Podcasts about VSO

Leah and Rebecca Deming from Provet Legal dive deep into the topic of "pyramiding" in VA disability claims. They explain how the VA prevents veterans from receiving multiple ratings for the same symptoms, using real-world examples involving mental health, respiratory conditions, and TBI. The conversation is packed with practical insights on how to avoid rating mistakes, maximize benefits, and when to seek legal and medical support. It's a thorough, relatable guide for veterans who want to better understand the rating process and protect their rights. 

Matthew Shepherd, Director of Outreach and Education, Bring Back the Pollinators Matthew has worked for the Xerces Society for more than two decades, initially at the vanguard of a new movement to protect pollinators, but then on endangered species and a range of other issues, as well as several years leading Xerces' communications work. Throughout this time, he maintained a direct involvement in pollinator conservation in towns and cities, and in his current role has returned to outreach and community engagement. Much of this focuses on supporting neighborhood-level efforts such as pollinator gardens and small habitat projects in parks, as well as leading the Bring Back the Pollinators campaign and promoting the No Mow May and Leave the Leaves initiatives. Matthew is author of numerous articles and other publications, including Attracting Native Pollinators (Storey Publishing, 2011) and Gardening for Butterflies (Timber Press, 2016). He also is the long-time editor of Wings, the Xerces Society's magazine. Matthew's 35-year conservation career began in England and took him to Kenya before his arrival in the United States. After completing a master's of science in land resource management, Matthew managed National Trust lands in Oxfordshire, established a successful community-based conservation program in Essex, and helped to create Samphire Hoe, an award-winning nature park at the foot of the White Cliffs of Dover. During a VSO placement in Kenya, he worked with local communities and government agencies to improve the management of Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, on the coast north of Mombasa. It was in Kenya that he met a Peace Corps volunteer⁠—who is the reason he moved to Oregon. They live on the west side of the Portland metro region. Their two children are now at college, but they still get together—although sometimes they roll their eyes when Matthew points out yet another super-cool insect that he found.

I greet you in Jesus' precious name! It is Sunday morning, the 27th of April, 2025, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start in the Book of Luke 5:10: “And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.” What a beautiful scripture! The Lord wants to make you and I fishers of men. Then we go to the Gospel of Mark 16:15: “And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” The Lord is calling you and I today to be fishers of men, not just fishers of fish but men. Peter was a fisherman. He used all his secular skills to win souls for Christ once the Lord had called him into full-time service. I want to speak to young people this morning. A lot of young people are getting ready to write their final exams and then go into the world. I want to say one thing to you, get qualified! Get qualified. If you are qualified, you will be of more use to the Lord in the mission field than in anything else. The Lord is looking for doctors, nurses, engineers, farmers. He wants to teach people how to fish.Now, I remember clearly as a young boy, maybe 16 years old, I read about an organisation called VSO, Voluntary Service Overseas, and I wrote to them and I said I want to offer myself to help the poor in foreign nations, and I never even got a response. I was so disappointed but you know, they were quite correct. I had nothing to offer. We don't want to go to some underprivileged country and eat the food from poor people, and we have absolutely nothing to offer in return. Let us get qualified. If you want to be a motor mechanic, then be the best one for Jesus. If you want to be a farmer, then produce food for Jesus, and that will give you a passport into any nation on earth. When people know that you are qualified as a doctor, an engineer, and as a farmer and let us shine for the Lord so we will be fishers of men. And once we do that, people will ask us to please help them, pray for them and lead them to Christ.Have a wonderful day as a fisher of men,Goodbye.

Igor Tuta je pred kratkim praznoval osemdesetletnico. Je vsestranski kulturni delavec, s pomembno in dolgoletno vlogo med Slovenci v zamejskem prostoru. Vso svojo delovno dobo je posvetil Radiu Trst A, sodeloval je tudi pri številnih televizijskih dokumentarnih oddajah. Od otroštva predan skavt, tudi po njegovi zaslugi je v tržaškem okolju to gibanje zelo živo. Med njegovimi vidnejšimi zanimanji je tudi filatelija. V zadnjih letih pa se največ posveča publicistiki.

I denne uges episode ser vi nærmere på diverse markedsnyheder og også forbi Chewys seneste regnskab. Ugens tema giver en status på AI-toget og dykker ned i Nvidias præsentation og deres fortsatte dominans. Derudover besvarer vi et lytterspørgsmål om investering i space-tech aktier. Alt dette og meget mere! Denne episode er sponsoreret af Finobo. Få et gratis økonomitjek hos specialisterne i låneoptimering ved at bruge linket:finobo.dk/gratis-oekonomitjek-aktieuniverset/Prøv den nye omlægningsberegner på Finobo.dk/beregner-omlaegningsberegner/?utm_source=aktieuniverset Denne episode er sponsoreret af investeringsfonden NewDeal Invest. NewDeal Invest er blevet børsnoteret, så der nu ikke er nogen minimumsinvestering for at komme med i fonden. Find den på din danske handelsplatform under PMINDI eller NewDeal Invest (nu også på Nordnet og eToro). Hvis du er en virksomhed, kan du også investere i hovedfonden gennem virksomhedsskatteordningen (VSO).NewDeal Invest: ⁠newdealinvest.dk⁠ Tjek os ud på:FB gruppe: ⁠facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843⁠X: ⁠x.com/aktieuniverset⁠IG: ⁠instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast⁠

