college, I mean, high school, you have my high school, my senior year of high school, I worked at a PT clinic, and I was a PTA and then I was also a, that's what I told you. I was doing a lot of amazing stuff, and I didn't know it. So I was a PTA and I was a administrative assistant at the at the actual clinic. And then so I was like, Okay, well, I've liked this, let me go into to my school. So at my school, I was on the track of doing a year, a year and a half, two year no two years at Oakwood, and then finish off my PhD at Andrews University. And that's another school that was 78 minute school. And that was a mix School of everyone. So it also in Alabama. No, that was in Michigan. So you moved around. No, I didn't go there. But that was the plan. But I didn't go there. So it got too expensive for me. So I went to u h, and four semesters, kind of figure out what I was going to do. And then after you, ah, I kind of went to Chicago, and stayed there for six months, came back home, went to Michigan State six months, tech came back home. And then last time I came back home to Mississippi. And that's where I'm originally from. I graduated from a community college with honors and with 23 hours, and what I went there for, and I changed my major to psychology and elementary education. And so that summer, I went to Delta State University, and I was getting started with my elementary education degree. And that's when I found out during the summer school, that bush two that was president, then he was talking about inclusion, I was like, I can't do that, because I was like, it's too much, it will be too much for me. And so I left there, I finished off my semester there that summer, and I left Delta State that was in Delta Mississippi, and I went to Mississippi State. And that's where I finished up my degree and sociology, gender studies and leadership skills. So I found my niche. And when I went to, when I went to Mississippi State, I, I'm really good at understanding like society, like I can sit back and kind of figure out, like, what's going on. And so, for me, I've done it all my life, until I got into the classes of sociology, gender studies and leadership skills that took some psychology classes, and also behavior science classes while I was there, but I it felt like it felt like home. And so that's how I got into the work that I do now, because of the sociology, me pairing sociology and psychology together for socio psychology, for me to figure out how do I help help the world. And so for, for me, learning throughout the years, I'm about disabilities and what I did not know, until like a year or two ago, about the eight modalities of intelligence, and switch schools do not teach. And for me, within the eight modalities of intelligence, I possess two of the A modells of intelligence, intra and inter personal intelligence. So I'm good at going into spaces, understanding the culture, and then learning how to create create a better space within that space. So like, again, organizational development. So these are things that they don't teach in schools, and these are the things where, you know, with my understanding, even without disabilities, when I do our organizational development work, I make sure that when I'm doing leadership development, I ask the leader, like, what type of intelligence that they have, and I do an assessment to kind of figure it out. And then I helped to understand their actual client, the mean, not their client, but the employees, but direct reports, because you sometimes even in work, there's several different ways that people learn. And there's definitely different ways that they actually interact, but they don't teach us that in school, about the eight modalities of intelligence. So I'm doing it in a workplace and I'm trying to also do it within the actual school systems of teaching them like how to actually help the students learn through that throughout their, through their eight modalities, and hopefully the school systems that will catch on to it because if I would have known that even with my dyslexia, I would have done a whole lot better instead of going into physical therapy. You know that That's pretty much a part of my gift. But the main two areas, I'm really great at, like, seeing and developing systems. And if we got a modalities, everyone has a different modality that they can go into that that that they can figure out a field that is best for them per their modality. Michael Hingson ** 25:21 Tell me a little bit more about the modality. You said they're eight modalities. Can you can you talk a little bit about more? What that is? Anquida Adams ** 25:28 Yeah, sure, I can do that for you. Let me let me pull it up. So I know as inter and Trump are intelligent, those two different modalities, intra and inter, personal, intra and intra and inter intelligence, then there's Kunis kinesiology, then there's looking for, so it's eight of them, but I know my see. Michael Hingson ** 25:54 Well, and while you're doing that, so when did you actually graduate from college? Anquida Adams ** 26:03 So I graduated in 2010. Okay, Michael Hingson ** 26:06 and so you have a bachelor's? Did you go and get an advanced degree at all. Anquida Adams ** 26:11 So I, I literally, um, so like, um, for me, I. So after that, I left Mississippi State. And then I went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I started my clinical mental health counseling degree. And I was gonna, I thought I wanted to be a counselor. But now it's like, I told you, I find finance systems really quick to figure out what I want to do. If I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it. And what I found within the No disrespect for Counselors, and Therapists, it just wasn't for me. Like, it was a weird trick. It was a, how they set everything up. Like it's all about not being sued. And the second part is, it was all about, you know, not allowing the person to navigate their own situation like, like with the therapist, you're there. And you're asking all these questions, but it's just, it's a robust or like, robotic way of doing it. And so I rather I thought, if I did go into it, and like I'm doing right now I'm doing coaching. So I get to, like, do things that I want to do. And then within the space, so like, say, for instance, I have a client, like one person I did coaching with I, she, she dealt with a lot of internal things. And of like, I don't know if I can say it on here, but like, she don't realize her a lot of internal things. And so, for her, we went walking, and for me, I'm very intuitive, and with walking, and allow that person to like, walk and talk. As they're walking and talking, what most people don't connect with the different types of techniques that you can use, especially how I connect my techniques with them to have the way that I think and also connect with that person. I'm with her, we were doing three things. One, she had never out of all the therapist, she told me I have to offer our session. So out of all the therapists issue seen that they have never gotten out of her what I've gotten out of her at that moment, too. While we're walking, I think most people don't understand perception, and also how you connect. So our I call it the human, emotional, human, emotional, sorry, human emotional standpoints. We're walking. She was literally not being triggered, but being triggered a good way of bringing back those memories of what she was saying. But then, also she was metaphorically saying what she was expressing how she was expressing the actual thing or the trauma that she was going through. But then she was still it was like she was whatever burden she had, she was up on lifting and leaving it there as she walked every step she took. So it was like a lot of things going on at the same time. And so that and so as we were talking in m plus how I connect with the my client, I was able to like hold a container for her as we're walking as we're talking so allow her to like, elaborate on some of the things that that happened to her or to happen with her throughout her lifetime. And so she was like, you know, she wants to do more Do more sessions with me because there was a lot of things that were happening at the same time where she was able to release, and forgive. And also think of ways that she could, you know, be better because of the things that have happened. So I say all that to say like, so, going through the program, I realized that it wasn't for me, because I wasn't able to actually, um, go outside of the, the parameters of what psychiatrists, psychologists or therapists do. And so I did a whole year within that program. And I picked what I need to take, because I use again, both psychology and sociology within my therapeutic session. So after there, after Chattanooga, I left there and went to Texas stayed there for four years. And I thought, I want to go back into sociology, and I was gonna start my master's in sociology. And then I figured I was like, No, I don't want to do that again. So I stayed there for four years, going to one semester for that fruit to notice that I didn't want to do it. And within being there, I was like, Okay, well, I don't think this is places for me. So I moved again to Seattle, I've been here for going on 10 years now, this year. And as I got here, I got into corporate and I knew when I got into corporate, some of the things that are happening, when it came to leadership, when it came to culture, I was like, this is where I want to plant my seed. And like doing the work of making sure that we do better with our as leaders, we do better with our employees. And so I actually started my master's degree. And it was organizational psychological development. And as I went through that program, I don't want to be rude to them. But like, I knew that I wanted to do the work. But at the same time, there was a lot of things that were going on at work. And that was going on within that actual organization, or within the program that I could, I wasn't able to deal with the pasty of it. And so I finished that, but I started my I was only one out of the group that actually started my consulting firm. And with and with all the stuff that I've learned within that first year, I was able to kind of hone in to what part of organizational development that I want to go into. And they didn't help me with creating my business, I did everything on my own levels. But by being in that program, it allowed me to understand the different again, I tell you, I can just go into a space and learn a lot of stuff and learn a foundation of things because I see, I can see systems. And so like, as I as I went into that space, I kind of understood and I went out and created my own system, um, by seeing what they did. And so it kind of helped me out with building out my business. A long journey. So yeah, Michael Hingson ** 33:30 so you did get your master's degree. By the time it was all said and done. Anquida Adams ** 33:33 I did I did not finish. Finish it. Okay, good. But every time I went into a space, I guess, for me, Michael Hingson ** 33:43 school wasn't the right thing. Anquida Adams ** 33:45 Well, I mean, it's not it wasn't the right thing. It was the right thing for the moment that I got the foundation. Right, what I needed, I actually left, right, that makes sense. Michael Hingson ** 33:57 Yeah, it does with all the other stuff that was going on. So when did you actually start? Well, let me go back. You said you went into corporate? Did you go to work for a company? Or did you just start your business? Anquida Adams ** 34:08 I worked for several companies. And as well, I'll just be transparent. Like, within this space here, and the Pacific Pacific, or Pacific Northwest. When I first got here, there was less talk around diversity and inclusion. And this is pretty much white culture space. And me being here and me, I'm not getting a memo of like, hey, like, you know, just shrink yourself. And if I didn't get the memo, I didn't care about the memo. So like I learned very first, just first off and being in a corporate spaces that I if I did not take care of take up for myself or to have self advocacy around myself, that I would allow other people to actually bully me or actually be in a space where I felt so I could not breathe. And when I say when I cannot breathe, it's like, you know, me not being able to actually display my talents and my gifts, not in a shirt that show off the way. But like, for me, my my mindset is, um, I have what I need to do what I need to do, I will do it. And I know, I don't need micromanaging. And if you want to micromanage me, maybe you need to do the job yourself. And so that's not to be ugly about it. But it's like, if you hired me, and you know that I can do the job, like I, you know, please don't micromanage me. And so I had like those people who will try to micromanage me, or if they didn't try to micromanage me, they would, one person told me, I can make a foreign company, but not on her watch, he did a lot of stuff that was I told you, there was a lot of things that was happening. So I had to deal with that kind of sort of, in my program to where there was a young lady that in that program who did the same thing to me also where it's like she was bullying me. But at the same time, that's when I started to wake up and start to my, my self advocacy began much more after after those two situations, because I knew that, yes, I speak up for myself, but most people within my demographic group, they don't say anything, because they just want to get along play along so they can kind of like move along. But I knew if I didn't say anything, that's the next person that was younger than me, came in that position, or came in that organization, they will face the same situation that I faced, and I would not be able to, I don't want to cry, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, if I wouldn't have said nothing. Or if I wouldn't have said if I wouldn't have you know, did something about it. And most of the adults that were older that because i i When I came into those positions, I was in my early 30s I was 30 and I was just a baby kind of sorta. And so being in those positions, and having someone older than me that looked like me that was brown. You know, tell me don't rock the boat or enquete uh, you know, don't say anything about it, because you're gonna make it hard on everybody else. Like that, to me was that that wasn't that didn't tell what mean. And so for I got in trouble a lot because I spoke up and I spoke out because I was like, I could not leave I for my My motto is if you go into the place, make sure you leave it better than where you found it. Yeah. Michael Hingson ** 37:46 So when did you actually start your business? Well, I started my business in 16 2016. Okay. And so tell tell us a little bit about the business. You've got several brands and segments under it. That's pretty fascinating, which is, of course, why you describe yourself as a multi printer. So tell us about that. Right. Okay, cool. 38:10 So, um, within, like I told you before, like the origins of this of like, is making sure that organizations Well, let me back up. So ALA brand consists of three areas, ALA consultant, firm, ala event planning and management and aLa foundation. aLa World Foundation, sorry. So I'll go back to ALA consortium or ALA Consulting Firm is a boutique, a global boutique firm with expertise in social relations with a human centered approach to staying developing operating systems on a human side, also the organizational side. So what does that mean? So what that means is you might have a problem in three areas, the human, or the organization and the process are both right. So pretty much we make sure that within that space, we're helping you out with a culture that's the seeing, seeing, seeing the systems, helping out with the systems of your culture, developing that system within your culture, and then implementing what what is there, so like, that's what we do within those spaces, so and unpacking that. So for different divisions, organizational socio emotional psychological development and their services underneath there. Then this the second division is equity inclusion, diversity with the social justice lens. And then the third, division is entrepreneurship and startup coaching and development and the last division is the individual personal professional family Christian development. So all four areas, enter. Have an intersectionality together because of the person you as a pro Sin creates the subculture of the beggar culture, whether it's within any afford those areas. Michael Hingson ** 40:06 So what exactly do you do? How does it work? Anquida Adams ** 40:10 So, up underneath the organizational development sector, so there's four. So there's several services, but it's four main services. So there's our so they're a succession planning, always keep that first session planning. And underneath succession planning, there's millennial, multi millennial attention as a strategist, we go in and kind of figure out, you know, the next generation of who's gonna be in charge, that's millennials, right? So making sure that we know who was in your organization, who are the millennials, and then understanding like, okay, um, the second part of that is millennial leadership, development. So like, with that, when we figure out who's the millennials in the space, we're looking at the, the, the, the life, the life, the lifespan of the company. So when you think about the lifespan of the company, need to make sure within those millennials, how are you how you doing leadership development with them, and then also tracking them. So then, when you're able to bring them in the actual positions when the boomers leave, that you have people that are on a succession plan to actually fill those positions. And not only you have the tools to fill fulfill those positions, you have organization that will continue as life is as lifeforce because again, if you're not leading or developing your leaders on all levels, it's going to be hard for you to maintain a great company. So that's two of the actual first two, I secession planning for millennials. And then the second area of it is our ecosystem, Matic structure, leadership coaching and development. And that's for all generations, not just for millennials or generation. And then the second part of that is desk paired with that is ecosystem, Matic team, structure team coaching and development. So what happens is, is that most of the time the leadership get developed, what the team don't, and it's by different people. So we created a actual, a program to where you're, you're, you're doing both development, because if you develop the leader in a manner where they're understanding themselves, and then also understanding how do they lead as a leader, what leadership does they have, or understanding their actual direct reports, and then also understand themselves, because most of the time, most leaders don't have a full unfolding for understanding of how they impact it and print their actual direct reports. And that can lead to a lot of what was the retention, where, you know, people there, you know, lack of retention, because like, pretty much there, people are leaving as a rotating door in and out. So when, when a leader is like, have their actual space in the world and their space within that company, where they're, they're learning of what they do, because most leaders don't get leadership training, they literally are just pushed into a space because they're great at an actual subject, or they're great at actual department or whatever a trait, and they're not able to actually, you know, lead because of that. And I think most of the time, that's why you have people in spaces where they're great at what they do, but they don't know how to lead. And so that's why we help within that space. Now, when it comes to the teams, you have to feel like you're in a safe space to collaborate and to actually you have camaraderie with your peers. So with that of being in a safe space that you know that your leader is leading you and and in a way where they're helping growing the talent and the talent, feel safe, you're going to have a great department and a great culture within your whole organization. So that's the four main areas of coaching and consulting within that space of organizational social, emotional, psychological development. Michael Hingson ** 44:32 So how do you do how do you do leadership training? How does that work? Anquida Adams ** 44:37 So again, it's a lot of deep diving. First, creating awareness with them, of their I call it my cornea professional patterns are professional professional origins. It's kind of like our family of origins but is professional origins that I created, most individuals who are and a leadership position, they pretty much mimic the leaders that was before them. And sometimes they picked up good habits, and that's why they could pick up bad habits. And so when they're not developed, they tend to either lane with the patterns that they picked up from their parents, and then in the past, they picked up from the professions of, of, of who they worked for. And so when you think about that, that's a lot of think a lot of things to unpack, and mostly just don't unpack that. And that's why you have a lot of ineffective leaders. And so we work on that inner work of the person first. And then we then work on styles, helping them out with the different types of styles that they can they that they can use per their department of the people that are within our department, because you we teach them how to figure out the actual, the, their employees styles, because a style, you know, each person has a different style. So at least adapted three styles and, and doing a mixture of of one of those three styles to help out with the actual direct reports. Then, after that, we start going into other things that they need to learn that that could be helpful to them that that they have not learned, but then they want to learn around, um, leadership skills. And so especially when it comes to conversational intelligence, that's like embedded in our, our space of like, I'm doing leadership development. So conversational intelligence skills group, it helps the leader to understand how to articulate their thoughts and their feelings. And to be clear, and have clarity when they're actually giving their direct reports. A clear understanding of what they're asked to do as a task. Not only that, but it helps out with conflict, because most of the time, you're dealing with different personalities and different cultures and different ways of living. And so with that, it kind of help out with mediation, because there are cameras or the mediation, they're mediating between, of their self advocacy of how they lead and also between the actual person like of how they is accepting the actual tasks that they're given. Because most of the time, again, we all learn in different ways, and teaching them how to actually work with their their actual direct report around how they learn how they are wanting to be led, and in what styles that actually helped them into motivating them to do well, within the workspace. So all Michael Hingson ** 48:03 of this that we're talking about comes under the umbrella of ALA consulting. Yes. Okay. Now, do you have a number of people that work with you? Is it just you or how does that work? Anquida Adams ** 48:17 So, and this is what I have to explain to people, I'm, I'm in big, I'm in this in the space of scaling. So how I created my businesses. Each so by being an entrepreneur, you can have different types of services. Most people tell you to keep keep it at one space. But what happens is when you do one space, within different quarters, different organizations can now only bring you in, but if I have four divisions, and I have services underneath each one, it's easier for me to kind of get an actual get picked to like go into any organization, different in different cores, depending on what services they need, or if there's going to be someone doing it individually. So it helps me out to figure out like how did that work? So because I'm scaling right now I'm able to I'll be able to, like, bring in some more people to do the work with me and or I have some people that I have on the side, if they need to come in to help me out with it, they can help me out with it. Other than that, I'm the person until I began to scale and then so I'm starting to do so yeah, Michael Hingson ** 49:29 it's cool. Well, you know, the whole issue, of course, is that it's ala consulting, and there's nothing wrong with having more than one consultant or people that work with you. So that that makes sense. But what about I Anquida Adams ** 49:41 knew I wanted to create a bigger organization and so Michael Hingson ** 49:47 it makes sense to do that if you can do it in and as they would say with franchises, although this is not but you want to make sure you keep the same flavor and you keep the same process throughout Whoever you work with, needless to say, yes. So a la event planning minute and management. Anquida Adams ** 50:06 Yeah, so la event planning and management goes hand in hand with La consulting firm because it is event planning and management for organizations. So, we hire, retain, and then develop talent. And so we have four different layers for different divisions to that one too. So there's the career fair. So we have our signature career fair that we're going to start in 2020, but COVID hit, so we had were having to like, throw, you know, like, put it out, and we're gonna try and do it this year. Um, so but what we have been doing for since 2013, is that because we leave on the Astra peripher space, system 13, because we were the only woman event planning and management career management firm here in Seattle, we did over 48 career fairs for career choice, that was the company that chose us to work within their career fairs here in Seattle. And that's how we got started. So, um, by hearing from them, of the, the vendors that want more, more areas, that's when I was like, Okay, well, maybe I need to, to create our signature career fairs. And that's what happened when 2020 hit and I wasn't able to do it, but I started doing it now. And then the second layer of it is organizational events, pretty much we do, um, fun, employee fun day. And then if you don't do any work, just have fun to create commodity. And then camaraderie. And then the second area of that space is team building. And the third area within that space is retreats. And then so the next level of this and so screen of Metellus, showing up the org chart, but the next level, the third level, this is like events. So if you want a one day event to the event or a week event, we can we can help out with a small to medium events. And the last level is our disabilities and inclusion level where we where we do our ala disabilities, transition, transitioning resource summit and Expo. And then this year will be our first year doing it. And then we have our ala team, no ala L A disabilities is Community Connect. And it's like where we get to have people to come together. So whatever, what, whatever quarter it is, by his quarter after the actual Summit is put in place so that the organizations who are wanting to create a disability and inclusion affinity group, they're able to meet with other organizations around the city to work together to actually help out with their affinity groups. And then we coupled that with hiring and people who have disabilities to work with those companies so that we can kind of create jobs for people with disabilities. And then the third piece of that part because there's three initiatives within disabilities. It's our ala disabilities, talent recruiting and consultancy agency, where we do time recruiting and consultancy. So so that this for the wraparound summit there's two other things that will help out. So it's not just you just going to a summit and getting all this things and you're like, Oh, yay, we're happy. But no, we have two other things that will help out. So then you can actually stay on track, but haven't been being intentional about having a space of, you know, a disability and inclusion workspace. So if that makes sense. That's pretty much all of that. Michael Hingson ** 54:10 So what is ala World Foundation? Anquida Adams ** 54:14 Okay, so ALAFondation comes into play, where we're able to the foundation part is to work with other organizations, and spotlight nem of saying, Hey, we see you're doing good work. I feel like within the workspace, or within the workforce, we have a lot of people that is quick to say, this is what bad this company is doing. And there's no shining a light on the company that's doing well. And so a big part of our foundation is to partner with other companies to make sure that they other nonprofits, to make sure that they're seen within the actual workspace of doing whatever they need, will that they're doing what they're doing with The individuals that they're working with within the communities that we're working with, and then that's part of the foundation, and then another part of the foundation. And so it's two projects, a project for making sure that organization is being seen. And the other project is to human, the human project and this around homelessness, and we're bringing it bringing awareness around homelessness, um, and several different ways. So it's five phases of that. And this homeless, a lot of, I'm not gonna go into it, Michael Hingson ** 55:30 that's okay. Up. So what is being Anquida? Anquida Adams ** 55:34 Oh, that's, so that's like opposite. So I explained in the ss, so ala Brand, it creates foundations, and it helps out society with creative foundations, and getting started on the right feet on, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever area that you're working with, with us, it's just creating that foundation. So being Anquida, is actually a space of creating healthy relationships. So you have the foundations, but now you need to learn how to like, have an ongoing way of learning how to have those healthy relationships to continue the actual foundation that you have created. So that's what being enquete is about. So being Anquida is a small boutique firm, with expertise in relationships. And so within that space of learning about relationship, it starts with you first, not only does it start with you, it's about understanding, that's where the identity intelligence starts out with. So like, we created this formula for all of our work throughout our identity intelligence. And that's where identity intelligence for our consultant for our elite consulting firm came from. The root of it came from the actual being queasy to being quita is a space where you're able to, first have a relationship with yourself, first, understand who you are, and how to navigate yourself in the world around you. And having identity intelligence create a place where you can actually understand your shadow side and your light, or your fragmented shadow side in front of you in light. And what we're all that, all that is means is, is that we have different duality parts of us. And then if we suppress the parts that we think that, you know, if someone knew about us would make them run away, then we intentionally or unintentionally do things that will make people not like us, and we don't even know it, because we're we ignore the fact that this is part of our shadow side. Does that make sense? That is a lot of it's a lot of unpacking? Michael Hingson ** 57:53 It does make sense. I think I understand exactly what you're saying. And it does make sense. And you certainly pull a lot of things together, no doubt about it. And clearly you're you happen in person that getting a lot of things accomplished. And you're you're trying to bring a lot of things into the world. And and I hope that you are going to be very successful at scaling. Well, let me ask you, if people want to learn more about you, or reach out to you and maybe engage you or or in somehow become involved with you, how do they do that, Anquida Adams ** 58:29 um, they can go through our link tree, link to yours. You can say WWW link, and then t r dot e e and then slash a dot L dot a consulting firm. And it's unnecessary. I know it's a lot. But if you can look there, or like, the best way is LinkedIn, LinkedIn, you can get get in touch with me really quickly. And then all of what we do is underneath experiences, you can kind of go visit or go visits from LinkedIn from there. And I think that will be the best way. LinkedIn is a whole Michael Hingson ** 59:04 lot better. What's your LinkedIn handle? Anquida Adams ** 59:08 So it is Anquida, Adam. So that's pretty much it. Michael Hingson ** 59:12 A n q u i d a d a m s. Okay. Well, I hope people will reach out, I hope that we've been able to do some good and getting people more acquainted with you and what you do. You are fascinating, you are doing a lot. And that's cool. Anquida Adams ** 59:29 I write all the things I've done in my lifetime, like, oh, like I know, I talked about a lot but like there's a whole lot of things that I didn't talk about being a part of the Commission for people with disabilities, and then being the co chair of that and then being within that, that space for four years, being a part of the disabilities and inclusion. Well, the Kane county disabilities Developmental Disabilities board, so there's, I've done too, so there's a lot. Michael Hingson ** 59:58 Well, I think people will definitely Learn about that as they go seek you out and investigate you. And I hope they'll do that. And I want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn some about what you do. And for you who are listening out there, I really appreciate you listening. Please give us a five star rating wherever you find unstoppable mindset, we are grateful for it. I know Anquida will be grateful for it. And also, if you'd like to reach out to me, please do so you can reach me at Michaelhi m i c h a e l h i at accessibe A C C E S S I B E .com. Or you can go to our podcast page which is www dot Michael hingson.com/podcast. And Michael hingson is m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. So Michael hingson.com/podcasts Love it. If you go there and in listen to some more podcasts and rate us there as well. We really appreciate it. But most of all, I hope that she'll reach out to Anquida I think that she has offered us a lot of interesting and useful information and a lot of insights and we should definitely feel free to engage her and use her talents and her skills. And clearly there's a lot of it there. So Anquida, one last time, I want to thank you for being with us today and coming on unstoppable mindset and telling us so much more. Thank Anquida Adams ** 1:01:19 you for having me. And I'm just grateful to be a part of this space. So thank you again, Michael. Michael Hingson ** 1:01:31 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for listening. 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Jim Boone is entering his first season as the Head Men's Basketball Coach at Greensboro College in North Carolina. Boone comes to Greensboro as the 5th active winningest coach among NCAA Division II Coach's and is ranked in the top 30 all-time for overall wins. He has taken his teams to 12 NCAA tournaments, including six Sweet Sixteen appearances and two Final Fours. Boone is known for his success with the Pack Line Defense and his ability to turn around programs to produce championship results. In his career his has led four programs to the NCAA tournament.Previously, Boone served as the Head Coach at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith for four years. Prior to UAFS, He spent seven seasons as the head men's basketball coach at Delta State University.Boone has also been the Head Coach at West Virginia Wesleyan, Robert Morris University, California University of Pennsylvania, Eastern Michigan University, Tusculum College.If you're looking to improve your coaching please consider joining the Hoop Heads Mentorship Program. We believe that having a mentor is the best way to maximize your potential and become a transformational coach. By matching you up with one of our experienced mentors you'll develop a one on one relationship that will help your coaching, your team, your program, and your mindset. The Hoop Heads Mentorship Program delivers mentoring services to basketball coaches at all levels through our team of experienced Head Coaches. Find out more at hoopheadspod.com or shoot me an email directly mike@hoopheadspod.comFollow us on social media @hoopheadspod on Twitter and Instagram.You'll want to be prepared to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Jim Boone, Head Men's Basketball Coach at Greensboro College in the state of North Carolina.Website - https://greensborocollegesports.com/sports/mens-basketballEmail - jim.boone@greensboro.eduTwitter - @coachjimbooneVisit our Sponsors!Dr. Dish BasketballMention the Hoop Heads Podcast when you place your order and get $300 off a brand new state of the art Dr. Dish Shooting Machine! Fast Model SportsFastModel Sports has the most compelling and intuitive basketball software out there! In addition to a great product, they also provide basketball coaching content and resources through their blog and playbank, which features over 8,000 free plays and drills from their online coaching community. For access to these plays and more information, visit fastmodelsports.com or follow them on Twitter @FastModel. Use Promo code HHP15 to save 15%The Coaching PortfolioYour first impression is everything when applying for a new coaching job. A professional coaching portfolio is the tool that highlights your coaching achievements and philosophies and, most of all, helps separate you and your abilities from the other applicants. Special Price of just $25 for all Hoop Heads Listeners.Training Camp - Elite Skill...