And as if the above title weren't enough, Paul Hylenski is also a 5-time successful author, a pilot and a public speaker. Paul grew up in Delaware. He joined the Marines in 1999 and stayed with the Corps until 2007. He then left to join a large company and, as he put it, got the opportunity to observe both good and bad leaders. He and I talk quite a bit about leaders and leadership. I asked him if he observed bad leadership in the Marines. He said that people being human do find themselves not leading properly in and out of the marines. His insights about this are best left for him to tell.   Along the way Paul formed his company, Quantum Leap Academy. His company was formed to provide comprehensive training in AI technologies. He also formed VetMentor.ai, a service designed to assist military members in navigating the complexities of disability claims and career transitions with the aid of AI.   As you may be able to gather, AI is a subject Paul has learned a great deal about. He discusses how we all can use it much more than we do in ways that can and will benefit us along our life journeys.   Time passed for me quickly talking with Paul. He would love to hear from you, veteran or not. He has much to offer as you will see.       About the Guest:   Paul Hylenski is a dynamic business leader, software programmer, and motivational speaker with a deep passion for leveraging technology to enhance community and personal growth. After serving in the Marine Corps, Paul founded Quantum Leap Academy, a platform dedicated to providing comprehensive training in AI technologies. His vision extends into healthcare, where he has launched BioMarker Detect, an early cancer detection company. Paul's entrepreneurial spirit is complemented by his authorship, notably of his book 'Error-Proofing Humans,' which explores the intersection of human error and technological solutions. Paul's commitment to veteran affairs is evident through VetMentor.AI, a service designed to assist military members in navigating the complexities of disability claims and career transitions with the aid of AI. His efforts to democratize technology education are also showcased in his development of courses like 'Introduction to AI for Teens' and specialized training for veterans. Outside of his professional endeavors, Paul enjoys piloting aircraft and spending quality time with his family. His forward-thinking approach and dedication to service have made significant impacts across multiple sectors, particularly in AI education and veteran support.   Ways to connect with Paul:   LinkedIn : (1) Paul Hylenski | LinkedIn Website : www.quantumleapacademy.org   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 subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   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, hello everyone, and pleasant greetings to you wherever you happen to be today. I am Michael Hingson, the host of unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. It's a lot of fun to be here. I really appreciate you joining us today. Hope that you have as much fun listening as I and our guest have in bringing this to you, I tell everyone who's going to come on the podcast that there is only one rule that everyone has to follow on the podcast or we won't do it, and that is, you have to have fun. And Paul Hylenski is definitely a person who said he would him force himself to do that. So Paul, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here   Paul Hylenski ** 02:02 today. Thank you so much. Michael, appreciate it. Thank you for having me on Well, Paul is a   Michael Hingson ** 02:08 former Marine. He is the founder and CEO of something called Quantum Leap. He does various things with AI and technology. He is a leader by any standard. He's authored, if I recall write five books anymore, any more coming up in the queue, we'll have to learn about that. But definitely not a person who is idle, a man of action in a lot of different ways. And we're really glad that you're here with us. So why don't we start if you would, why don't you tell me a little bit about you as kind of the early Paul growing up and all that kind of life and all that and how you got started.   Paul Hylenski ** 02:45 So, you know, I grew up in actual Newark, Delaware, so funny, there had a great childhood. Decided when I was in high school that I was going to enlist in the Marine Corps, so I wanted to be one of the few and the proud, and so I joined the Marine Corps, served in the Marine Corps, that was one of the best experiences of my life. Then after the Marine Corps, I actually got connected with a company with that was an aerospace company, and started working there as a frontline leader, and then from there, I saw a lot of bad leaders, and I saw some great leaders. And so I was able to, actually, as I kept going through the ranks, tailor my leadership towards how I wanted to be. And it was different. It was using science, psychology and leadership. And then as the AI revolution started happening, I started actually putting AI into business, and I wrote a book about AI in business, and then I thought to myself, well, now maybe I can impact the world in a bigger way. And that was what kind of drove me to start Quantum Leap Academy. And Quantum Leap Academy focuses on teaching professionals AI that's practical and and then that's really been my passion and mission is impacting the world with actually teaching how to automate and really make your life easier using AI   Michael Hingson ** 04:23 Cool. Well, you've been been doing a lot of stuff. How did you come up with the name quantum leap?   Paul Hylenski ** 04:29 A great story, but back in the 80s, there used to be an amazing TV   Michael Hingson ** 04:33 show, yes. So   Paul Hylenski ** 04:35 I thought, what better? You know, I was looking for a name that showed like, look, we're gonna go from where we're at now, and we're going to take this huge leap, and it's almost a leap of faith, you know, that we can use this new technology in in the forces of good. And so, you know, broke it out from my childhood. But, you know, kind of took the quantum leap. And then, you know, the academy. So, and   Michael Hingson ** 05:02 it kind of went from there, yeah, well, so you said that you left the Marines. Well, when you left the Marines, and you went then to a major company, and you started out in kind of initial leadership and so on, how did being a Marine help you in terms of dealing with an understanding leadership, much less what made a good leader and what made a leader, not necessarily a good leader.   Paul Hylenski ** 05:31 You know, for me, and I've done, I've done a few talks, and I've done a couple TED talks, actually, on this. And for me, the military is is is a great example of what they what I like to call the total leadership. So in business, normally what we do is we only worry about the people when we need them, or while they're at work or while they're accomplishing a mission. But in the military, we have to worry about the total person, because even the person's home life, or maybe things they have going on outside of the mission impact their ability to carry out the mission. And, you know, I've said a couple things you know about just both the military rewards people. So in the military, you get medals, and, you know, you get medals and awards for sacrificing yourself for the good of your people. But in business, a lot of times you get, you know, raises and promotions for sacrificing everyone around you for the good of yourself. And I think that's a flawed dynamic that I really got to see in action in the military, and I brought that into the civilian business life, do you   Michael Hingson ** 06:45 and looking back on it, if you will, and you talked about you saw leaders who were good leaders and not so good leaders in the corporate world. And I don't want to pick on the military, but did you see the same sort of thing at all in the military, or do they really weed out people who don't tend to to do very well in the leadership role? That's   Paul Hylenski ** 07:07 actually a myth. So most people think that there's only great leaders in the military.   Michael Hingson ** 07:15 You did find some that weren't necessarily so, okay,   Paul Hylenski ** 07:18 yes, yeah. And you know, like bad leaders tend to shape us in different ways, and sometimes better than the better leaders. You know, because you learn more from watching people who might be doing it wrong. But you know, it is great learning experience. I learned some things to do, and then I learned some things that did work, but yeah, absolutely, there are bad leaders everywhere. So   Michael Hingson ** 07:43 what would you define as as a bad leader? What are some things that you experienced or you've seen that made people not necessarily such great leaders?   Paul Hylenski ** 07:52 So for me, it's, you know, leading through intimidation and fear that was a practice that was made pretty common all throughout, you know, 1970s 1980s and the myth there was that people stayed because they were okay with the treatment. Well, in reality, the reason why they stayed to endure that horrible kind of leadership was because they had pensions. Well, the world now doesn't have pensions for most part. So people stay because they like the place or they like the culture. You know, another defining factor for me for leadership is, do I feel psychologically safe with that person? Yeah. And, you know, psychological safety and the ability to make state mistakes and the ability to make failures and view them as growth really defines a leader that's focused on the future and not just on the present or the past.   Michael Hingson ** 08:48 In the military, did people have much opportunity when they encountered somebody who wasn't necessarily a good leader to move elsewhere? I would think that that was probably more challenging to do than when you're working for a company, especially a large company, where you could transfer probably easier, is that true?   Paul Hylenski ** 09:08 Yeah, that that is true. So sometimes you had to endure it and and then you make the best out of a situation. And, you know, like I was saying earlier, sometimes that's where I learned, you know, as I was going through things that just didn't work, you know, and the way you talk to people and treat people, and just even the overall demeanor that you have as a leader, you know, matters. And everything you say is a communication, but everything you do is a communication as well. And a lot of leaders don't remember that, or they don't, you know, they don't visualize that I   Michael Hingson ** 09:45 know, for me personally, and you mentioned the whole concept of fear and intimidation, and I've experienced it from time to time for a variety of reasons, being blind and interacting with. People, I faced challenges because people tended to not necessarily view blindness as as they should. And so oftentimes I would have people say to me, Well, you got to work harder and different than everyone else, because you're blind and people aren't going to perceive you as being competent. Well, there's truth to that to a degree, but there are ways to approach that as a leader. And I would think that when you're telling someone all the time, you gotta be better, you gotta be smarter, and so on, as opposed to saying, how do we make sure that you shine as best as you possibly can? And I don't know when I adopted this method of operation, but one of the things that I discovered fairly early on was that as I was managing people, and when I started really hiring people and opening offices for companies, one of the things that I said to people was, look, I'm hiring you because you've demonstrated to me, or you've convinced me that you can do the job. So my job isn't to boss you around. My job is to work with you specifically to see how I can add value to what you're doing to make you the best performer that you can be. And what I discovered is that the people who really got that and understood it and chose to find ways that I could work with them and use the skills that I have, and oftentimes they took the lead in discovering what they thought that I could help with but we worked together, and when they got that concept, they really did perform a whole lot better than those who didn't get it.   Paul Hylenski ** 11:53 That's a great strategy.   Michael Hingson ** 11:55 Well, I think it's and it's important, because I think that fear and intimidation doesn't help anyone, and it doesn't help you or anyone to develop a real trust if you're just dealing with someone out of fear, as opposed to dealing with someone through trust and teamwork, it's a it can be a challenge. Yeah, I   Paul Hylenski ** 12:18 think you know, one of the things that we're finding out more and more and companies are finding out is they never really made significant headway to fix issues or to get real growth because of that fear and intimidation. And I mean, just take, just take mistakes. Right? If I'm afraid to make a mistake, I'm going to lie, cheat and steal my way out of that mistake. I'm gonna blame it on everyone else, but if I'm not afraid to make the mistake, then I'll tell you, as my leader, exactly what happened, and then as the leader, if you know exactly what happened, you can work corrective action and fix it and make the environment better. And that's where the beauty and the secret behind that is   Michael Hingson ** 13:01 well, or the other part of it is because you acknowledge the mistake and so on, the leader will let you do the corrective acting and take the corrective steps that need to be done, because especially that will be a good learning experience for you, but they're there to support you, which is really the issue.   Paul Hylenski ** 13:21 And I think when leaders change their mindset from failure being this negative connotation, and, you know, failure being this bad thing, to, hey, that's just another step towards our growth, you know. But what did you learn from it? Or what are you going to do different, right? All those things, then all of a sudden, people start to realize they're in a growth mindset. They can fail, they can learn, they can proceed, and then they end up growing. Yeah, and   Michael Hingson ** 13:49 I think overall, people really do want to grow. They want to evolve, but the leader is, or ought to be, the person to help really create that environment for people.   Paul Hylenski ** 14:04 Yep, and spot on. I mean, who wakes up in the morning and says, Hey, I'm going to be a loser today. I'm going to be a failure today, right? Nobody, so. But people fail, and people might not get something, they might not understand something, and you're spot on. The leader has to be the one that's their cheerleader or their coach or their mentor or giving them direction on Hey, you didn't really do well on this, but this is what you need to do next time. Similarly, a different way, or   Michael Hingson ** 14:34 you didn't do well. Do you have any idea of why? Because it's always great if you can figure it out. You know, I have worked with guide dogs since 1964 and it took a couple of dogs for me to develop and begin to articulate this. But what I learned is that every time I got a new guide dog, and we would spend time at the school or whatever, what I. Really doing there is beginning the process of creating a bond with a new teammate. And no mistake, dogs are as much a part of a team as anyone else. If you allow that to happen, most people really look down on on dogs, but the reality is that they have a lot of senses, and they have a lot to contribute. And the thing is, if you believe people like Cesar Milano and so on, the thing is, dogs really want to be a part, and they really want you to tell them what you expect from them. And in that sense, it's really cool. They don't have hidden agendas like people often do. And so the difficulty with people with hidden agendas is it makes it more difficult to trust them, and sometimes you can break through that. And the hidden agenda isn't such a hidden agenda that isn't necessarily a negative agenda at all, but we tend to be very closed in terms of trusting others, because we're always concerned about what hidden agendas they have. Dogs, I believe, do love unconditionally, but I don't think that they trust unconditionally. But the difference between a dog and a person is that a dog is generally more open to trust, unless something just really hurt them, which is something typically that it would be a person who did that. But dogs are open to trust. And if you create that trusting relationship, it is second to none.   Paul Hylenski ** 16:34 That's that's interesting. Know that?   Michael Hingson ** 16:38 Yeah, they The reality is that they want to please. They want to do a good job. So I've learned over the years working with guide dogs, it is an extremely stressful job for them, because they want to please. They want to make it work. And they're being tested whenever, for example, the harness is on, even when it's off a lot. But when the harness is on, they watch, and have to watch a lot what's coming up at the street corner, the curb is coming up. I got to stop at the curb and make sure that my person stops at the curb. I tell the dog to go forward, and the dog sees there's a hybrid car coming, and I don't know it, because it's in battery mode and so I don't hear it, but the dog, if I create a good, teaming relationship with that dog, the dog knows that it has the authority to not budge to make sure that we don't get smushed by the car. Likewise, if everything is fine, then the dog will go. But the dog has a lot of decisions to make in the in the guiding process. They don't lead, they guide. It's my job to know where to go and how to get there, and I need to learn that as I travel and make that happen. And the neat thing about it is that when the dog understands I'm doing my job, it feels a lot better about doing its job, and it knows what its job is. And in reality, what that ultimately means is that we form a good team, supportive relationship. And I think that is something that because just as relevant in person to person, leadership and teamwork as it is in person to dog relationships, oh sure,   Paul Hylenski ** 18:27 the ability to trust each other and feel safe with each other, absolutely. Yeah. So,   Michael Hingson ** 18:33 so you've done a lot. What got you started in dealing with AI? What? What attracted you to that? Yeah,   Paul Hylenski ** 18:40 yeah. My fourth book was actually titled The evolution of leadership. So aI had just kind of started coming online. I started researching AI, and then I thought to myself, Okay, well, now that I've researched it, I'm going to start actually using it. And then I went to actually input it into a few businesses, and once I realized, like, wow, like, I could automate 50 to 60% of the business with AI. And I started noticing, like we had time to be proactive, not reactive. Then, then I realized, okay, I'm we're on to something most anybody. If you ask them about AI, they're just going to say, chat, GPT. But there's, you know, 1000 different platforms. There's AI automations. So I thought, Okay, people just don't know. And, you know, the more senior people are, the least, the less that they knew about, you know, AI and chatgpt and everything. So I thought, Okay, well, the, you know, baby boomers and a lot of the you know, millennials, they're running companies right now, or they own companies, but they're the ones that are not able to really use AI or new AI. So you. Know, I've really tried to put a focus on teaching practical AI. So not just the, not just the theory and all the, you know, school type of material, but actually how to utilize AI to benefit you and your business. And that's been, you know, really fantastic since we kicked the academy off, we've gotten formally accredited. So when you take, you know, certifications, one thing that's different is a lot of places you'll take AI certifications, and you just get a little certificate, but no credits, and it's not formally accredited. And that was one thing we put a lot of attention into because as business professionals, the whole point of taking training is to grow in your, you know, career and grow in your job. So, you know, accreditation and credentials matter. But, yeah, that's what got me started, and then now it's become a passion. I, you know, I do free training for veterans. We actually even started a software as a service to help veterans put their disability claims in and streamline that process. So it's been it's been really fantastic. AI has opened up a lot of opportunities. How does AI   Michael Hingson ** 21:18 help in that whole process of doing the claims, applications and so on. What does it say? So it's   Paul Hylenski ** 21:23 absolutely great. So this was our startup company, which was a derivative off of Quantum Leap, and it's called vet mentor AI, so we'll be releasing it towards the end of the year, and we've already used, utilized it on, you know, test veterans, where they've actually allowed us to help them put their applications in. So the problem is that, you know, for first time submittals for veterans, it's a 70% rejection rate rate, so a lot of veterans either don't know what to do, or maybe they're afraid to do it. And then one of the big things is PTSD and anxiety. There's a fair amount of veterans that really have high anxiety, or maybe have issues from their PTSD, where this process is daunting and the fact of going in front of a medical examiner is almost impossible for them. So the way it does it, or what it does is it allows the veteran to basically in plain language, right? What's wrong? So they'll fill out a very simple form. It's something that you know, someone with basic education can fill out, and it's basically a questionnaire. And then we have a proprietary AI software that we actually built that analyzes all that data, and then it's trained on the VA rating manuals. It's trained on the VA forms, the VA website. And so what it does is it actually tailors the person's claim to the VA rating manual. And by wording it like that, it actually allows the veteran to get this comprehensive report, which even asks the person, Hey, did you have this medical documentation? Did you think about filing for this secondary claim and and so then the second part of this is we actually built an AI platform to allow the veteran to do a simulated CNP exam. So what a cmp exam is, it's a medical exam where the veteran has to go in and actually get examinated, and you know, then that that doctor will determine if they, you know, meet the criteria. So what we've done is we've actually utilized AI and allowed them to do their medical examination with an AI. It even has a voice, so that they can talk to it like a person and imagine and this has been wildly successful for our veterans that have high anxiety or PTSD, because they're able to practice their their CNP exam, and you know, it will critique their answers. It will let them know, you know, what, what their rating would be, and all this thing in the background. And it's really amazing, because then when they go in for their real one they've already practiced, and they are less anxious, they're less nervous about it, and they make better decisions. So the one great thing, and I'm so proud of this, because being a veteran, this was something that was really hard for me, was, you know, submitting my disability claims, so the average failure rate is 70% on the first time submission but with vet mentor, all of our veterans, we are currently at an 80% acceptance rate on first time submittals. So we've flipped the strip the script, and you know, instead of a 30% approval rate, we're up to an 80% approval. Boring and   Michael Hingson ** 25:01 it's interesting, because what I'm really hearing is that, to a large degree, the AI system is helping to train, much less helping to create the actual information that has to be submitted. So it's kind of a double pronged approach to solving a problem,   Paul Hylenski ** 25:20 yeah, and it's, it does it. It prompts them for, you know, something simple that I never realized in the beginning of the process was a personal statement. So it helps them to actually generate a personal statement about their illness or injury or disability. And then, even more than that, it prompts you to put it in the proper form. So most veterans don't know, but if you don't upload your personal statement in the 4138 Bravo form, they actually discount it. And there's a lot of veterans that are are submitting just a Word document with a little handwritten thing, but it, you know, the AI, actually, when we started doing this, the AI picked up that, hey, this must be done in this form. And when we were looking at it, we were like, Oh my God. We didn't even know that. So the AI taught us when we were actually making it   Michael Hingson ** 26:13 well. And how long have you been doing this? So   Paul Hylenski ** 26:17 we've been doing this for four months. Little over 20 veterans. So we're in the middle of, we're in the middle of the end stages of, you know, building the rest of the site and the platform. We basically, when we started, we kind of had three or four different types of AI systems talking to each other. So we're actually building and consolidating it just into one that's a nice little format for a user. And the beauty part with with our software is it's a one time lifetime fee, so you pay $50 which covers the cost of the AI software in the background, and you have it for life. So as your your disabilities get worse with age, because we all know they do. You have the software for the rest of your life, and it's for only $50 which is starkly different than the A lot of the companies out there, which you know they're preying on veterans. And what they do is they take 1000s of dollars or percentages off of their disability every single month. So that's one of the things that we wanted to do when I made this company. It wasn't to make money, it was to impact the world. So that's why we keep it just as a lifetime fee, just a $50 one time, and you're done. So the veteran basically just pays for the software is   Michael Hingson ** 27:43 bit mentor, a nonprofit like a 501 c3 company. So no,   Paul Hylenski ** 27:47 we're not right now. We haven't done any of that yet, just because we want to build the platform,   Michael Hingson ** 27:54 it's fair. Um, you've got to start somewhere, needless to say. So   Paul Hylenski ** 27:59 we've helped. We've helped over 20 veterans so far. So that was the big thing, was we get we got veterans in the beginning that we're like, Okay, well, let's try it out. And then, you know, we've done a couple pitches. We've, you know, been getting investments in, in the platform and everything. And the intention is, you know, I want to roll this out nationwide to help veterans. There's a little over a million pending disability claims right now, and if you just go off of the you know, the standard statistics, 70% of them will get rejected. Yeah, and that is a horrible thing for a veteran who maybe is having trouble at work, or maybe their disability is impacting their ability to get promoted and and to have to go through that after they've honorably served the country. You know that I'm trying to fix that?   Michael Hingson ** 28:53 Do you see expanding this and also working with people who aren't veterans by any chance?   Paul Hylenski ** 29:01 So we haven't thought of that. But that is a great idea. I was actually so we, we're in the VA Pathfinder system, because my intention in the beginning was actually to partner with the VA, because imagine a VSO, or, you know, one of the members from VA who are helping the veterans have this tool to help them. You know, I think that would change the game too   Michael Hingson ** 29:26 well. I'm thinking, for example, there are a lot of people with disabilities who have to navigate and interact with their state rehabilitation systems and so many other things that might very well benefit from what you're doing and also who will learn a lot, and that will help them with their confidence as well, which is kind of what prompted my my question, and my thought about it like   Paul Hylenski ** 29:50 we haven't yet, but you got my mind thinking now, and you know what happens when that,   Michael Hingson ** 29:54 there you go, yeah, well, that's, that's always, that's always a good thing, not. A problem. So when you started really integrating AI into healthcare and doing the things that you were doing, what kind of challenges did you run into, or are you running into?   