Pablo Molina, associate vice president of information technology and chief information security officer at Drexel University and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, leads the conversation on the implications of artificial intelligence in higher education. FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Pablo Molina with us to discuss implications of artificial intelligence in higher education. Dr. Molina is chief information security officer and associate vice president at Drexel University. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Dr. Molina is the founder and executive director of the International Applies Ethics in Technology Association, which aims to raise awareness on ethical issues in technology. He regularly comments on stories about privacy, the ethics of tech companies, and laws related to technology and information management. And he's received numerous awards relating to technology and serves on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for AI and Digital Policy. So Dr. P, welcome. Thank you very much for being with us today. Obviously, AI is on the top of everyone's mind, with ChatGPT coming out and being in the news, and so many other stories about what AI is going to—how it's going to change the world. So I thought you could focus in specifically on how artificial intelligence will change and is influencing higher education, and what you're seeing, the trends in your community. MOLINA: Irina, thank you very much for the opportunity, to the Council on Foreign Relations, to be here and express my views. Thank you, everybody, for taking time out of your busy schedules to listen to this. And hopefully, I'll have the opportunity to learn much from your questions and answer some of them to the best of my ability. Well, since I'm a professor too, I like to start by giving you homework. And the homework is this: I do not know how much people know about artificial intelligence. In my opinion, anybody who has ever used ChatGPT considers herself or himself an expert. To some extent, you are, because you have used one of the first publicly available artificial intelligence tools out there and you know more than those who haven't. So if you have used ChatGPT, or Google Bard, or other services, you already have a leg up to understand at least one aspect of artificial intelligence, known as generative artificial intelligence. Now, if you want to learn more about this, there's a big textbook about this big. I'm not endorsing it. All I'm saying, for those people who are very curious, there are two great academics, Russell and Norvig. They're in their fourth edition of a wonderful book that covers every aspect of—technical aspect of artificial intelligence, called Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. And if you're really interested in how artificial intelligence can impact higher education, I recommend a report by the U.S. Department of Education that was released earlier this year in Washington, DC from the Office of Education Technology. It's called Artificial Intelligence and Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations. So if you do all these things and you read all these things, you will hopefully transition from being whatever expert you were before—to a pandemic and Ukrainian war expert—to an artificial intelligence expert. So how do I think that all these wonderful things are going to affect artificial intelligence? Well, as human beings, we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and really underestimate the impact of technology in the long run. And I believe this is also the case with artificial intelligence. We're in a moment where there's a lot of hype about artificial intelligence. It will solve every problem under the sky. But it will also create the most catastrophic future and dystopia that we can imagine. And possibly neither one of these two are true, particularly if we regulate and use these technologies and develop them following some standard guidelines that we have followed in the past, for better or worse. So how is artificial intelligence affecting higher education? Well, number one, there is a great lack of regulation and legislation. So if you know, for example around this, OpenAI released ChatGPT. People started trying it. And all of a sudden there were people like here, where I'm speaking to you from, in Italy. I'm in Rome on vacation right now. And Italian data protection agency said: Listen, we're concerned about the privacy of this tool for citizens of Italy. So the company agreed to establish some rules, some guidelines and guardrails on the tool. And then it reopened to the Italian public, after being closed for a while. The same thing happened with the Canadian data protection authorities. In the United States, well, not much has happened, except that one of the organizations on which board I serve, the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy, earlier this year in March of 2023 filed a sixty-four-page complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Which is basically we're asking the Federal Trade Commission: You do have the authority to investigate how these tools can affect the U.S. consumers. Please do so, because this is your purview, and this is your responsibility. And we're still waiting on the agency to declare what the next steps are going to be. If you look at other bodies of legislation or regulation on artificial intelligence that can help us guide artificial intelligence, well, you can certainly pay attention to the U.S. Congress. And what is the U.S. Congress doing? Yeah, pretty much that, not much, to be honest. They listen to Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, who recently testified before Congress, urging Congress to regulate artificial intelligence. Which is quite clever on his part. So it was on May 17 that he testified that we could be facing catastrophic damage ahead if artificial intelligence technology is not regulated in time. He also sounded the alarm about counterfeit humans, meaning that these machines could replace what we think a person is, at least virtually. And also warned about the end of factual evidence, because with artificial intelligence anything can be fabricated. Not only that, but he pointed out that artificial intelligence could start wars and destroy democracy. Certainly very, very grim predictions. And before this, many of the companies were self-regulating for artificial intelligence. If you look at Google, Microsoft, Facebook now Meta. All of them have their own artificial intelligence self-guiding principles. Most of them were very aspirational. Those could help us in higher education because, at the very least, it can help us create our own policies and guidelines for our community members—faculty, staff, students, researchers, administrators, partners, vendors, alumni—anybody who happens to interact with our institutions of higher learning. Now, what else is happening out there? Well, we have tons, tons of laws that have to do with the technology and regulations. Things like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Sarbanes-Oxley. Federal regulations like FISMA, and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, Payment Card Industry, there is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, there is the Budapest Convention where cybersecurity insurance providers will tells us what to do and what not to do about technology. We have state laws and many privacy laws. But, to be honest, very few artificial intelligence laws. And it's groundbreaking in Europe that the European parliamentarians have agreed to discuss the Artificial Intelligence Act, which could be the first one really to be passed at this level in the world, after some efforts by China and other countries. And, if adopted, could be a landmark change in the adoption of artificial intelligence. In the United States, even though Congress is not doing much, what the White House is trying to position itself in the realm of artificial intelligence. So there's an executive order in February of 2023—that many of us in higher education read because, once again, we're trying to find inspiration for our own rules and regulations—that tells federal agencies that they have to root out bias in the design and use of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, because they have to protect the public from algorithm discrimination. And we all believe this. In higher education, we believe in being fair and transparent and accountable. I would be surprised if any of us is not concerned about making sure that our technology use, our artificial technology use, does not follow these particular principles as proposed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and many other bodies of ethics and expertise. Now, the White House also announced new centers—research and development centers with some new national artificial intelligence research institutes. Many of us will collaborate with those in our research projects. A call for public assessments of existing generative artificial intelligence systems, like ChatGPT. And also is trying to enact or is enacting policies to ensure that U.S. government—the U.S. government, the executive branch, is leading by example when mitigating artificial intelligence risks and harnessing artificial intelligence opportunities. Because, in spite of all the concerns about this, it's all about the opportunities that we hope to achieve with artificial intelligence. And when we look at how specifically can we benefit from artificial intelligence in higher education, well, certainly we can start with new and modified academic offerings. I would be surprised if most of us will not have degrees—certainly, we already have degrees—graduate degrees on artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and many others. But I would be surprised if we don't even add some bachelor's degrees in this field, or we don't modify significantly some of our existing academic offerings to incorporate artificial intelligence in various specialties, our courses, or components of the courses that we teach our students. We're looking at amazing research opportunities, things that we'll be able to do with artificial intelligence that we couldn't even think about before, that are going to expand our ability to generate new knowledge to contribute to society, with federal funding, with private funding. We're looking at improved knowledge management, something that librarians are always very concerned about, the preservation and distribution of knowledge. The idea would be that artificial intelligence will help us find better the things that we're looking for, the things that we need in order to conduct our academic work. We're certainly looking at new and modified pedagogical approaches, new ways of learning and teaching, including the promise of adaptive learning, something that really can tell students: Hey, you're not getting this particular concept. Why don't you go back and study it in a different way with a different virtual avatar, using simulations or virtual assistance? In almost every discipline and academic endeavor. We're looking very concerned, because we're concerned about offering, you know, a good value for the money when it comes to education. So we're hoping to achieve extreme efficiencies, better ways to run admissions, better ways to guide students through their academic careers, better way to coach them into professional opportunities. And many of this will be possible thanks to artificial intelligence. And also, let's not forget this, but we still have many underserved students, and they're underserved because they either cannot afford education or maybe they have physical or cognitive disabilities. And artificial intelligence can really help us reach to those students and offer them new opportunities to advance their education and fulfill their academic and professional goals. And I think this is a good introduction. And I'd love to talk about all the things that can go wrong. I'd love to talk about all the things that we should be doing so that things don't go as wrong as predicted. But I think this is a good way to set the stage for the discussion. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you so much. So we're going to go all of you now for your questions and comments, share best practices. (Gives queuing instructions.) All right. So I'm going first to Gabriel Doncel has a written question, adjunct faculty at the University of Delaware: How do we incentivize students to approach generative AI tools like ChatGPT for text in ways that emphasize critical thinking and analysis? MOLINA: I always like to start with a difficult question, so I very much, Gabriel Doncel, for that particular question. And, as you know, there are several approaches to adopting tools like ChatGPT on campus by students. One of them is to say: No, over my dead body. If you use ChatGPT, you're cheating. Even if you cite ChatGPT, we can consider you to be cheating. And not only that, but some institutions have invested in tools that can detect whether or something was written with ChatGPT or similar rules. There are other faculty members and other academic institutions that are realizing these tools will be available when these students join the workforce. So our job is to help them do the best that they can by using these particular tools, to make sure they avoid some of the mishaps that have already happened. There are a number of lawyers who have used ChatGPT to file legal briefs. And when the judges received those briefs, and read through them, and looked at the citations they realized that some of the citations were completely made up, were not real cases. Hence, the lawyers faced professional disciplinary action because they used the tool without the professional review that is required. So hopefully we're going to educate our students and we're going to set policy and guideline boundaries for them to use these, as well as sometimes the necessary technical controls for those students who may not be that ethically inclined to follow our guidelines and policies. But I think that to hide our heads in the sand and pretend that these tools are not out there for students to use would be—it's a disserve to our institutions, to our students, and the mission that we have of training the next generation of knowledge workers. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to go next to Meena Bose, who has a raised hand. Meena, if you can unmute yourself and identify yourself. Q: Thank you, Irina. Thank you for this very important talk. And my question is a little—(laughs)—it's formative, but really—I have been thinking about what you were saying about the role of AI in academic life. And I don't—particularly for undergraduates, for admissions, advisement, guidance on curriculum. And I don't want to have my head in the sand about this, as you just said—(laughs)—but it seems to me that any kind of meaningful interaction with students, particularly students who have not had any exposure to college before, depends upon kind of multiple feedback with faculty members, development of mentors, to excel in college and to consider opportunities after. So I'm struggling a little bit to see how AI can be instructive for that part of college life, beyond kind of providing information, I guess. But I guess the web does that already. So welcome your thoughts. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And Meena's at Hofstra University. MOLINA: Thank you. You know, it's a great question. And the idea that everybody is proposing right here is we are not—artificial intelligence companies, at least at first. We'll see in the future because, you know, it depends on how it's regulated. But they're not trying, or so they claim, to replace doctors, or architects, or professors, or mentors, or administrators. They're trying to help those—precisely those people in those professions, and the people they served gain access to more information. And you're right in a sense that that information is already on the web. But we've aways had a problem finding that information regularly on the web. And you may remember that when Google came along, I mean, it swept through every other search engine out there AltaVista, Yahoo, and many others, because, you know, it had a very good search algorithm. And now we're going to the next level. The next level is where you ask ChatGPT in human-natural language. You're not trying to combine the three words that say, OK, is the economics class required? No, no, you're telling ChatGPT, hey, listen, I'm in the master's in business administration at Drexel University and I'm trying to take more economic classes. What recommendations do you have for me? And this is where you can have a preliminary one, and also a caveat there, as most of these search engine—generative AI engines already have, that tell you: We're not here to replace the experts. Make sure you discuss your questions with the experts. We will not give you medical advice. We will not give you educational advice. We're just here, to some extent, for guiding purposes and, even now, for experimental and entertainment purposes. So I think you are absolutely right that we have to be very judicious about how we use these tools to support the students. Now, that said, I had the privilege of working for public universities in the state of Connecticut when I was the CIO. I also had the opportunity early in my career to attend public university in Europe, in Spain, where we were hundreds of students in class. We couldn't get any attention from the faculty. There were no mentors, there were no counselors, or anybody else. Is it better to have nobody to help you or is it better to have at least some technology guidance that can help you find the information that otherwise is spread throughout many different systems that are like ivory towers—emissions on one side, economics on the other, academics advising on the other, and everything else. So thank you for a wonderful question and reflection. FASKIANOS: I'm going to take the next question written from Dr. Russell Thomas, a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations and Diplomatic Studies at Cavendish University in Uganda: What are the skills and competencies that higher education students and faculty need to develop to think in an AI-driven world? MOLINA: So we could argue here that something very similar has happened already with many information technologies and communication technologies. It is the understanding at first faculty members did not want to use email, or the web, or many other tools because they were too busy with their disciplines. And rightly so. They were brilliant economists, or philosophers, or biologists. They didn't have enough time to learn all these new technologies to interact with the students. But eventually they did learn, because they realized that it was the only way to meet the students where they were and to communicate with them in efficient ways. Now, I have to be honest; when it comes to the use of technology—and we'll unpack the numbers—it was part of my doctoral dissertation, when I expanded the adoption of technology models, that tells you about early adopters, and mainstream adopters, and late adopters, and laggards. But I uncovered a new category for some of the institutions where I worked called the over-my-dead-body adopters. And these were some of the faculty members who say: I will never switch word processors. I will never use this technology. It's only forty years until I retire, probably eighty more until I die. I don't have to do this. And, to be honest, we have a responsibility to understand that those artificial intelligence tools are out there, and to guide the students as to what is the acceptable use of those technologies within the disciplines and the courses that we teach them in. Because they will find those available in a very competitive work market, in a competitive labor market, because they can derive some benefit from them. But also, we don't want to shortchange their educational attainment just because they go behind our backs to copy and paste from ChatGPT, learning nothing. Going back to the question by Gabriel Doncel, not learning to exercise the critical thinking, using citations and material that is unverified, that was borrowed from the internet without any authority, without any attention to the different points of view. I mean, if you've used ChatGPT for a while—and I have personally, even to prepare some basic thank-you speeches, which are all very formal, even to contest a traffic ticket in Washington, DC, when I was speeding but I don't want to pay the ticket anyway. Even for just research purposes, you could realize that most of the writing from ChatGPT has a very, very common style. Which is, oh, on the one hand people say this, on the other hand people say that. Well, the critical thinking will tell you, sure, there are two different opinions, but this is what I think myself, and this is why I think about this. And these are some of the skills, the critical thinking skills, that we must continue to teach the students and not to, you know, put blinds around their eyes to say, oh, continue focusing only on the textbook and the website. No, no. Look at the other tools but use them judiciously. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to go next to Clemente Abrokwaa. Raised hand, if you can identify yourself, please. Q: Hi. Thanks so much for your talk. It's something that has been—I'm from Penn State University. And this is a very important topic, I think. And some of the earlier speakers have already asked the questions I was going to ask. (Laughs.) But one thing that I would like to say that, as you said, we cannot bury our heads in the sand. No matter what we think, the technology is already here. So we cannot avoid it. My question, though, is what do you think about the artificial intelligence, the use of that in, say, for example, graduate students using it to write dissertations? You did mention about the lawyers that use it to write their briefs, and they were caught. But in dissertations and also in class—for example, you have students—you have about forty students. You give a written assignment. You make—when you start grading, you have grading fatigue. And so at some point you lose interest of actually checking. And so I'm kind of concerned about that how it will affect the students' desire to actually go and research without resorting to the use of AI. MOLINA: Well, Clemente, fellow colleague from the state of Pennsylvania, thank you for that, once again, both a question and a reflection here. Listen, many of us wrote our doctoral dissertations—mine at Georgetown. At one point of time, I was so tired of writing about the same topics, following the wonderful advice, but also the whims of my dissertation committee, that I was this close from outsourcing my thesis to China. I didn't, but I thought about it. And now graduate students are thinking, OK, why am I going through the difficulties of writing this when ChatGPT can do it for me and the deadline is tomorrow? Well, this is what will distinguish the good students and the good professionals from the other ones. And the interesting part is, as you know, when we teach graduate students we're teaching them critical thinking skills, but also teaching them now to express themselves, you know, either orally or in writing. And writing effectively is fundamental in the professions, but also absolutely critical in academic settings. And anybody who's just copying and pasting from ChatGPT to these documents cannot do that level of writing. But you're absolutely right. Let's say that we have an adjunct faculty member who's teaching a hundred students. Will that person go through every single essay to find out whether students were cheating with ChatGPT? Probably not. And this is why there are also enterprising people who are using artificial intelligence to find out and tell you whether a paper was written using artificial intelligence. So it's a little bit like this fighting of different sources and business opportunities for all of them. And we've done this. We've used antiplagiarism tools in the past because we knew that students were copying and pasting using Google Scholar and many other sources. And now oftentimes we run antiplagiarism tools. We didn't write them ourselves. Or we tell the students, you run it yourself and you give it to me. And make sure you are not accidentally not citing things that could end up jeopardizing your ability to get a graduate degree because your work was not up to snuff with the requirements of our stringent academic programs. So I would argue that this antiplagiarism tools that we're using will more often than not, and sooner than expected, incorporate the detection of artificial intelligence writeups. And also the interesting part is to tell the students, well, if you do choose to use any of these tools, what are the rules of engagement? Can you ask it to write a paragraph and then you cite it, and you mention that ChatGPT wrote it? Not to mention, in addition to that, all the issues about artificial intelligence, which the courts are deciding now, regarding the intellectual property of those productions. If a song, a poem, a book is written by an artificial intelligence entity, who owns the intellectual property for those works produced by an artificial intelligence machine? FASKIANOS: Good question. We have a lot of written questions. And I'm sure you don't want to just listen to my voice, so please do raise your hands. But we do have a question from one of your colleagues, Pablo, Pepe Barcega, who's the IT director at Drexel: Considering the potential biases and limitations of AI models, like ChatGPT, do you think relying on such technology in the educational domain can perpetuate existing inequalities and reinforce systemic biases, particularly in terms of access, representation, and fair evaluation of students? And Pepe's question got seven upvotes, we advanced it to the top of the line. MOLINA: All right, well, first I have to wonder whether he used ChatGPT to write the question. But I'm going to leave it that. Thank you. (Laughter.) It's a wonderful question. One of the greatest concerns we have had, those of us who have been working on artificial intelligence digital policy for years—not this year when ChatGPT was released, but for years we've been thinking about this. And even before artificial intelligence, in general with algorithm transparency. And the idea is the following: That two things are happening here. One is that we're programming the algorithms using instructions, instructions created by programmers, with all their biases, and their misunderstandings, and their shortcomings, and their lack of context, and everything else. But with artificial intelligence we're doing something even more concerning than that, which is we have some basic algorithms but then we're feeling a lot of information, a corpus of information, to those algorithms. And the algorithms are fine-tuning the rules based on those. So it's very, very difficult for experts to explain how an artificial intelligence system actually makes decisions, because we know the engine and we know the data that we fed to the engine, but we don't know the real outcome how those decisions are being made through neural networks, through all of the different systems that we have and methods that we have for artificial intelligence. Very, very few people understand how those work. And those are so busy they don't have time to explain how the algorithm works for others, including the regulators. Let's remember some of the failed cases. Amazon tried this early. And they tried this for selecting employees for Amazon. And they fed all the resumes. And guess what? It turned out that most of the recommendations were to hire young white people who had gone to Ivy League schools. Why? Because their first employees were feeding those descriptions, and they had done extremely well at Amazon. Hence, by feeding that information of past successful employees only those were there. And so that puts away the diversity that we need for different academic institutions, large and small, public and private, from different countries, from different genders, from different ages, from different ethnicities. All those things went away because the algorithm was promoting one particular one. Recently I had the opportunity to moderate a panel in Washington, DC, and we had representatives from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And they told us how they investigated a hiring algorithm from a company that was disproportionately recommending that they hired people whose first name was Brian and had played lacrosse in high school because, once again, a disproportionate number of people in that company had done that. And the algorithm realized, oh, this must be important characteristics to hire people for this company. Let's not forget, for example, with the artificial facial recognition and artificial intelligence by Amazon Rekog, you know, the facial recognition software, that the American Civil Liberties Union, decided, OK, I'm going to submit the pictures of all the congressmen to this particular facial recognition engine. And it turned out that it misidentified many of them, particularly African Americans, as felons who had been convicted. So all these artificial—all these biases could have really, really bad consequences. Imagine that you're using this to decide who you admit to your universities, and the algorithm is wrong. You know, you are making really biased decisions that will affect the livelihood of many people, but also will transform society, possibly for the worse, if we don't address this. So this is why the OECD, the European Union, even the White House, everybody is saying: We want this technology. We want to derive the benefits of this technology, while curtailing the abuses. And it's fundamental we achieve transparency. We are sure that these algorithms are not biased against the people who use them. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I'm going to go next to Emily Edmonds-Poli, who is a professor at the University of San Diego: We hear a lot about providing clear guidelines for students, but for those of us who have not had a lot of experience using ChatGPT it is difficult to know what clear guidelines look like. Can you recommend some sources we might consult as a starting point, or where we might find some sample language? MOLINA: Hmm. Well, certainly this is what we do in higher education. We compete for the best students and the best faculty members. And we sometimes compete a little bit to be first to win groundbreaking research. But we tend to collaborate with everything else, particularly when it comes to policy, and guidance, and rules. So there are many institutions, like mine, who have already assembled—I'm sure that yours has done the same—assembled committees, because assembling committees and subcommittees is something we do very well in higher education, with faculty members, with administrators, even with the student representation to figure out, OK, what should we do about the use of artificial intelligence on our campus? I mentioned before taking a look at the big aspirational declarations by Meta, and Google, and IBM, and Microsoft could be helpful for these communities to look at this. But also, I'm a very active member of an organization known as EDUCAUSE. And EDUCAUSE is for educators—predominantly higher education educators. Administrators, staff members, faculty members, to think about the adoption of information technology. And EDUCAUSE has done good work on this front and continues to do good work on this front. So once again, EDUCAUSE and some of the institutions have already published their guidelines on how to use artificial intelligence and incorporate that within their academic lives. And now, that said, we also know that even though all higher education institutions are the same, they're all different. We all have different values. We all believe in different uses of technology. We trust more or less the students. Hence, it's very important that whatever inspiration you would take, you work internally on campus—as you have done with many other issues in the past—to make sure it really reflects the values of your institution. FASKIANOS: So, Pablo, would you point to a specific college or university that has developed a code of ethics that addresses the use of AI for their academic community beyond your own, but that is publicly available? MOLINA: Yeah, I'm going to be honest, I don't want to put anybody on the spot. FASKIANOS: OK. MOLINA: Because, once again, there many reasons. But, once again, let me repeat a couple resources. One is of them is from the U.S. Department of Education, from the Office of Educational Technology. And the article is Artificial Intelligence and Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations, published earlier this year. The other source really is educause.edu. And if you look at educause.edu on artificial intelligence, you'll find links to articles, you'll find links to universities. It would be presumptuous of me to evaluate whose policies are better than others, but I would argue that the general principles of nonbiased, transparency, accountability, and also integration of these tools within the academic life of the institution in a morally responsible way—with concepts by privacy by design, security by design, and responsible computing—all of those are good words to have in there. Now, the other problem with policies and guidelines is that, let's be honest, many of those have no teeth in our institutions. You know, we promulgate them. They're very nice. They look beautiful. They are beautifully written. But oftentimes when people don't follow them, there's not a big penalty. And this is why, in addition to having the policies, educating the campus community is important. But it's difficult to do because we need to educate them about so many things. About cybersecurity threats, about sexual harassment, about nondiscriminatory policies, about responsible behavior on campus regarding drugs and alcohol, about crime. So many things that they have to learn about. It's hard to get at another topic for them to spend their time on, instead of researching the core subject matter that they chose to pursue for their lives. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And we will be sending out a link to this video, the transcript, as well as the resources that you have mentioned. So if you didn't get them, we'll include them in the follow-up email. So I'm going to go to Dorian Brown Crosby who has a raised hand. Q: Yes. Thank you so much. I put one question in the chat but I have another question that I would like to go ahead and ask now. So thank you so much for this presentation. You mentioned algorithm biases with individuals. And I appreciate you pointing that out, especially when we talk about face recognition, also in terms of forced migration, which is my area of research. But I also wanted you to speak to, or could you talk about the challenges that some institutions in higher education would have in terms of support for some of the things that you mentioned in terms of potential curricula, or certificates, or other ways that AI would be woven into the new offerings of institutions of higher education. How would that look specifically for institutions that might be challenged to access those resources, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities? Thank you. MOLINA: Well, very interesting question, and a really fascinating point of view. Because we all tend to look at things from our own perspective and perhaps not consider the perspective of others. Those who have much more money and resources than us, and those who have fewer resources and less funding available. So this is a very interesting line. What is it that we do in higher education when we have these problems? Well, as I mentioned before, we build committees and subcommittees. Usually we also do campus surveys. I don't know why we love doing campus surveys and asking everybody what they think about this. Those are useful tools to discuss. And oftentimes the thing that we do also, that we've done for many other topics, well, we hire people and we create new offices—either academic or administrative offices. With all of those, you know, they have certain limitations to how useful and functional they can be. And they also continue to require resources. Resources that, in the end, are paid for by students with, you know, federal financing. But this is the truth of the matter. So if you start creating offices of artificial intelligence on our campuses, however important the work may be on their guidance and however much extra work can be assigned to them instead of distributed to every faculty and the staff members out there, the truth of the matter is that these are not perfect solutions. So what is it that we do? Oftentimes, we work with partners. And our partners love to take—(inaudible)—vendors. But the truth of the matter is that sometimes they have much more—they have much more expertise on some of these topics. So for example, if you're thinking about incorporating artificial intelligence to some of the academic materials that you use in class, well, I'm going to take a guess that if you already work with McGraw Hill in economics, or accounting, or some of the other books and websites that they put that you recommend to your students or you make mandatory for your students, that you start discussing with them, hey, listen, are you going to use artificial intelligence? How? Are you going to tell me ahead of time? Because, as a faculty member, you may have a choice to decide: I want to work with this publisher and not this particular publisher because of the way they approach this. And let's be honest, we've seen a number of these vendors with major information security problems. McGraw Hill recently left a repository of data misconfigured out there on the internet, and almost anybody could access that. But many others before them, like Chegg and others, were notorious for their information security breaches. Can we imagine that these people are going to adopt artificial intelligence and not do such a good job of securing the information, the privacy, and the nonbiased approaches that we hold dear for students? I think they require a lot of supervision. But in the end, these publishers have the economies of scale for you to recommend those educational materials instead of developing your own for every course, for every class, and for every institution. So perhaps we're going to have to continue to work together, as we've done in higher education, in consortia, which would be local, or regional. It could be based on institutions of the same interest, or on student population, on trying to do this. And, you know, hopefully we'll get grants, grants from the federal government, that can be used in order to develop some of the materials and guidelines that are going to help us precisely embrace this and embracing not only to operate better as institutions and fulfill our mission, but also to make sure that our students are better prepared to join society and compete globally, which is what we have to do. FASKIANOS: So I'm going to combine questions. Dr. Lance Hunter, who is an associate professor at Augusta University. There's been a lot of debate regarding if plagiarism detection software tools like Turnitin can accurately detect AI-generated text. What is your opinion regarding the accuracy of AI text generation detection plagiarism tools? And then Rama Lohani-Chase, at Union County College, wants recommendations on what plagiarism checker devices you would recommend—or, you know, plagiarism detection for AI would you recommend? MOLINA: Sure. So, number one, I'm not going to endorse any particular company because if I do that I would ask them for money, or the other way around. I'm not sure how it works. I could be seen as biased, particularly here. But there are many there and your institutions are using them. Sometimes they are integrated with your learning management system. And, as I mentioned, sometimes we ask the students to use them themselves and then either produce the plagiarism report for us or simply know themselves this. I'm going to be honest; when I teach ethics and technology, I tell the students about the antiplagiarism tools at the universities. But I also tell them, listen, if you're cheating in an ethics and technology class, I failed miserably. So please don't. Take extra time if you have to take it, but—you know, and if you want, use the antiplagiarism tool yourself. But the question stands and is critical, which is right now those tools are trying to improve the recognition of artificial intelligence written text, but they're not as good as they could be. So like every other technology and, what I'm going to call, antitechnology, used to control the damage of the first technology, is an escalation where we start trying to identify this. And I think they will continue to do this, and they will be successful in doing this. There are people who have written ad hoc tools using ChatGPT to identify things written by ChatGPT. I tried them. They're remarkably good for the handful of papers that I tried myself, but I haven't conducted enough research myself to tell you if they're really effective tools for this. So I would argue that for the timing you must assume that those tools, as we assume all the time, will not catch all of the cases, only some of the most obvious ones. FASKIANOS: So a question from John Dedie, who is an assistant professor at the Community College of Baltimore County: To combat AI issues, shouldn't we rethink assignments? Instead of papers, have students do PowerPoints, ask students to offer their opinions and defend them? And then there was an interesting comment from Mark Habeeb at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Knowledge has been cheap for many years now because it is so readily available. With AI, we have a tool that can aggregate the knowledge and create written products. So, you know, what needs to be the focus now is critical thinking and assessing values. We need to teach our students how to assess and use that knowledge rather than how to find the knowledge and aggregate that knowledge. So maybe you could react to those two—the question and comment. MOLINA: So let me start with the Georgetown one, not only because he's a colleague of mine. I also teach at Georgetown, and where I obtained my doctoral degree a number of years ago. I completely agree. I completely agree with the issue that we have to teach new skills. And one of the programs in which I teach at Georgetown is our master's of analysis. Which are basically for people who want to work in the intelligence community. And these people have to find the information and they have to draw inferences, and try to figure out whether it is a nation-state that is threatening the United States, or another, or a corporation, or something like that. And they do all of those critical thinking, and intuition, and all the tools that we have developed in the intelligence community for many, many years. And artificial intelligence, if they suspend their judgement and they only use artificial intelligence, they will miss very important information that is critical for national security. And the same is true for something like our flagship school, the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, one of the best in the world in that particular field, where you want to train the diplomats, and the heads of state, and the great strategical thinkers on policy and politics in the international arena to precisely think not in the mechanical way that a machine can think, but also to connect those dots. And, sure they should be using those tools in order to, you know, get the most favorable position and the starting position, But they should also use their critical thinking always, and their capabilities of analysis in order to produce good outcomes and good conclusions. Regarding redoing the assignments, absolutely true. But that is hard. It is a lot of work. We're very busy faculty members. We have to grade. We have to be on committees. We have to do research. And now they ask us to redo our entire assessment strategy, with new assignments that we need to grade again and account for artificial intelligence. And I don't think that any provost out there is saying, you know what? You can take two semesters off to work on this and retool all your courses. That doesn't happen in the institutions that I know of. If you get time off because you're entitled to it, you want to devote that time to do research because that is really what you sign up for when you pursued an academic career, in many cases. I can tell you one thing, that here in Europe where oftentimes they look at these problems with fewer resources than we do in the United States, a lot of faculty members at the high school level, at the college level, are moving to oral examinations because it's much harder to cheat with ChatGPT with an oral examination. Because they will ask you interactive, adaptive questions—like the ones we suffered when we were defending our doctoral dissertations. And they will realize, the faculty members, whether or not you know the material and you understand the material. Now, imagine oral examinations for a class of one hundred, two hundred, four hundred. Do you do one for the entire semester, with one topic chosen and run them? Or do you do several throughout the semester? Do you end up using a ChatGPT virtual assistance to conduct your oral examinations? I think these are complex questions. But certainly redoing our assignments and redoing the way we teach and the way we evaluate our students is perhaps a necessary consequence of the advent of artificial intelligence. FASKIANOS: So next question from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi: Who should safeguard ethical concerns and misuse of AI by criminals? Should the onus fall on the creators and companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to ensure security and not pass it on to the end users of the product? And I think you mentioned at the top in your remarks, Pablo, about how the founder of ChatGPT was urging the Congress to put into place some regulation. What is the onus on ChatGPT to protect against some of this as well? MOLINA: Well, I'm going to recycle more of the material from my doctoral dissertation. In this case it was the Molina cycle of innovation and regulation. It goes like this, basically there are—you know, there are engineers and scientists who create new information technologies. And then there are entrepreneurs and businesspeople and executives to figure out, OK, I know how to package this so that people are going to use it, buy it, subscribe to it, or look at it, so that I can sell the advertisement to others. And, you know, this begins and very, very soon the abuses start. And the abuses are that criminals are using these platforms for reasons that were not envisioned before. Even the executives, as we've seen with Google, and Facebook, and others, decide to invade the privacy of the people because they only have to pay a big fine, but they make much more money than the fines or they expect not to be caught. And what happened in this cycle is that eventually there is so much noise in the media, congressional hearings, that eventually regulators step in and they try to pass new laws to do this, or the regulatory agencies try to investigate using the powers given to them. And then all of these new rules have to be tested in courts of law, which could take years by the time it reaches sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court. Some of them are even knocked down on the way to the Supreme Court when they realize this is not constitutional, it's a conflict of laws, and things like that. Now, by the time we regulate these new technologies, not only many years have gone by, but the technologies have changed. The marketing products and services have changed, the abuses have changed, and the criminals have changed. So this is why we're always living in a loosely regulated space when it comes to information technology. And this is an issue of accountability. We're finding this, for example, with information security. If my phone is my hacked, or my computer, my email, is it the fault of Microsoft, and Apple, and Dell, and everybody else? Why am I the one paying the consequences and not any of these companies? Because it's unregulated. So morally speaking, yes. These companies are accountable. Morally speaking also the users are accountable, because we're using these tools because we're incorporating them professionally. Legally speaking, so far, nobody is accountable except the lawyers who submitted briefs that were not correct in a court of law and were disciplined for that. But other than that, right now, it is a very gray space. So in my mind, it requires everybody. It takes a village to do the morally correct thing. It starts with the companies and the inventors. It involves the regulators, who should do their job and make sure that there's no unnecessary harm created by these tools. But it also involves every company executive, every professional, every student, and professor who decides to use these tools. FASKIANOS: OK. I'm going to take—combine a couple questions from Dorothy Marinucci and Venky Venkatachalam about the effect of AI on jobs. Dorothy talks about—she's from Fordham University—about she read something about Germany's best-selling newspaper Bild reportedly adopting artificial intelligence to replace certain editorial roles in an effort to cut costs. Does this mean that the field of journalism communication will change? And Venky's question is: AI—one of the impacts is in the area of automation, leading to elimination of certain types of jobs. Can you talk about both the elimination of jobs and what new types of jobs you think will be created as AI matures into the business world with more value-added applications? MOLINA: Well, what I like about predicting the future, and I've done this before in conferences and papers, is that, you know, when the future comes ten years from now people will either not remember what I said, or, you know, maybe I was lucky and my prediction was correct. In the specific field of journalism, and we've seen it, the journalism and communications field, decimated because the money that they used to make with advertising—and, you know, certainly a bit part of that were in the form of corporate profits. But many other one in the form of hiring good journalists, and investigative journalism, and these people could be six months writing a story when right now they have six hours to write a story, because there are no resources. And all the advertisement money went instead to Facebook, and Google, and many others because they work very well for advertisements. But now the lifeblood of journalism organizations has been really, you know, undermined. And there's good journalism in other places, in newspapers, but sadly this is a great temptation to replace some of the journalists with more artificial intelligence, particularly the most—on the least important pieces. I would argue that editorial pieces are the most important in newspapers, the ones requiring ideology, and critical thinking, and many others. Whereas there are others that tell you about traffic changes that perhaps do not—or weather patterns, without offending any meteorologists, that maybe require a more mechanical approach. I would argue that a lot of professions are going to be transformed because, well, if ChatGPT can write real estate announcements that work very well, well, you may need fewer people doing this. And yet, I think that what we're going to find is the same thing we found when technology arrived. We all thought that the arrival of computers would mean that everybody would be without a job. Guess what? It meant something different. It meant that in order to do our jobs, we had to learn how to use computers. So I would argue that this is going to be the same case. To be a good doctor, to be a good lawyer, to be a good economist, to be a good knowledge worker you're going to have to learn also how to use whatever artificial intelligence tools are available out there, and use them professionally within the moral and the ontological concerns that apply to your particular profession. Those are the kind of jobs that I think are going to be very important. And, of course, all the technical jobs, as I mentioned. There are tons of people who consider themselves artificial intelligence experts. Only a few at the very top understand these systems. But there are many others in the pyramid that help with preparing these systems, with the support, the maintenance, the marketing, preparing the datasets to go into these particular models, working with regulators and legislators and compliance organizations to make sure that the algorithms and the tools are not running afoul of existing regulations. All of those, I think, are going to be interesting jobs that will be part of the arrival of artificial intelligence. FASKIANOS: Great. We have so many questions left and we just couldn't get to them all. I'm just going to ask you just to maybe reflect on how the use of artificial intelligence in higher education will affect U.S. foreign policy and international relations. I know you touched upon it a little bit in reacting to the comment from our Georgetown University colleague, but any additional thoughts you might want to add before we close? MOLINA: Well, let's be honest, one particular one that applies to education and to everything else, there is a race—a worldwide race for artificial intelligence progress. The big companies are fighting—you know, Google, and Meta, many others, are really putting—Amazon—putting resources into that, trying to be first in this particular race. But it's also a national race. For example, it's very clear that there are executive orders from the United States as well as regulations and declarations from China that basically are indicating these two big nations are trying to be first in dominating the use of artificial intelligence. And let's be honest, in order to do well in artificial intelligence you need not only the scientists who are going to create those models and refine them, but you also need the bodies of data that you need to feed these algorithms in order to have good algorithms. So the barriers to entry for other nations and the barriers to entry by all the technology companies are going to be very, very high. It's not going to be easy for any small company to say: Oh, now I'm a huge player in artificial intelligence. Because even if you may have created an interesting new algorithmic procedure, you don't have the datasets that the huge companies have been able to amass and work on for the longest time. Every time you submit a question to ChatGPT, the ChatGPT experts are using their questions to refine the tool. The same way that when we were using voice recognition with Apple or Android or other companies, that we're using those voices and our accents and our mistakes in order to refine their voice recognition technologies. So this is the power. We'll see that the early bird gets the worm of those who are investing, those who are aggressively going for it, and those who are also judiciously regulating this can really do very well in the international arena when it comes to artificial intelligence. And so will their universities, because they will be able to really train those knowledge workers, they'll be able to get the money generated from artificial intelligence, and they will be able to, you know, feedback one with the other. The advances in the technology will result in more need for students, more students graduating will propel the industry. And there will also be—we'll always have a fight for talent where companies and countries will attract those people who really know about these wonderful things. Now, keep in mind that artificial intelligence was the core of this, but there are so many other emerging issues in information technology. And some of them are critical to higher education. So we're still, you know, lots of hype, but we think that virtual reality will have an amazing impact on the way we teach and we conduct research and we train for certain skills. We think that quantum computing has the ability to revolutionize the way we conduct research, allowing us to do competitions that were not even thinkable today. We'll look at things like robotics. And if you ask me about what is going to take many jobs away, I would say that robotics can take a lot of jobs away. Now, we thought that there would be no factory workers left because of robots, but that hasn't happened. But keep adding robots with artificial intelligence to serve you a cappuccino, or your meal, or take care of your laundry, or many other things, or maybe clean your hotel room, and you realize, oh, there are lots of jobs out there that no longer will be there. Think about artificial intelligence for self-driving vehicles, boats, planes, cargo ships, commercial airplanes. Think about the thousands of taxi drivers and truck drivers who may end up being out of jobs because, listen, the machines drive safer, and they don't get tired, and they can be driving twenty-four by seven, and they don't require health benefits, or retirement. They don't get depressed. They never miss. Think about many of the technologies out there that have an impact on what we do. So, but artificial intelligence is a multiplier to technologies, a contributor to many other fields and many other technologies. And this is why we're so—spending so much time and so much energy thinking about these particular issues. FASKIANOS: Well, thank you, Pablo Molina. We really appreciate it. Again, my apologies that we couldn't get to all of the questions and comments in the chat, but we appreciate all of you for your questions and, of course, your insights were really terrific, Dr. P. So we will, again, be sending out the link to this video and transcript, as well as the resources that you mentioned during this discussion. I hope you all enjoy the Fourth of July. And I encourage you to follow @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, you send us comments, feedback, suggestions to CFRacademic@CFR.org. And, again, thank you all for joining us. We look forward to your continued participation in CFR Academic programming. Have a great day. MOLINA: Adios. (END)
Dr. Vernell Bennett-Fairs began her tenure as the 13th president of LeMoyne-Owen College on January 5, 2021. Dr. Bennett-Fairs is the second woman chosen to lead the only historically black college in Memphis, TN. Dr. Bennett-Fairs' career spans 26 years in higher education. She is a trained vocalist and orator who has served as an associate professor and college administrator. However, her most cherished role is that of student advocate. Previously, Dr. Bennett-Fairs served as the Vice President for Student Affairs at Delta State University. A native of Lorain, Ohio, Dr. Bennett-Fairs began her postsecondary career at Kentucky State University as a non-tenure tract Instructor of Music. Dr. Bennett-Fairs' career spanned 20 years at KSU where her final role was as the Vice President for Student Affairs. Dr. Bennett-Fairs is a HBUC alum of Fisk University where she sang and traveled worldwide with the esteemed Jubilee Singers. She also joined the Pi Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. while attending Fisk. Take a listen as Dr. Bennett-Fairs discusses her journey as a Fisk University Jubilee Singer, leadership in higher education and her outlook both personally and professionally in the next ten years.
Dr. Vernell Bennett-Fairs began her tenure as the 13th president of LeMoyne-Owen College on January 5, 2021. Dr. Bennett-Fairs is the second woman chosen to lead the only historically black college in Memphis, TN.Dr. Bennett-Fairs' career spans 26 years in higher education. She is a trained vocalist and orator who has served as an associate professor and college administrator. However, her most cherished role is that of student advocate. Previously, Dr. Bennett-Fairs served as the Vice President for Student Affairs at Delta State University.A native of Lorain, Ohio, Dr. Bennett-Fairs began her postsecondary career at Kentucky State University as a non-tenure tract Instructor of Music. Dr. Bennett-Fairs' career spanned 20 years at KSU where her final role was as the Vice President for Student Affairs.Dr. Bennett-Fairs is a HBUC alum of Fisk University where she sang and traveled worldwide with the esteemed Jubilee Singers. She also joined the Pi Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. while attending Fisk. Take a listen as Dr. Bennett-Fairs discusses her journey as a Fisk University Jubilee Singer, leadership in higher education and her outlook both personally and professionally in the next ten years.