Paul Hylenski ** 30:13 Yeah, the first one was when I started integrating it into business, I met a lot of resistance, because people don't understand it. So even something as simple as chat GBT, right? Just go real basic into AI. Chat GBT. There's so many people right now that either haven't used it or are not using it or don't even know all of the things that it can do. If you have a business, if you're a business owner, if you're a manager, if you are doing office clerical work, chat, GPT can probably boost your productivity just by 30% and you know, I mean instantly you will feel the benefit. I use it to write emails. I use it to do charts, data analysis. You know, there's a there is so many uses. You know, you can use chat GBT to build a game show that then you can use that game show to go train people on Excel. I mean, it's amazing the amount of limitless things that you're able to do with it. But chat TBT is literally like one grain of sand in the beach that is AI, and most people don't know that. You know, there's another platform that's make.com it literally builds automations. So this call our podcast right now, you could have an automation that it would literally transcribe the the podcast, then it could send it into four or five different directions. We could do Google Doc, we could do a Google sheet, we could put a summary about it. It would do everything all in one just by hitting one button. And so businesses are starting to use this because it's automating most of the clerical work that they do.   Michael Hingson ** 32:04 I know that I'm not using AI nearly to the extent that I could even chat GPT, and part of it has been that I've found some inaccessibility issues in some of the buttons that aren't labeled and so on. So gee, maybe I'll have to talk into giving me a better lesson on using some AI stuff, but I appreciate and understand the concepts of it, and so I know what you're saying, and I've used it to write articles in the past. And what I do when I when I bring AI or chat GPT into it, is I'll tell it to write something, and then my job is to look at that and massage it and make it my own and add my own stuff to it. And in fact, I've I've actually told chat GPT to create something, and I've told it to do it six or seven times, and I take the best of all of those, plus what I contribute to it, and turn that into the article that I actually publish. But the I think the most important part about it is that I really know what it's it's doing, and what I'm doing, and I know that I have to be the one to control it. I can't just go off and let chat, GPT create something and then submit it. That's not only worthless, but it's it's certainly dishonest. I've said many times. You know, teachers talk about students that use chat GPT to write their papers and all that, and then they turn them in, and sometimes you can tell that they're written by chat GPT, and sometimes you can't, but teachers are worried about that. My reaction, and I have a secondary teaching credential, so I do understand something about all this. But my reaction is, I think that for chat for teachers, chat GPT is great if kids go off and write their own papers, great if they use chat GPT to do it. Great because at the end of the day, you turn the paper in, and then the teacher calls you up during a period and say, not offend your paper, you're going to know real quickly who really did the work and who didn't. Yeah,   Paul Hylenski ** 34:11 and, and, you know, you brought up some good points there, right? So I have a, I have a colleague on LinkedIn who's the AI educator, and so what he actually has done is he's put a lot of AI into education, and there are softwares that a lot of teachers are using now that actually detect chat. GBT, yeah, detects AI. You know, one of the best things that people can do, and this is something that most people know nothing about, but you can actually create a digital twin of yourself, and it's very easy to do on open AI, so you can create an assistant that's actually trained on how you write, how you sound, right? And so this, we did this very easily for me, where I. Downloaded all of my posts, all of my interactions, and everything from LinkedIn, and I trained it on all of my books. So what happens is is you literally have an AI system that talks like you, has your same tone, has the same humor that you do. And when I do my posts and everything I do kind of the same thing you do, where I'll have my digital twin create the post and then I massage it or whatever, or go through it and read it. But what I've found is definitely for automations and definitely for email writing, these digital twins that you're able to create for particularly marketing as well. They're pretty spot on. I mean, you would have a hard time telling the difference between my digital twin and my writing. Of   Michael Hingson ** 35:48 course, you're leaving yourself open to the obvious question, which one are you the twin or the real person? But that's okay, yes,   Paul Hylenski ** 35:56 that's a good one today. Are   Michael Hingson ** 35:59 you a robot or not,   Paul Hylenski ** 36:01 no. But people don't realize that. And you know, the beauty part of it, Michael is like, so if you own a small marketing company, I mean, you could create 30 to 60 days of content in literally a couple hours. If you have a digital twin, and it changes the game, because you're able to scale businesses, you're able to do things. You can set automations up. You know, on some of my emails, particularly my personal emails, depending on what is in the email, I have automations where the AI actually responds to the email and it sends it to my drafts and then, so at the end of the day, we do as I look at the draft email. I click it, I click it, I click it up. I don't like the way that read it. I'll delete that and write it for real. But for the most part, I'd say it's about 90% perfect. And you know, I took, I take maybe about two hours of emails and turn it into about 1520 minutes. And so then it gives me an extra hour and some change every single day just on that task.   Michael Hingson ** 37:06 So here's a question, actually. So you do the process that you just described, and you go off and you massage some of the emails because you didn't like the way your twin created them. How do you then make sure that your twin gets trained on your changes.   Paul Hylenski ** 37:23 Plus, you know, I mean, you That's exactly it's the whole point is you have to what I'll do is I'll basically copy and paste the email, put it into my digital twin and say I did not like maybe the word, a couple of the words they used, or I didn't like the tone of this email, and so that's the beauty part with chat. GPT, yeah, and you know, any, pretty much, any, AI, the whole point of it is fine tuning it, so you have to, but most people don't realize that you can talk to the AI because it responds. So like, if you say, I don't like this, it's not going to do that, and it's so important, and one of the hacks that a lot of people don't do. So when I create something, let's say a business plan or a coaching plan, and I'll create it, I'll ask chat GBT to critique it for me and then improve it. So now I have it created, then I have it critique it and improve it, and pretty much, at the end of that, I have a pretty perfect document. And that's changed a lot of the the ability that I but most people don't realize you can actually have it critique its own work,   Michael Hingson ** 38:36 yeah, and that's and that's the reason I asked the question, because that's really the whole point. It is a, it is a process, and AI is opening so many things. I work with a company called accessibe, and accessibe uses AI and what's, what's called a, well, it's, it's a, it's a process where it can generate the code that will make a website more accessible, called an overlay. Some people say they don't work and so on, because they believe that you got to manually code it. But in reality, I can find manual coders who don't always do a good job. But what accessibe does is that they have created a system out of necessity. They're in Israel, and in 2017 Israel said, websites need to be accessible. And these guys that all started this company in 2015 and the company was making websites for people, well, suddenly they had to make everything accessible. And they created an AI process that does a lot of that. It's expanding and it's improving over time, because there are things that it it didn't do well, and there are things that it will get better at as it goes forward. But the fact of the matter is that it does help make websites a lot more inclusive than they ever were. So for example, if you're a person with epilepsy and you go to a web. Site that uses accessibe, and there are blinking elements on that page that could cause you to have a seizure. You can go into a particular disability profile on accessibe That's for people with epilepsy, and disable those blinking elements. And the way it all works is that accessibe's widget transmits the code not to the website and modifies the website code. It transfers the information directly to my browser and and my browser and my screen reader that verbalizes to me doesn't care where the code comes from, as long as it's there. So it's really pretty clever, and it and it's and it's making quite a difference. It's got a long way to go, but AI is new autonomous vehicles have a long way to go. They're pretty new, but they're getting better. So it's, it's a process, right?   Paul Hylenski ** 40:52 We're at the beginning of this, and it's, you know, starting to really grow. And so, like, you know, people, people just, you know, a lot of people are still resistant to it and, and there's good reasons for that, right? I mean, this is going to be very dangerous as much as it's going to be good, right? I mean, with the deep fakes and all the ability that you allow people to do with it, they but there's that much good with it too and knowing it. And once you start knowing it and knowing what to look for and learning it and everything, then you can start to pick up on maybe some not so good ways of using it, or, you know, the ethics about it, or, you know, the transparency about Yeah, how do   Michael Hingson ** 41:38 you balance the technological innovations and the ethics in, in what you do, yeah,   Paul Hylenski ** 41:45 for me, so that's part of what we teach in the academy. So like, the first and I have five levels there. Each level goes up, but in, in the first level, it's all about, like, AI and business. So there's a fair amount of, you know, ethics, transparency and everything about proprietary data, not putting certain data into it, you know. So for me, it's that is the biggest key, because especially with vet mentor, you know, you're dealing with really touchy areas, medical information and everything. And, you know, while it's kind of sanitized because of our process, you know, it's still it's new. And, you know, and with anything new, there's going to be some type of resistance, there's going to be questions, and people with the lack of information, they make up their own, right, and that's where you get a lot of the confusion about AI right now, but I think it's important to realize that, you know, this is new, so you have to tread carefully. And you know, the best way to actually protect yourself is to educate yourself, yeah, um,   Michael Hingson ** 42:55 and, you know, the internet and itself, it's got the dark web, and the web that's not so dark, and there are, there are going to be people who will misuse it, but what we we need to learn is how to bring ethical decisions into it, and over time, hopefully, we can bring down a lot of The the so called Dark Web, and let people know or or get people to understand that's inappropriate behavior. And I think the same thing with AI. And yes, you're going to see people who get fooled. You're going to have a lot of challenges, but there is so much positivity that can come from it that is is even more important than the negative parts,   Paul Hylenski ** 43:41 yep. And I think, you know, there's, there are companies out there, because I've talked to a couple of their CEOs that are actually building AI systems to detect negative AI, right, like, so they can detect the deep fakes and everything. And, you know, AI the one, the one touchy thing that it's done so in the in the past, you know, before the internet and everything, if somebody wanted to steal from you, they had to walk up to you and steal from you. They had to pick pocket you, or actually rob you. So you got to see the person's face as they were taking something from you. When the internet came, you had hackers that had no face, right? He was just this person on the other end of the computer, and they could steal your information or steal your money. Well, the problem with AI in this manner is, and why we have to be careful and we have to protect against this is, now it's your daughter. Now it's your husband, your wife, your boss, that comes on the screen and says, I need you to make this transfer. I need money, right? And it's really the thieves, but they've been able to clone, you know, your family member, so now the people stealing from you look like and sound like people that. You care about, and that is why it is getting drastically more difficult to identify some of these, you know, really tough ways that it's being used. So I'm excited to see the innovation that keeps us going to come out, you know, with some of these companies to actually screen for those deep fakes, because then I think once you can get rid of or regulate some of that negative usage, then people really will just focus on the positivity that it gets.   Michael Hingson ** 45:29 Yeah, because the reality is that it can be so positive for everyone, and that if people really learn that and catch on to it and ethically use it, there's, there's no end to the capabilities and the positive things that they can bring about.   Paul Hylenski ** 45:48 I mean, you have 10 year old children now coding websites because they've made it so easy they can literally type in to code a game. People are making their own games. You can go on Claude AI and literally make a web application. Just by saying, make a web application for a loan calculator. So you can create anything in the world. And before, I used to have to know how to code if I wanted to make something like that. Now I just type in what I want, and it spits it out,   Michael Hingson ** 46:20 yeah, yeah, and it's it is going to get better, which is really what makes it so cool. And I hope that people will catch on and understand that being positive and doing it ethically really is better and worth more than than the alternative.   Paul Hylenski ** 46:39 And I think so too. I think once we figure ways to have the AI protect against the AI, I think, I think it'll be even better, too. And, you know, I'm excited, because from the students that I've had in the academy, so many people from beginner level to where they thought they knew, you know, they thought they knew chat GBT. They thought they knew automations. It's been great because you see the light bulb click on, when some people are like, Oh, my God. Why was I taking a week to do that? And you just did it in five minutes. And you know, our level four is where you actually learn how to build a software as a service. And you know, our students walk away with a fully functional AI business. And there's not many schools, there's not many academies that you'll ever walk away with actually real practical knowledge or a real business.   Michael Hingson ** 47:38 Yeah, and that's what makes it so cool, and it it certainly helps to empower people a lot, doesn't it?   Paul Hylenski ** 47:45 Yeah, I mean, we had a school teacher build a CRM platform that then she took and she went and sold it to five different companies, and they're using her platform that we built in two days with AI, it was so crazy. And she's like, I never thought I'd be able to do something like this. And it's true, because five years ago, she would have never been able to do that, because that wasn't her specialty. Right now, you know, she built a fully functioning Software as a Service, and it was, it was the most beautiful thing to see. Her eyes light up at the end of it, where it was, like, I just built this.   Michael Hingson ** 48:24 Yeah, it is so cool that she's recognizing that she's still the one who did it and she used tools, but she's still the one who did it,   Paul Hylenski ** 48:34 yep, yep. And it's, that's really what's amazing is you can, you know, you show people, I bring up, you know, a lot of examples, but most, most people don't realize what they actually have the power to. And a lot of people come on, especially the level one people come in and say, I can't learn this. This is just so hard for me. And then once you start breaking it down to a very simplistic level of, hey, this is how to prompt. This is how the system reads your words. And once you understand that, then everything else starts to make sense. And it's so beautiful, because you have people, you know, creating things they never thought they could before, yeah. And   Michael Hingson ** 49:20 that's what makes it so fun. And people do want to be creative, which is great. You've written several books. I know one you've written. I'm intrigued about. We haven't discussed it yet, error proofing, humans Tell me about that.   Paul Hylenski ** 49:33 Yeah, so error proofing, I love the title. Oh, it's great. And, you know, I got so many comments on that so that book, actually, I'm so proud of it, because it was an Amazon bestseller. You know, I've been on a book tour with it and everything. So I originally brought that book up because I thought, okay, error proofing humans there. So everybody you know commented and said, You can't error proof a human. That. Is the whole point of the book. So every human in the world makes anywhere from three to five mistakes per hour, if they're trained on a topic. Now that goes up by 11 times, potentially if they're they're not trained. So you have people every day making mistake after mistake. Now, most of them are what they call micro mistakes, and they're detectable, right? So you can detect, okay, I typed in the wrong letter, so I hit the backspace or whatever. But when you're doing some tasks, if you have that many mistakes, sometimes you don't detect them, or sometimes you can't correct them, and that's when we have accidents and injuries and everything. So the whole point of the book is, what if you could error proof processes and finally make an error proof human so what we do is we follow, and I did all the in the book. It's all the science and psychology behind human error, how to eliminate it or mitigate it. And one of the one of the key strategies that I'll leave with, like your viewers and listeners, is the Swiss cheese method. Now you can use this in your in your house, you can use this in your business. And it was made up by air, created by a guy named James Reason. And what he said was every process was like a piece of Swiss cheese. It had holes that the error or the accident could go through. So the only way to truly error proof human is to layer peace upon peace upon peace. And every failure you have means that the process isn't robust enough, so you have to add another layer of process. And what happens is, after a while, just like pieces of Swiss cheese laid up on after each other, the holes don't line up after a while, and all of a sudden you have error proof humans. And so we've done this in multiple businesses, and it has transformed their quality numbers. It has transformed their safety numbers. And what happens is, and when you can get people behind things like this, you know, you change the entire culture of the of the company or the business, or even at home. You could do these things that I say it in the book. You can do this with your children. You can do this with yourself, right to to make less and less mistakes. And you know, one of the things that a lot of people don't realize too, one of the other key main things, and then I'll get off the book, but one of the key main things the book is, you know, a high frequency, low risk activity like walking. So 30% of all injuries in a workplace are slips, trips and falls. And you'd ask yourself, well, how come people can't walk? Well, they can walk, right? But, well, I don't look at my feet when I walk, because it's a high frequency low risk, so my mind becomes immediately complacent. But if I were to drive a fork truck, or, let's say, operate a crane with a heavy load, every little sound that thing makes, I'm going to be on super high alert so people don't typically get injured on those high risk, low frequency jobs. So what you have to do in a workplace is you actually have to change the risk dia or dynamic to make it feel more risky. And by layering process after process, and sometimes check after check, you increase the risk profile, which decreases complacency,   Michael Hingson ** 53:44 yeah, which makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Yep, and, and I think that that in reality, we take so many things for granted. Gi, I don't know. I think there are a lot of drivers out there who consider driving like walking. It's high frequency and low risk, and it's not. And the way they drive, though, you'd think they think otherwise, yep,   Paul Hylenski ** 54:06 and that's why there's a lot of accidents, you know, but, and you know, there's a study that said the most accidents happen closer to the person's property, closer to the person's house. And you know, when you look at that, it's because I'm getting closer to home. I'm comfortable with the area. I become more complacent, and now I might run through that stop sign, or I might, yeah, make that turn a little faster than normal. So it's it's really important in an environment, and as we as leaders craft our environment. We need to look at the risk profile. We need to look at our processes.   Michael Hingson ** 54:47 It's also true that what we have to do is to learn to be more disciplined about what we do. And I think that's a lot of what you're saying. When you get closer to home, you tend to be more undisciplined, but you've got to keep the discipline. Plan all the way through the process? Yeah, absolutely. And that doesn't necessarily always happen. Were you a pilot when you were in the Marines? No,   Paul Hylenski ** 55:10 so I was a, I was actually worked on helicopters in the Marine Corps, and then after the Marine Corps, I said, you know, I want to, I want to fly and and so I got my pilot's license. It was one of the best things I ever did in my life. And, you know, it taught me a lot about complacency, because being a pilot and checklists and everything, the entire cockpit is designed to defeat complacency, yeah, and, you know, but I was telling a story last week, you know, the most deadly time for a pilot is between 250 and 500 hours. And you think to yourself, again, these are experienced pilots, like, why would somebody, you know, be more dangerous than than a brand new pilot? And it's because of that risk protein as a brand new pilot, everything matters. I'm going through every single checklist item, every noise that the aircraft makes. I'm hyper vigilant. But after about 250 or 250 to 500 hours, now I'm confident. I'm used to the plane. I'm we might skip my checklist, I might do something riskier than normal, right? And that's the complacency death trap, right there.   Michael Hingson ** 56:28 Yeah. And so after 500 hours, you have done it enough that, in theory, it dawns on you. I've got to stay disciplined. I've got to do this the right way, like I did at the beginning, and it makes me safer, and it makes the flight safer.   Paul Hylenski ** 56:45 Yup and, and sometimes, and a lot of pilots have told me that sometimes during that little 250 to 500 you have a lot of near mistakes or mistakes that you learn from pretty quickly. Yeah and, and then that's enough for them to say, Yep, I gotta break myself of this. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 57:05 exactly, right. Well, and we're we're seeing so many things at airports now. It's crazy. I don't understand how so many airplanes either collide with each other, or other equipment collides with them and so on. How come we're seeing a lot more of that than we used to   Paul Hylenski ** 57:22 think. Well, I have to be honest, I think as the travel keeps getting more and more, right, you're going to probably see a lot more of this, because it's taxiing. So taxiing for a pilot is at one of those low risk, yeah, high frequency things, right? I'm just, I'm literally down, I'm not in the air. You feel safe because you're on the ground. You're, you know, you're steering it. And a lot of times, they're also very task saturated while they're taxiing. Yeah, so one thing most people don't see is while they're taxiing, they're going through checklists, they're prepping. And, you know, you don't have a good view of around you in the cockpit. You only have a window that you really can't see in the back. And you know, so the reduced visibility, the high you know, high task saturation, and then that, you know, high frequency, low risk. It's perfect environment for complacency to crop up   Michael Hingson ** 58:20 well. And the reality is, a lot of times it's not a pilot's fault that something happened. They're also relying on other people, whether it's air traffic controllers or whatever. And so there are just a lot of issues, and I think that it is something that hopefully National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA and so on, will work more on to try to eliminate more of those accidents. I have a friend whose daughter went on a vacation last Saturday with her husband, and as they were backing away from the terminal, they got hit by some sort of piece of equipment, and it to late, everything by a day. I don't know any of the details, but just so many of those things happen. We we've got to not allow things to be taken for granted. But I, I would not at all say it necessarily wasn't any way a pilot error, because there's no way to for me to know that, and it probably wasn't, but it still happened, which is, which   Paul Hylenski ** 59:19 is, there's humans everywhere. So humans are prone to mistake. And you know exactly the point of the book is, you're never going to error proof a human, but you can air proof processes. Yep,   Michael Hingson ** 59:32 you can do that. Well, if people want to reach out to you and learn more about you, what you do, maybe become involved in your courses and so on. How do they do that?   Paul Hylenski ** 59:41 Yes, so the best, and I love for people to do this. I have a fantastic network and a community on LinkedIn. So the best way to reach me, and you can reach me personally, is through LinkedIn. Just look up my name, Paul Hylenski, and then if you are interested in. Learning. Ai Mike, it's Quantum Leap Academy. So it's www, dot Quantum Leap academy.org, so it's gonna be.org yeahlin ski   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:12 for me,   Paul Hylenski ** 1:00:12 please. So, h, y, l, e, n, s, k, I,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:17 so, Paul Hylenski on LinkedIn, which makes sense? Yep, and that's it cool. Well, I want to thank you for being here and being a part of this today. It's been educational for me, and it's been a lot of fun. I value the time that we spent, and maybe in the future, if you think we ought to talk some more, I'm always glad to do that. We can, can do more of this, but I really appreciate all the sound knowledge and advice that you shared, and I hope everyone out there listening and watching appreciated it as well. Love to hear from you. If you would let us know what you thought about our podcast today, you can reach me through email, Michael M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, I b, e.com, or go to our podcast page, www dot Michael hingson.com/podcast, Michael hingsons, M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I N, G, s, O n.com/podcast, wherever you're listening, though, we hope that you like this well enough that you'll give us a five star rating as a review. We really value your reviews. We love them. Please give us a review. And if you've reviewed us on earlier podcasts, don't stop. We'd like to hear it about this one too. We really look forward to your comments and your thoughts. If you know of anyone who ought to be a guest, and Paul you as well. If you think of anyone else who you think ought to come on our podcast, we'd love to hear from you. We're always looking for new friends to make and new people who have stories to tell. So feel free to do it, and we, we'd love to to hear from you in whatever you do. So Paul, again, I want to thank you for being here. This has been absolutely a lot of fun and and I hope we get to do more of it in the future. Yeah. Thank   Paul Hylenski ** 1:01:59 you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity, and this has been great. Thank you, Michael,   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:07 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. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Robin Kanters is een paar jaar geleden begonnen als time-outdocent op een VSO-school. Ondertussen is Robin de Associate Degree-opleiding, Educatief Professional Beroepsonderwijs gaan volgen aan Hogeschool Windesheim. Zijn docent Anne van de Weg vertelt over de opleiding en wat je met zo'n opleiding kan doen.

I denne uges episode ser vi nærmere på ugens aktie-smackdown og de vigtigste takeaways derfra - og kigger på historikken på denne slags korrektioner på aktiemarkedet. Vi har besøg af investeringsstrateg Lars Skovgaard fra Danske Bank, der deler sine perspektiver på markedet. Ugens tema byder på en debat om ‘europæisk tech' – købsmulighed? Hvor står vi, og hvad bringer fremtiden? Derudover gennemgår vi en række spændende regnskaber og meget mere! Denne episode er sponsoreret af MBA på CBS. På CBS kan du tage efteruddannelsesprogrammer på 2 år. Læs mere på efteruddannelse.cbs.dk/mba. Denne episode er sponsoreret af NewDeal Invests PMINDI - nu en akkumulerende version og VSO-venlig. Der er indtil videre en minimumsinvestering på 750k DKK. Find den på Fundmarket.dk.Læs mere på ⁠Newdealinvest.dk⁠.NewDeal Invests nyhedsbrev: Newdealinvest.dk/nyhedsbrev/ Denne episode er sponsoreret af Finobo. Få et gratis økonomitjek hos specialisterne i låneoptimering ved at bruge linket:finobo.dk/gratis-oekonomitjek-aktieuniverset/Prøv den nye omlægningsberegner på Finobo.dk/beregner-omlaegningsberegner/?utm_source=aktieuniverset Tjek os ud på:FB gruppe: ⁠facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843⁠X: ⁠x.com/aktieuniverset⁠IG: ⁠instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast⁠

V Tolminu nocoj slovesna prireditev združenja VSO ob dnevu samostojnosti in enotnosti.Zgodil se je izjemen trenutek soglasja. Tako sprejetje in razglasitev slovenske ustave pred 33. leti vidi doktor Jernej Letnar Černič.Vlada o izhodiščih za obdavčitev nepremičnin. Bo z novim davkom uspela oživiti najemni trg?Marta Kos in Robert Golob o evropskih temah.Nova Slovenija zahteva ustavno presojo zakona o dohodnini. Podprli so jih tudi v SDS.Jeruzalemski latinski patriarh drugič od začetka vojne obiskal edino katoliško župnijo v Gazi.Reševanje dveh tujcev v Kamniško Savinjskih Alpah se nadaljuje. Gre za zahtevno nalogo, poudarjajo reševalci.Dom Danice Vogrinec je največji dom za starejše pri nas. Začenjajo z gradnjo treh novih manjših enot.Šport: slovenski smučarski skakalci vikend v Engelbergu končali z 10-im mestom Timija Zajca.Vreme: na zahodu že nekaj sonca, drugje oblačno, jutri vetrovno.

Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL, CEO of Echelon Front, bestselling author, and the host of the wildly popular Jocko Podcast. His insights on discipline, ownership, and mindset have transformed lives in boardrooms, on battlefields, and beyond. From leading combat missions in Iraq to helping businesses and individuals thrive under pressure, Jocko's approach to life is as relentless as it is empowering.In this episode of The Resilient Life, Ryan sits down with her long-time friend to answer some of the most-requested questions. From advice to transitioning service members, to improving mental health, and what's on Jocko's Thanksgiving table, don't miss this up close and personal conversation.CONNECT with The Resilient Life Podcast:Instagram SUBSCRIBE Get the latest video podcast on YouTubeGet the latest audio podcastCONNECT Ryan Manion on Social Media:Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - LinkedIn  LEARN about Travis Manion FoundationMEET Jocko WillinkInstagram

Our guest this time, Michael Rosenkrantz grew up in California and had, what he says, was a normal childhood. I would say that Mike grew up as a very curious individual. He went to college at the University of California at Irvine, and then, after receiving his Bachelor's degree, went East to Boston where he attended graduate schools at Northeastern University and Boston College. He earned Master's degrees in Sociology and Business. Michael then traveled around the United States quite a bit working in part for various nonprofit organizations. In 2009 he moved to India where he worked for the National Trust and became involved in helping persons with disabilities. By 2011 he had found himself involved with adaptive sports. He not only worked to help persons with disabilities become active in sporting events, but he also began working to educate others about becoming more inclusive. He eventually moved back to the States where he continued to promote adaptive sporting efforts. In 2019 Mike was a co-founder of SoCal Adaptive Sports. He will tell us about the organization. Even more relevant, Michael discuss Inclusion and its importance. This episode is not only quite inspiring, but it also helps put a lot of issues surrounding persons with disabilities into perspective. About the Guest: Michael Rosenkrantz has been working in the adaptive sport space since 2011 when he learned about wheelchair basketball. From 2009-12 Michael volunteered/worked as a Voluntary Services Overseas Volunteer with the National Trust which is part of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment-Government of India. He then worked in Nepal from 2012-16. Coming back to the US Michael was an Assistant Women's Wheelchair Basketball Coach at the University of Arizona and co-founded Southern Arizona Adaptive Sports. He then went onto to work in North Carolina with Bridge II Sports and moved back to California in 2019. In 2020 he co-founded SoCal Adaptive Sports and has been the Board President and Executive Director. Bio-Michael see greater societal inclusion as a social justice issue, having learned this from working overseas. His path to working with people with disability has been varied, having worked for numerous municipalities and non-profits including the oldest longest operating public market in the US in Lancaster, PA and Director of the Alliance for Living an HIV/AIDS Services organization in Connecticut. Ways to connect with Michael: Web: Socaladaptivesports.org https://www.facebook.com/palmstopinesparasports 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 subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . 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, hi everyone. I am Mike Hingson, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. Today. We get to chat with someone who was referred to me by our friend, Sheldon Lewis, who is involved in the nonprofit part of accessibe. That is he looks for nonprofits, especially in the disabilities arena, where he provides access to be to them at no charge, which is always a good thing. And Michael Rosenkrantz is one of the people that Sheldon has met along the way, and he suggested that Michael and I ought to do an episode of unstoppable mindset. And I guess I said enough right things that here he is. So Michael, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 02:03 Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 02:06 why don't we start kind of like I love to do. Tell me a little about the early Michael, growing up and all that.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 02:14 Sure, I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of California. Was always outside what town, and it was called Sepulveda at that time. No North Hills, okay? And, you know, always played sports since the weather was always pretty decent, yeah, a fairly usual childhood, nothing out of the ordinary, I would say. And, yeah, but I think it kind of shaped, you know, where I what I'm doing today, actually, that's for sure. Especially, no   Michael Hingson ** 02:55 difference, yeah, yeah. Did you go to did you go to college?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 03:00 I went to college. I went to UC Irvine.   Michael Hingson ** 03:03 Did you I don't know whether I knew that. When were you there?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 03:07 Yeah, I was there. Let's see that's a good question. 75 to 78   Michael Hingson ** 03:18 we overlapped by one year. Well, it's not to you, okay,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 03:22 thank you. Went to Irvine and then went to grad school in   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 03:29 in the Boston area, Northeastern and Boston College, and they got me out to the East Coast, and, you know, ended up living on the East Coast for quite a number of years, and have moved around, you know, quite a bit.   Michael Hingson ** 03:46 So what got you to the East Coast rather than staying out west at Irvine or somewhere out here?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 03:52 Well, grad school, essentially, just   Michael Hingson ** 03:54 decided that's what you wanted to do. Yeah,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 03:57 yeah. I had a professor at Irvine had started a program at Boston College that I was very interested in, and so I ended up, you know, driving in a U haul cross country and with him, and spent a couple years at Boston College and a little bit more than a year and a half at Northeastern University.   Michael Hingson ** 04:22 So what was your bachelor's degree in   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 04:26 bachelor's degree in political science? Started out as a, you know, wanted to be a dentist. About was very short lived, as I didn't do well in chemistry and such. And, yeah, ended up changing. And you know, all for the best. Of course, all for the best. So   Michael Hingson ** 04:45 what were your graduate degrees in,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 04:49 in sociology and also in business?   Michael Hingson ** 04:55 I remember being at UC Irvine in physics and. The year I started, which was 68 1600 people joined as freshmen in the bio side department. And one of the things that the School of Biological Sciences did, at least by reputation, to weed out a lot of the people who weren't going to really do well in biosci was that in your first year you were required to take your first or second year you were required to take organic chemistry. So by the end of two years, 1600 dropped to 200   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 05:41 Yeah, that'll do it.   Michael Hingson ** 05:46 So I didn't have to take organic chemistry, um, although I would have put up with it if that were required, but in physics, it wasn't. But I did take a year of bio side biology, one A, 1b and 1c which was a lot of fun, and that was requirement, but not organic chemistry, fortunately, which would have required memorizing lots of different kinds of reactions and so on. And memory has never been a problem for me, so I could have done that, but I'm glad I didn't have to.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 06:19 That's great. Well, so,   Michael Hingson ** 06:20 so you went off to the east and went to school back there, different weather than out here.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 06:30 Yeah, yeah, I remember wearing a very puppy down coat, and, you know, with a few snowflakes, a friend from New York just laughing, okay,   Michael Hingson ** 06:44 yeah, yeah, well, I'm sure that people laughed at me the first year I was back there, starting in October of 76 I moved to the Cambridge area and actually lived for a few months in a studio apartment in Back Bay Boston, and had to go to Cambridge every day. Well, had to go, went to Cambridge every day or work. And that was the first time I encountered lots of snow. And how they shoveled the sidewalks off and made sort of snow walls along the street gutters was just a very narrow pathway to walk through to get to the street, and I knew nothing about all that going into it. Well, I figured it out soon enough, though.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 07:33 Yeah, I could just imagine   Michael Hingson ** 07:36 the dog loved it. Loved to play with the snowballs. So what? What did you do after college?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 07:45 Let's see, after grad school, got married and then moved to the Bay Area Oakland and worked for the city of Oakland for a few years got me started working in the public markets a bit, which I really enjoyed, ended up moving back to the east coast for some 20 years now. Again, it moved to Pennsylvania after that, right there, who knows, live in Connecticut a little bit longer, and then moved back eventually, went back to the West Coast, moved to Colorado, lived in moved to India. Lived in India for a while. Nepal.   Michael Hingson ** 08:45 So were you married all this time?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 08:47 No, oh, I moved to Pennsylvania. I got divorced. Oh,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 08:55 but in the meantime, you know, I had two children. You know, they had a good childhood, and, yeah, just kind of pursued, you know, things that were important to me. And so when I was in, I was a VSO volunteer, I think the Voluntary Service overseas in 2009   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 09:24 and, you know, working with the Indian government, and that company started and working with people with disability and adaptive sports. So that's been my path pretty much since, you know, 2009   Michael Hingson ** 09:40 so what kinds of things did you do, or how did you get involved in working with people with disabilities over there?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 09:47 So I was working for the Indian government, autonomous body called the National Trust, which was part of the Ministry of Social Justice and empowerment. I. And my role was to develop and then implement a variety of workshops for nonprofits, NGOs, involved with people with disability throughout the country, which I did, and was also I was living in New Delhi, so I was Saturday nights when I was in Delhi, I would coach at the YMCA coach basketball. And in 2011 some friends from a group called wheelchair athletes worldwide came over to the country, and that got me started in wheelchair basketball. And you know, I've just continued kind of on this path since that time. And you know, very much led to when I came back to the country, living in Tucson for a little bit, living in Raleigh, Durham area for a bit, and then back to California in 2019 and incorporating this nonprofit, along with some others, in May of 2020, and you know, we've continued. We've grown working throughout Southern California. And you know, I feel we're making an impact.   Michael Hingson ** 11:34 Well, going back to 2009 you started in New Delhi, and they had you starting to work with people with disabilities. What did you think about that, that that certainly was a different population than you were mostly used to being involved with so what? What were your thoughts or, how did, how did all that work out for you? What did you learn? I   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 11:55 hadn't really worked with people with disability before. I've been in Connecticut, you know, had a few different roles, but one of them was as director of an HIV AIDS organization, which was really good. So that got me more into the, you know, the nonprofit world, and kind of what that meant in working with people with disability, again, I worked, you know, primarily with the with the NGOs, with the organizations teaching them about fundraising and strategic planning, things to keep them really go, going and growing, becoming sustainable. So, you know, in India, in you know, disability looks different than it does here. You know, if you live in a village, a rural area, difficult, definitely, the thing that I learned, though, think was about advocacy and how important advocacy is. And, yeah, I think that's the thing that really put me on this path, in that, you know, people with disability are the largest minority population in the world. And about, you know, 15, 16% of worldwide population are people with disabilities. So it's a huge, huge number. And even, you know, in India, even without the kind of resources that we have in the US, there was a lot of movement in terms of trying to make structures much more accessible. You know, I saw the fight that that advocates had, and I realized that, realized that, you know, this is very much a social justice issue, and so that that really appealed to me. And then the, you know, the sports aspect, where, in India there weren't a lot of adaptive sports, you know. But since that time, obviously, things you know, things have changed and sports have grown. There are more people playing adaptive sports, yeah, certainly   Michael Hingson ** 14:32 back even in 2000 2001 and even later, the level of adaptive sports in the US wasn't what it is today either.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 14:48 Yeah, well, I mean, it's certainly grown. You know, as more awareness is created about capabilities, as more awareness is created about, you know, removing barrier. Barriers, leveling the playing field, creating greater access. But you know, the thing that I saw in both India and Nepal, where I lived for four years after living in India for three years, was that accessibility was just a huge, huge issue. And you know, that starts with accessible sidewalks, or even having sidewalks, you know, that people could, could actually walk on. Yeah, so it's it, you know, it's a different it's a different access is very different than kind of what it is here. I mean, I realize there's a very long way to go. I mean, throughout the world, you know, especially in places like the US, with a lot more resources, but you know, there are a lot more opportunities here than in places, you know, like Nepal or India. I mean, I realized that there still needs to be a lot more priority placed on accessibility level in the playing field, creating societal inclusion. But certainly in my time back in the US, I've seen the growth of an interest in adaptive sports. And I you know, la 2028 with the Paralympic Games, is certainly it's already making a huge difference, especially in the LA area. How so? Well, so you have la 2028 you know, is fully functional. And so staff from LA 2028 you know, I see them in a number of adoptive sports fairs. I see the city of LA growing their programming terms of adaptive sports. You know, I see my friends organizations, Triumph Foundation, Angel City, which really la greater LA area, you know, just doing a whole lot more, and there being a lot more interest from people with disabilities in participating, but also in the able bodied neurotypical community, you know, volunteering a whole lot more. So I think you know all of those things with this goal of really making you know, huge impact in 2028 is, is making a difference. But you know, it has to continue, right? You have to have more municipalities creating adaptive sports a level in the playing field. And so, you know, that's one of the things that I'm working on, not necessarily, necessarily with La 2028 in mind, but more, you know, Southern California is an area where the weather is fairly good, and so you can play, you know, all year round. And and therefore, why aren't there adaptive sports being offered on a consistent basis in municipality, south, Southern California. So all of these things, you know. And then you have move united, which is the industry Chamber of Commerce, which is really making a difference. And I see more adaptive sports organizations joining, you know, with move united, so it, you know, it's happening. Change happens slowly, but I can see lots of light and lots more offerings, especially throughout Southern California,   Michael Hingson ** 18:58 something that I kind of wonder, and I asked the question, not being well educated in the whole area of adaptive sports, but in general, in some ways, philosophically, adaptive sports is still a separate But potentially equal environment. Can Can people who participate in adaptive sports be integrated into actually participating just in the regular sporting events, or are they so different that there's no way to really integrate the two? And I and I asked that, because I did have someone as a guest a while ago who was talking about, like wheelchair marathoners, who actually go faster than regular runners. And so, you know, is that an advantage or a disadvantage, or whatever? But are there ways to integrate any of the two so that you could have so called Able bodied people? And I, and I use it in that term, um. Um, participating with people, say, who are in wheelchairs or whatever? Yeah,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 20:05 that's a that's a really good question. A few years ago, when I was living in Tucson, we had a summertime Wheelchair Basketball League, and so you got people with disability participating with people, you know, over able bodied women. It was I thought it was great. It was really fun. You know, the True, true inclusion, the program that I run in Riverside, an after school program, city of Riverside, it's for children, and that is an inclusive program. So I think in many cases, yes, and I think that you know schools and other some other programs are looking to do more inclusive sports. But I don't think that's it's always the case, right? I think there are times with certain athletes with certain abilities that it makes sense to have, you know, adaptive sports,   Michael Hingson ** 21:29 yeah, I don't know about wheelchair tennis, for example, or even wheelchair basketball, whether you could fully integrate them. I don't know enough about them to to know so   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 21:40 in in in Wiltshire basketball, people get a certain number of points depending on their disability. So sometimes able bodied would be a 4.5 for example. And you can only have a certain number of points on the court at one time, like one of my friends, Keith Wallace, actually does a league, Wilshire Basketball League, where he allows, you know, I mean, it's just inclusive. It's just an inclusive thing. Whereas, you know, a group like the National Wilshire Basketball Association is specifically for, you know, people with disabilities, so they're not making it at an get an inclusive thing. And, you know, that's fine. I mean, that's, you know, that's how they run their lead. So I think the more that you can do inclusive sports and and have people without disability try adaptive sports, the better. Actually, we do an example of that. So we do a school based program called sports for everybody. It's a program that a similar program that I did when I lived in North Carolina and worked for an adaptive sports organization there. So we go into schools. We bring sport wheelchairs. We set up three stations teach, you know, all the children how to push the sport wheelchair. We do Boccia and do sitting volleyball in a disability etiquette piece. And so this is a way to educate and create greater awareness about capabilities. And I think that's that's really key for, you know, removing barriers, creating more access and creating greater societal inclusion. That is, you know, and I asked the children, and it's all grades, I asked the children, I say, Well, do you know someone with disability? And you know, inevitably, I would say, you know, 40, 50% of the children say they know someone with disability. And you know, by the end of the session, I'm asking, so can you play with someone with disability? And all the kids are, yeah, of course we can, but you know, we have to adapt. So   Michael Hingson ** 24:13 adapting, adapting is a two way street. But yeah, yeah,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 24:16 yeah, no, that's right. So I think that's and ultimately, you know, I'm looking at, how do you change society so that there is greater societal inclusion, and it doesn't matter you know what your ability level is, you know what's going on with your body, but that everyone can play together, right?   Michael Hingson ** 24:47 Well, one of the reasons that I asked the question was, I have a friend who, for many years was a national rowing champion and participated in rowing at the Paralympics. And I asked her, Why don't you. To participate in the regular Olympics rowing teams, and she said they won't allow that yet, you know, and she acknowledged that eyesight isn't an issue in rowing, but you know, maybe that will will change over time, but it is a growth issue just the presumption that disability means you can't do the same things that other people can do. Certainly there are areas where that's true. I am not going to watch television and make determinations about visual effects. That doesn't mean, however, that I can't watch television and I can't get a lot out of it, and it also doesn't mean that I don't encounter television commercials that have content where they never say what product they're advertising. And so they they systematically leave some of us out that shouldn't be a problem that I face, but inclusion is something that we really haven't totally adapted to and agreed needs to be part of our world.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 26:11 Yeah, I think you know that South African runner victorious? Was it? Yeah, I believe, I think you participated in the Olympics. I'm not sure, but I think there are, there probably are areas in the Olympics, or somewhat disability could participate. I mean, I, you know, I wouldn't want to see someone doing standing basketball and in a wheelchair, you know, playing in the Olympics, because I think, you know, having a wheelchair might be difficult when you know someone's running And standing right, yeah, that might not go together, but you know, one of the best archers in the world is a guy without arms, and so, you know, why couldn't he participate in the Olympics? I mean, he may choose to participate in the Paralympics, but yeah, there probably are, like, a full range of sports where, you know, it shouldn't really matter whether, whether you have a disability, but that you could participate, you know, in the Olympics, because they're all, you know, when it comes down to it, Paralympics, Olympics. I mean, these, they're all you lead athletes, you know, and they're just incredible people. Some may just have, you know, a disability, but it shouldn't really make a whole heck of a lot of difference. I think for, you know, recreation programs that you can do a lot more inclusion and, you know, but just being aware that some people need one on one assistance. So again, I, you know, I, I kind of celebrate when like the programs that I do, especially with youth, are inclusive, because many times, parents don't understand what adaptive sports are, so they just sign their kids up to participate. And I say, Okay, that's great, sure, of course. But I also take the time, you know, to talk to the children who are neuro typical, able bodied, and say, you know, look, you may have noticed that, you know, this person acts a little bit differently, and so you need to be aware that, you know, maybe this person is autistic, right, yeah? Or has intellectual disability, and the kids, you know, they'll look at me with understanding and say, Okay, now I now I get it, and maybe I can change a little bit of the way that I interact, you know, with that person, which I think is really important, yeah? And I think that's the thing that brings about more societal inclusion.   Michael Hingson ** 29:25 One of the things, and I've said it on this podcast a number of times, is we've got to get beyond thinking that disability means lack of ability. And I've had a number of so called diversity experts on and they always say, but disability begins with dis, which is a lack of and I have discovered and learned and react when I hear that by saying things like, okay, then where does this come into the word disciple or discrete? You know, the reality is, dis doesn't need to be a lack. Lack of like with blindness, we always hear about visually impaired, which is such a gross term on so many levels, because visually we're not different and impaired, we are not and why do you compare how much eyesight I have to how much eyesight you have? We've got to get beyond believing that disability means a difference that makes some of us less than some of you, because everyone has gifts, and what we really need to do is to promote and understand each person's gifts and figure out how to help them use those gifts. Yeah,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 30:36 well, that's you know, conversations about language and what people want. And when I was in India, so the the CEO of National Trust said, you know, it's discover ability, right? Put cover in there. When I use the word, or I've heard the word, differently able, yeah, one of my friends gets really pissed off and said, you know, come on, I do too, and that's okay, so, but I think it's more about it's not about disability. It's about, again, how do you create greater access, given that, you know, a lot of the systems and structures we've created did not have a person who, you know, may be blind in mind, right? And so, I mean, I think that's the thing intellectually, which we need to think about and change. And a lot of that, you know, is happening in New Delhi. When I was there, that's what the advocates were working on, you know, how do we change? How do we change the sidewalk so, you know, how do we ensure that all the restrooms have large enough openings to so that a person, a wheelchair, can fit in, right? And that's, you know, that's, that's a huge, huge discussion, but you're right. I mean, language, language does make a big difference. So I, you know, I always try to be careful and think about the language. But, you know, the reality is, how do you create greater access? So it's not, you know that person has a disability, but that person doesn't, you know, the person who maybe is blind or uses a wheelchair automatically, automatically, can get into a building, or, you know, into a restroom, or, you know, so there isn't this, yeah, there isn't this difference. I was in Israel a couple years ago for something called the Maccabee games, and I was coaching our wheelchair basketball team, and it was really curious to me, and somewhat frustrating when I saw on the hotel where we were staying at in Tel Aviv, it said handicap parking. But, you know, there was no, there was no place like for the person in the wheelchair to go, to get up, go in the front door. They had to go behind all the cars and all that. Yeah, excuse me, and you go, Well, come on, you know, that's not creating access. Or, you know, the front door that says, you know, handicap accessible, but yet, there's no button on it to push, and the doors are so heavy that you can't really pull it open, right? So, you know, you kind of scratch your head and go, Well, wait a second. This is really not, not creating greater access for people. And so it kind of defeats the purpose right to to have these signs and say all this, but yet, you know, the reality is, it's not, it's not accessible. So, you know, you got to think more about that. How do you make things much more accessible, so there isn't this difference. You know, we don't point to someone and say, Oh, they have a disability, and that's going to take time.   Michael Hingson ** 34:10 It is going to take time, and it takes involving some of the people who are actually being affected by the decisions. You know, several years ago, Israel did pass regulations that said all websites need to be accessible, and people took it, I think, in general, pretty seriously. I work with accessibe, as you know, and accessibe came out of needing to make websites inclusive, by three guys who had a company that made websites for people, and suddenly had to magically make them usable. And so they did, and they came up with a product that helps a lot in making websites usable and inclusive. Around the world, lots to do, and they're working on a lot of projects with that, but still, yeah, it's it's all about really involving the people who are affected by the decisions that you make. And clearly, if someone said that something was accessible, like a door, but they didn't have a button. You got to kind of wonder, who did they ask, or where did they consult to decide that that made it accessible? And so, you know, much less using the word handicapped in today's world, more and more, we're recognizing not a good thing to do, but you know, one of the things that that I hope over time, people will recognize is that disability is really a characteristic that everyone shares. It just manifests itself differently. I mean, you're light dependent, you know, so if the lights go out, you're in a world of hurt. Doesn't bother me a bit, but, but the reality is that we've got to raise consciousness. And it is a process. It is a slow process. And, you know, there are just so many areas where there is a lot of work to be done, but I think it's also important that we really try to get the work done. And if people refuse to listen, sometimes we have to take a harder stance than we might have in the past, but it is what we got to do. Well, you   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 36:24 know, as I say to the children that we educate in our sports, everybody program, if you live long enough, you're going to have a disability. I mean, there's no getting around that. And so, you know, understanding that now and again, you know, I keep talking about creating greater access, and thinking about that is, I think, is really, really important and very key. You know, I think about what's going on in Gaza now, and of course, they're going to be many more people with physical disability. And you know, Israel has a center for people with disability to play sports and all that. Obviously, we don't want to create, you know, more people who are amputees. But, you know, given the state of the world, you got to think about, you know, we are creating more people with disability. There's no doubt about that. Yes, but then how do we so how do we help those people once, you know, hopefully wars end, to participate fully in society, and it is about removing barriers, you know, making the world very accessible to everybody, you know, with an emphasis on body, no matter what their ability, who they are. So it's, you know, for me, it's personally, it's really important to create lots and lots of opportunities, and ensure that these opportunities are accessible. You know, whether it's sports, whether it's art, whether it's being able to go to professional sporting event, you know it's about it is about educating people to a colleague and I actually train coaches, ice skating coaches at our local ice Plex, you know, and working with people who are autistic, people with physical disability, people with other developmental disabilities. And so now we're embarking hopefully, on a program to train municipal parks and rec staff about working, you know, with people with all different abilities and and part of that, you know, Michael, is, it's demystifying, working with people with disability. Because I think many people think, you know, there's this, there's this magic, right? And I can't do it because I've never been trained on how to work with someone with disability. But I don't think that's it. You know, for me, it's been a matter of just experience, just getting in there and and doing it, and learning, you know, through sometimes making mistakes, but learning to lose mistakes and saying, okay, you know, I love sports and so, you know, I can work. I can work with anybody and that, and that's proven to work very well, you know, from non verbal people to, you know, people. People who are deaf. I mean, I, you know, I feel like I can work with anybody. And, you know, maybe it requires more patience and allowing a little more time for someone to process what direction I'm given. I've given rather but, but still, it's, you know, and I think that gets back to your question of, should we have more inclusion? And I think probably, over time, we will. But again, it's, it's this kind of taking the mystique out of working, you know, with stuff entrepreneurs who just has different abilities, you know, and who, does take longer to process, you know, direction   Michael Hingson ** 40:46 well. And the reality is, people with what are more traditional disabilities or not. The bottom line is that not everyone has the gifts to do some things. Not everybody's going to be good at basketball or tennis or golf. There are some blind people who play golf, and there are many blind people who don't play golf. There are some sighted people who play golf and are good at it. There are lots of people who don't play golf or who play at it but aren't very good. The reality is it that we need to not make the so called Disability the reason why something doesn't work? You know, people say to me all the time, well, of course, you didn't know what happened on September 11, even though you were in the building because you were blind, you couldn't see it. And of course, my response to that is, you got it all wrong as usual, and I don't say the as usual, but you've got it all wrong. The airplane hit 18 floors above us on the other side of the building. How was I supposed to know? How was anyone supposed to know what happened? I went down the stairs with 1000s of people who had no clue what had happened because they didn't see it and it had nothing to do with seeing it or not seeing it clearly, we had to get out of the building because of the way the building behaved. But you don't blame it on someone's so called disability. It's more common sense than that, but we haven't learned to do that collectively yet, and I hope it is something that over time, people will come more to realize,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 42:20 yeah, you know, again, I think it's, it's more about is there, is there an opportunity for someone to come out and try golf or basketball, right, to see if they like it? You got, you know, there's some. So we do golf. We did golf yesterday, and, you know, that's not one of my favorite sports. But, you know, for for the athletes who came out who wanted to play great, and they like it good, you know, I mean, I, I was egged on, you know, to try and do it. And it took me, let's see how many shots take me, five or six shots for me to hit the ball, you know? And it's like, I'm not. Golf is not my game, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 43:07 my, my British, New Zealand and Australian friends notwithstanding, golf is still faster than cricket. But, you know,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 43:15 I guess I got so I've heard, yeah, but, but it's, it's more about Yeah, I think the key word here, as I keep saying, is access. Correct, if the sport, if the art class, if the dance class is not offered, then certainly, you know, we put up barriers to participating. And so that's where things need to change. Again. It's, for me, it comes back to leveling the playing field, no matter what that playing field is. You know, it could be art, it could be dance, whatever. So that's where we all need to participate. And that's where, you know, municipalities, I feel, have a very key, key role, because they're managing, you know, fields and community centers and all that. And they have to prioritize, you know, adaptive sports. They have to prioritize, you know, saying this is an inclusive program. You know, anybody who wants to can come in and play, and they have to prioritize training their staff, so staff feels comfortable in working with everybody.   Michael Hingson ** 44:30 And you also have to learn to take out the disability and really look at people's gifts. I mean, as you pointed out, some people are going to play golf better than others. You might figure it out someday, though, by the way. So maybe you shouldn't give up yet. Maybe I hear a little bit of doubt there somewhere. Tell me. Tell me more about SoCal adaptive sports. You know what? It's all about, what you do and and what you're accomplishing with it? Yeah.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 44:59 Thanks. So this, you know, I told you, I've been working kind of in the adapt with sports space since 2011 when my friends from wheelchair athletes worldwide came over to India. And so it's been, it's been a, definitely an evolution for me. When I came back to the US, I was able to be an assistant coach. This was in 2016 I was able to be an assistant coach at the University of Arizona with the women's wheelchair basketball team. So the got that got me more kind of into this. And then I helped to co found a nonprofit in Tucson called Southern Arizona adaptive sports, which I left before it really took off. And it has taken off due to my friend Mia handsome, you know, went out of North Carolina for a year and a half and then came back to the US work first, I mean, to California, worked for a small non profit in Coachella Valley. And then, you know, when COVID hit, parting of ways, and said it was really time to start, kind of my own thing. Co founded the organization, and I really appreciated kind of this journey which started in in India, this path, because I, you know, I live by, how do we create, again, numerous opportunities, and, you know, I'm able to work throughout Southern California, but numerous, just great organizations, a lot of partnering. And so we offer programs, you know, we offer basketball, tennis and pickleball. We're working with a hiking program. We're working with a group called Friends of the desert mountains to lead our hiking program, which is now three years old. We're working with Special Olympics. We're working with acute autism. I'm working with a group called Desert art. You know, we go sailing. So we work with a group of California inclusive sailing. We work with challenge sailors in San Diego. We've done trips to a place called calf find a ranch where athletes can participate in numerous activities. We've gone to professional sporting events. You know, as I mentioned earlier, we've done, we're doing after school programming. I'm working with a school district. We've worked with over 3000 children at Coachella alligator bike school district. And now we're going to start working with other school districts. So it's really, you know, it's a lot of different things that we offer, I think, in an effort to, again, let a level the playing field, a lot of education, which is vital, a lot of teaching life lessons through sports and it, you know, it's, it's about I can, as opposed to, I can't do this. And when I coach, you know, if one of the athletes says this is too hard, I can't do it, I say, you need to try it. And yes, you can. And then they do, and ultimately, you know, that leads to other things, right? That leads to maybe I can wash my clothes, I can wash my dishes, I can get a job, I can get an apartment or a house. And I think that's the really important piece. That's really important piece again, for me, you know, it's not just playing sports. It's playing to the best of your abilities, whatever you know those are. But then it's taking all of that and say, okay, you know, I'm going to make decisions for my life and what I'm passionate about and what I want to do.   Michael Hingson ** 48:57 Yeah, because the usual I can't isn't that they can't, it's that they've learned through whatever society has offered them that they can't, when that isn't necessarily true at all. Well,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 49:12 I think that's right, and so I provide. You know, I don't coach anybody differently than I coach anybody else. I mean, maybe, you know, for some people, obviously, I, you know, have a bit well, I have patience, but maybe have a bit more patience, you know, wait a little bit longer for response and all that. But I push people because I think it's, I think it's important to do that, you know, I don't think it's okay to for someone to say, well, I can't do it because it's too hard. Well, no, you're going to try it and, you know, if you can't do it after I'm really trying, that's okay, but you're not just going to give up, because you're not going to give up. You know? Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 50:01 yeah. We, we are taught all too often, all too much to give up rather than really being curious and really exploring and trying.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 50:11 Yeah, you know, I've been, we have the BNP service open happening this for the next couple weeks out in Indian Wells, and I was able to see, you know, one of the women tennis players. And, you know, I thought, Wow, this woman hits the ball so hard. You know, she's only 21 but you know, she's been doing that for hours, endless hours every day, and it's not to say, you know, that I'm going to spend endless hours shooting hoops, but I'm going to play as much as I need to, so that, you know, I think compete on some level. And excuse me, I think this the same thing for, you know, the athletes that I've been working with, it's you may not play every day, right? You may not, but in the time that we're together, we're really going to push and, you know, we're all going to play to the best of our abilities, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 51:20 how do we really work to level the playing field?   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 51:24 Well, you know, I just, I just had an article published on the National Parks and Recreation website, and in that, I wrote about municipalities. And as I indicated earlier, I said, you know, municipalities really have the power to change things again, because, you know, they have the infrastructure, they have the facilities. So it takes them again to prioritize, adaptive, inclusive sports, you know, and really push this stuff. So I, I see, you know, I see municipalities doing adaptive sports, bears, right? Perhaps I'm seeing more municipalities offer, you know, adaptive sports. I think that's going to really change. That's going to really level the playing field, I think, as our younger you know younger people, and even you know those of us my age, should you know, have greater acceptance for removing barriers and say, Hey, this person's in a wheelchair, but they want to participate. So how do I make that happen? I think that levels of playing field, I think, yeah, as people become, you know, more empathetic towards others and their situation, you know, can put themselves in, you know, another person's shoes, or even consider, well, what? What if I had to use a wheelchair or,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 53:09 you know, to get around? How would I do it? Certainly, that changes things. I think, as we enlarge our world, which is not an easy task. You know, if   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 53:23 you've only lived in one part of the world for all of your life, you know, and haven't experienced other societies, maybe your empathy is not as great. But, you know, we live in a world that's, I mean, that's very connected, and so as we have more understanding that also levels of playing field, you know, it's, it's not only for people with, you know, we use the word disability, but it's, it's for everybody, right? It's   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 53:52 no matter what ethnicity you are, or, you know, religion you are, or you know what, however you choose to live your life,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 54:05 there has to be greater understanding. But I think that that levels things for everybody, and that that again, you know, it's an it's an evolution. So it's going to take, it takes time. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 54:18 it, it is a process. And we, we do need to be committed to doing it, but it is a process and and hopefully we'll get there, yeah, and that we'll we'll see a lot more inclusion than we do. My late wife was in a wheelchair her whole life. I remember once at Christmas time, we wanted to go see the Rockettes, and we went to Radio City Music Hall, and they were supposed to have accessible seats, and they didn't. They they didn't move things around so that people in wheelchairs could have a seat. And it was a little bit of a frustrating situation. We pushed back on it, and they said, sorry. Do. Don't have anything, and we the next day, we called and talked to people at Radio City, and then a couple days later, miraculously, they found accessible seating for Karen, where, where she and I could sit next to each other, and and, and it worked out, but it was just interesting, the cavalier attitude that they had when radio, city music, Hall, of all places, shouldn't have even had that issue come up. But it did. Yeah, when was that? Oh, gosh, it was probably in, I would say 1999 or 2000   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 55:42 Yeah. But it took you and Karen to, kind of, you know, push back and say, Hey, for people to, you know, I mean, literally, open their eyes and say, Oh, huh, yeah. We need to make sure this is accessible, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 55:57 And there's still many examples of that today. It's, it is. It's all about education. It's all about awareness raising, you know, which is important to do well for you, you you do a lot of different things. How do you maintain a work life balance? You must have some time when you rest a little bit. I would think,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 56:19 you know, a bit, but I think, you know, I've been very fortunate in that I love sports. I very much see my work as a social justice kind of issue, although, you know, at times I think I should be doing, maybe I should be doing other things, you know, that, have, you know, so called greater importance, like climate change and whatever else. But, you know, again, I'm very fortunate that I found this even later in life. So it's, it's not a question of Sure, there are times when I feel really tired and, you know, kind of beat up. But when I get on the playing field and I'm coaching athletes, you know, there's nothing else kind of going on in the world at all. And so I think, you know, I know, you know, that focus really gives me a lot of energy. Um, you know, and to to see children in the in our school program, you know, who then come to another program and I say, Oh my gosh. You know, we're making an impact. They really get it. So that kind of thing really keeps me going. You know, this is a seven day a week job. I mean, there's no doubt about it. And look, I'm a co founder, and so, you know, I'm, we're still building to make this sustainable. So it's not a it's not something that really weighs on me in that, oh, I need to take, I need to go out and rest now, because, look, when I'm coaching, I'm also exercising, you know, yeah, and so it's not where I'm sitting at a desk. But, I mean, there are times when I do, when I write brands, but so I, you know, I feel fine with the way things are. Yes, you know, I need to hire more staff to help out. But for me, this was all it's very positive that, you know, I can be an entrepreneur, I can be a coach, and I and I feel like I'm hoping you know others and my all my small part of of the world. So your question is relevant, but it's also a little bit irrelevant too, right? Because I just, yeah, I just, I just do well,   Michael Hingson ** 59:07 I would also submit, you know, is climate change really more important? I mean, it is very important, but some people have the gift to do that, right? And so the other side of it is that making society more aware of important issues is, in its own way, just as important. Yeah, and you, you seem to do it very well, so I wouldn't denigrate it a whole lot. I think it's extremely important to do what you're doing. And, yeah, go   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 59:34 ahead. No, no, no, it is. But you know, given who I am and interested in the world of ideas and all that. I mean, I do you know think about these other things too. Sure. I know that, you know. I know that, especially with the children and with the adults that you know, making somewhat of a difference. So, yeah, if   Michael Hingson ** 59:55 people want to reach out and learn more about SoCal adaptive sports, maybe communicate. With you, maybe become involved and so on, whether it's here or in other parts of the country. How do they do that? Yeah, so or other parts of the world for that matter, because we do have initiatives outside the US too. Yeah,   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 1:00:13 because of our name, I do have people reaching out from other parts of the country, that's for sure. And I'm, you know, I'm still connected, obviously, with people in India on the call. But so SoCal adaptive sports.org is our website,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:27 so it's S, O, C, A, L, adaptive sports.org   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 1:00:33 Okay? Or, you know, my emails might get SoCal adaptive sports.org so you know, feel free to reach out, happy to advise you wherever you live, connect you with resources wherever you live. And yeah, again, just, you know, join us. It's a growing community, a growing family. And yeah, we are making a difference.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:02 And I think that's as much as anyone can ask for. Make a difference, make it a better world. Gee, Who can argue with that? Well, I want to thank you again for being with us. This has been fun, and I really enjoyed the discussion. And if you ever want to come back and talk more about it, and talk more about things that are happening and progress you're making, you are always welcome to to come visit us. So thank you for doing that, and I want to thank you all for listening to us today. This has been a lot of fun, and it's been very educational. I've learned a lot, and I love that. I always love to learn. When people come on and visit with us, I hope that you found it interesting and useful as well. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You are welcome to reach out to me at Michael H, i@accessibe.com that's M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, I, B, E.com, or go to our podcast page, which is www dot Michael hingson.com/podcast, that's m, I C, H, A, E, L, H, I N, G, s, O, N, wherever you're listening, please give us a five star rating. We value your ratings highly and value your input and your thoughts, so please feel free to let us know, please feel free to rate us wherever you're listening to us, and if you know of any guests and Mike you as well. If you know of anyone else who you think we ought to have on as a guest, on unstoppable mindset, always looking for more people, please reach out to us and let us know. So Michael, once again, I want to thank you. This has been fun. I really want to thank you for being here with us today.   Michael Rosenkrantz ** 1:02:40 Thank you. I appreciate   **Michael Hingson ** 1:02:47 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. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Tonight's episode focuses on a critical issue: scams targeting veterans. We're joined by Sean, a VSO officer, and Ashley, a veterans evaluation nurse practitioner, to discuss how veterans are being scammed out of their hard-earned money. Get access to past and bonus content with exclusive guest. Please help support the podcast and veterans so we can keep making the show - patreon.com/GulfWarSideEffects ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Explore the Legacy Study: Gulf War Veteran & Family Healthhttps://sites.bu.edu/legacystudy This study seeks to understand the long-term health impacts of Gulf War service on veterans and their families, focusing on reproductive and children's health. Gulf War veterans and their adult children are invited to participate in this groundbreaking research launching in early 2024. Learn more: Legacy Study For details, call (617) 358-1345 or email gwrepro@bu.edu Life Wave Patches: https://lifewave.com/kevinsimon/store/products *Here is my recommendations on what patches to get and what has helped me. Ice Wave - this helps with my neuropathy. x39 - this helps me with brain fog and my shakes x49 - helps with bone strength Gludifion - helps get rid of toxins Merch: https://gulfwar-side-effects.myspreadshop.com/ Contact me with your questions, comments, or concerns at kevinsimon@gulfwarsideeffects.com