Brian Winter, vice president of policy at Americas Society and Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, leads the conversation on U.S. relations with South America. CASA: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Brian Winter with us to discuss U.S. relations with South America. Mr. Winter is the vice president of policy for the America Society and Council of the Americas and editor in chief of Americas Quarterly. An influential political analyst, he has followed South America for more than twenty years and has served as a correspondent for Reuters in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Mr. Winter is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé. He is a regular contributor to television and radio and host of the Americas Quarterly podcast. Welcome, Brian. Thank you very much for being with us. WINTER: Thank you, Maria. Thanks for the invitation. CASA: Can you begin with a general overview of current U.S. relations with South American countries? WINTER: I can try and actually, as a matter of fact, today is an extremely fortuitous day to be doing this and let me tell you why. A couple of weeks ago on February 10, Brazil's new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made a one-day trip to Washington. He met with President Biden while he was here. He brought his foreign minister with him as well as his chief foreign policy adviser, his finance minister, a couple other members of his Cabinet. One of the biggest sort of concrete results of this trip that Lula made up here was a U.S. donation to the Amazon Fund of $50 million. That is million with an M. Well, today, Lula leaves for China with about half of his Cabinet and a delegation of approximately two hundred and thirty leaders from Brazil's private sector in what Brazilian media are calling the biggest foreign delegation ever to leave Brazil for another country. They will be in China for six days and there is a whole roster of deals on the table ranging from financing to infrastructure to education, environmental, and so on. So the point I'm trying to get across here is one of clear asymmetry and it really reflects kind of the new moment for U.S. relations with South America overall. As Maria mentioned, I started my career in the region as a reporter a little more than twenty years ago. I was in Argentina for four years. I was in Mexico for one year and Brazil for five, and in the course of that relatively short period of time we've seen kind of the power balance in how we think about Latin America but specifically South America. We've seen a significant change in how we think about that region. Back the early 2000s, certainly, during the 1990s, these were the final years of the so-called Washington Consensus, a period characterized by kind of the unipolar moment that came with the end of the Cold War, a certain consensus not only around democracy but around a certain set of liberalizing economic policies as well, and that ran its course. But really, it was around 2003 when everything started to change for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is the one that I've already referenced, which is the growth of China as a trading partner for the region. China had always had a presence in Latin America. In fact, for the magazine that I run, Americas Quarterly, we ran a piece two years ago about the Chinese presence in Mexico going all the way back to the 1600s when they operated barber shops and other sort of forms of commerce. But what's happened over the last twenty years is really remarkable. In numbers, Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean overall went from 18 billion (dollars) in 2002 to a stunning 450 billion (dollars) in 2021. China is now the largest trading partner for Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, and for South America as a whole if you take all those countries in the aggregate China now outranks the United States. When you look at Latin America, by the way, that includes Mexico. If you take that grouping then the U.S. is still the number-one trading partner but, again, that's almost entirely because of that relationship—that trading relationship as a result of the former NAFTA and now USMCA. Along with that big growth in Chinese trade have come other changes. We've had a lot of talk in the U.S. media in recent days about the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war. That was something—and I was living in Argentina at the time and you could really feel how that even then carried a cost for the U.S. reputation in some of these countries. I think that with the failure of the—the failures of the war over time I think that that only accentuated the view that—not only a long-standing view that the U.S. was an unwelcome, meddling, and in many cases imperialist presence but it also accelerated this narrative that the United States was in relative decline. More recent years we've seen kind of other things contribute to this diminished reputation of the United States and throughout many countries in the region—everything ranging from not just the election of Donald Trump, who, of course, was not popular in most of the region; but also specific decisions that were made by his government, such as the withdrawal from the TPP—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—that, of course, is the trade deal that was negotiated under the Obama administration that included several Latin American countries, including Chile and Peru—but also the weaponization of tariffs; and, you know, Trump's repeated threats to even cut off Mexican imports. They did—those threats did have the effect of kind of forcing, first, President Peña Nieto in Mexico and then his successor, Andrés Manuel Lόpez Obrador, to cooperate with initiatives like management of migration policy. So in the short term, they, quote/unquote, “worked” but in the longer term it showed Mexico as well as other countries in the region that the U.S. was not a particularly reliable partner. Some of you may be listening to all this and thinking, well, this sounds like the viewpoints espoused by governments in the region that are leftist and have never really cared for the United States in the first place. But another interesting thing about this latest trend and the way that things have changed over the last ten years is that this desire to forge a middle path between China and the United States as their strategic competition escalates is shared by leaders across the ideological spectrum. South American countries in particular are not unlike the United States when it seems like virtually everything is polarized, and yet in this area and specifically the need—the perceived need to have closer relations with—I'm sorry, closer relations with China while maintaining a civil relationship but not siding too much with United States, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of that view in recent years have actually been governments on the center right and right such as Sebastián Piñera, the former president of Chile, Iván Duque, the former president of Colombia, Guillermo Lasso, the current president of Ecuador, who has worked extensively with China, and even Jair Bolsonaro, who was until recently the right-wing president of Brazil, ended up essentially going along with Beijing and allowing Huawei to participate in the recent auction of 5G mobile communications technology there. And so what we end up with as a result is a policy in many countries across the region that some are calling active nonalignment, the idea that governments in the region, regardless of their ideological stripe, need to seek an equidistant or middle path between Washington and Beijing, essentially taking advantage of their relative distance from not only potential conflicts between the U.S. and China but also looking at what's happening in Ukraine right now and saying, look, we need to maintain our independence, not side too strongly with either of these emerging blocs, and see if we can benefit from this by selling our commodities to everybody, keeping in mind that these are economies, especially in South America, that rely extremely heavily on the sale of commodities exports to drive their economic growth. So, you know, in conclusion for these initial remarks that is a huge change in the course of a generation. We've gone in a little more than twenty years from this assumption that most Latin American countries are in the U.S. sphere of influence, to use a very outdated term, which I detest, that they were part of our, quote/unquote, “backyard” to an increasing realization in DC, and I think people are still getting their heads around that, that automatic support, automatic alignment, can no longer be expected whether it is in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and then on down into South America, which I know is our focus today, governments like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, another country where we've seen a lot of change on this front even in the last couple years and, again, not just because there's a leftist president in Colombia now because his predecessor, who I've already mentioned, Iván Duque, was one of the main people pushing this change. So that's a lot to digest. I'm happy to take any questions and hear from you. So thank you. CASA: Thanks, Brian, for that comprehensive introduction. Now let's open it up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question is a written question and it comes from Andrea Cuervo Prados, who is an adjunct instructor at Dickinson State University, and asks, what is your perspective regarding the new leftist president of Colombia and U.S. relations? What is the risk that Colombia could turn into another Venezuela? WINTER: Right. It's a good question. I think that we are still figuring out exactly what Gustavo—not only who Gustavo Petro is but what his ambitions are for both Colombia and for his relationships with the rest of the region and the rest of the world. There is some distance between what he has said he wants to do and what he may be able to do. This is a president who, you know, talks in these grand sweeping terms but ultimately has to get things through congress, and to just cite a result or an example of this that doesn't directly have to do with Colombia's foreign relationships, he said—he gave a very dramatic speech at the UN General Assembly last September in which he talked about the need to legalize narcotics across the board, including cocaine. But then—it was a speech that generated a lot of attention in capitals all over the world and all over the region. But then in ensuing weeks when he was pressed on this he didn't really have a lot of detail and admitted that it was not something that Colombia could do unilaterally, which is all to say that, again, there's this gap where I think it's important to pay careful attention to the gap between the rhetoric and what's actually possible with Petro. I don't personally—you know, the question of could X country become another Venezuela it's a question that people have been asking all over Latin America for the last ten years. I think—I understand why people ask it because what happened in Venezuela was so awful and dramatic, not only with the country becoming a full-fledged dictatorship that represses political opposition but also the humanitarian crisis that has forced some 7 million people or about a quarter of the country's population to leave the country. But, look, Petro is Colombia's first president on the left and I don't think it necessarily follows that—in fact, I'm certain that it doesn't follow that every person on the left wants to go down the path of Venezuela. So I suppose I'm a little more optimistic not only that Petro is a pragmatist in areas like the economy—for example, his finance minister is a quite pragmatic figure, a Columbia University professor who is well respected by markets—and I'm also somewhat optimistic about Colombian institutions and their ability to stand in the way of any truly radical change. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Morton Holbrook, who is an adjunct professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Morton? Q: Hello. Yes, I'm here. Morton Holbrook, Kentucky Wesleyan College. University of Louisville also. Thanks for your really interesting comments, especially about China's relationship with Latin and South America. Can I turn north a little bit to Russia? Considering particularly the Brazilian president's upcoming visit to China do you think he might want to go to Russia, too? Bearing in mind that the International Criminal Court just issued an arrest warrant for President Putin, how might that affect Latin American relations with Russia? Do you think some of them might now have second thoughts about Russia or inviting Putin to visit their countries? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela have all signed the ICC statute promising to cooperate in the carrying out of arrest warrants. Thank you. WINTER: That's a great question and one that is—I can tell you is very front of mind for Brazilian officials and I think others around the region right now. I was just in Brazil two weeks ago working on our—our next issue of Americas Quarterly will be on Brazil's foreign policy and what it means for the rest of Latin America. This is a question that's very front and center. Brazil's foreign minister did say in the last couple of days—he did explicitly almost word for word repeat what you just said, which is that Brazil is a signatory to that treaty. That would seem to eliminate any possibility of Vladimir Putin visiting Brazil. I'm not sure that that was really on his list of things to do anyway. But it was not only a practical signal but a diplomatic one as well. Lula's position on Russia and the Ukraine war has been inconsistent. He said during his campaign last year that Zelensky and Putin bear equal responsibility for the conflict. My understanding is that after that statement, you know, nobody wants to contradict the boss openly and sometimes not even in private. My sense personally based on conversations with others in Brasilia is that at the very least his foreign policy team regretted that he made that statement. Brazil has, in other form, condemned the Russian invasion. Other governments including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and others have done the same. However, these are countries that, like most of the Global South, are firmly opposed to any sanctions and so their position, again, ends up being I suppose you could call it nuanced. They believe it's important in part because of their own experience as nations to condemn invasions of one country by another. I, personally, think that it's fair to think of what Putin is doing is a kind of imperialist aggression, which these are countries that have certainly objected to that when it's the U.S. over the last, you know, 200-plus years and so you would think that it would be in their DNA to do so in the Ukrainian case as well, and in fairness most of them have. I would just add that, you know, the Brazilian position, I think, though, gets influenced also by two other things. One is, again, this notion of nonalignment. Most people talk about nonalignment in Brazil and Argentina, in Chile and Colombia, and they think about the U.S.-China relationship, as I noted during my introductory remarks. But they also think of it as a helpful guide to thinking about the conflict, the war in Ukraine, as well for reasons that are not firmly rooted in morals or values, let's say, but in interests as, you know, foreign policy often is. To say it in a different way, I had a conversation a couple of years ago with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who I helped him write his memoir in English back in 2006. He was president during the 1990s, and in talking with him about the China question he said, we have to take advantage of our greatest strategic asset, which is that Brazil is far. (Laughs.) And to just unpack that a little bit, I think the meaning of that is clear to all of you. But these are countries that really see an opportunity right now just by virtue of their geographic distance from these conflict zones to avoid being dragged in and also to potentially, at some level, benefit from it through strategic superpower competition for their support as well as through higher prices for some of the commodities that they produce. There's one added element in the case of Brazil, which is that Lula, I'm told by people close to him, sees himself as almost a Nelson Mandela-type figure. He's back now for his third term in the presidency twenty years after he was president the first time. Of course, I'm sure people on this call know that he went through some real struggles in the intervening years including nearly two years in prison over—on corruption charges that were later thrown out and, you know, he may see his presidency as an opportunity to kind of write the last chapter or two in his biography, and there's talk that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize and that he sees potentially helping negotiate a peace deal for the Ukraine war as the best opportunity to do that. I actually think that that idea, which is—tends to be dismissed in Washington as well as in European capitals, I personally think that idea is not as crazy as some people here in Washington think. But maybe I can go into that a little bit later if anybody wants. CASA: Thank you. Next, we have two written questions from the same university that we can take together. They're from Marisa Perez and Trevor Collier, who are undergraduate students at Lewis University. They would like to know what world leaders such as the United States can do to prevent deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and how they can do so without compromising Brazil's sovereignty. WINTER: Well, it's a really great question, in part because it mentions an issue that Americans don't often think about, which is precisely the sensitivity on the sovereignty issue. Brazil, and specifically not only Brazil's military but Brazil's foreign policy establishment, have a long-standing concern that is part of their doctrine, I suppose you could say, that is concerned always about the possibility of territorial loss and about foreigners gaining influence or, in some cases, even control over the Amazon. And I have to say, you know, this is another one of those ideas that I think—I wish we were all together in a room. This Zoom is kind of the next best thing. I could see your faces that way. But sometimes when I talk about this I see people kind of roll their eyes as if it was some sort of imagined conspiracy. But the truth is that as recently as 2019 when the—the first year of Jair Bolsonaro's government when the fires in the Amazon really became a huge controversy, driven in large part by social media and tweets from people like Justin Bieber and Cher, who, to be clear, were, I think, justifiably and quite heroically shining light on what was happening there. In the midst of all that Emmanuel Macron actually proposed that perhaps some sort of international force in the Amazon was necessary, that that deployment of that would be a good idea if Brazil was not capable of taking care of the Amazon itself. That proposal was disastrous because it just reinforced this long-standing fear that so much of the establishment in Brazil has always had, and it's true that Bolsonaro was on the right but you, certainly, in conversations, I think, with people across the ideological spectrum this is something that people think about. So OK. So back to the original question, how can the U.S. help. Well, the U.S. could help by providing both logistical and financial resources beyond the $50 million, which is, you know, the equivalent of about seven seconds of what we're spending in terms of supporting Ukraine right now. I don't know—Norway is the biggest sponsor of the Amazon Fund. I don't have that number in front of me but I think that their contribution is upwards of at least a billion dollars, probably more. Ultimately, though, I do believe that the Amazon is a local challenge and I know that can be unsatisfying to hear in forums like this where we're sort of designed—you know, this is a CFR event. We're supposed to be thinking of ways that the international community can get involved. But it's going to be a big challenge. The good news is that Brazil has shown that it is capable of getting its hands around this problem before. During Lula's first terms in office from 2003 to 2010 his government was able to reduce the level of deforestation by upwards of 75 percent. It was a very dramatic difference in a very short period of time. This was done through a variety of means, both things like satellite monitoring and new technology that let the authorities follow this in real time. They were also able to step up environmental enforcement agencies like IBAMA, whose inspectors are necessary. It's necessary to have them on the ground in order to, you know, stop—actually stop illegal loggers from setting the fires that are the main driver of deforestation. They were also able to build political consensus around the need to reduce deforestation during those years. I don't think it's going to be—in fact, I'm certain it will not be as “easy,” quote/unquote, this time around. A lot has changed. The upwards of 60 percent increase that we saw in deforestation during the Bolsonaro years had the support, unfortunately, in my view, of local populations who believe essentially that slashing and burning will lead their day-to-day economic lives to improve. In the election that happened in October where Lula won and Bolsonaro lost but by a very small margin—the closest margin in Brazil's modern democratic history—the strongest support nationally for Bolsonaro was in areas that have seen the most illegal deforestation over the last four years and what that tells you is that, again, these are local populations that believe that this will lead to greater wealth and greater well-being for all of them, this being deforestation. So that's a big challenge for Lula with a—you know, at a time when resources are fairly scarce. It's not like it was during his first presidency when all of this increase in Chinese trade was really boosting the amount of money in Brazil's coffers. So he's going to have to figure out a way to dedicate financial resources as well as convince local populations that this is in their interest to do it. It's not going to be an easy road. CASA: Our next question comes from Mike Nelson, an affiliate adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Mike? Q: Thank you very much for an outstanding overview of what's going on in U.S. relations to South America. I study international technology policy and data governance but my question is about corruption. You mentioned corruption in Brazil but it's a problem throughout South America, and my three-part question, is it getting worse or better; are there any countries who have really done the right thing and have taken serious measures to address it; and how can the internet and some of the technologies for citizen journalism help expose corruption and make leaders less likely to dip into the public fund? WINTER: OK. Yeah. No, great questions, and reflective of if you look at opinion polling and remember that these are countries that many of them have been dealing with rising crime, rising homicide levels, economic stagnation, the pandemic, which hit Latin America by many measures harder than in any other region in the world at one point—I haven't seen updated numbers on this but it was fairly consistently throughout the pandemic Latin America, which is about 8 percent of the world's population, was accounting for about 30 percent of the world's confirmed COVID deaths. Anyway, amid all of that, and the economic stagnation that has been such a problem over the last ten years, in a lot of countries and in public opinion surveys, the thing that people identified as the number-one problem in their country is corruption. That was not always true. If you look back at public polling twenty years ago, people tended to identify kind of more, what's the word, basic needs—think, like, unemployment, hunger, misery, which often is kind of asked as a separate—that's one of the boxes you can check. Twenty years ago, those were the issues. And as the region became more middle class, especially in the 2000s because of this China-driven economic growth that described during my introduction, a lot of people were able to move beyond their basic needs and focus on essentially what was happening to the money that they paid in taxes, keeping in mind that many people were paying taxes for the first time. Some of it surely was also driven by these things, as you mentioned, mobile phones that not only things like videos of people carrying suitcases of cash, but also the attention that was given to big corruption scandals. Previously in a lot of countries, governments were able to make pacts with newspapers and TV channels, and kind of tamp things down a little bit, and lower the temperature. In an era of Facebook and Twitter, that was no longer as easy for them to do. All of this culminated in several corruption scandals at once in the mid-2010s, the most emblematic of which was the so-called Lava Jato, or car wash, scandal, which originated in Brazil, but eventually had franchises, if you will, in almost a dozen countries throughout Latin America and the world. That story is complicated. Politicians all over the region went to jail. Business leaders did too. Lula was one of them. That was the case that put him in jail. In intervening years, we've discovered that there were abuses and procedural violations, both things on behalf of the prosecutors and the judge involved, who the Brazilian Supreme Court decided, I think in 2021, they ruled—maybe it was earlier than that—that the judge overseeing Lula's conviction had not been—or, rather, it's easier to say—had been partial in his rulings. And so that's left us in a place today where populations are still angry about corruption, as I mentioned, but it is no longer driving conversation in most countries, like it did before. I still believe—and you can probably tell, this is something I've thought about a lot over the years and continue to watch. The first question you asked, in some ways, is the most important one. Is corruption getting worse or better? It's impossible to know for sure. My hypothesis is actually corruption is about the same, and may in fact be getting better, which flies in the face of all of these headlines that we've seen. But to me, the operative question over these last ten years or so has been, you know, not why—I've heard people say, well, why are these—why are these countries so corrupt? And to me, the real question is, why are we suddenly seeing these cases of corruption? Because I think it speaks to not only the technological changes that I referenced, but also the improvement—(audio break)—these are countries many of which transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s. And therefore, it really took a generation for independent prosecutors to show up, to have the training and political support that they needed to go after some very powerful people. So, in sum, I am a believer in the story of rule of law improving in many countries in Latin America. I would recognize, again, that it's a very complex story, in part because of some of the problems around not just Lava Jato but in other countries, such as Peru and Guatemala. But progress is rarely linear. (Laughs.) And I still think that this is something that is likely to get better with time. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Mary Beth Altier at New York University. She asks: What role do you think misinformation and disinformation play in citizens' perceptions of the U.S. versus China and Russia in Latin America? What could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective, if anything? And then—I can repeat this other question later, which is kind of a follow up. So you think— WINTER: Yeah, maybe. Well, that first one—that first one is worthy of a book. All of these are—these are great questions. They're difficult to answer in pithy fashion in three minutes. I am continually impressed by the quality of Russian propaganda in Latin America. Those guys are really good. You look at RT en Español—(changes pronunciation)—RT en Español—it has one of the biggest social media followings of any “media company,” quote/unquote, in the region. Even people who I know are—who I know to not be pro-Russia, let's put it that way, I see sharing content and videos from RT, which, of course, is just as pure a propaganda arm as you can get of the Russian government. But also, you know, have a whole network of sites that are more subtle and that push very sophisticated and sometimes, you know, not particularly obvious narratives that are designed to undermine the United States or promote the views of China and Russia. I would recognize at the same time that—I referenced this during my introduction remarks, sometimes the United States does not need any help with it comes to undermining its reputation in the region. I mentioned some of the, quote/unquote “own goals” that we've seen over the last five to ten, even twenty years, going all the way back to the Iraq War. As far as actively pushing back, all I can say is this: You know, I think that they're—on the one hand, I think there are concrete steps that are being used. We're still trying to get our heads around this problem to fight misinformation. But I was just in a different forum this morning where I was asked, what—how can the U.S. help the cause of democracy in Latin America. And my answer to that is that the best thing the United States can do to help democracy in Latin America is to get its own house in order, to move past the polarization, the misinformation, and the scorched earth politics that have put our own democracy at risk over the last several years, and try to, you know, recapture some of the consensus, at least around basic democratic rules of the game and how we hold elections that characterized most of the previous two-hundred-plus years of our history. Because I do think that while—you know, look, I lived ten years in Latin America. I know that people roll their eyes at the notion of the United States as being kind of the shining city on the hill. And I understand why. And that was always true, in part because of the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America often showing, you know, some of our worst behaviors. On the other hand, as a Brazil specialist, I've seen how some of the tactics and even some of the same people that were behind our own democratic decay of the last five years, some of those same tactics were repackaged and exported to open arms in Brazil. So I do think that it makes a difference on the ground in places like Brazil, potentially, and other countries as well, when a strong democratic example is being set in the United States. And I think that's the most powerful thing we can do. Some of the other stuff, like what's happening on RT and Telesur and some of these other outlets is relatively outside our control. CASA: We have a complementary question from— WINTER: There was a second part of that question. CASA: Oh, no, you did end up answering, I think, what could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective. I think you kind of covered that. We have another question from Gursimran Padda, a student at Stony Brook University, who asks: Does China's strategy of gaining influence in Latin America differ from its tactics in Africa? And if so, why? WINTER: Gosh, all these great questions. China—I have to start from the beginning. I am not an African specialist. But I can tell you kind of the narrative of what happened in Africa through Latin American eyes, if that makes any sense, because this is a conversation I've had a lot over the years. The perception is that China went into some of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and engaged in infrastructure projects and other things that had abusive terms. In many cases, China imported its own labor to do some of these projects. They also engaged in some predatory lending practices. And that was all—essentially the takeaway from actions like that in places like Buenos Aires, Bogota, certainly Brasilia, was that the Chinese would not be allowed to come and engage in those same behaviors in Latin America. And I think, in practice, it seems that the Chinese have realized that. There have been examples, such as the construction of a dam in Ecuador, where the terms ended up being perceived as something of a debt trap. But my sense—again, and this is not so much my sense; it's repeating what I've heard in numerous conversations about this subject with leaders across the ideological spectrum and throughout the region—is that they understand the risks involved in working with China, in part because of the experience throughout parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And they're determined to not let those things happen in their home countries. You know, I know that that's a view that, in places like where I am today—I'm on in the road in Washington, participated in this other conference this morning. That's why my Zoom background is not quite as put together as it sometimes is, by the way. I know people roll their eyes at that notion here, and are constantly warning—you know, kind of wagging their finger a little bit at governments throughout South America, and saying that they need to be eyes wide open about the risks of engagement with the Chinese. The problem is that here in the U.S., I think they're underestimating, in some cases, the sophistication of foreign ministries and trade ministries in places like Peru and Chile when they make those comments. Which is to say, I think that there's something both visually and in terms of the context a bit paternalistic about it, that everybody picks up on and tends to make people in the region justifiably crazy. (Laughs.) And then, the other part is that the U.S. is not really offering much in the way of alternatives. We're at a pretty unique moment in the history of the United States right now where we have both parties—the Republican and Democratic Parties—are pretty much closed to the idea of new free trade deals. That, in my lifetime, has never happened before. I mentioned the fact that Trump dropped out of TPP. Well, Joe Biden has not picked that back up. I think there are domestic political reasons that explain that, but what it means in practice for our relationships with governments in Latin America is that Washington doesn't have a whole lot to offer. Because, unlike the Chinese, we can't just order our companies to go invest someplace. That's not how our economy works. It is very much how the Chinese economy works, where they can decide to make these decisions. They are not necessarily for a short-term economic payoff, but for medium-term reasons, or even decisions that have very little to do with dollars and cents or ROI, return on investment, and everything to do with geopolitics. So wanting to have beachheads in terms of, say, ports in places like El Salvador. So, you know, again, without that—without trade and without that ability to kind of dictate investment, there's not a lot that's left in Washington's toolkit for counteracting this kind of influence. CASA: Our next question comes from Daniel Izquierdo, an undergraduate student at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Daniel. Q: Good afternoon, sir, ma'am. Thank you for taking the time. I just had a quick question on the increasing tensions between China and the U.S., and how that will kind of develop itself in Latin and South America. So given the strategic interests of Latin and South America, and the persistent political unrest, along with increasing tensions between China and the U.S., what do you believe the likelihood to be of proxy conflicts or foreign meddling, similar to what occurred during the Cold War, occurring in the region? And if not, how do you foresee the U.S. and China competing for influence in the region? WINTER: So another very good question. Thank you for that. Look, I think some of this ground we've covered already, but I would say that, you know, you're the first to mention—I had not previously mentioned this idea of a new cold war. And this—you know, this is another reason why so many countries across the ideological spectrum are opting for this policy of nonalignment. Essentially because they believe that the first Cold War went badly, very badly, for Latin America. It resulted in all kinds of traumas, from the wars in Central America during the 1980s to U.S. support for coups in places like Chile, to, you know, Cuban meddling in places like Bolivia and elsewhere around the region during those years, which led to the rise of guerrilla movements like the FARC, that ended up killing very high numbers of people. And so essentially, you know, not to be glib about it, but the reaction that today's generation has is: We want no part of this. Because it didn't go well for us the first time. I think there are obvious differences between a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s, and this strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, that thankfully has not quite reached those heights, at least not yet, here in the twenty-first century. But I have to tell you, and again this is based on conversations I'm having all the time, the fear is real. The perception is that the world may be headed back to that kind of conflict, being driven not only by what's happening in the Ukraine but the increasing speculation of potential war over Taiwan. So this, again, as far as—as far as how it could play out in practice, I think it's still early. I think it remains to be seen. Right now there is—you know, there are clear cases where I think the Chinese are, as I alluded to in my previous answer, making investments not for economic reasons but for strategic ones, with a long-term horizon I mind. Things like the, quote/unquote, “space base” that they've established in Argentina, which really is deserving of the full air quotes when we say the phrase “space base.” I think everyone senses that—you know, that that conflict—or, that competition, if you will, is likely to define the next twenty to thirty years. And I think there's a determination in most countries, it makes a lot of sense to me personally, that they don't want their countries used again as a chessboard amid that larger conflict. CASA: Our next question comes from Damien Odunze. He's assistant professor at Delta State University who writes: Ideas in the long run change the world. Do you think a closer educational collaboration between U.S. universities and those in Latin and South America could help shape and strengthen liberal democratic values in those countries? WINTER: What an interesting question. Look, let me talk first about kind of the—that equation today. There's already quite a lot of connectivity, especially at the—at, you know, not a word I love to use, but at the elite level, the elites in government and business and U.S. education systems. Which is an unnecessarily wordy way of saying that a large percentage of people in South America come from the elite classes and get educated at universities and sometimes even at high schools in the United States. That is one reason why, again, many of these governments are likely to at least forge a middle path between China and the United States, rather than going full-fledged in the direction of China. I think there's a cultural affinity, family ties, cultural ties, educational ties, and other things that are probably kind of the strongest connection that the U.S. has with a lot of these countries right now. As to whether a strengthening of those educational ties would improve dedication and the strength of democracy, whew. It could, but I watched with dismay as poll after poll suggests that younger generations, not just in the United States but across the Western world, are less committed in theory to both democracy and democratic institutions than their predecessors. And so I wonder just—I don't have an answer to this—but I wonder if even, quote/unquote, “even” within the United States, if we're properly instilling an appreciation for democracy in today's generations, which then raises the question of whether we'd be able to do so amongst the youth of other countries as well. I'm not sure. I think this is another area where, you know, in the U.S. we have some work to do at home before we start thinking about what's possible in other countries. CASA: Our next question comes from Mary Meyer McAleese, who is a professor of political science at Eckerd College in Florida. Mary. Q: Yes. Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity. I have, well, two questions. I hope they're quick. The first one is, what do you think the effect will be on Latin America or South America with regard to the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank? I read that a lot of Latin American businesses have had investments in that bank, so I wonder if you could say a bit more about the banking situation and the longer-term effects there. And also, gender violence, of course, is a horrible problem all around the world, but especially in Latin and South America. What do you think the United States and the Americas Society could do to support groups in the region that are fighting against gender violence? Thank you. WINTER: Well, thank you for both questions. Both very good questions. There's been a lot of talk about SVB and possible effects in Latin America. What I've heard from people who are far more knowledgeable about the financial—excuse me—the financial system than I am, is that as long as it does not spread and become a more systemic risk, it should not pose much of an issue for Latin America. In part because—and this is another area where just like—where we were talking about the courts having, I think, been engaged in a thirty-year long process of improvement—I think the same can be said of banking and financial systems around most of Latin America. My first job was covering the financial crisis that Argentina went through back in 2001 and 2002. Which, for the uninitiated, that saw five presidents in two weeks, a freeze of bank deposits, and a 70 percent devaluation of the currency. It was quite a traumatic thing to be a part of. And during those years, we saw similar—well, not quite as bad—but at least thematically similar crises in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere, following other crises in the 1990s. Which is all to say, Latin America has been curiously quiet this time around in terms of financial contagion. The economies aren't doing well, for the most part, but at least we're not talking about a financial meltdown. And that is because of lessons learned. These are banking systems that now have stricter capital requirements than they did in the past. And the macroeconomic fundamentals, generally speaking, are better than they were twenty years ago. Argentina, of course, is kind of in trouble again with an inflation rate that just passed 100 percent. And that's terrible. But again, the depth—(laughs)—everything's relative. And the depth of just financial devastation is, thankfully, nothing compared to what it was when I was there twenty-plus years ago. So, you know, we'll see. If the bank run spreads and we start seeing other banks come in trouble here in the U.S., then my sense is that, with the whole Credit Suisse thing, and we're not out of the woods yet. But if it stays more or less contained, then the consensus, at least so far, is that Latin America should be fine. Your question about femicide is an excellent one. It has driven the political discussion in Brazil in recent years. It's something that President Lula has spoken movingly about. It has also been, on the other end in Mexico, the feminist movement that has had femicides as one of the main areas of concern, has been one of the most effective opposition groups to President López Obrador, who has often been, sadly in my view, dismissive of the seriousness of that problem. As far as what the United States can do to help, or even what my own organization can do, I think that in a lot of cases these are—you know, like a lot of problems—there are things that the international community can do to help. And certainly, I see things from a journalist's perspective, even though I'm more analyst than journalist these days. I think that shining light on these problems, using vehicles like—platforms like Americas Quarterly, which is the small publication about Latin American politics that I run, that's, you know, my own insufficient contribution to looking at his problem. But it's certainly one—I mean, we look at the numbers in places like Brazil. I don't have those numbers on my fingertips, but it is just an incredibly serious problem, and one that deserves more attention. CASA: Thank you, Brian. We have so many other questions. I'm really sorry, though, we have to cut off now. We're at the hour. But this has been a very interesting discussion. And you've covered an enormous amount of ground. Thank you to all of you participating for your great questions. I hope you will follow Brian on Twitter at @BrazilBrian. The next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 29, at 1:00 Eastern Time. Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, will lead a conversation on media literacy and propaganda. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you, again, for joining us today, and we look forward to you tuning in again for our webinar on March 29. Bye. WINTER: Bye. Thank you. (END)
Margaret O'Mara, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington, leads the conversation on big tech and global order. CASA: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Margaret O'Mara with us to discuss big tech and global order. Dr. O'Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. Dr. O'Mara is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and has received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. Previously, she served as a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. O'Mara served in the Clinton administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is the author of several books and an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Welcome, Margaret. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. O'MARA: Thank you so much, Maria, and thank you all for being here today. I'm setting my supercomputer on my wrist timer so I—to time my talk to you, and which is very apropos and it's really—it's great to be here. I have a few slides I wanted to share as I talk through, and I thought that since we had some really interesting meaty present tense readings from Foreign Affairs as background for this conversation as well as the recent review essay that I wrote last year, I thought I would set the scene a little more with a little more history and how we got to now and thinking in broad terms about how the technology industry relates to geopolitics and the global order as this very distinctive set of very powerful companies now. So I will share accordingly, and, Maria, I hope that this is showing up on your screen as it should. So I knew I—today I needed to, of course, talk—open with something in the news, this—the current—the ongoing questions around what has—what was in the sky and what is being shot down in addition to a Chinese spy balloon, which is really kind of getting to a question that's at the center of all of my work. I write at the intersection of economic history and political history and I do that because I'm interested in questions of power. Who has power? What do they value? This is the kind of the question of the U.S.-China—the operative question of the U.S.-China rivalry and the—and concern about China, what are the values, what are the—and Chinese technology and Chinese technology companies, particularly consumer-facing ones. And this is also an operative question about the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a few large platform companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States—(laughs)—a couple in my town of Seattle where I am right now talking to you, and others in Silicon Valley. It's very interesting when one does a Google image search to find a publicly available image and puts in Silicon Valley the images that come up are either the title cards of the HBO television comedy, which I was tempted to add, but the—really, the iconic shot of the valley as place is the Apple headquarters—the Spaceship, as it's called in Cupertino—that opened a few years ago in the middle of suburbia. And this is—you know, the questions of concentrated power in the Q&A among the background readings, you know, this was noted by several of the experts consulted about what is the threat of big tech geopolitically and concentrated power, whether that's good, bad, if that's an advantage geopolitically or not. It was something that many of those folks brought up as did the other readings as well. And this question of power—who has power and taking power—has been an animating question of the modern technology industry and there's an irony in this that if you think about the ideological granddaddy of Apple itself is the Whole Earth Catalog, which I—and this is—I quote from this in the opening to my review essay that was part of the background readings and I just thought I would pop this up in full for us to think about. This is Stewart Brand. This is the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The full issue is digitized at the Internet Archive as are so many other wonderful artifacts and primary source materials about this world, and this is right here on the—you know, you turn—open the cover and here is the purpose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, and church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The audience of the Whole Earth Catalog was not a bunch of techies, per se. It was back to the landers, people who were going and founding communes and the catalog was—you know, which was more a piece of art than it was an actual shopping guide, had all sorts of things from books by Buckminster Fuller to camp stoves and to the occasional Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, making this kind of statement that these tools could actually be used for empowerment of the individual because, of course, the world of 1968 is one in which computers and AI are in the hands of the establishment. We see this playing out in multiple scales including Hollywood films like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, of course, follows, what, four years earlier Dr. Strangelove, which was also a satiric commentary on concentrated power of the military industrial complex, and computers were, indeed, things that were used by large government agencies, by the Pentagon, by Fortune 50 companies. And so the countercultural computer or personal computer movement is very much about individual power and taking this away from the global order, so to speak. This is the taking—using these tools as a way to connect people at the individual level, put a computer on every desk, connect everyone via computer networks to one another, and that is how the future will be changed. That is how the inequities of the world would be remedied. The notion of ultimate connectivity as a positive good was not something that originated with Facebook but, indeed, has much, much deeper origins and that's worth thinking about as we consider where we are in 2023 and where things are going from there. It's also worth thinking about the way in which global—the global order and particularly national security and government spending has played a role—an instrumental role—in the growth of the technology industry as it is. Take, for example, the original venture-backed startup, Fairchild Semiconductor, which is legendary as really starting the silicon semiconductor industry in the valley. It is the—it puts the silicon in the valley, and the eight co-founders known as the Traitorous Eight because they all quit en masse their previous job at Shockley Semiconductor working for William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, and they went off and did something that one does not—did not do in 1957 very often, which was start your own company. This was something that you did if you were weird and you couldn't work for people. That's what one old timer told me, reflecting back on this moment. But they, indeed, started their own company, found outside financing and in this group contains Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the two co-founders of Intel, as well as Gene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm. This is really the—you know, the original—where it all began, and yes, this is a story of free-market entrepreneurialism but it also is a story of the national security state. This is a—Fairchild is founded at a moment when most of the business in the Santa Clara Valley of California, later known as Silicon Valley, was defense related. This is where the jobs were. This is the business they were doing, by and large. There was not a significant commercial market for their products. A month after they're incorporated—in September '57 is when Fairchild incorporates itself. October 1957 Sputnik goes into orbit. The consequent wave of space spending is really what is the literal rocket ship that gets Silicon Valley's chip business going. The integrated circuits made by Fairchild and other chip makers in the valley go into the Apollo guidance system. NASA is buying these chips at a time that there is not a commercial market for them and that enables these companies to scale up production to create a commodity that can be delivered to the enterprise. And so by the time you get to the 1970s you are not talking about defense contractors in any way. These are companies that are putting their chips in cars and in other—all sorts of one time mechanical equipment is becoming transistorized. And Intel is Intel, still one of the most important and consequential—globally consequential tech companies around at the center of the action in the CHIPS Act of last year, not to mention others. But this longer history and this intertwining with the military industrial complex and with broader geopolitics—because, of course, the space program and the Apollo program was a Cold War effort. It was about beating the Soviets to the moon, not just doing it because we could. But that really kind of dissipates and fades from collective memory in the Valley and beyond with the rise of these entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, young, new-time CEOs that are presenting a very, very different face of business and really being consciously apolitical, presenting themselves as something so far apart from Washington, D.C. And this notion of tech, big or little, being something separate from government and governance is perpetuated by leaders of both parties, not just Ronald Reagan but also by Democrats of a younger generation that in the early 1980s there was a brief moment in which lawmakers like Tim Wirth and Gary Hart were referred to as Atari Democrats because they were so bullish on high-tech industries as the United States' economic future. And the way in which politicians and lawmakers from the 1980s forward talked about tech was very much in the same key as that of people like Steve Jobs, which is that this is a revolutionary—the tools have been taken from the establishment, and this is something that is apart from politics, that transcends the old global order and is a new one. And, in fact, in the speech in May 1988 in Moscow at the end of his presidency Ronald Reagan delivers a—you know, really frames the post-Cold War future as one in which the microchip is the revolutionary instrument of freedom: “Standing here before a mural of your revolution”—and a very large bust of Lenin—“I talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now. Its effects are peaceful but they will fundamentally alter our world, and it is—the tiny silicon chip is the agent of that, no bigger than a fingerprint.” This is really remarkable, if we sit back and take a deep breath and think about it, and particularly thinking about what happens after that. What happens after that are decades in which, again, leaders of both parties in the United States and world leaders elsewhere are framing the internet and understanding the internet as this tool for freedom and liberation, a tool that will advance democracy. Bill Clinton, towards the end of his presidency, famously kind of said, effectively, that I'm not worried about China because the internet is going to bring—you know, internet is going to make it very hard to have anything but democracy. And this notion of a post-Cold War and beyond the end of history and tech and big tech being central to that that, in fact, aided the rise of big tech. That was a rationale for a light regulatory hand in the United States, allowing these companies to grow and flourish and so big, indeed, they have become. But I want to end on a note just thinking about the—you know, why this history is important, why this connective tissue between past and present actually does matter. It isn't just that, oh, this is nice to know. This is useful. Lawrence Preston Gise was the second—sorry, the first deputy administrator of DARPA in 1958, created in the wake of the Sputnik—post-Sputnik panic, originally called ARPA, now DARPA. He later ran the entire Western Division of the Atomic Energy Commission—Los Alamos, Livermore, et cetera. Longtime government public servant. In his retirement he retired to his farm in west Texas and his young grandson came and lived with him every summer. And his grandson throughout his life has talked about how—what a profound influence his grandfather was on him, showing him how to be a self-sufficient rancher, how to wrangle cattle and to build a barbed wire fence. But the grandson—you know, what the grandson didn't mention that much because it wasn't really relevant to his personal experience was who his grandfather was and what he had done. But when that grandson, Jeff Bezos—a few years ago when there was—when Google employees were writing their open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai saying, we are not in the defense business. We are—we don't like the fact that you are doing work with the Pentagon, and pressuring Google successfully and other companies to get out of doing work with the Pentagon, Bezos reflected, no, I think we're—I think this is our patriotic duty to do work—do this kind of work. And as I listened to him say that on a stage in an interview I thought, ah, that's his grandfather talking because this little boy, of course, was Jeff Bezos, the grandfather of Lawrence Preston Gise, and those—that connective tissue—familial connective tissue as well as corporate and political connective tissue, I think, is very relevant to what we have before us today. So I'll leave it there. Thanks. CASA: Thank you, Margaret, for that very interesting introduction. Let's open up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) While our participants are gathering their thoughts would you start us off by providing a few examples of emerging technologies that are affecting higher education? O'MARA: Yeah. Well, we've had a very interesting last three years in which the debate over online learning versus in-person learning very quickly was not necessarily resolved. We did this mass real-time experiment, and I think it made—put into sharp relief the way in which different technologies are shaping the way that higher education institutions are working and this question of who's controlling the—who controls the platforms and how we mediate what learning we do. Even though I now teach in person again almost everything that I do in terms of assignments and communication is through electronic learning management systems. The one we use at UW is Canvas. But, of course, there are these broader questions—ethical questions and substantive questions—about how our AI-enabled technologies including, notably, the star of the moment, ChatGPT, going to change the way in which—it's mostly been around how are students going to cheat more effectively. But I think it also has these bigger questions about how you learn and where knowledge, where the human—where the human is necessary. My take on it is, aside from the kind of feeling pretty confident in my having such arcane prompts for my midterm essay questions and research projects that ChatGPT, I think, would have a very hard time doing a good job with it but although I'm looking forward to many a form letter being filled by that technology in the future, I think that there is a—you know, this has a history, too. The concern about the robot overlords is a very deep one. It extends from—you know, predates the digital age, and the anxiety about whether computers are becoming too powerful. Of course, this question of artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence kind of is the computer augmenting what a human can do rather than replacing what a human can do or pretending to have the nuance and the complexity that a human might be able to convey. I think there's, you know, these bigger questions and I'm sure—I imagine there are going to be some other questions about AI. Really, you know, this is a—I think this is a very good learning moment, quite frankly, to think more—you know, one of the things I teach about a lot is kind of the information that is on the internet and who's created it and how it is architected and how it is findable and how those platforms have been developed over time. And what ChatGPT and other AIs like them are doing is they're scraping this extraordinary bounteous ocean of information and it is as good as the—it's as good as its source, right. So whatever you're able to do with it you have—your source materials are going to determine it. So if there is bias in the sources, if there is inaccuracy in the sources, there is—that will be replicated. It cannot be—you know, I think what it is is it's a really good rough draft, first draft, for then someone with tacit knowledge and understanding to come into, and I like to think of digital tools as ones that reveal where things that only people can do that cannot be replicated, that this—where human knowledge cannot be, where a machine still—even though a machine is informed by things that humans do and now does it at remarkable speed and scale it still is—there is—we are able to identify where humanity makes a difference. And then my one last caution is I do—you know, the one thing you can't do with these new—any of these new technologies is do them well really fast, and the rush to it is a little anxiety inducing. CASA: Thank you. Our first question is from Michael Leong from the—he's a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Michael, would you like to unmute and ask your question? Q: Yeah. Hi, Dr. O'Mara. Hi, Ms. Casa. Sorry for any background noise. I just had a, like, general question about your thoughts on the role big tech plays in geopolitics. Specifically, we've seen with SpaceX and Starlink especially with what's going on in Ukraine and how much support that has been provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and potentially holding that over—(inaudible)—forces. So, basically, do we expect to see private companies having more leverage over geopolitical events? And how can we go forward with that? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a really—that's a really great question. And you know, I think that there's—it's interesting because the way—there's always been public-private partnerships in American state building and American geopolitics, and that's something—it's worth kind of just noting that. Like, from the very beginning the United States has used private entities as instruments of policy, as parastatal entities, whether it be through, you know, land grants and transcontinental railroad building in the nineteenth century all the way through to Starlink and Ukraine because, of course, the Pentagon is involved, too—you know, that SpaceX is in a very—is a significant government contractor as ones before it. I think that where there's a really interesting departure from the norm is that what we've seen, particularly in the last, you know, the last forty years but in this sort of post-Cold War moment has been and particularly in the last ten to fifteen years a real push by the Pentagon to go to commercial enterprises for technology and kind of a different model of contracting and, I should say, more broadly, national security agencies. And this is something, you know, a real—including the push under—when Ash Carter was in charge of DOD to really go to Silicon Valley and say, you guys have the best technology and a lot of it is commercial, and we need to update our systems and our software and do this. But I think that the SpaceX partnership is one piece of that. But there has been a real—you know, as the government has, perhaps, not gotten smaller but done less than it used to do and there's been more privatization, there have been—there's been a vacuum left that private companies have stepped into and I think Ian Bremmer's piece was really—made some really important points in this regard that there are things that these platform companies are doing that the state used to do or states used to do and that does give them an inordinate amount of power. You know, and these companies are structurally—often a lot of the control over these companies is in the hands of very, very few, including an inordinate unusual amount of founder power, and Silicon Valley, although there's plenty of political opinionating coming out of there now, which is really a departure from the norm, this kind of partisan statements of such—you know, declarations of the—of recent years are something that really didn't—you didn't see very much before. These are not folks who are—you know, their expertise lies in other domains. So that's where my concern—some concern lies where you have these parastatal actors that are becoming, effectively, states and head of states then and they are not, indeed, speaking for—you know, they're not sovereign powers in the same way and they are speaking for themselves and speaking from their own knowledge base rather than a broader sense of—you know, they're not speaking for the public. That's not their job. CASA: Our next question is from Michael Raisinghani from Texas Woman's University. Michael, if you could unmute. Q: Thank you, Ms. Casa and Dr. O'Mara. A very insightful discussion. Thank you for that. I just thought maybe if you could maybe offer some clarity around the generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Wordtune or any of this in terms of the future. If you look, let's say, five, ten years ahead, if that's not too long, what would your thoughts be in this OpenAI playground? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Well, with the first—with the caveat that the first rule of history is that you can't predict the future—(laughs)—and (it's true ?); we are historians, we like to look backwards rather than forwards—I will then wade into the waters of prediction, or at least what I think the implications are. I mean, one thing about ChatGPT as a product, for example, which has been really—I mean, what a—kudos for a sort of fabulous rollout and marketing and all of a sudden kind of jumping into our public consciousness and being able to release what they did in part because it wasn't a research arm of a very large company where things are more being kept closer because they might be used for that company's purposes. Google, for example, kind of, you know, has very in short order followed on with the reveal of what they have but they kind of were beaten to the punch by OpenAI because OpenAI wasn't—you know, it was a different sort of company, a different sort of enterprise. You know, a lot of it are things that are already out there in the world. If we've, you know, made an airline reservation and had a back and forth with a chatbot, like, that's—that's an example of some of that that's already out in the world. If you're working on a Google doc and doing what absolutely drives me bonkers, which is that Google's kind of completing my sentences for me, but that predictive text, those—you know, many things that we are—that consumers are already interacting with and that enterprises are using are components of this and this is just kind of bringing it together. I think that we should be very cautious about the potential of and the accuracy of and the revolutionary nature of ChatGPT or any of these whether it be Bard or Ernie or, you know, name your perspective chatbot. It is what it is. Again, it's coming from the—it's got the source material it has, it's working with, which is not—you know, this is not human intelligence. This is kind of compilation and doing it very rapidly and remarkably and in a way that presents with, you know, literacy. So I'm not—you know, does very cool stuff. But where the future goes, I mean, clearly, look, these company—the big platform companies have a lot of money and they have a great deal of motivation and need to be there for the next big thing and, you know, if we dial back eighteen months ago there were many in tech who were saying crypto and Web3 was the next big thing and that did not—has not played out as some might have hoped. But there is a real desire for, you know, not being left behind. Again, this is where my worry is for the next five years. If this is driven by market pressures to kind of be the—have the best search, have the best—embed this technology in your products at scale that is going to come with a lot of hazards. It is going to replicate the algorithmic bias, the problems with—extant problems with the internet. I worry when I see Google saying publicly, we are going to move quickly on this and it may not be perfect but we're going to move quickly when Google itself has been grappling with and called out on its kind of looking the other way with some of the real ethical dilemmas and the exclusions and biases that are inherent in some of the incredibly powerful LLMs—the models that they are creating. So that's my concern. This is a genie that is—you know, letting this genie out of the bottle and letting it become a mass consumer product, and if—you know, OpenAI, to its credit, if you go to ChatGPT's website it has a lot of disclaimers first about this is not the full story, effectively, and in the Microsoft rollout of their embedding the technology in Bing last week Microsoft leaders, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI, were kind of—their talking points were very careful to say this is not everything. But it does present—it's very alluring and I think we're going to see it in a lot more places. Is it going to change everything? I think everyone's waiting for, like, another internet to change everything and I don't know if—I don't know. The jury's out. I don't know. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Denis Fred Simon, clinical professor of global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He asked, technology developments have brought to the surface the evolving tension between the drive for security with the desire for privacy. The U.S. represents one model while China represents another model. How do societies resolve this tension and is there some preferred equilibrium point? O'MARA: That is a—that's the billion-dollar question and it's—I think it's a relevant one that goes way back. (Laughs.) I mean, there are many moments in the kind of evolution of all of these technologies where the question of who should know what and what's allowable. If we go back to 1994 and the controversy over the Clipper chip, which was NSA wanting to build a backdoor into commercially available software, and that was something that the industry squashed because it would, among other things, have made it very difficult for a company like Microsoft to sell their products in China or other places if you had a—knew that the U.S. national security agencies were going to have a window into it. And, of course, that all comes roaring back in 2013 with Snowden's revelations that, indeed, the NSA was using social media platforms and other commercial platforms—consumer-facing platforms—to gather data on individuals. You know, what is the perfect balance? I mean, this is—I wish I had this nice answer. (Laughs.) I would probably have a really nice second career consulting and advising. But I think there is a—what is clear is that part of what has enabled the American technology industry to do what it has done and to generate companies that have produced, whether you think the transformations on balance are good or bad, transformative products, right. So everything we're using to facilitate this conversation that all of us are having right now is coming from that font. And democratic capitalism was really critical to that and having a free—mostly free flow of information and not having large-scale censorship. I mean, the postscript to the Clipper chip—you know, Clipper chip controversy is two years later the Telecom Act of 1996, which was, on the one hand, designed to ensure the economic growth of what were then very small industries in the internet sector and not—and prevent the telecoms from ruling it all but also were—you know, this was a kind of making a call about, OK, in terms when it comes to the speech on the internet we are going to let the companies regulate that and not be penalized for private—when private companies decide that they want to take someone down, which is really what Section 230 is. It's not about free speech in a constitutional sense. It's about the right of a company to censor or to moderate content. It's often the opposite of the way that it's kind of understood or interpreted or spun in some ways. But it is clear that the institutions of—that encourage free movement of people and capital have been—are pretty critical in fueling innovation writ large or the development and the deployment and scaling of new technologies, particularly digital technologies. But I think you can see that playing out in other things, too. So that has been, I think, a real tension and a real—there's a market dimension to this, not just in terms of an ethical dimension or political dimension that there does need to be some kind of unfettered ability of people to build companies and to grow them in certain ways. But it's a fine balance. I mean, this sort of, like, when does regulation—when does it—when do you need to have the state come in and in what dimension and which state. And this goes back to that core question of like, OK, the powerful entities, what are their values? What are they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? I don't know. I'm not giving you a terribly good answer because I think it's a really central question to which many have grappled for that answer for a very long time. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ahmuan Williams, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Ahmuan? Q: Thank you. Hi. I'm wondering about ChatGPT, about the regulation side of that. It seems like it's Microsoft that has kind of invested itself into ChatGPT. Microsoft had before gotten the Pentagon contract just a few years back. So it's kind of a two-part question. So, first of all, how does that—what does that say about government's interest in artificial intelligence and what can be done? I know the Council of Foreign Relations also reported that the Council of Europe is actually planning an AI convention to figure out how, you know, a framework of some type of AI convention in terms of treaties will work out. But what should we be worried about when it comes to government and the use of AI in political advertisements and campaigns, about, basically, them flooding opinions with, you know, one candidate's ideas and, therefore, them being able to win because they're manipulating our opinions? So what would you say would be kind of a regulation scheme that might come out of these type—new flourishing AI devices? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. That's a good question. I think there's sort of different layers to it. I mean, I see that, you know, the Pentagon contract—the JEDI contract—being awarded to Microsoft, much to Amazon's distress—(laughs)—and litigious distress, is a kind of a separate stream from its decision to invest 10 billion (dollars) in OpenAI. I think that's a commercial decision. I think that's a recognition that Microsoft research was not producing the—you know, Microsoft didn't have something in house that was comparable. Microsoft saw an opportunity to at last do a—you know, knock Google off of its dominant pedestal in search and make Bing the kind of long—kind of a punch line—no longer a punch line but actually something that was a product that people would actively seek out and not just use because it was preinstalled on their Microsoft devices. That is—so I see that as a market decision kind of separate from. The bigger AI question, the question of AI frameworks, yes, and this, again, has a longer history and, you know, I kind of liken AI to the Pacific Ocean. It's an enormous category that contains multitudes. Like, it's—you know, we can—oftentimes when we talk about AI or the AI that we see and we experience, it's machine learning. And part of why we have such extraordinary advances in machine learning in the last decade has—because of the harvesting of individual data on these platforms that we as individuals use, whether it be Google or Meta or others, that that has just put so much out there that now these companies can create something that—you know, that the state of the art has accelerated vastly. Government often is playing catch up, not just in tech but just in business regulation, generally. The other—you know, another example of this in the United States cases with the—in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, with what were then new high-tech tech-driven industries of railroads and oil and steel that grew to enormous size and then government regulators played catch up and created the institutions that to this day are the regulators like the FTC created in 1913. Like, you know, that's—of that vintage. So, I think that it depends on—when it comes to—the question about electoral politics, which I think is less about government entities—this is about entities, people and organizations that want to be in charge of government or governments—that is, you know, AI—new technologies of all kinds that incorporate ever more sophisticated kind of, essentially, disinformation, that—information that presents as real and it is not. The increased volume of that and the scale of that and the sophistication of that and the undetectability of it does create a real challenge to free and fair elections and also to preventing, in the American context, international and foreign intervention in and manipulation of elections but true in every context. That is, you know, getting good information before voters and allowing bad actors to exploit existing prejudices or misassumptions. That is an existing problem that probably will be accelerated by it. I think there's—there's a strong case to be made, at least in the U.S. context, for much stronger regulation of campaign advertising that extends to the internet in a much more stricter form. In that domain there's—I think we have pretty good evidence that that has not been—you know, having that back end has made the existing restrictions on other types of campaign speech and other media kind of made them moot because you can just go on a social platform and do other things. So there's—you know, this is—I think the other thing that compromises this is the rapidly changing nature of the technology and the digital—and the global reach of these digital technologies that extends any other product made—you know, any other kind of product. It just is borderless that—in a kind of overwhelming way. That doesn't mean government should give up. But I think there's a sort of supranational level of frameworks, and then there are all sorts of subnational kind of domain-specific frameworks that could occur to do something as a countervailing force or at least slow the role of developers and companies in moving forward in these products. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Prashant Hosur, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at Clarkson University. He asks, how do you—or she. I'm sorry. I'm not sure. How do you think big tech is likely to affect conventional wisdom around issues of great power rivalry and power transitions? O'MARA: Hmm. I don't—well, I think there are a—these are always—these definitions are always being redefined and who the great powers are and what gives them power is always being reshuffled and—but, of course, markets and economic resources and wealth and—are implicated in this for millennia. I think that tech companies do have this—American tech companies and the tech platforms, which I should preface this by saying, you know, none of the companies we're talking about now are going to rule forever. Maybe that just goes without—it's worth just note, you know, this is—we will have the rise and fall. Every firm will be a dinosaur. Detroit was the most innovative city in the world a hundred and ten years ago. There's still a lot of innovation and great stuff coming out of Detroit, but if you—if I queried anyone here and said, what's the capital of innovation I don't know if you would say Detroit. But back in the heyday of the American auto industry it was, and I think it's a good reminder. We aren't always going to be talking about this place in northern California and north Seattle in this way. But what we have right now are these companies that their products, unlike the products of Henry Ford or General Motors, are ones that are—go across borders with—you know, the same product goes across borders seamlessly and effortlessly, unlike an automobile where a—to sell in a certain country you have to meet that country's fuel standards and, you know, safety standards, et cetera, et cetera. You have a different model for a different market. Instead, here, you know, a Facebook goes where it goes, Google goes where it goes, YouTube goes where it goes, and that has been kind of extraordinary in terms of internationalizing politics, political trends. I think what we've seen globally is very—you know, the role of the internet in that has been extraordinary, both for good and for ill, in the last fifteen years. And then the kind of—the immense—the great deal of power that they have in the many different domains and, again, Ian Bremmer also observed this kind of the—all the different things they do and that is something that is different from twenty-five years ago where you now have companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States with products designed by a small group of people from a kind of narrow, homogenous band of experience who are doing things like transforming taxis and hotels and, I mean, you name it, kind of going everywhere in a way that in the day of the—you know, the first Macintosh, which was like this cool thing on your desk, that was—yes, it was a transformative product. It was a big deal and Silicon Valley was—became a household word and a phrase in the 1980s and the dot.com era, too. That was—you know, everyone's getting online with their AOL discs they got in the mail. But what's happened in the twenty-first century is at a scale and—a global scale and an influence across many different domains, and politics, this very deliberate kind of we are a platform for politics that has really reshaped the global order in ways that are quite profound. This is not to say that everything has to do with big tech is at the root of everything. But let's put it in context and let's, you know—and also recognize that these are not companies that were designed to do this stuff. They've been wildly successful what they set out to do and they have a high-growth tech-driven model that is designed to move fast and, yes, indeed, it breaks things and that has—you know, that has been—they are driven by quarterly earnings. They are driven by other things, as they should be. They are for-profit companies, many of them publicly traded. But the—but because, I think, in part they have been presenting themselves as, you know, we're change the world, we're not evil, we're something different, we're a kinder, gentler capitalism, there has been so much hope hung on them as the answer for a lot of things, and that is not—kind of giving states and state power something of the past to get its act together that instead states need to step up. CASA: Our next question is from Alex Grigor. He's a PhD candidate from University of Cambridge. Alex? Q: Hello. Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me? O'MARA: Yes. CASA: Yes. Q: Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Ms. O'Mara. Very insightful and, in fact, a lot of these questions are very good as well. So they've touched upon a lot of what I was going to ask and so I'll narrow it down slightly. My research is looking at cyber warfare and sort of international conflict particularly between the U.S. and China but beyond, and I was wondering—you started with the sort of military industrial complex and industry sort of breaking away from that. Do you see attempts, perhaps, because of China and the—that the technology industry and the military are so closely entwined that there's an attempt by the U.S. and, indeed, other countries. You see increase in defense spending in Japan and Germany. But it seems to be specifically focused, according to my research, on the technologies that are coming out of that, looking to reengage that sort of relationship. They might get that a little bit by regulation. Perhaps the current downsizing of technology companies is an opportunity for governments to finally be able to recruit some good computer scientists that they haven't been able to—(laughs)—(inaudible). Perhaps it's ASML and semiconductor sort of things. Do you see that as part of the tension a conscious attempt at moving towards reintegrating a lot of these technologies back into government? O'MARA: Yeah. I think we're at a really interesting moment. I mean, one thing that's—you know, that's important to note about the U.S. defense industry is it never went away from the tech sector. It just kind of went underground. Lockheed, the major defense contractor, now Lockheed Martin, was the biggest numerical employer in the valley through the end of the Cold War through the end of the 1980s. So well into the commercial PC era and—but very—you know, kind of most of what was going on there was top secret stuff. So no one was on the cover of Forbes magazine trumpeting what they've done. And there has been—but there has been a real renewed push, particularly with the kind of—to get made in Silicon Valley or, you know, made in the commercial sector software being deployed for military use and national security use and, of course, this is very—completely bound up in the questions of cyber warfare and these existing commercial networks, and commercial platforms and products are ones that are being used and deployed by state actors and nonstate actors as tools for cyber terrorism and cyber warfare. So, yes, I think it's just going to get tighter and closer and the great—you know, the stark reality of American politics, particularly in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, is the one place that the U.S. is willing to spend lots of money in the discretionary budget is on defense and the one place where kind of it creates a rationale for this unfettered—largely, unfettered spending or spending with kind of a willingness to spend a lot of money on things that don't have an immediately measurable or commercializable outcome is in national security writ large. That's why the U.S. spent so much money on the space program and created this incredible opportunity for these young companies making chips that only—making this device that only—only they were making the things that the space program needed, and this willingness to fail and the willingness to waste money, quite frankly. And so now we're entering into this sort of fresh—this interesting—you know, the geopolitical competition with China between the U.S. has this two dimensions in a way and the very—my kind of blunt way of thinking about it it's kind of like the Soviet Union and Japan all wrapped up in one, Japan meaning the competition in the 1980s with Japan, which stimulated a great deal of energy among—led by Silicon Valley chip makers for the U.S. to do something to help them compete and one of those outcomes was SEMATECH, the consortium to develop advanced semiconductor technology, whose funding—it was important but its funding was a fraction of the wave of money that just was authorized through last year's legislation, the CHIPS Act as well as Inflation Reduction Act and others. So I'm seeing, you know, this kind of turn to hardware and military hardware and that a lot of the commercial—the government subsidized or incentivized commercial development of green technology and advanced semiconductor, particularly in military but other semiconductor technology and bringing semiconductor manufacturing home to the United States, that is—even those dimensions that are nonmilitary, that are civilian, it's kind of like the Apollo program. That was a civilian program but it was done for these broader geopolitical goals to advance the economic strength and, hence, the broader geopolitical strength of the United States against a competitor that was seen as quite dangerous. So that's my way of saying you're right, that this is where this is all going and so I think that's why this sort of having a healthy sense of this long-term relationship is healthy. It's healthy for the private sector to recognize the government's always been there. So it isn't though you had some innovative secret that the government is going to take away by being involved. And to also think about what are the broader goals that—you know, who is benefiting from them and what is the purpose and recognize often that, you know, many of the advanced technologies we have in the United States are thanks to U.S. military funding for R&D back in the day. CASA: Our next question is written. It's from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University. Regarding cybersecurity, do you think tech companies should take greater responsibility since they develop the hardware and software packages? Can the government mandate them, for instance, to have inbuilt security systems? O'MARA: Hmm. Yeah. I think—look, with great power comes great responsibility is a useful reminder for the people at the top of these companies that for—that are so remarkably powerful at the moment and because their platforms are so ubiquitous. There are—you see, for example, Microsoft has really—is a—I think what they've done in terms of partnering with the White House and its occupants and being—kind of acting as a NSA first alert system of sorts and kind of being open about that I think that's been good for them from a public relations perspective, and also—but I think it also reflects this acknowledgement of that responsibility and that it also is bad for their business if these systems are exploited. Yeah, I think that, again, regulation is something that—you know, it's like saying Voldemort in Silicon Valley. Like, some people are, like, oh, regulation, you know. But there's really—there can be a really generative and important role that regulation can play, and the current industry has grown up in such a lightly-regulated fashion you just kind of get used to having all that freedom, and when it comes to cybersecurity and to these issues of national security importance and sort of global importance and importance to the users of the products and the companies that make them there's, I think, a mutual interest in having some sort of rules of the road and that—and I think any company that's operating at a certain scale is—understands that it's in their market interest to be—you know, not to be a renegade, that they are working with. But I think having—you know, there can be a willingness to work with but they're—having a knowledge and an understanding and a respect for your government partners, your state partners, whether they be U.S. or non-U.S. or supranational is really critically important and sometimes tech folks are a little too, like, oh, politics, they don't know what they're doing, you know. We know better. And I think there needs to be a little more mutual exchange of information and some more—yes, some more technical people being able to be successfully recruited into government would probably be a help, too, so there's—on both sides of the table you have technically savvy people who really understand the inner workings of how this stuff is made and don't have simplistic answers of like, oh, we'll just take all the China-made technology out of it. You're, like, well, there's—like, it's kind of deep in the system. You know, so having technologists in the conversation at all points is important. CASA: Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. We'll take that from Louis Esparza, assistant professor at California State University in Los Angeles. Q: Hi. Thank you for your very interesting talk. So I'm coming at this from the social movements literature and I'm coming into this conversation because I'm interested in the censorship and influence of big tech that you seem to be, you know, more literate in. So my question is do you think that this—the recent trends with big tech and collaboration with federal agencies is a rupture with the origin story of the 1960s that you talked about in your talk or do you think it's a continuity of it? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a great way to put it. The answer is, is it both? Well, it's something of a rupture. I mean, look, this—you know, you have this—you have an industry that grows up as intensely—you know, that those that are writing and reading the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 the military industrial complex is all around them. It is paying for their education sort of effectively or paying for the facilities where they're going to college at Berkeley or Stanford or name your research university—University of Washington. It is the available jobs to them. It is paying for the computers that they learn to code on and that they're doing their work on. It is everywhere and it is—and when you are kind of rebelling against that establishment, when you see that establishment is waging war in Vietnam as being a power—not a power for good but a power for evil or for a malevolent—a government you don't trust whose power, whose motivations you don't trust, then you—you know, you want to really push back against that and that is very much what the personal computer movement that then becomes an industry is. That's why all those people who were sitting around in the 1970s in Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—Xerox Park—just spitballing ideas, they just did not want to have anything to do with military technology. So that's still there, and then that—and that ethos also suffused other actors in, you know, American government and culture in the 1980s forward, the sort of anti-government sentiment, and the concerns about concentrated power continue to animate all of this. And the great irony is that has enabled the growth of these private companies to the power of states. (Laughs.) So it's kind of both of those things are happening and I think, in some ways, wanting to completely revolutionize the whole system was something that was not quite possible to do, although many—it is extraordinary how much it has done. CASA: Margaret, thank you very much for this fascinating discussion and to all of you for your questions and comments. I hope you will follow Margaret on Twitter at @margaretomara. Our next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 1, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Chris Li, director of research of the Asia Pacific Initiative and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, will lead a conversation on U.S. strategy in East Asia. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR's paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to you tuning in for our webinar on March 1. Bye. (END)
THE KELLY CARDENAS PODCAST PRESENTS BJ Fratesi was born 9/22/57 in Indianola, Miss. Both parents deceased. I have two older brothers and a younger sister. Graduated from Delta State University with a BBA. Passed CPA exam in 1982. Worked in pulic accounting for 8 years in south mississippi. Moved to St Louis in 1986 to help Dominoes pizza franchisee to grow his business. Moved to Huntsville Al to join Steak Out Franchise as their CFO. This company was sold in 1994. The main owner of Steak Out took the sales proceeds and asked me and another guy to start a TexMex restaurant which opened in 1995. 28 years later, we have 8 restaurants in North Alabama. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's 8 years ago. It is a progressive decease. However, through excercise, great doctors, good diet, etc, i have kept.the progression at bay. I work full time and love every minute. THE HIDEOUT Be sure to check out my new audiobook SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES (THE 7 P'S THAT CAN SHIFT YOUR REALITY) Thank you to our sponsors PRIVATE MONEY CLUB USE CODE - KELLY500 MONEY SCHOOL TABLE ONE HOSPITALITY RAVEN DRUM FOUNDATION THE MINA GROUP SECRET KNOCK FAMECAST Findlay Volvo Las Vegas Samaritans Feet Cardenas Law Group Squeeze Dried Agua Hedionda Lagoon Foundation PAUL MITCHELL HAIR CARE DELIVERED TO YOUR DOORSTEP BLING SHINE SERUM-The #1 seller of over 15 years and the only product to be endorsed by my MAMA! MORE KELLY “JOY IS THE ART OF FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOUR CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND ALLOWING MAGIC TO HAPPEN!” EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BROOKLYN CARDENAS
Director of Athletics, Mike Kinnison, embodies Delta State University athletics and the family environment. At DSU for over 40 years as a student-athlete, teacher, coach and now Athletic Director, he has had astounding success on the fields (particularly in baseball). More importantly his pride lies in the exponential positive influence on thousands of young people over the years. Join this conversation on how Coach Kinnison and DSU invest in their student-athletes by setting expectations early and often and giving them confidence to succeed 5, 10, 40 years down the line - and it starts with their education first. Find out more on our website: AmericanDream.fmFollow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn @degreeinsurance. Produced by Degree Insurance
We previously reported on Delta State University student, Jay T Hardiman, for being targeted by campus police after reporting a hate crime, now we have an exclusive interview with him where he talks about the incident and the charges that ensued. Interview Guest: Jay T Hardiman*** Indisputable, features Dr. Richey talking about the top news stories of the day, reading viewer comments, and engaging in debates and conversations with guests.Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/joinSUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/IndisputableTYTFACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/IndisputableTYTTWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/IndisputableTYTINSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/IndisputableTYTTWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt
A Mississippi university recognizes the man who integrated it.Then, the latest on hundreds of lawsuits over lead exposure that have piled up against the city and state leadership in Mississippi.Plus, looking back on a historic sit-in at Delta State University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Dr. Alyssa Killebrew to talk about her life and incredible resilience in the face of crushing loss and grief and her work to help kids work past their trauma. Dr. Killebrew knows about working past trauma. In December of 2021, Dr. Killebrew's longtime husband Keath, a successful farmer, died in a plane crash in South America. This is after losing the couple lost their unborn child to COVID-19. You will be inspired by her incredible strength and positive outlook. She talks about her and Keath's creation of a camp called SEK Intensives to honor their youngest daughter and help both adolescents and their parents deal with life's challenges. Dr. Killebrew is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist (No. 54-946), a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor. In 2005, she earned a Master's degree of Education (M.Ed.) in Community Counseling from Delta State University. In 2008, she obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Clinical Psychology from Jackson State University and completed a residency at Valley Mental Health in Salt Lake City, Utah. She completed her post-doctoral year with the Mississippi Department of Corrections, where she was the Mental Health Director of the Youthful Offender Unit. She started her private practice, Killebrew Psychological Services, LLC, in 2016, focusing her services primarily on mood disorders, PTSD, addiction and personality disorders. She specializes in Biofeedback, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and Modified Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
For the second installment of the second season of our Haunted College Tour Palooza, we're traveling (metaphorically, of course) to three colleges in Mississippi. The Mississippi University for Women, Delta State University, and Mississippi State University all come with paranormal encounters haunting their halls. Listen to learn about Mary (a Civil War-era nurse who never left Callaway Hall), a group of three students who slowly realized their shared house was haunted, and old classroom buildings with a vibe that can only be described as "creepy."But first, Zoey's Something Southern + Spooky is all about a haunted Savannah house.Sources: https://hauntedhospitality.wordpress.com/2022/08/09/ep-71-haunted-college-tour-part-7-mississippi-university-for-women-delta-state-university-and-mississippi-state-university/
In today's episode, Ryan speaks to Jack Madgen, a professional Australian rules footballer playing for Collingwood in the Australian Football League (AFL). He previously played professional basketball for Cairns Taipans in the National Basketball League (NBL) and College Basketball at Delta State University.Jack's outstanding passion for creating relationships through storytelling and shared experiences, especially in the sports industry, has helped him build a small business called Athlete Inspired. Athlete Inspired is a platform where athletes share their stories and experiences through articles and blogs to humanize athletes, educate, inform and inspire other athletes and the general population. Tune in to learn more about:His life as a youngster coming up through sports in the USA Jack's smooth transition from NBL to NFLWhat he's doing to prepare himself for a career after sportsEducating and humanizing fans in the media His Passion project and the steps he has taken to get it running right… and so much more! LinksLinkedIn: Jack MadgenInstagram: @big_jack_madgenAre you looking for Career Clarity for your next step, for more information, or to book a consultancy, make sure you check out www.2ndwind.io
The Shrimp Tank Podcast Atlanta - The Best Entrepreneur Podcast In The Country
Austin Rocconi / Food & Beverage Director of Boone's Restaurant Austin Rocconi familiarized himself with cooking at a young age, growing up in Mississippi in a large Italian family focused on food and the joy of preparing it. While attending Delta State University in pursuit of a degree in business management, Rocconi took a job washing dishes at a local restaurant and immediately became enamored with the fast-paced atmosphere of the kitchen. After attending culinary school in Pasadena, California, and working in LA at several locations, including The Jonathan Club, he found his way back to the South, landing in Atlanta. Feeling more aligned with his Southern upbringing, Rocconi worked his way up within several renowned Atlanta restaurants, including Kyma and Canoe. He took his first executive chef role at Le Vigne Restaurant at Montaluce Winery in 2011. In 2015, Rocconi extended his fine dining experience by taking a sous chef position at Michelin-starred La Toque in Napa, California, where he also studied as a sommelier. With his Southern and West Coast experience, Rocconi brought his culinary style to Austin, Texas, in July 2018 when he joined Hotel Ella as executive chef. After more than a year in Texas, he and his wife decided to move back to Atlanta where he joined Bobby Jones Golf Course to help bring the Boone's vision to life. https://youtu.be/OfdGbGxjBjc Lee Heisman / Savant CTS (Host) Stone Stafford / Icon Studios (Host) Austin Rocconi / Boone's Restaurant (Guest)
Shalando R. Jones, Ph.D. is an award winning instructor of Communication at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Mississippi. She is a published author and facilitates research. She has special emphasis in Public Speaking, Organizational Communication, Crisis Communication, & Multicultural Communication. Shalando established Audacious Communication Strategies, LLC. to give entrepreneurs & leaders the support they need to transform their concerns with public speaking into confidence. While her professional accomplishments are impressive, she is most proud to be the mother of her two wonderful sons. Marchon is a Sailor in the United States Navy and Bryson plays basketball at Delta State University. May Your Greatest Ambition become Your Greatest Accomplishment!Follow Name of guest @Tiktok: @Shalando.speaksIG: @Speechcoach.Shalando___________________________________________________________________________________________________Follow Chaundria and learn more about my health coaching programshttps://www.healthytrailsliving.comhttps://instagram/com/healthytrailslivinghttps://facebook.com/healthytrailslivingFreebies:Free Meal Planner Webinarhttps://www.subscribepage.com/spring-mastermindAll My Other Amazing Links:https://www.Linktr.ee/com/healthytrailslivingSupport the show (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/my/profile) 1 Electric 1Electric a commercial service, maintenance and upgrade your building's electrical systems.Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEThe Infinity Hoop For the Win! Do you struggle with working out because you aren't motivated or you have bad knees? Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show
I sat down with Emily Hunt, owner of Magnolia Moms blog, and she shared 3 things to do to get started blogging and 2 obstacles to be aware of in the process. I learned a lot of valuable info myself! She also gave reasons why it would benefit you and your teen to find something that you are interested in and start writing. Grab a cup of tea or coffee and LET'S GO! Emily grew up in Vicksburg, MS, and attended Delta State University, where she received a degree in marketing. In 2018, Emily started the blog Magnolia Moms, and it quickly took off! She left the corporate world in 2020, and started her own digital marketing firm, Hunt media Group. Emily is married to her husband Chris, and they have two girls, 7 & 9. https://magnolia-moms.com Facebook- @MsMagnoliaMoms BFF Voice Hotline 901-308-7110 Heather.LCBFF@gmail.com https://www.lifecoachbff.com
Dr. Marie Roberts has invested much of her career in education, with extensive experience in student services, programming, and technology. A believer in long-term student success and engaging course content, Roberts is a trusted voice for best practices and trends in online education, training, and support. Roberts is proud to serve as the Instructional Technologist at Lauderdale County School District where she focuses on supporting holistic course design and development. She is a co-host of the Education Innovation and Technology podcast, an adjunct instructor for Delta State University and Meridian Community College, trainer and PD facilitator for the Mississippi Community College Board, Mississippi Virtual Community College, and friED Technology. Roberts contributes to scholarly research, serves as a methodologist or reader on several dissertation committees, and provides contractual services for all things education and technology. Roberts' teaching and research interests focus on digital empathy, student success, professional development, and current and emerging instructional technologies. She is a proud wife and mom of two, and is an active volunteer in her church and local community. Find her on Twitter @marie_roberts2, or connect via LinkedIn.