Tonight's episode focuses on a critical issue: scams targeting veterans. We're joined by Sean, a VSO officer, and Ashley, a veterans evaluation nurse practitioner, to discuss how veterans are being scammed out of their hard-earned money. Get access to past and bonus content with exclusive guest. Please help support the podcast and veterans so we can keep making the show - patreon.com/GulfWarSideEffects ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Explore the Legacy Study: Gulf War Veteran & Family Healthhttps://sites.bu.edu/legacystudy This study seeks to understand the long-term health impacts of Gulf War service on veterans and their families, focusing on reproductive and children's health. Gulf War veterans and their adult children are invited to participate in this groundbreaking research launching in early 2024. Learn more: Legacy Study For details, call (617) 358-1345 or email gwrepro@bu.edu Life Wave Patches: https://lifewave.com/kevinsimon/store/products *Here is my recommendations on what patches to get and what has helped me. Ice Wave - this helps with my neuropathy. x39 - this helps me with brain fog and my shakes x49 - helps with bone strength Gludifion - helps get rid of toxins Merch: https://gulfwar-side-effects.myspreadshop.com/ Contact me with your questions, comments, or concerns at kevinsimon@gulfwarsideeffects.com

On this episode of the pod, my guest is David Cayley, a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster. For more than thirty years (1981-2012) he made radio documentaries for CBC Radio One's program Ideas, which premiered in 1965 under the title The Best Ideas You'll Hear Tonight. In 1966, at the age of twenty, Cayley joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960's to promote international development. Two years later, back in Canada, he began to associate with a group of returned volunteers whose experiences had made them, like himself, increasingly quizzical about the idea of development. In 1968 in Chicago, he heard a lecture given by Ivan Illich and in 1970 he and others brought Illich to Toronto for a teach-in called “Crisis in Development.” This was the beginning of their long relationship: eighteen years later Cayley invited Illich to do a series of interviews for CBC Radio's Ideas. Cayley is the author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (2022), Ideas on the Nature of Science (2009), The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (2004), Puppet Uprising (2003),The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (1998), George Grant in Conversation (1995), Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992), Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), and The Age of Ecology (1990).Show Notes:The Early Years with Ivan IllichThe Good Samaritan StoryFalling out of a HomeworldThe Corruption of the Best is the Worst (Corruptio Optimi Pessima)How Hospitality Becomes HostilityHow to Live in ContradictionRediscovering the FutureThe Pilgrimage of SurpriseFriendship with the OtherHomework:Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State Press) - Paperback Now Available!David Cayley's WebsiteThe Rivers North of the Future (House of Anansi Press)Ivan Illich | The Corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessima (2000)Charles Taylor: A Secular AgeTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, David, to the End of Tourism Podcast. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. David: Likewise. Thank you. Chris: I'm very grateful to have you joining me today. And I'm curious if you could offer our listeners a little glimpse into where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you through the lenses of David Cayley.David: Gray and wet. In Toronto, we've had a mild winter so far, although we did just have some real winter for a couple of weeks. So, I'm at my desk in my house in downtown Toronto. Hmm. Chris: Hmm. Thank you so much for joining us, David. You know, I came to your work quite long ago.First through the book, The Rivers North of the Future, The Testament of Ivan Illich. And then through your long standing tenure as the host of CBC Ideas in Canada. I've also just finished reading your newest book, Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey. For me, which has been a clear and comprehensive homage [00:01:00] to that man's work.And so, from what I understand from the reading, you were a friend of Illich's as well as the late Gustavo Esteva, a mutual friend of ours, who I interviewed for the podcast shortly before his death in 2021. Now, since friendship is one of the themes I'd like to approach with you today, I'm wondering if you could tell us about how you met these men and what led you to writing a biography of the former, of Ivan.David: Well, let me answer about Ivan first. I met him as a very young man. I had spent two years living in northern Borneo, eastern Malaysia, the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As part of an organization called the Canadian University Service Overseas, which many people recognize only when it's identified with the Peace Corps. It was a similar initiative or the VSO, very much of the time.And When I returned to [00:02:00] Toronto in 1968, one of the first things I saw was an essay of Ivan's. It usually circulates under the name he never gave it, which is, "To Hell With Good Intentions." A talk he had given in Chicago to some young volunteers in a Catholic organization bound for Mexico.And it made sense to me in a radical and surprising way. So, I would say it began there. I went to CDOC the following year. The year after that we brought Ivan to Toronto for a teach in, in the fashion of the time, and he was then an immense celebrity, so we turned people away from a 600 seat theater that night when he lectured in Toronto.I kept in touch subsequently through reading mainly and we didn't meet again until the later 1980s when he came to Toronto.[00:03:00] He was then working on, in the history of literacy, had just published a book called ABC: the Alphabetization of the Western Mind. And that's where we became more closely connected. I went later that year to State College, Pennsylvania, where he was teaching at Penn State, and recorded a long interview, radically long.And made a five-hour Ideas series, but by a happy chance, I had not thought of this, his friend Lee Hoinacki asked for the raw tapes, transcribed them, and eventually that became a published book. And marked an epoch in Ivan's reception, as well as in my life because a lot of people responded to the spoken or transcribed Illich in a way that they didn't seem to be able to respond to his writing, which was scholastically condensed, let's [00:04:00] say.I always found it extremely congenial and I would even say witty in the deep sense of wit. But I think a lot of people, you know, found it hard and so the spoken Illich... people came to him, even old friends and said, you know, "we understand you better now." So, the following year he came to Toronto and stayed with us and, you know, a friendship blossomed and also a funny relationship where I kept trying to get him to express himself more on the theme of the book you mentioned, The Rivers North of the Future, which is his feeling that modernity, in the big sense of modernity can be best understood as perversionism. A word that he used, because he liked strong words, but it can be a frightening word."Corruption" also has its difficulties, [00:05:00] but sometimes he said "a turning inside out," which I like very much, or "a turning upside down" of the gospel. So, when the world has its way with the life, death and resurrection and teaching of Jesus Christ which inevitably becomes an institution when the world has its way with that.The way leads to where we are. That was his radical thought. And a novel thought, according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, who was kind enough to write a preface to that book when it was published, and I think very much aided its reception, because people knew who Charles Taylor was, and by then, they had kind of forgotten who Ivan Illich was.To give an example of that, when he died, the New York [00:06:00] Times obituary was headlined "Priest turned philosopher appealed to baby boomers in the 60s." This is yesterday's man, in other words, right? This is somebody who used to be important. So, I just kept at him about it, and eventually it became clear he was never going to write that book for a whole variety of reasons, which I won't go into now.But he did allow me to come to Cuernavaca, where he was living, and to do another very long set of interviews, which produced that book, The Rivers North of the Future. So that's the history in brief. The very last part of that story is that The Rivers North of the Future and the radio series that it was based on identifies themes that I find to be quite explosive. And so, in a certain way, the book you mentioned, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, [00:07:00] was destined from the moment that I recorded those conversations. Chris: Hmm, yeah, thank you, David. So much of what you said right there ends up being the basis for most of my questions today, especially around the corruption or the perversion what perhaps iatrogenesis also termed as iatrogenesis But much of what I've also come to ask today, stems and revolves around Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan story, so I'd like to start there, if that's alright.And you know, for our listeners who aren't familiar either with the story or Illich's take on it, I've gathered some small excerpts from An Intellectual Journey so that they might be on the same page, so to speak. So, from Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey:"jesus tells the story after he has been asked how to, quote, 'inherit eternal life,' end quote, and has replied that one must love God and one's neighbor, [00:08:00] quote, 'as oneself,' but, quote, who is my neighbor? His interlocutor wants to know. Jesus answers with his tale of a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, who is beset by robbers, beaten, and left, quote, 'half dead' by the side of the road.Two men happen along, but, quote, 'pass by on the other side.' One is a priest and the other a Levite, a group that assisted the priests at the Great Temple, which, at that time, dominated the landscape of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount. Then, a Samaritan comes along. The Samaritans belonged to the estranged northern kingdom of Israel, and did not worship at the Temple.Tension between the Samaritans and the Judeans in the Second Temple period gives the name a significance somewhere between 'foreigner' and 'enemy.' [00:09:00] In contemporary terms, he was, as Illich liked to say, 'a Palestinian.' The Samaritan has, quote, 'compassion' on the wounded one. He stops, binds his wounds, takes him to an inn where he can convalesce and promises the innkeeper that he will return to pay the bill.'And so Jesus concludes by asking, 'Which of the three passers by was the neighbor?'Illich claimed that this parable had been persistently misunderstood as a story about how one ought to act. He had surveyed sermons from the 3rd through 19th centuries, he said, 'and found a broad consensus that what was being proposed was a, quote, rule of conduct.' But this interpretation was, in fact, quote, 'the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out.'He had not been asked how to act toward a neighbor, but rather, 'who is my neighbor?' And he had replied, [00:10:00] scandalously, that it could be anyone at all. The choice of the Samaritan as the hero of the tale said, 'in effect, it is impossible to categorize who your neighbor might be.' The sense of being called to help the other is experienced intermittently and not as an unvarying obligation.A quote, 'new kind of ought has been established,' Illich says, which is not related to a norm. It has a telos, it aims at somebody, some body, but not according to a rule. And finally, The Master told them that who your neighbor is is not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you speak, but by you.You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who, you can [00:11:00] say by providence or pure chance, is the one who lies somewhere along your road in the grass and create the supreme form of relatedness, which is not given by creation, but created by you. Any attempt to explain this 'ought,' as correspond, as, as corresponding to a norm, takes out the mysterious greatness from this free act.And so, I think there are at least, at the very least, a few major points to take away from this little summary I've extracted. One, that the ability to choose one's neighbor, breaks the boundaries of ethnicity at the time, which were the bases for understanding one's identity and people and place in the world.And two, that it creates a new foundation for hospitality and interculturality. And so I'm [00:12:00] curious, David, if you'd be willing to elaborate on these points as you understand them.David: Well if you went a little farther on in that part of the book, you'd find an exposition of a German teacher and writer and professor, Claus Held, that I found very helpful in understanding what Ivan was saying. Held is a phenomenologist and a follower of Husserl, but he uses Husserl's term of the home world, right, that each of us has a home world. Mm-Hmm. Which is our ethnos within which our ethics apply.It's a world in which we can be at home and in which we can somehow manage, right? There are a manageable number of people to whom we are obliged. We're not universally obliged. So, what was interesting about Held's analysis is then the condition in which the wounded [00:13:00] man lies is, he's fallen outside of any reference or any home world, right?Nobody has to care for him. The priest and the Levite evidently don't care for him. They have more important things to do. The story doesn't tell you why. Is he ritually impure as one apparently dead is? What? You don't know. But they're on their way. They have other things to do. So the Samaritan is radically out of line, right?He dares to enter this no man's land, this exceptional state in which the wounded man lies, and he does it on the strength of a feeling, right? A stirring inside him. A call. It's definitely a bodily experience. In Ivan's language of norms, it's not a norm. It's not a duty.It's [00:14:00] not an obligation. It's not a thought. He's stirred. He is moved to do what he does and he cares for him and takes him to the inn and so on. So, the important thing in it for me is to understand the complementarity that's involved. Held says that if you try and develop a set of norms and ethics, however you want to say it, out of the Samaritan's Act, it ends up being radically corrosive, it ends up being radically corrosive damaging, destructive, disintegrating of the home world, right? If everybody's caring for everybody all the time universally, you're pretty soon in the maddening world, not pretty soon, but in a couple of millennia, in the maddening world we live in, right? Where people Can tell you with a straight face that their actions are intended to [00:15:00] save the planet and not experience a sense of grandiosity in saying that, right?Not experiencing seemingly a madness, a sense of things on a scale that is not proper to any human being, and is bound, I think, to be destructive of their capacity to be related to what is at hand. So, I think what Ivan is saying in saying this is a new kind of ought, right, it's the whole thing of the corruption of the best is the worst in a nutshell because as soon as you think you can operationalize that, you can turn everyone into a Samaritan and You, you begin to destroy the home world, right?You begin to destroy ethics. You begin to, or you transform ethics into something which is a contradiction of ethics. [00:16:00] So, there isn't an answer in it, in what he says. There's a complementarity, right? Hmm. There's the freedom to go outside, but if the freedom to go outside destroys any inside, then, what have you done?Right? Hmm. You've created an unlivable world. A world of such unending, such unimaginable obligation, as one now lives in Toronto, you know, where I pass homeless people all the time. I can't care for all of them. So, I think it's also a way of understanding for those who contemplate it that you really have to pay attention.What are you called to, right? What can you do? What is within your amplitude? What is urgent for you? Do that thing, right? Do not make yourself mad with [00:17:00] impossible charity. A charity you don't feel, you can't feel, you couldn't feel. Right? Take care of what's at hand, what you can take care of. What calls you.Chris: I think this comes up quite a bit these days. Especially, in light of international conflicts, conflicts that arise far from people's homes and yet the demand of that 'ought' perhaps of having to be aware and having to have or having to feel some kind of responsibility for these things that are happening in other places that maybe, It's not that they don't have anything to do with us but that our ability to have any kind of recourse for what happens in those places is perhaps flippant, fleeting, and even that we're stretched to the point that we can't even tend and attend to what's happening in front of us in our neighborhoods.And so, I'm curious as to how this came to be. You mentioned "the corruption" [00:18:00] and maybe we could just define that, if possible for our listeners this notion of "the corruption of the best is the worst." Would you be willing to do that? Do you think that that's an easy thing to do? David: I've been trying for 30 years.I can keep on trying. I really, I mean, that was the seed of everything. At the end of the interview we did in 1988, Ivan dropped that little bomb on me. And I was a diligent man, and I had prepared very carefully. I'd read everything he'd written and then at the very end of the interview, he says the whole history of the West can be summed up in the phrase, Corruptio Optimi Pessima.He was quite fluent in Latin. The corruption of the best is the worst. And I thought, wait a minute, the whole history of the West? This is staggering. So, yes, I've been reflecting on it for a long time, but I think there are many ways to speak [00:19:00] about the incarnation, the idea that God is present and visible in the form of a human being, that God indeed is a human being in the person of Jesus Christ.One way is to think of it as a kind of nuclear explosion of religion. Religion had always been the placation of a god. Right? A sacrifice of some kind made to placate a god. Now the god is present. It could be you. Jesus is explicit about it, and I think that is the most important thing for Iman in reading the gospel, is that God appears to us as one another.Hmm. If you can put it, one another in the most general sense of that formula. So, that's explosive, right? I mean, religion, in a certain way, up to that moment, is society. It's the [00:20:00] integument of every society. It's the nature of the beast to be religious in the sense of having an understanding of how you're situated and in what order and with what foundation that order exists. It's not an intellectual thing. It's just what people do. Karl Barth says religion is a yoke. So, it has in a certain way exploded or been exploded at that moment but it will of course be re instituted as a religion. What else could happen? And so Ivan says, and this probably slim New Testament warrant for this, but this was his story, that in the very earliest apostolic church. They were aware of this danger, right? That Christ must be shadowed by "Antichrist," a term that Ivan was brave enough to use. The word just has a [00:21:00] terrible, terrible history. I mean, the Protestants abused the Catholics with the name of Antichrist. Luther rages against the Pope as antichrist.Hmm. And the word persists now as a kind of either as a sign of evangelical dogmatism, or maybe as a joke, right. When I was researching it, I came across a book called "How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is The Antichrist." Mm-Hmm. It's kind of a jokey thing in a way, in so far as people know, but he dared to use it as to say the antichrist is simply the instituted Christ.Right. It's not anything exotic. It's not anything theological. It's the inevitable worldly shadow of there being a Christ at all. And so that's, that's the beginning of the story. He, he claims that the church loses sight of this understanding, loses sight of the basic [00:22:00] complementarity or contradiction that's involved in the incarnation in the first place.That this is something that can never be owned, something that can never be instituted, something that can only happen again and again and again within each one. So, but heaven can never finally come to earth except perhaps in a story about the end, right? The new heaven and the new earth, the new Jerusalem come down from heaven.Fine. That's at the end, not now. So that's the gist of what he, what he said. He has a detailed analysis of the stages of that journey, right? So, within your theme of hospitality the beginnings of the church becoming a social worker in the decaying Roman Empire. And beginning to develop institutions of hospitality, [00:23:00] places for all the flotsam and jetsam of the decaying empire.And then in a major way from the 11th through the 13th century, when the church institutes itself as a mini or proto state, right? With a new conception of law. Every element of our modernity prefigured in the medieval church and what it undertook, according to Ivan. This was all news to me when he first said it to me.So yeah, the story goes on into our own time when I think one of the primary paradoxes or confusions that we face is that most of the people one meets and deals with believe themselves to be living after Christianity and indeed to great opponents of Christianity. I mean, nothing is more important in Canada now than to denounce residential schools, let's say, right? Which were [00:24:00] the schools for indigenous children, boarding schools, which were mainly staffed by the church, right?So, the gothic figure of the nun, the sort of vulpine, sinister. That's the image of the church, right? So you have so many reasons to believe that you're after that. You've woken up, you're woke. And, and you see that now, right? So you don't In any way, see yourself as involved in this inversion of the gospel which has actually created your world and which is still, in so many ways, you.So, leftists today, if I'm using the term leftists very, very broadly, "progressives," people sometimes say, "woke," people say. These are all in a certain way super Christians or hyper Christians, but absolutely unaware of themselves as Christians and any day you can read an analysis [00:25:00] which traces everything back to the Enlightenment.Right? We need to re institute the Enlightenment. We've forgotten the Enlightenment. We have to get back to the, right? There's nothing before the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the over, that's an earlier overcoming of Christianity, right? So modernity is constantly overcoming Christianity. And constantly forgetting that it's Christian.That these are the ways in which the Incarnation is working itself out. And one daren't say that it's bound to work itself out that way. Ivan will go as far as to say it's seemingly the will of God that it should work itself out that way. Right? Wow. So, that the Gospel will be preached to all nations as predicted at the end of the Gospels." Go therefore and preach to all nations," but it will not be preached in its explicit form. It will enter, as it were, through the [00:26:00] back door. So that's a very big thought. But it's a saving thought in certain ways, because it does suggest a way of unwinding, or winding up, this string of finding out how this happened.What is the nature of the misunderstanding that is being played out here? So. Chris: Wow. Yeah, I mean, I, I feel like what you just said was a kind of nuclear bomb unto its own. I remember reading, for example, James Hillman in The Terrible Love of War, and at the very end he essentially listed all, not all, but many of the major characteristics of modern people and said if you act this way, you are Christian.If you act this way, you are Christian. Essentially revealing that so much of modernity has these Christian roots. And, you know, you said in terms of this message and [00:27:00] corruption of the message going in through the back door. And I think that's what happens in terms of at least when we see institutions in the modern time, schools, hospitals, roads essentially modern institutions and lifestyles making their way into non modern places.And I'm very fascinated in this in terms of hospitality. You said that the church, and I think you're quoting Illich there, but " the church is a social worker." But also how this hospitality shows up in the early church and maybe even how they feared about what could happen as a result to this question of the incarnation.In your book it was just fascinating to read this that you said, or that you wrote, that "in the early years of Christianity it was customary in a Christian household to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger without a roof, a form of behavior that was utterly [00:28:00] foreign to the cultures of the Roman Empire."In which many Christians lived. And you write, "you took in your own, but not someone lost on the street." And then later "When the emperor Constantine recognized the church, Christian bishops gained the power to establish social corporations." And this is, I think, the idea of the social worker. The church is a social worker.And you write that the first corporations they started were Samaritan corporations, which designated certain categories of people as preferred neighbors. For example, the bishops created special houses financed by the community that were charged with taking care of people without a home. Such care was no longer the free choice of the householder, it was the task of an institution.The appearance of these xenodocheia? Literally, quote, 'houses for foreigners' signified the beginning of a change in the nature of the church." And then of course you write and you mentioned this but "a gratuitous and truly [00:29:00] free choice of assisting the stranger has become an ideology and an idealism." Right. And so, this seems to be how the corruption of the Samaritan story, the corruption of breaking that threshold, or at least being able to cross it, comes to produce this incredible 'ought,' as you just kind of elaborated for us.And then this notion of, that we can't see it anymore. That it becomes this thing in the past, as you said. In other words, history. Right? And so my next question is a question that comes to some degree from our late mutual friend Gustavo, Gustavo Esteva. And I'd just like to preface it by a small sentence from An Intellectual Journey where he wrote that, "I think that limit, in Illich, is always linked to nemesis, or to what Jung calls [00:30:00] enantiodromia, his Greek word for the way in which any tendency, when pushed too far, can turn into its opposite. And so, a long time ago, Illich once asked Gustavo if he could identify a word that could describe the era after development, or perhaps after development's death.And Gustavo said, "hospitality." And so, much later, in a private conversation with Gustavo, in the context of tourism and gentrification, the kind that was beginning to sweep across Oaxaca at the time, some years ago, he told me that he considered "the sale of one's people's radical or local hospitality as a kind of invitation to hostility in the place and within the ethnos that one lives in."Another way of saying it might be that the subversion and absence of hospitality in a place breeds or can breed hostility.