Ndidi Emefiele is one of the most renowned post-war and contemporary artists in Nigeria. She produces rich figurative compositions based on cultural, gendered, and personal references. Her dynamic brush strokes and color juxtaposition convey the complexity of modern experience and feminine identity. Her work has been exhibited in prominent galleries around the world from Lagos to London and New York to name a few. Ms. Ndidi holds a Bachelor of Arts in painting from Delta State University and a Masters in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
Guest Info/Bio: This week I welcome author/historian Miriam C. Davis PhD. We discuss the new information she uncovered while researching the Axeman of New Orleans, and her theory on just who was responsible. Miriam graduated from Emory University magna cum laude with a degree in history and studied at the University of St. Andrews on a Bobby Jones Scholarship. She went on to earn an MA in medieval archaeology from the University of New York on a Fullbright Fellowship and a PhD in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After teaching for sixteen years at Delta State University, she left as Professor of History and is now a freelance writer and lectures for Smithsonian Journeys. Guest (select) Publications: Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging Up the Holy Land; The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story Guest Links: www.axemanofneworleans.com www.miriamghost.com Stay on top of all the latest by following the show at:Instagram: @thefromthevoidpodastFacebook: @thefromthevoidpodcastTwitter: @thefromthevoidpodcast The From the Void Podcast is written, edited, mixed, and produced by John Williamson.
This episode explores the impact of history on your mental health and features a real life historian. The featured guest is Dr. Miller Boyd, III, and he an educator and consultant, on top of being a historian. Every day we are creating history and having knowledge and awareness of history allows us to learn from the past to create a better future. In addition, history can also impact your mental health. Even if you were never one to enjoy history class, this episode has something for you. Stay tuned until the last moment to get all of these pearls of wisdom. Questions this episode answers: -What are the historical events that everyone needs to know? -How do preconceived notions of others impact relationships and behavior? -Can history inspire hope? -Is there more to black history than slavery? -How is COVID impacting history and our lives? Where to find Miller: https://twitter.com/DocMWB3 Resources: The free Overwhelm Solution Blueprint ebook: www.overwhelmsolution.com Join Better Nation for enhanced show notes and bonuses: www.JoinBetterNation.com About Dr. Miller Boyd, III: Historian, Dr. Miller Williams Boyd, III was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Currently, he serves as the 9th-grade Social Studies teacher at Whitfield School. From 2019-2021, Boyd held the school's Robert B. Lobusch Endowed Chair in Humanities. Before coming to Whitfield, Dr. Boyd was a faculty instructor in the Departments of History and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. Boyd completed his undergraduate degree in Sociology at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans in 1998. In 2006, he received a Masters in African American Studies from Boston University. Studying under pioneering Atlantic World historian John Thornton, his work focused on free people of color in Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pulling from research conducted during his Masters program, Boyd authored an award-winning article entitled, “Privilege Lost: Shifting Creole Identity in Antebellum Louisiana,” which was published in the Fall 2007 edition of The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies. In 2008, he began his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi, specializing in Early American and African American History. As a fellow of the Center for Civil War Research at the University of Mississippi, Boyd worked under noted Civil War historian, John R. Neff, and researched the African American experience in Civil War Missouri. As a result of his research, he has received several research fellowships and has been invited to speak at various institutions, including the University of Missouri, Kansas State University, Delta State University, the Missouri History Museum, and Soldier's Memorial in St. Louis. In May 2016, Boyd successfully defended his dissertation entitled, “The Exigencies of War: Black Military Service, Free Labor, and Education in Civil War Missouri.” Since returning to St. Louis full-time, Boyd has continued to write and lecture on the African American experience in Missouri. Starting in 2019, Boyd entered the field of consulting, conducting workshops for educators on how to teach African American history in the 21st century.
THE DIGNITY OF SERVICE: THE POWER OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP by Nathan W. McKie, Sr.In 2018, Nathan published a book entitled, The Dignity of Profit: Building Community through Entrepreneurship. In it he described the call that we have as Christians to go out into the field to make a difference and the landscape that awaits those servants who do. A general approach to the way this plays out at field level was provided; but now, there has been some actual experience that we use to flesh out the process.Through a grant from a local economic development organization, Luke 16 Corp (a non-profit founded by Nathan) purchased a building and built out areas for incubated businesses. This facility also included a café for training people for work focused on customer service. It is an unusual concept in that businesses get support by the Luke 16 organization. This book is about how to garner the support necessary to make projects like this be all that they can be.Jeffery Baker is joining in this book to provide the additional perspective that will make it much richer in terms of a broader knowledge of field work. Both Nathan and Jeff have entrepreneurial backgrounds and seek to foster a better understanding of the power that can come from true service-oriented approach.Additionally, our experience has helped us understand the potholes that await anyone who seeks to step out in faith. Profit was directed toward churches, and to some degree businesspeople, who weren't that interested in either social enterprises or social entrepreneurship. So, here's the approach in Service: let's develop the notion that servants are not weak or ignorant folks who can't or won't take on such projects. As we look at what it means to be a servant leader, we hope you will find yourself imagining how you can pursue your dream or objective with this approach.Ultimately, the main focus still has to be on developing community. For we believe that only by doing so can there be a meaningful impact on helping to alleviate poverty. We will look closely at the fallacy of other programs and provide some alternatives that can be very effective.In 2018, Nathan published a book entitled, The Dignity of Profit: Building Community through Entrepreneurship. In it he described the call that we have as Christians to go out into the field to make a difference and the landscape that awaits those servants who do. A general approach to the way this plays out at field level was provided; but now, there has been some actual experience that we use to flesh out the process.Nathan W. McKie, Sr.Nathan's earliest real experience as an entrepreneur came at 12 years old when he began a newspaper route – mostly on bicycle, but sometimes on his horse. involving many skills necessary for being in business. He graduated from Ole Miss with a degree in Business Administration and was immediately commissioned as an officer in the US Air Force. He learned discipline, logistics skills, and management of a large group of people.Upon leaving the military, Nathan worked in manufacturing, distribution, retail, and computer sales. Some of these were as a business owner or independent contractor. He later received his MBA from Delta State University. A job as general manager of a manufacturing company drew him to St. Louis, MO, where he later created his own manufacturing company then as a business broker and a retail consultant.In 2016, he launched Luke 16 Corp, a non-profit organization focused on community development. In 2018, he published The Dignity of Profit: Creating Community Through Entrepreneurship, a book that laid out a plan for how to address the need for small business to take its rightful role in helping strengthen local economies.https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Service-Nathan-W-Mckie-ebook/dp/B08Q61VYT6/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=9781648952517&qid=1608673683&sr=8-1www.dignitytrilogy.comwww.Stratton-Press.comhttp://www.bluefunkbroadcasting.com/root/twia/stprc111821.mp3
On this episode, Whitney talks with journalist Aallyah Wright about her journey to journalism, reporting on issues of labor, race, and equity in her native Mississippi. Wright reports on rural affairs and leads race and equity coverage for Stateline. Previously, Aallyah worked for Mississippi Today, a digital nonprofit newsroom, covering K-12 education and government in the Mississippi Delta—her home region. As a member of the Delta Bureau, she investigated Mississippi's teacher shortage, finding it was six times worse than in 1998 when the Mississippi legislature passed a bill to alleviate the crisis. She is a 2020 Mississippi Humanities Council Preserver of Mississippi Culture Award recipient, 2019 StoryWorks Theater Fellow, and 2018 Educating Children in Mississippi Fellow at the Hechinger Report. Wright graduated from Delta State University with a bachelor's in journalism and minors in communication and theater.
The Creativity, Education, and Leadership Podcast with Ben Guest
Jasper “Julio” Johnson died on July 27, 2021, far too young at the age of 38. He left behind three children and one grandson. I first met Jasper when he was a senior at Simmons High School in Hollandale, Mississippi. I was an English teacher and the assistant basketball coach under legendary George Willis.We won a state championship that year and Jasper was a Dandy Dozen. He would go on to play at the University of Southern Mississippi, Delta State University, and have a long professional career overseas, most notably in South Korea.As great a basketball player as Jasper was, he was a far better person.To help process his passing, several of his teammates from that championship year and I got together via Zoom. My idea was that we could share memories of Jasper that his family, especially his three children, would appreciate. From there we started reminiscing about that championship season and Mr. Willis, who passed away in 2018.My guests for the conversation were Larry “LB” Brown, Ricky Johnson, Pat White, and Jeremy “Me-Me” Smith.Podcast LinksApple here.Spotfity here.YouTube here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com
#595 - John O'Sullivan The John O'Sullivan Interview is featured on The Paul Leslie Hour. Socrates said “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” On this episode of The Paul Leslie Hour, we'll meet Dr. John O'Sullivan. He says first he tries to be an educator, and as we will soon find out…he is inquisitive and thoughtful. Whether you agree with the ideas he expresses, we hope it may encourage you to think. Who is Dr. John O'Sullivan? He is a professor of Sociology at the University of North Georgia. His interests are in ecology, education, social change, population trends, and sustainability. John O'Sullivan is also a supporter of the non-profit organization called The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the 430 mile long Chattahoochee River, which originates in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia and terminates in Lake Seminole on the Florida-Georgia line. Our special guest John O'Sullivan has published articles on a variety of environmental topics and has taught at Delta State University in Mississippi as well as the University of North Carolina. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.
Jesse Brown(Assistant Professor - Department of Art at Delta State University) joins the conversation to break down how he got selected to be featured in MMA
Ayodeji Richard Makun, also known by his stage name A.Y, is a Nigerian actor, comedian, radio and TV presenter, writer, producer and movie director. Ayo Makun was born on 19th of August, 1971 in Warri, Delta State. A.Y hails from Ifon, Ose Local Government, Ondo State but prefer to be called a ‘warri boy'. Ayo makun has a Bachelor's degree in Theatre Art from Delta State University, Abraka. While in school, A.Y was very active and had many nominations and awards including Best Showbiz Promoter (2001) and Most Celebrated Theatre Arts Student (2003). Ayo Makun married Mabel, CEO of Maidas Interior in 2008 and they are blessed with a beautiful daughter, Michelle Makun. AY has six siblings, two boys, and four girls. One of his brothers, Yomi Makun known as Yomi Casual is one of the A-list fashion designer in Nigeria. As a ‘warri boy', Ayo Makun expanded his portfolio by venturing into movie production. His first movie as a producer was '30 Days in Atlanta'. His movies are hilarious adventurous. AY's 30 Days in Atlanta broke Nigeria's box office record as the highest domestic grossing film in 2015 and was listed on Guinness Book of World Records. The film also starred leading actors such as Richard Mofe Damijo, Ramsey Noah and Mercy Johnson. ✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️ Here are his Top 10 Rules for Success.
In this episode of the Life and Football Podcast our special guest is Coach Our Special Guest is Jamey Chadwell. Jamey Chadwell is currently the Head Football Coach for the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers! Chadwell is a great Coach who is positive, enthusiastic, supportive, trusting, focused, goal-oriented, knowledgeable, observant, respectful, patient and a clear communicator. He's the son of a former Football Coach and he played his College Football at East Tennessee State. While serving as the head coach and offensive coordinator at Coastal Carolina; he also served as interim head coach in the 2017 season while permanent head coach Joe Moglia was on a medical leave.[2] He was named Head Coach of CCU on January 18, 2019. Chadwell was previously the head coach at Charleston Southern University for four seasons (2013–16), North Greenville University for three seasons (2009–2011) and Delta State University for one season (2012). He grew up in Tennessee and attended East Tennessee State University where he played quarterback from 1995 to 1999. He began his coaching career in 2000 at East Tennessee State before taking an assistant position at Charleston Southern University in 2004. He won several coach of the year awards in 2020 after leading his team to a 11–1 record.
Milena Stephens and Emma Doyle met through the Professional Tennis Registry (PTR) symposiums and they have been good friends ever since. Milena has a passion for coaching that is infectious and her Dad is also a tennis coach. What does Milena and her Dad think makes a great coach in three words? Milena Araujo Stephens - Connect, educate, and listens. Her Dad - Moises Araujo - Teaching, education, and listens Emma and Milena share their early coaching memories together during the extended interview on The Coaching Podcast. Milena grew up on the courts of her parents' tennis club, where she started playing at age three; and as a junior player, Stephens reached #1 in her native Brazil. She earned a full athletic scholarship to play for Delta State University and went on to earn her BA and then a Masters degree in Sports Management. Milena served as Director of Tennis at Cleveland Country Club in Mississippi. She also coached at Midtown Athletic Club in Weston, Florida, before joining the PTR team as Director of Development and Diversity where she is heavily involved with coaches' education. In this episode, we mentioned that we would share the link to the Tennis NLP Online Course that Emma created with the PTR to help improve your language patterns for accelerated player performance. https://ptr.teachable.com/p/tennis-nlp/?preview=logged_out
In this episode of Location Intelligence, we discuss how Hexagon partners with Delta State University to prepare students for GEOINT careers.
Tricia Walker is a singer/songwriter who made her career in Nashville. From there, she went to the MS Delta where she began to run the Delta Music Institute at Delta State University. In this episode, Tricia unpacks what it means to be a songwriter by sharing the lessons she has learned through a variety of experiences.
Your brain is the boss of your body. It controls your heartbeat, breathing, sleep, mood, thoughts, movements and has to be on, 24/7. To do that your brain needs fuel. The better the fuel, the better your brain will work. Join us today as we talk with Dr. Chaiqua Harris, Assistant Professor at Jackson State University, Dr. Robika Mylroie, Distance Clinical Professor at Lamar University and School Counselor at St. Anthony, Dr. Mary Bess Panel, Assistant Professor at Delta State University about the brain/food connection and how it affects mental wellness. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ndidi Emefiele is a mixed media artist b orn in 1987. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Painting from Delta State University, Abraka. An award-winning artist, she won the COJA Art Award in 2003. She recieved her Masters in Fine Art at the prestigious Slade School of Art, University College, London, her work takes a critical look at how society constructs identity and how it defines and confines the roles of gender. Ndidi’s work has been featured in international media outlets like Al Jazeera, and published in various magazines and online platforms including Visionary Artistry Magazine and IAM (Intense Art) Magazine. Emefiele is well exhibited nationally in Nigeria. Internationally, her work can be found in major and important collections. This episode is sponsored by Golden Artist Colors and The New York Studio School.
Milton Wilder is retired and Professor Emeritus of Health, Physical Education and Recreation (HPER) at Delta State University, Cleveland, MS. In addition to 29 years at DSU, his 44- year teaching career included the University of New Orleans, the University of Alabama in Birmingham and 4 ½ years teaching and coaching in public schools. Milton has served at every level including the national level, District and the state associations of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Milton has 29 years of service to the Mississippi HPERD included President, an elected or appointed member of the Board of Directors (22 years) and State Convention Manager. Milton is the epitome of servant leadership.
Joyce is a game changer. Roy called in at the beginning of this episode to suggest we ask his mom about her activism in the Civil Rights Movement, and we’re grateful Joyce was willing to share. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Joyce went on to Delta State University where she was one of the first Black students to integrate the school. Her enrollment exposed her to innumerable tribulations due to the racism of teachers, students, the entire academic system and society at large. She didn’t succumb to racism and instead fought for her human rights by participating in sit-ins, protesting her grades from discriminatory professors and merely by using the bathrooms in her dorm. Despite these negative forces Joyce still went onto grad school and law school, and continues her remarkable work in the world of academia as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at a college in Birmingham, Alabama. She told us that Roy was a quiet child which worked quite nicely considering he was a toddler when she was in law school. She was influential in Roy attaining his college degree from Florida A&M, and was supportive of his comedy career once he completed his schooling. Listen to Roy’s latest special “No One Loves You” on Spotify or Apple and catch him on The Daily Show or hosting his show This Is Not Happening on Comedy Central.
In this episode of Divided By Design, we look at the topic of housing and segregation, particularly in the south. The legacy of segregation is palpable across the American South and has enormous implications for how people lead their daily lives. From redlining and housing policy to physical separations by highways or railroad tracks and transit policies, physical separation is a real-life consequence of decades-old decisionmaking. This episode features Nathaniel Smith of the Partnership for Southern Equity, Dr. Temika Simmons of Delta State University, Danyelle Solomon of the Center for American Progress and more.Find out more information at:https://www.unumfund.org/podcastFollow E Pluribus Unum on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/unumfund Instagram: http://Instagram.com/UnumFundFacebook: http://Facebook.com/UnumfundDivided By Design is a production of Next Chapter Podcasts.Learn more at https://ncpodcasts.com/Credits:Written by Byron C. Hunter Music by Jay WeigelEditing & Sound Design by Nick LucaExecutive Producers: Ryan Berni, Robert Cappadona & Jeremiah Tittle
hello, Hello, HELLO friends! WE ARE BACK Y'ALL with Dr. Tameka N. Jones, DNP! Dr. Jones is currently the Director of the Baylor Scott and White McClinton Cancer, Hillcrest Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Center, and Acute Care at the Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest location in Waco, TX. originally from Greenville, MS. she received her BSN from Delta State University in 2001. Prior to joining Baylor Scott and White, she worked in various leadership roles at West Cancer Center for 5 years, including managing 13 clinics throughout TN, AR, and MS. and authoring/coauthoring multiple ground breaking cancer clinical research trials as director of innovative research. In 2018 she received her Doctorate of Nursing Practice and Masters of Business Administration from Union University. She then went on to achieve the NEA-BC certification in 2019. Connect with 3 friends TALK: www.instagram.com/3friendsTALK
In this episode Phillip sits down to talk with Jeremiah Matthews, guitarist and songwriter for Memphis-based band The Ellie Badge to talk about his very interesting guitar rig, his methodology in live shows, and the Memphis music scene. You can find Jeremiah at the following links!- on Instagram- on SpotifyYou can support the show on Patreon!40 Watt Merchandise: https://40-watt-merch.creator-spring.com/Reverb Affiliate link: https://reverb.grsm.io/phillipcarter5480
This episode we get to meet Dillard University head coach Nile Legania. Nile is born and raised in New Orleans who made a long career as a local high school and summer track club coach. We learn why he moved to the collegiate level and why the time was right. You'll enjoy learning about Nile's athletic background winning a state championship in Louisiana High School track and playing football at Delta State University in Mississippi.
Christmas in the air, people
Coach Mike Kinnison is the Athletic Director at Delta State University. He was the head baseball coach for 20+ years gathering more than 1200+ wins during his tenure. He was a 2004 World Series Champion. Coach talks about the importance of humility, gratitude, and hard work has been a staple in his program and his own life. The importance of toughness in his program along with competitiveness has maintained DSU as one of DIIs best programs.
On this week's episode of Arm Cast: Dead Sexy Podcast, host Armand Rosamilia is joined by Miriam C. Davis Miriam earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After teaching for sixteen years at Delta State University, she is now a freelance writer and ghostwriter. Her most recent book is The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story, listed by the New York Times Book Review as excellent summer true crime reading.
Our guest in this interview is Bill Spencer who is the author of, "Uranus is Always Funny." Bill Spencer's humor writing has been published by numerous outlets including Funny Times, Narrative Magazine, Reader's Digest, The Sun, and HumorOutcasts.com. Bill has also published scholarly articles on the novels of Cormac McCarthy, has written more than 140 comic skits performed at the Wildacres Writers Workshop, and has co-authored an un-produced screenplay entitled "Angel Pays a Visit." Bill taught English for thirty-one years, twenty-five of them at Delta State University and six at Western Carolina University. He lives in a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina with his wife, artist-poet Carolyn Elkins. Please visit HumorOutcasts.com
This week Phil and Adam have a conversation with Cailten Barron, WSRTwPA(C). They share memories of their time together at Delta State University. Cailten shares her encouraging story about transitioning from teaching music to being an athletic missionary in Canada. They talk about remembering who the church is during COVID-19. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pawpod/message
In this episode of the podcast. I discuss with my guest, Mr Ezeogu Chuks Kayode, He's a Certified Life Coach, Psychologist, Corporate Trainer, Author and Conference Speaker. He has degrees in Mathematics & Psychology from Delta State University and the University of Ibadan respectively. He works as the Head of Academy & Coaching services at Olusola Lanre Coaching Academy, Africa's foremost coaching academy. We explore insights on how to position yourself and business for impact in these changing times. He shares his lessons from career so far, inspiring stories of sacrifices he has made to become the person he is now and so many more. And we discuss what it means to live life from your core and why it is a necessity for the entire human species. In this episode you will learn: - What it means to live from your core - How to find your core - How to reinvent yourself for impact in your business and work - Critical decisions he made that helped him evolve from who he was to who he is personally and professionally - What to do when he hits a rough patch and how to implement it - We also speak about the power of the human mind, workplace disruptions and many more Additional Recommendations - Origins By Dan Brown - Future Shock By Alvin Toffler - The Power of Your Subconscious Mind By Joseph Murphy
Talbot Brooks is a man on a mission. He wants to make maps – good maps, maps that tell an accurate story to its intended audience. A fifth-generation firefighter, National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) member, and current Professor of the Practice at Delta State University where he teaches geospatial technologies, Talbot has spent his life in service of others, with a focus on Emergency Management. Join Darryl Murdock, Adam Simmons, and Talbot Brooks as we discuss how to approach mapmaking from what pre-mapmaking questions and considerations should be addressed to Cognitive Biases and their effects during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. This episode was recorded using Talbot’s cell phone only 1 week after devastating tornados and flash-flooding in Mississippi destroyed much of the local communications infrastructure. About Us This episode of Project Geospatial is hosted by Adam Simmons and Darryl Murdock. The show is dedicated to increasing awareness of Geospatial Technology, education resources, and industry best practices. Our show is composed of industry professionals who discuss diverse topics such as new geospatial projects, innovations, and resources that benefit the overall community. If you are an industry professional reach out to us, we’d love to hear your feedback or have you on the show. Listen in and check us out at projectgeospatial.com Episode Music by Chaz
1:02 - Jeremy talks about his small town roots, and shares how valuable of a decision it was to play Div II baseball at Delta State under Coach Marchant. 7:10 - Jeremy shares the core values and the mental shift that he went through when competing for a spot on the Boston Red Sox, and credits his coaches for helping to build those values and support him as he grew personally and professionally. 8:56 - Jeremy shares a Mike Kinnison coaching story from when the Delta State team was competing in the World Series, and an occasion where Jeremy needed to be pushed to succeed, but also received heartfelt encouragement from his coach. 11:20 - Jeremy discusses the shift from playing at the college level to professional baseball in the minor leagues, and describes the increase in intensity along with the importance of taking care of yourself throughout the process. 12:43 - Jeremy talks about the path that took him from baseball back to working in college sports, and from getting married to earning an MBA, to deciding that he was unhappy in his corporate job and making the decision to work in development for Delta State University. That decision would lead to an opportunity to take charge as Athletic Director after Brad Teague's departure. 18:57 - Jeremy shares his thought process in realizing that it was time for the next step in his career after 6 years at Delta State, and the transition from working in Div II to Div I. His career journey would take him from AD at Delta State, to Deputy AD at Southern Miss, to AD at Troy, until he would come full circle back as Athletic Director at Southern Miss. 22:20 - Jeremy talks about the tough decisions and tough conversations that need to be made by athletic leadership, and how his personal process for those situations is driven by faith and by colleagues who can have valuable and candid discussions. 28:00 - “For me, it's always been about being creative on the revenue side. How can we get more resources to our student-athletes and our coaches, where they can get their needs list met?” Jeremy talks about looking at both sides of the balance sheet from a financial leadership perspective, and how his philosophy revolves around creating more opportunities for resources to avoid budget cuts whenever possible. 37:16 - Jeremy shares his number one piece of advice for professionals moving up in their careers in college sports, and his vision for Southern Miss athletics
Dr. Kent Wyatt became the President of Delta State University in 1975. In this episode, Wyatt shares some of the accomplishments and challenges of his tenure. He also explains the importance of having an emphasis on academic excellence and an “open door” policy for faculty and students. When Wyatt took over as President of Delta State in 1975, inflation made it difficult to control operating costs. He recalls how that early experience foreshadowed future shortfalls brought on by statewide budget cuts. Throughout Wyatt’s tenure as the President of Delta State, he insisted on developing programs that met the academic needs of the Mississippi Delta. He discusses some of those programs. The Bologna Performing Arts Center at Delta State University was built in 1994 through state funding from the Mississippi legislature. Dr. Kent Wyatt explains the importance of having such a Center in the Delta. This episode of Mississippi Moments was researched by Hayley Hasik and produced by Ross Walton, with narration by Bill Ellison. PHOTO: http://inauguration.deltastate.edu/past-presidents/
This episode of Ladies of the Fright is brought to you by Inkshares. This October experienceViolet, the second novel of Stoker-nominated Kill Creek author Scott Thomas. Violet follows Kris Barlow, who after the death of her husband returns to a long-abandoned lake house. She soon finds that the town of Pacington, Kansas is not as it seems, and that a presence has been awaiting her return. Bird Box author Josh Malerman calls it a "master class in immersion." Jason Heller of National Public Radio calls it "indelible" and says that the "sheer, skin-crawling fright is masterful." Available in bookstores nationwide and Amazon. Before we get into today’s episode, we want to remind you that we now have a Patreon! We would like to give a special shoutout to our higher tier patrons SM Fedor and Eli Ryder at the Satanic Panic level, and Kenesha, Nathan Blixt, and Nina Nahvi, Bjorn Svartalfson, and Jocelyn Codner at the Demon Possession level. We’re offering cool rewards we’re offering at every tier, the most exciting of which is our Patrons-only podcast, LOTF After Dark which is accessible to every single patron.When we hit our first 20 patrons, we’ll be doing a patrons-only giveaway! Show Notes Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson are the authors of the new book, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. Lisa is a writer who lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where she enjoys a life of reading, writing, and scaring the wits out of her husband, who doesn’t fully understand her love for all things horror. Sometimes she uses her Ph.D. in Gothic literature to teach, but mostly she uses it to write horror stories–and to raise two of her own little monsters, her sons. Melanie holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Mississippi. She is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS, where she teaches courses in American literature. She researches and writes about the American Gothic and supernatural literature (with occasional forays into pop culture). Lisa and Mel (along with their pal Matter) are the hosts of The Know Fear Cast, a podcast about horror and all the things that scare us. This is one of our most rowdy chats yet, with so many laugh out loud moments! We loved chatting with Lisa and Mel about their origin story, the inception of their latest book, the process of writing Monster, She Wrote, women in horror, and so much more! Find Lisa Kröger: Website Find Melanie R. Anderson: Website
We talk to octogenarian paddler and hiker Dale Sanders about his Guinness record-breaking solo treks, how his active lifestyle has improved his health and his frightening "River Stories" encounter with a Minnesota lake monster. We also speak with Todd Davis, a professor and Director of Outdoor Recreation at Delta State University who has created ground-breaking outdoor programs for underprivileged students and community members in the state of Mississippi. Also featuring "Reflections" with Mark River and "River Time" with John Ruskey.
Aallyah Wright is a native of Clarksdale and a Mississippi Delta reporter covering education and local government for Mississippi Today, a digital nonprofit news organization that aggressively covers state and local government and community issues. She is a playwright for "Wade Through The Waters", a 2019 project by StoryWorks. She is also a radio co-host for WROX Radio (97.5 FM) and was a playwright/reporter for "Beautiful Agitators," a 2017 project by StoryWorks/Reveal Labs from the Center for Investigative Reporting in partnership with Mississippi Today. Aallyah has a bachelor's in journalism with a minor in communications and theater from Delta State University. Prior to joining Mississippi Today January 2017, she interned as a reporter for the Bolivar Commercial and was the project producer and community journalist for The Cleveland Yearbook, a project by The Center for Investigative Reporting and Delta Arts Alliance. In 2018, Aallyah earned a fellowship with Hechinger Report to report on Mississippi's teacher shortage and its effects. Her reporting with the Mississippi Today Education Team for "Behind the Headlines:Cleveland Central" received third-place at the 68th Annual Green Eyeshade Awards. Her work has appeared in The Hechinger Report, The Lily, The Daily Journal and Delta Magazine. She is a board member for the Lower Mississippi River Foundation.
Malcolm White talks to Tricia Walker, singer/songwriter and former director of the Delta Music Institute at Delta State University. The two talk about Tricia’s storied career, which includes writing songs for Faith Hill, Patty Loveless, Kathy Troccoli and Allison Krauss, who won a GRAMMY® for “Looking In The Eyes Of Love,” co-written by Tricia. As part of the show, Tricia also talks about and plays a few songs from her latest album "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Eye." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The week we discuss the list of committed players at the Sanderson Farm Championship, the Walker Cup, and other golf news, but we spent the majority of the episode talking with Easton Key the Head Men's Golf Coach at Delta State University (starts at the 15:00 mark) and his outlook on the upcoming golf season for the Statesmen. Another great interview that we hope you enjoy!
This week we are talking to Richard Steele about what it means to be an Emergency Manager at an Airport. Richard has worked at both large international airports and regional hubs. If you ever travel or live near an airport, you have to listen to this show.Guest BioManager, Emergency Preparedness and SecurityJohn Wayne Airport (SNA)Richard N. Steele is currently the Manager, Emergency Preparedness and Security at John Wayne Airport (SNA) – Orange County, California with over 18 years of experience in military and civilian aviation. Richard joined SNA in December 2016 after working for three other medium and large hub airports to include Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Burbank-Bob Hope Airport (BUR), and Tampa International Airport (TPA). Mr. Steele has held several positions in airport operations and emergency management at these airports to include communications center supervisor and dispatcher, airside operations manager, landside operations manager, chief of operations, and training manager.His military career included over eight years in the United States Marine Corps as an avionics technician on various fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft platforms, quality assurance inspector, squadron safety and training manager, and a helicopter aerial observer.Mr. Steele is currently a Certified Member (CM) of AAAE and has his Airport Security Coordinator (ASC) certificate from AAAE. He has an undergraduate degree from Southern Illinois University in Aviation Business Management and a Master’s Degree from Delta State University in Commercial Aviation. Mr. Steele is also an Industry Advisory Board member for California Baptist University’s Aviation Science program in Riverside, California.Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-steele-68989b141/Facebook:Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnWayneAirInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/10480373/john-wayne-airport-orange-county/Website: https://ocair.com/defaultAdvertisershttps://www.titanhst.com/
Tiger Talk Podcast by Northeast Mississippi Community College
In this sixty-sixth (66th) edition of the TigerTalk podcast presented by Northeast Mississippi Community College, host Will Kollmeyer welcomes the reigning Mississippi Virtual Community College Instructor of the Year Carlena Benjamin back to the podcast. Benjamin recently received the honor at the Creating Futures Through Technology Conference on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Benjamin talks about the innovation that she has brought to her classroom and about some of the comments that supported her nomination for the award. In addition to the award, Benjamin talks about time management, where she is one of the top innovators on campus in the classroom, a co-director of the NEMCC Honors Institute, a wife and mother of two and finishing up her doctorate degree through Delta State University this week. In the second half of the podcast, Northeast jazz band director Jason Beghtol joins the podcast to talk about the Northeast Jazz Band Concert where he will have seven guest artists in attendance at the event. With seven guest artists, six will be NEMCC alumni while the seventh will be as Beghtol puts it, 'an adopted Tiger.' Kollmeyer wraps up this week's podcast with one of the most comprehensive lists of events and happenings on the Northeast campus for the upcoming week, so if you have an event or happening on campus and want to be part of the Tiger Talk podcast, reach out to us. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, now would be a good time to subscribe to stay up-to-date on all the happenings on the Northeast campuses and hear in-depth interviews with guests each week. Don't forget to follow the Northeast TigerTalk podcast on Facebook at http:.//www.facebook.com/nemcctigertalk, on Twitter at @nemcctigertalk or listen to all of our past episodes at http://nemcctigertalk.simplecast.fm
Dr. Donielle M. Lovell is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Kentucky University. Originally hailing from Salamanca, NY—home to the Seneca Nation of Indians, she has happily settled in Elizabethtown, KY. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Science Education (2001) and Master’s in Community Development (2004) from Delta State University. Dr. Lovell also earned a PhD in Rural Sociology from the University of Missouri—Columbia (2009). Her areas of expertise include race, social class and gender particularly within the context of community development processes. Over the last several years, Dr. Lovell has facilitated research on both restitution initiatives for juveniles and disproportionate minority contact in the juvenile justice system in Kentucky. This includes securing grants totaling nearly $150,000. An active member of both the campus and local community, she was awarded the Kentucky Court of Justices Law Related Education Award in 2011 for her work on juvenile justice issues. She has served on national boards of organizations such as the Rural Sociological Society. Locally, she serves on the boards of the Hardin County BRIDGES Council and Warm Blessings. In 2018, Dr. Lovell was a candidate for state representative in the 18th district. Married to her husband Jason and parent to her fiery daughter Abigail, Dr. Lovell is passionate and committed to ensuring our community, state, nation and world are left a better place for the Seventh Generation.
Delta State University President Bill LaForge talks about his life and career and his journey back home to the one place that helped impact Mississippi, United States and other countries around the world – Delta State University.
It’s a hot August day in 1976, the sun beats down in the Mississippi Delta, and three siblings go swimming in the old, forbidden rock quarry. Everyone knows that something evil and unspeakable once happened there. The youngest child disappears, the quarry is drained, and news of the missing child spreads. As the days and months pass, it becomes clear that Pansy has vanished into thin air. Then older sister Bert graduates from high school. Sure that her little sister is still alive somewhere, she convinces her brother to help find Pansy. Tiffany Quay Tyson’s debut novel, Three Rivers, was a finalist for both the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Past is Never (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) is a 2018 Okra Pick. Tiffany was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi and is a graduate of Delta State University. After college she worked for a brief stint as a newspaper reporter in the Mississippi Delta, where she received the Frank Allen Award for Journalism. She is the recipient of two Heartland Emmy Awards including one for writing for a children’s public television program. She is a faculty member at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program in Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It’s a hot August day in 1976, the sun beats down in the Mississippi Delta, and three siblings go swimming in the old, forbidden rock quarry. Everyone knows that something evil and unspeakable once happened there. The youngest child disappears, the quarry is drained, and news of the missing child spreads. As the days and months pass, it becomes clear that Pansy has vanished into thin air. Then older sister Bert graduates from high school. Sure that her little sister is still alive somewhere, she convinces her brother to help find Pansy. Tiffany Quay Tyson’s debut novel, Three Rivers, was a finalist for both the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Past is Never (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) is a 2018 Okra Pick. Tiffany was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi and is a graduate of Delta State University. After college she worked for a brief stint as a newspaper reporter in the Mississippi Delta, where she received the Frank Allen Award for Journalism. She is the recipient of two Heartland Emmy Awards including one for writing for a children’s public television program. She is a faculty member at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program in Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For Show Notes and Coach McKeefery's Website - http://www.RonMcKeefery.com Now Available on iTunes http://bit.ly/1bPlMei Pick up your copy of Coach McKeefery's #1 Amazon International Bestseller "CEO Strength Coach" - http://www.CEOStrengthCoach.com Please “Thank” our sponsors who bring this show to you for free:PLAE - http://plae.us/Samson - https://www.samsonequipment.comIron Grip - http://www.irongrip.com/Intek - https://intekstrength.com/Train Heroic - http://trainheroic.com/Gym Aware - https://kinetic.com.au/gymaware.htmlWoodway - http://www.woodway.com/Versa Pulley - http://versaclimber.com/vp-versapulley/ Jeff Hurd was born in Pomona, Calif., and raised in Parker, Ariz. where he graduated from Parker High School in 1976. Jeff was Student Council President in addition to his participation in sports and extra curricular activities during his four years at PHS. Following high school, Jeff went on to become a two-year baseball letterman at Imperial Valley Junior College in El Centro, Calif., before transferring to Fort Hays State University, in Hays, Kan., where he earned two more letters and graduated with a degree in physical education in 1981. Jeff then returned to Parker High School as a volunteer assistant baseball coach for one season, while substitute teaching in the school district. He returned to Fort Hays State University as a graduate assistant for the Tigers and in 1984, received his Master’s degree in physical education with an emphasis in exercise physiology. Jeff served as the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Delta State University (’85-’86), Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach at Clemson University (’86-’87) and Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Western Michigan ( ’87-‘’92). During the 1992 and 1993 football seasons, Jeff was an intern Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Kansas City Chiefs. He returned to the university setting for the 1994 football season at Tulsa University. Jeff returned to the National Football League with the Jacksonville Jaguars as an assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach from 1995-1997. The Kansas City Chiefs made him their Head Strength and Conditioning Coach in 1998 through 2006. Jeff came out to the West Coast in 2007 to become, the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for the San Diego Chargers. Jeff Hurd has more than 25 years of experience in the field of strength and conditioning, most of which has been in the National Football League (NFL) from 1992 until 2016, finishing his career with the Minnesota Vikings as their assistant strength and conditioning coach. Over his twenty-three years of coaching his teams compiled a cumulative record of 203-165-0. Jeff and his wife, Kathy, have three children: Eric, Austin and Audra. In This Episode We Discuss: What experience in his journey impacted him the most, and Why.Biggest mistake he has made and how he learned from it.How he got started in the profession. What Strength and Conditioning Coaches are not thinking about for life after S&C. What he likes and dislikes about the profession. Best piece of coaching advice he has ever received.His favorite quote, Book/App/Website recommendation.
For Show Notes and Coach McKeefery's Website - http://www.RonMcKeefery.com Now Available on iTunes http://bit.ly/1bPlMei Pick up your copy of Coach McKeefery's #1 Amazon International Bestseller "CEO Strength Coach" - http://www.CEOStrengthCoach.com Please “Thank” our sponsors who bring this show to you for free:PLAE - http://plae.us/Samson - https://www.samsonequipment.comIron Grip - http://www.irongrip.com/Intek - https://intekstrength.com/Train Heroic - http://trainheroic.com/Gym Aware - https://kinetic.com.au/gymaware.htmlWoodway - http://www.woodway.com/Versa Pulley - http://versaclimber.com/vp-versapulley/ Jeff Hurd was born in Pomona, Calif., and raised in Parker, Ariz. where he graduated from Parker High School in 1976. Jeff was Student Council President in addition to his participation in sports and extra curricular activities during his four years at PHS. Following high school, Jeff went on to become a two-year baseball letterman at Imperial Valley Junior College in El Centro, Calif., before transferring to Fort Hays State University, in Hays, Kan., where he earned two more letters and graduated with a degree in physical education in 1981. Jeff then returned to Parker High School as a volunteer assistant baseball coach for one season, while substitute teaching in the school district. He returned to Fort Hays State University as a graduate assistant for the Tigers and in 1984, received his Master’s degree in physical education with an emphasis in exercise physiology. Jeff served as the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Delta State University (’85-’86), Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach at Clemson University (’86-’87) and Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Western Michigan ( ’87-‘’92). During the 1992 and 1993 football seasons, Jeff was an intern Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Kansas City Chiefs. He returned to the university setting for the 1994 football season at Tulsa University. Jeff returned to the National Football League with the Jacksonville Jaguars as an assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach from 1995-1997. The Kansas City Chiefs made him their Head Strength and Conditioning Coach in 1998 through 2006. Jeff came out to the West Coast in 2007 to become, the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for the San Diego Chargers. Jeff Hurd has more than 25 years of experience in the field of strength and conditioning, most of which has been in the National Football League (NFL) from 1992 until 2016, finishing his career with the Minnesota Vikings as their assistant strength and conditioning coach. Over his twenty-three years of coaching his teams compiled a cumulative record of 203-165-0. Jeff and his wife, Kathy, have three children: Eric, Austin and Audra. In This Episode We Discuss: What experience in his journey impacted him the most, and Why.Biggest mistake he has made and how he learned from it.How he got started in the profession. What Strength and Conditioning Coaches are not thinking about for life after S&C. What he likes and dislikes about the profession. Best piece of coaching advice he has ever received.His favorite quote, Book/App/Website recommendation.
What started out as a fairly ordinary NBA contest quickly turned into a record-setting performance for the Orlando Magic on January 13, 2009 against the Sacramento Kings. Using 13 first-half three-pointers, the Magic stormed out to a 75-56 halftime lead and never looked back. Delta State University product Jeremy Richardson hit the team's 22nd three of the night to break the NBA record, and Keith Bogans added another late triple to expand the mark that stood until 2016.
For years, we've been hearing about all the challenges with immigration in the United States. Most of us have little first-hand experience with what's happening at our borders, and that's why we are excited to hear from Rev. Dr. Bill Jenkins, founder of Christ Ministry Center, which has provided a "safe harbor" for over 6,000 refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers, migrants in detention, and families broken by deportation. Based in San Diego, his ministry has a working relationship with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as they bring families in need to the ministry. He grew up in Mississippi during the 1960s Civil Rights Era, and he earned a Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Delta State University, where he did his student teaching at an all African-American high school in the Mississippi Delta in 1969-70. This began a lifelong passion for social justice.
https://youtu.be/wa4iwjqQ23k David played college football at Delta State University where he got a degree in Exercise Science. He has his CSCS and a CrossFit Level 1 certification as well. Since leaving college, David has trained for and competed in Olympic lifting, strongman, powerlifting, bodybuilding, OCRs, and CrossFit. David has been in the fitness industry for over 10 years with roles in college strength and conditioning, private sector sports performance, personal training, and 6 years running his own facility, NBS Fitness. NBS Fitness is a 24-hour training facility that offers memberships, training, CrossFit, nutrition, and customized programming and works with a wide variety of clients.
Friday, March 2, 2018 9p.m.- EST, Coach Stone's guest on Coach Stone Podcastwill be Coach Eugene Crosby, offensive line coach for Campbellsville University. Eugene Crosby was hired as the offensive line coach for Campbellsville University in 2017. In his first season with the Tigers were 8-2 with over 5,300 yards of total offense. The rushing game improved by 400 yards. Crosby was the offensive line coach for the St. Olaf for the 2015 & 2016 seasons. Prior to coming to St. Olaf Crosby coached at Benedict College in South Carolina, Albany State in Georgia where he helped the Golden Rams win the SIAC conference championship in 2013 as defensive line coach. He spent 2010 – 2012 at Beloit College as Co-Offensive Coordinator/Offensive Line coach where he worked with Washington Redskins TE Derek Carrier. Before Beloit previous stops were at Youngstown State University, Delta State University, Oregon State University, Hiram College & Washington & Jefferson College. Crosby received his Bachelor’s degree from Washington & Jefferson College in 2000. Coach Stone Podcast can be heard twice a month on the JC Hawks Sports Network. Coach Stone can be followed through Twitter @Coach_Stone_MTor he can be found at CoachStoneFootball.com.
Kent Wyatt’s dad became the Delta State football coach in 1945, when Wyatt was 10 years old. In this episode, he recalls how their entire family lived in the Men’s dormitory while all the boys were off fighting in WWII. After the war was over, enrollment numbers spiked as returning veterans took advantage of the GI Bill. Wyatt discusses how the older men would play tricks on the young freshmen and sophomores. Having attended the Delta State Demonstration School as a child and later, Cleveland High School, it was only natural that Wyatt would pick Delta State when it was time for college. He remembers playing basketball and becoming a cheerleader to spend time with the girl he liked. In 1956, the Delta State men’s basketball team won the regional tournament and advanced to the Nationals as Wyatt and his fiancé, Janice, tried to make time for a wedding and honeymoon between quarters. After postponing the honeymoon and preparing to compete in the Nationals in Kansas City, they were devastated when the Governor forbid them from participating because they might have to play against racially integrated teams. PODCAST BONUS: Dr. Kent Wyatt served as President of Delta State University from 1975 until 1999. He reflects on how the school has grown since he first moved to Cleveland.
Show Notes: Today's interview is with Mike Harland of LifeWay Worship. We discuss the crucial topic of discontent. It's a slippery slope that will lead to the ruin of both your ministry and your family. Here's more about Mike: Mike Harland grew up in Mississippi, graduated from Delta State University and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and has led churches in worship leadership roles for most of his life. Since 2005, Mike has served as the Director of LifeWay Worship Resources, the worship and music arm of LifeWay Christian Resources. He is a published author, Dove Award winning songwriter, and a worship leader who sings and speaks nationally and internationally. His blog and podcast, “WorshipLife” is followed by worship leaders and church musicians from across a wide spectrum of churches. Mike and his wife Teresa serve in the children's, discipleship, and worship ministries of Brentwood Baptist Church and live in Franklin, Tennessee. They have three grown children – Lee, Elizabeth, and John. Links: Mike Podcast: http://worshiplife.com/ LifeWay Worship http://www.lifewayworship.com/ Twitter - @mikeharlandLW https://twitter.com/mikeharlandLW Want to learn more about the Blueprint? worshipteamcoach.com/blueprint Our music on the podcast today was by Mike Graff CoreSoundsMusic.com Write a review for The Exceptional Worship Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-exceptional-worship-podcast/id955460994?mt=2
In this episode of the podcast we discuss Bret Pimentel's blog and website, his contribution to The Clarinet magazine as a co-writer of the Clarinet Cache article, his doubling career, and his work as a professor at Delta State University. Students, make sure to stick around all the way till the end where Dr. Pimentel shares some valuable audition tips! The giveaway for this episode is a gold-plated D’Addario H ligature with cap. To make sure you’re eligible to win this and other giveaways mentioned on the podcast, please be sure to sign up for our email mailing list at www.clarineat.com. You’ll also receive content updates, special offers, coupons and more right to your inbox. Today’s episode was brought to you by D’Addario woodwinds.
Take a new and fresh look at the most familiar verse in all the Bible with campus minister Seth Still preaching at a local church in North Mississippi.
The Lakers would be better off losing for the rest of the season, but Mitch Kupchak refuses to give up that easily. Sketches: College Bowl Preview, Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak Talks Tanking. Wide World of Weird Sports: The Delta State Okra.