[00:31:00] I'm curious what you make of his comment in the light of limits, enantiodromia and the corruption that Illich talks about.David: Well I'd like to say one thing which is the thought I was having while you, while you were speaking because at the very beginning I mentioned a reservation a discomfort with words like perversion and corruption. And the thought is that it's easy to understand Illich as doing critique, right? And it's easy then to moralize that critique, right? And I think it's important that he's showing something that happens, right? And that I daren't say bound to happen, but is likely to happen because of who and what we are, that we will institutionalize, that we will make rules, that we will, right?So, I think it's important to rescue Ivan from being read [00:32:00] moralistically, or that you're reading a scold here, right? Hmm. Right. I mean, and many social critics are or are read as scolds, right? And contemporary people are so used to being scolded that they, and scold themselves very regularly. So, I just wanted to say that to rescue Ivan from a certain kind of reading. You're quoting Gustavo on the way in which the opening up of a culture touristically can lead to hostility, right? Right. And I think also commenting on the roots of the words are the same, right? "hostile," "hospice." They're drawing on the same, right?That's right. It's how one treats the enemy, I think. Hmm. It's the hinge. Hmm. In all those words. What's the difference between hospitality and hostility?[00:33:00] So, I think that thought is profound and profoundly fruitful. So, I think Gustavo had many resources in expressing it.I couldn't possibly express it any better. And I never answered you at the beginning how I met Gustavo, but on that occasion in 1988 when I was interviewing Illich, they were all gathered, a bunch of friends to write what was called The Development Dictionary, a series of essays trying to write an epilogue to the era of development.So, Gustavo, as you know, was a charming man who spoke a peculiarly beautiful English in which he was fluent, but somehow, you could hear the cadence of Spanish through it without it even being strongly accented. So I rejoiced always in interviewing Gustavo, which I did several times because he was such a pleasure to listen to.But anyway, I've digressed. Maybe I'm ducking your question. Do you want to re ask it or? Chris: Sure. [00:34:00] Yeah, I suppose. You know although there were a number of essays that Gustavo wrote about hospitality that I don't believe have been published they focused quite a bit on this notion of individual people, but especially communities putting limits on their hospitality.And of course, much of this hospitality today comes in the form of, or at least in the context of tourism, of international visitors. And that's kind of the infrastructure that's placed around it. And yet he was arguing essentially for limits on hospitality. And I think what he was seeing, although it hadn't quite come to fruition yet in Oaxaca, was that the commodification, the commercialization of one's local indigenous hospitality, once it's sold, or once it's only existing for the value or money of the foreigner, in a kind of customer service worldview, that it invites this deep [00:35:00] hostility. And so do these limits show up as well in Illich's work in terms of the stranger?Right? Because so much of the Christian tradition is based in a universal fraternity, universal brotherhood. David: I said that Ivan made sense to me in my youth, as a 22 year old man. So I've lived under his influence. I took him as a master, let's say and as a young person. And I would say that probably it's true that I've never gone anywhere that I haven't been invited to go.So I, I could experience that, that I was called to be there. And he was quite the jet setter, so I was often called by him to come to Mexico or to go to Germany or whatever it was. But we live in a world that is so far away from the world that might have been, let's say, the world that [00:36:00] might be.So John Milbank, a British theologian who's Inspiring to me and a friend and somebody who I found surprisingly parallel to Illich in a lot of ways after Ivan died and died I think feeling that he was pretty much alone in some of his understandings. But John Milbank speaks of the, of recovering the future that we've lost, which is obviously have to be based on some sort of historical reconstruction. You have to find the place to go back to, where the wrong turning was, in a certain way. But meanwhile, we live in this world, right? Where even where you are, many people are dependent on tourism. Right? And to that extent they live from it and couldn't instantly do without. To do without it would be, would be catastrophic. Right? So [00:37:00] it's it's not easy to live in both worlds. Right? To live with the understanding that this is, as Gustavo says, it's bound to be a source of hostility, right?Because we can't sell what is ours as an experience for others without changing its character, right, without commodifying it. It's impossible to do. So it must be true and yet, at a certain moment, people feel that it has to be done, right? And so you have to live in in both realities.And in a certain way, the skill of living in both realities is what's there at the beginning, right? That, if you take the formula of the incarnation as a nuclear explosion, well you're still going to have religion, right? So, that's inevitable. The [00:38:00] world has changed and it hasn't changed at the same time.And that's true at every moment. And so you learn to walk, right? You learn to distinguish the gospel from its surroundings. And a story about Ivan that made a big impression on me was that when he was sent to Puerto Rico when he was still active as a priest in 1956 and became vice rector of the Catholic University at Ponce and a member of the school board.A position that he regarded as entirely political. So he said, "I will not in any way operate as a priest while I'm performing a political function because I don't want these two things to get mixed up." And he made a little exception and he bought a little shack in a remote fishing village.Just for the happiness of it, he would go there and say mass for the fishermen who didn't know anything about this other world. So, but that was[00:39:00] a radical conviction and put him at odds with many of the tendencies of his time, as for example, what came to be called liberation theology, right?That there could be a politicized theology. His view was different. His view was that the church as "She," as he said, rather than "it," had to be always distinguished, right? So it was the capacity to distinguish that was so crucial for him. And I would think even in situations where tourism exists and has the effect Gustavo supposed, the beginning of resistance to that and the beginning of a way out of it, is always to distinguish, right?To know the difference, which is a slim read, but, but faith is always a slim read and Ivan's first book, his first collection of published essays was [00:40:00] called Celebration of Awareness which is a way of saying that, what I call know the difference. Chris: So I'm going to, if I can offer you this, this next question, which comes from James, a friend in Guelph, Canada. And James is curious about the missionary mandate of Christianity emphasizing a fellowship in Christ over ethnicity and whether or not this can be reconciled with Illich's perhaps emphatic defense of local or vernacular culture.David: Well, yeah. He illustrates it. I mean, he was a worldwide guy. He was very far from his roots, which were arguably caught. He didn't deracinate himself. Hmm. He was with his mother and brothers exiled from Split in Dalmatia as a boy in the crazy atmosphere of the Thirties.But he was a tumbleweed after [00:41:00] that. Mm-Hmm. . And so, so I think we all live in that world now and this is confuses people about him. So, a historian called Todd Hart wrote a book still really the only book published in English on the history of CIDOC and Cuernavaca, in which he says Illich is anti-missionary. And he rebukes him for that and I would say that Ivan, on his assumptions cannot possibly be anti missionary. He says clearly in his early work that a Christian is a missionary or is not a Christian at all, in the sense that if one has heard the good news, one is going to share it, or one hasn't heard it. Now, what kind of sharing is that? It isn't necessarily, "you have to join my religion," "you have to subscribe to the following ten..." it isn't necessarily a catechism, it may be [00:42:00] an action. It may be a it may be an act of friendship. It may be an act of renunciation. It can be any number of things, but it has to be an outgoing expression of what one has been given, and I think he was, in that sense, always a missionary, and in many places, seeded communities that are seeds of the new church.Right? He spent well, from the time he arrived in the United States in 51, 52, till the time that he withdrew from church service in 68, he was constantly preaching and talking about a new church. And a new church, for him, involved a new relation between innovation and tradition. New, but not new.Since, when he looked back, he saw the gospel was constantly undergoing translation into new milieu, into new places, into new languages, into new forms.[00:43:00] But he encountered it in the United States as pretty much in one of its more hardened or congealed phases, right? And it was the export of that particular brand of cultural and imperialistic, because American, and America happened to be the hegemon of the moment. That's what he opposed.The translation of that into Latin America and people like to write each other into consistent positions, right? So, he must then be anti missionary across the board, right? But so I think you can be local and universal. I mean, one doesn't even want to recall that slogan of, you know, "act locally, think globally," because it got pretty hackneyed, right?And it was abused. But, it's true in a certain way that that's the only way one can be a Christian. The neighbor, you said it, I wrote it, Ivan said it, " the neighbor [00:44:00] can be anyone." Right?But here I am here now, right? So both have to apply. Both have to be true. It's again a complementary relation. And it's a banal thought in a certain way, but it seems to be the thought that I think most often, right, is that what creates a great deal of the trouble in the world is inability to think in a complementary fashion.To think within, to take contradiction as constituting the world. The world is constituted of contradiction and couldn't be constituted in any other way as far as we know. Right? You can't walk without two legs. You can't manipulate without two arms, two hands. We know the structure of our brains. Are also bilateral and everything about our language is constructed on opposition.Everything is oppositional and yet [00:45:00] when we enter the world of politics, it seems we're going to have it all one way. The church is going to be really Christian, and it's going to make everybody really Christian, or communist, what have you, right? The contradiction is set aside. Philosophy defines truth as the absence of contradiction.Hmm. Basically. Hmm. So, be in both worlds. Know the difference. Walk on two feet. That's Ivan. Chris: I love that. And I'm, I'm curious about you know, one of the themes of the podcast is exile. And of course that can mean a lot of things. In the introduction to An Intellectual Journey, you wrote that that Illich, "once he had left Split in the 30s, that he began an experience of exile that would characterize his entire life."You wrote that he had lost "not just the home, but the very possibility [00:46:00] of home." And so it's a theme that characterizes as well the podcast and a lot of these conversations around travel, migration, tourism, what does it mean to be at home and so, this, This notion of exile also shows up quite a bit in the Christian faith.And maybe this is me trying to escape the complementarity of the reality of things. But I tend to see exile as inherently I'll say damaging or consequential in a kind of negative light. And so I've been wondering about this, this exilic condition, right? It's like in the Abrahamic faith, as you write "Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all begin in exile.And eventually this pattern culminates. Jesus is executed outside the gates of the city, nailed to a cross that excludes him even from his native earth." And you write that "exile is in many ways the [00:47:00] Christian condition." And so, you know, I've read that in the past, Christian monks often consider themselves to be homeless, removed from the sort of daily life of the local community in the monasteries and abbeys and yet still of a universal brotherhood. And so I'd like to ask you if you feel this exilic condition, which seems to be also a hallmark of modernity, this kind of constant uprooting this kind of as I would call it, cultural and spiritual homelessness of our time, if you think that is part of the corruption that Illich based his work around?David: Well, one can barely imagine the world in which Abram, who became Abraham said to God, no, I'm staying in Ur. Not going, I'm not going. Right? I mean, if you go back to Genesis and you re read that passage, when God shows [00:48:00] Abraham the land that he will inherit, it says already there, "there were people at that time living in the land," right?Inconvenient people, as it turns out. Palestinians. So, there's a profound contradiction here, I think. And the only way I think you can escape it is to understand the Gospel the way Ivan understood it, which is as something super added to existing local cultures, right? A leaven, right?Hmm. Not everything about a local culture or a local tradition is necessarily good. Mm hmm. And so it can be changed, right? And I would say that Illich insists that Christians are and must be missionaries. They've received something that they it's inherent in what they've [00:49:00] received that they pass it on.So the world will change, right? But Ivan says, this is in Rivers North of the Future, that it's his conviction that the Gospel could have been preached without destroying local proportions, the sense of proportion, and he put a great weight on the idea of proportionality as not just, a pleasing building or a pleasing face, but the very essence of, of how a culture holds together, right, that things are proportioned within it to one another that the gospel could have been preached without the destruction of proportions, but evidently it wasn't, because the Christians felt they had the truth and they were going to share it. They were going to indeed impose it for the good of the other.So, I think a sense of exile and a sense of home are as [00:50:00] necessary to one another as in Ivan's vision of a new church, innovation, and tradition, or almost any other constitutive couplet you can think of, right? You can't expunge exile from the tradition. But you also can't allow it to overcome the possibility of home.I mean, Ivan spoke of his own fate as a peculiar fate, right? He really anticipated the destruction of the Western culture or civilization. I mean, in the sense that now this is a lament on the political right, mainly, right? The destruction of Western civilization is something one constantly hears about.But, he, in a way, in the chaos and catastrophe of the 30s, already felt the death of old Europe. And even as a boy, I think, semi consciously at least, took the roots inside himself, took them with him [00:51:00] and for many people like me, he opened that tradition. He opened it to me. He allowed me to re inhabit it in a certain way, right?So to find intimations of home because he wasn't the only one who lost his home. Even as a man of 78, the world in which I grew up here is gone, forgotten, and to some extent scorned by younger people who are just not interested in it. And so it's through Ivan that I, in a way, recovered the tradition, right?And if the tradition is related to the sense of home, of belonging to something for good or ill, then that has to be carried into the future as best we can, right? I think Ivan was searching for a new church. He didn't think. He had found it. He didn't think he knew what it was.I don't think he [00:52:00] described certain attributes of it. Right. But above all, he wanted to show that the church had taken many forms in the past. Right. And it's worldly existence did not have to be conceived on the model of a monarchy or a parish, right, another form that he described in some early essays, right.We have to find the new form, right? It may be radically non theological if I can put it like that. It may not necessarily involve the buildings that we call churches but he believed deeply in the celebrating community. As the center, the root the essence of social existence, right? The creation of home in the absence of home, or the constant recreation of home, right? Since I mean, we will likely never again live in pure [00:53:00] communities, right? Yeah. I don't know if pure is a dangerous word, but you know what I mean?Consistent, right? Closed. We're all of one kind, right? Right. I mean, this is now a reactionary position, right? Hmm. You're a German and you think, well, Germany should be for the Germans. I mean, it can't be for the Germans, seemingly. We can't put the world back together again, right?We can't go back and that's a huge misreading of Illich, right? That he's a man who wants to go back, right? No. He was radically a man who wanted to rediscover the future. And rescue it. Also a man who once said to hell with the future because he wanted to denounce the future that's a computer model, right? All futures that are projections from the present, he wanted to denounce in order to rediscover the future. But it has to be ahead of us. It's not. And it has to recover the deposit that is behind us. So [00:54:00] both, the whole relation between past and future and indeed the whole understanding of time is out of whack.I think modern consciousness is so entirely spatialized that the dimension of time is nearly absent from it, right? The dimension of time as duration as the integument by which past, present and future are connected. I don't mean that people can't look at their watch and say, you know, "I gotta go now, I've got a twelve o'clock." you know.So, I don't know if that's an answer to James.Chris: I don't know, but it's food for thought and certainly a feast, if I may say so. David, I have two final questions for you, if that's all right, if you have time. Okay, wonderful. So, speaking of this notion of home and and exile and the complementarity of the two and you know you wrote and [00:55:00] spoke to this notion of Illich wanting to rediscover the future and he says that "we've opened a horizon on which new paradigms for thought can appear," which I think speaks to what you were saying and At some point Illich compares the opening of horizons to leaving home on a pilgrimage, as you write in your book."And not the pilgrimage of the West, which leads over a traveled road to a famed sanctuary, but rather the pilgrimage of the Christian East, which does not know where the road might lead and the journey end." And so my question is, What do you make of that distinction between these types of pilgrimages and what kind of pilgrimage do you imagine might be needed in our time?David: Well, I, I mean, I think Ivan honored the old style of pilgrimage whether it was to [00:56:00] Canterbury or Santiago or wherever it was to. But I think ivan's way of expressing the messianic was in the word surprise, right? One of the things that I think he did and which was imposed on him by his situation and by his times was to learn to speak to people in a way that did not draw on any theological resource, so he spoke of his love of surprises, right? Well, a surprise by definition is what you don't suspect, what you don't expect. Or it couldn't be a surprise.So, the The cathedral in Santiago de Compostela is very beautiful, I think. I've only ever seen pictures of it, but you must expect to see it at the end of your road. You must hope to see it at the end of your road. Well the surprise is going to be something else. Something that isn't known.[00:57:00] And it was one of his Great gifts to me that within the structure of habit and local existence, since I'm pretty rooted where I am. And my great grandfather was born within walking distance of where I am right now. He helped me to look for surprises and to accept them also, right?That you're going to show up or someone else is going to show up, right? But there's going to be someone coming and you want to look out for the one who's coming and not, but not be at all sure that you know who or what it is or which direction it's coming from. So, that was a way of life in a certain way that I think he helped others within their limitations, within their abilities, within their local situations, to see the world that way, right. That was part of what he did. Chris: Yeah, it's really beautiful and I can [00:58:00] see how in our time, in a time of increasing division and despondency and neglect, fear even, resentment of the other, that how that kind of surprise and the lack of expectation, the undermining, the subversion of expectation can find a place into perhaps the mission of our times.And so my final question comes back to friendship. and interculturality. And I have one final quote here from An Intellectual Journey, which I highly recommend everyone pick up, because it's just fascinating and blows open so many doors. David: We need to sell a few more books, because I want that book in paperback. Because I want it to be able to live on in a cheaper edition. So, yes. Chris: Of course. Thank you. Yeah. Please, please pick it up. It's worth every penny. So in An Intellectual Journey, it is written[00:59:00] by Illich that "when I submit my heart, my mind, my body, I come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously, with the readiness to take in the other as a radical surprise, I do something else. I bow, bend over toward the total otherness of someone. But I renounce searching for bridges between the other and me, recognizing that a gulf separates us.Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness, and able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the Other and myself. All that reaches me is the Other in His Word, which I accept on faith."And so, David at another point in the biography you quote Illich describing faith as foolish. Now assuming that faith elicits a degree of danger or [01:00:00] betrayal or that it could elicit that through a kind of total trust, is that nonetheless necessary to accept the stranger or other as they are? Or at least meet the stranger or other as they are? David: I would think so, yeah. I mean the passage you've quoted, I think to understand it, it's one of the most profound of his sayings to me and one I constantly revert to, but to accept the other in his word, or on his word, or her word, is, I think you need to know that he takes the image of the word as the name of the Lord, very, very seriously, and its primary way of referring to the Christ, is "as the Word."Sometimes explicitly, sometimes not explicitly, you have to interpret. So, when he says that he renounces looking for bridges, I think he's mainly referring [01:01:00] to ideological intermediations, right, ways in which I, in understanding you exceed my capacity. I try to change my name for you, or my category for you, changes you, right?It doesn't allow your word. And, I mean, he wasn't a man who suffered fools gladly. He had a high regard for himself and used his time in a fairly disciplined way, right? He wasn't waiting around for others in their world. So by word, what does he mean?What is the other's word? Right? It's something more fundamental than the chatter of a person. So, I think what that means is that we can be linked to one another by Christ. So that's [01:02:00] the third, right? That yes, we're alone. Right? We haven't the capacity to reach each other, except via Christ.And that's made explicit for him in the opening of Aylred of Riveau's Treatise on Friendship, which was peculiarly important to him. Aylred was an abbot at a Cistercian monastery in present day Yorkshire, which is a ruin now. But he wrote a treatise on friendship in the 12th century and he begins by addressing his brother monk, Ivo, and says, you know, " here we are, you and I, and I hope a third Christ."So, Christ is always the third, right? So, in that image of the gulf, the distance, experiencing myself and my loneliness and yet renouncing any bridge, there is still a word, the word, [01:03:00] capital W, in which a word, your word, my word, participates, or might participate. So, we are building, according to him, the body of Christ but we have to renounce our designs on one another, let's say, in order to do that. So I mean, that's a very radical saying, the, the other in his word and in another place in The Rivers North of the Future, he says how hard that is after a century of Marxism or Freudianism, he mentions. But, either way he's speaking about my pretension to know you better than you know yourself, which almost any agency in our world that identifies needs, implicitly does. I know what's best for you. So Yeah, his waiting, his ability to wait for the other one is, is absolutely [01:04:00] foundational and it's how a new world comes into existence. And it comes into existence at every moment, not at some unimaginable future when we all wait at the same time, right? My friend used to say that peace would come when everybody got a good night's sleep on the same night. It's not very likely, is it? Right, right, right. So, anyway, there we are. Chris: Wow. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to listening to this interview again, because I feel like just like An Intellectual Journey, just like your most recent book my mind has been, perhaps exploded, another nuclear bomb dropped.David: Chris, nice to meet you. Chris: Yeah, I'll make sure that that book and, of course, links to yours are available on the end of the website. David: Alright, thank you. Chris: Yeah, deep bow, David. Thank you for your time today. David: All the best. And thank you for those questions. Yeah. That was that was very interesting. You know, I spent my life as an interviewer. A good part of my [01:05:00] life. And interviewing is very hard work. It's much harder than talking. Listening is harder than talking. And rarer. So, it's quite a pleasure for me, late in life, to be able to just let her rip, and let somebody else worry about is this going in the right direction? So, thank you. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

What it takes to be a VSO

I denne uges episode af Aktieuniverset tager vi et kig på Kinas myndigheder, som skuffede markedet med manglende yderligere stimuli-pakker. Vi dykker også ned i bl.a. Metas nye AI-værktøj og Teslas Optimus-robot, som blev vist frem på gaden. Dagens tema handler om Nobelprisvinderen Geoffrey Hinton og hans banebrydende arbejde med AI. Derudover går vi i dybden med Palantir og alt det spændende, der sker på tech-fronten. Alt dette og meget mere! Denne episode er sponsoreret af Kereby. Kereby tilbyder erhvervslejemål med fleksible vilkår, der tilpasses din virksomheds behov. Se mere på Kereby.dk. Denne episode er sponsoreret af Finobo. Få et gratis økonomitjek hos specialisterne i låneoptimering ved at bruge linket:finobo.dk/gratis-oekonomitjek-aktieuniverset/ Denne episode er sponsoreret af investeringsfonden NewDeal Invest. NewDeal Invest er blevet børsnoteret, så der nu ikke er nogen minimumsinvestering for at komme med i fonden. Find den på din danske handelsplatform under PMINDI eller NewDeal Invest. Hvis du er en virksomhed, kan du også investere i hovedfonden gennem virksomhedsskatteordningen (VSO).NewDeal Invest: ⁠newdealinvest.dk⁠ Tjek os ud på:FB gruppe: ⁠facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843⁠X: ⁠x.com/aktieuniverset⁠IG: ⁠instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast⁠

The gang is back together - and things get a little hairy before our guest arrives. THE INTERVIEW In his role as PACT Act Transitional Executive Director for the Department of Veterans Affairs, Army veteran Steven Miska serves as the senior advisor to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs – providing oversight on the development, adoption and implementation of the PACT Act. Miska talks about his military experience, the journey that led him to his role at VA, his work in the veteran non-profit space and his involvement with resettlment of interpreters from conflict zones. SCUTTLEBUTT New documentary by Army veteran highlights the struggles faced by homeless veterans in Los Angeles. Years into civilian jobs, vets struggle with networking, resume skills Navy SEAL astronaut doctor Jonny Kim will blast off into space next year Special Guest: Steven Miska.

Today hear from Kris Shepard, Senior Vice President of Clinical Enterprise Development and Core Market Growth and Physician Partnerships at Advocate Health. In a conversation with CHESS President, Dr. Yates Lennon, Kris talks of how Management Services Organizations benefit patients and creates opportunities for practice growth and professional development for providers.OK, Well, good morning, Chris. Glad to have you on the chess Move to Value podcast. Look forward to our conversation today.Good morning. Yeah, great to be here.Good. So Chris, I'm looking at your title clinic, SVP, clinical enterprise development and core market growth physician partnerships. Tell us what you do.I do a few different things. And as that title probably implies, sometimes I'm working on your plain vanilla physician practice acquisitions. Sometimes I'm working on acquisitions that are not so plain vanilla in a more complicated in a larger scenarios, something particularly unique. And then I work on a range of other physician partnership transactions, professional services arrangements, as well as working on management services opportunities that we see with groups. And we really view that clinical enterprise development as, you know, broadly designed to look at our physician networks across the Advocate enterprise and and pursue what we think will work in a given market, a given specialty. And so that's why it's a fun job to have. I get to be creative and yeah, engage with people in a very different settings and try to put together things that that are appropriate in the right context.Yeah, never a moment of boredom, I would imagine with that much variety. Well, you, you, you touched on managed services. You know, there's a lot going on today with various managed services organizations as well as what you might call value services organizations. Talk to me a little bit about sort of at a high level, what do you think the opportunity is in the MSO slash VSO either or both market today?Yeah. I think I'll, I'll come at it from the perspective of physician groups that we talked to pretty regularly And you know, different groups have different needs. But one of the realities that seems to be hitting a lot of, you know, physician owned practices is that they don't necessarily have the scale to keep up with whether it's, you know, physician practice infrastructure needs or, or it's and, or the value-based care capabilities that they need to be successful. And so, it's, you know, two different buckets that are that can be addressed through management services and value services arrangements. But that's the reality. I think practices used to be able to kind of, you know may do just fine on their own. I think there are a variety of factors playing in to the challenges on independent practices now, payer relationships and kind of reimbursement challenges that exist, the cost pressures that are hitting every everybody, especially in the healthcare industry, kind of inflationary factors. And then there are things like, you know, EMRs are expensive. It's expensive to fend off cyber-attacks, to have the right cyber security frameworks in place, to make sure that you can you can continue in operations, to have the best revenue cycle, the best supply chain options. All those are things that are I think increasingly challenging even for the larger physician practices out there. So there's a, there's a scale factor there, same kind of themes with respect to value services. I think it, it takes a lot. There's analytics platforms, there's teams of people to support, to support a practice in, in delivering care the right way and then being able to record that and have that be a parent in quality metrics that get reported and cost metrics and, and everything else. So I just think, I think it's this moment. And from a, you know, I work for Advocate health for the health...

In this episode, we're joined by Ratna Viswanathan, CEO of Reach to Teach. Ratna left a distinguished career in Civil Services to pursue her passion for education. With leadership experience at Oxfam India, VSO, MFIN, UNEP, and UNDP, she's dedicated to strengthening education. Join us as we explore her journey, Reach to Teach's work, and the future of education in India. Discussion Highlights - Ratna's journey from Civil Services to education - Reach to Teach's mission and collaboration with State Governments - Shift from on-field work to government collaboration - Future changes in the education sector - Supporting children beyond education - Expansion plans for Reach to Teach - Ratna's vision for the organization Tune in to this inspiring conversation with Ratna Viswanathan on The Good Sight Podcast! If you or your organisation are dedicated to driving positive social change, we want to hear from you. Reach out to us at The Good Sight by emailing us at contact@thegoodsight.org with a brief description of your work and achievements, or give us a call at 9696399931.

I ugens aktieunivers kommer vi forbi diverse markedsnyheder, der kom ud i løbet af ugen. Bl.a. kom der nye CPI-tal, der satte gang i markedet og Neuralink har fået en ekstra forsøgsperson, der skal have chip-implant. Vi har lavet Delivery news om til AI news for at følge med i de mange udviklinger, der hele tiden strømmer ind. Ugens tema står på FSD investeringsmuligheder (Full Self-Driving). Vi tager en snak om Enhanced OL, som er OL hvor doping er tilladt. Dagens 3 AI aktier kommer vi naturligvis også forbi. Alt dette og meget mere!Denne episode er sponsoreret af investeringsfonden NewDeal Invest. NewDeal Invest er blevet børsnoteret, så der nu ikke er nogen minimumsinvestering for at komme med i fonden. Find den på din danske handelsplatform under PMINDI eller NewDeal Invest (nu også på Nordnet og eToro). Hvis du er en virksomhed, kan du også investere i hovedfonden gennem virksomhedsskatteordningen (VSO).NewDeal Invest: ⁠newdealinvest.dk⁠ Tjek os ud på:FB gruppe: ⁠facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843⁠X: ⁠x.com/aktieuniverset⁠IG: ⁠instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast⁠

I ugens aktieunivers kommer husven Jens Schjerning fra Agrocura forbi til en snak om makro og renter. Dagens tema står på EU-regulering af big tech, hvor bøderne flyver af sig. Vi har også dagens 3 AI aktier med, og Mads har taget en ny aktie med: Core Scientific. Herudover kommer vi forbi et regnskab og meget mere. Denne episode er sponsoreret af investeringsfonden NewDeal Invest. NewDeal Invest er blevet børsnoteret, så der nu ikke er nogen minimumsinvestering for at komme med i fonden. Find den på din danske handelsplatform under PMINDI eller NewDeal Invest (nu også på Nordnet og eToro). Hvis du er en virksomhed, kan du også investere i hovedfonden gennem virksomhedsskatteordningen (VSO). NewDeal Invest: ⁠newdealinvest.dk⁠ Tjek os ud på: FB gruppe: ⁠facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843⁠ X: ⁠x.com/aktieuniverset⁠ IG: ⁠instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast⁠

I denne uges episode af Aktieuniverset har vi taget et spændende tema med til jer: Apple Intelligence (AI). Mads gennemgår bl.a. hvordan Apple devices vil integrere ChatGPT fra OpenAI og hvordan den personlige data skal sikres. Vi har også besøg af råvareanalytiker Tom Bundgaard, som vi snakker vender oliesituationen med. Derudover har vi lidt regnskaber med, inflationstal og meget mere fra ugens markedsnyheder. Denne episode er sponsoreret af investeringsfonden NewDeal Invest. NewDeal Invest er blevet børsnoteret, så der nu ikke er nogen minimumsinvestering for at komme med i fonden. Find den på din danske handelsplatform under PMINDI eller NewDeal Invest (nu også på Nordnet og eToro). Hvis du er en virksomhed, kan du også investere i hovedfonden gennem virksomhedsskatteordningen (VSO). newdealinvest.dk⁠ Tjek os ud på: FB gruppe: ⁠facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843⁠ X: ⁠x.com/aktieuniverset⁠ IG: ⁠instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast⁠

In this special Memorial Day episode, Ryan Manion, CEO Of Travis Manion Foundation, sits down with her father, Col. Tom Manion, USMC (Ret.) and explores the life and legacy of 1stLt Travis Manion, USMC. Through sharing incredible stories of Travis' life, their family traditions, and what their last conversation was like Travis, Ryan and Col. Manion shine a spotlight on the maelstrom of emotions that face Gold Star families and families of the fallen on Memorial Day.Listen now to find out how Travis would celebrate Memorial Day, and how you can use your Memorial Day barbecue to honor the brave souls who selflessly served our country and reflect on the sacrifices that bind us as a nation.CONNECT with The Resilient Life Podcast:Instagram SUBSCRIBE Get the latest video podcast on YouTubeGet the latest audio podcastCONNECT Ryan Manion on Social Media:Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - LinkedIn  LEARN about Travis Manion Foundation

Mayor Perry sits down with VSO, Paul Jensen and student leaders from the veterans flag replacement project.  

V prvih 15 minutah te epizode boste poslušali moj intro / analizo pogovora z Romanom. Vso srečo želim... :) V epizodi 140 je bil moj gost Roman Vodeb, publicist, nekdanji športnik in trener. Je avtor 6 knjig, izvaja svetovanja, hipnoze in psihične priprave športnikov. V epizodi se dotakneva naslednjih tematik: Pritiski družbe, predavanja in hipnoza Ali lahko istospolni partnerji vzgojijo mentalno zdravega otroka? Vpliv vzgoje staršev na spolno usmerjenost otroka Kako vem, da vem? Stopnja moralnega razsojanja Svetovanje, razlage in stopnja zmotljivosti Metodolgije psihoanalize in znanstveno dokazovanje psihe Poznavanje nezavednosti in konstrukt nezavednega dvoma Romanova okolica in izkušnje s posamezniki

In this episode: survivor benefit plans, VA benefits, VSO's disability benefits, tax planning, healthcare, and blended retirement systems. This week we are joined by Daniel Kopp, founder of Wise Stewardship Financial Planning, to outline ways you can best prepare for military retirement. Together we cover pensions, navigating the Survivor Benefit Plan and additional benefits, healthcare and disability resources, as well as other financial decisions you can consider as you begin to transition out of the military. When dealing with any kind of retirement planning, taking actionable steps to prepare and get a plan in place for you and your family is essential. While everyone's circumstances may be different as they transition out of the military, there are many resources available and benefit programs you are entitled to before and after you leave duty! Daniel Kopp, CFP Website: wisestewardshipfp.com Podcast: Military to Financial Planner Timestamps: 1:26 – Introduction 2:32 – Approaching Military Retirement/Blended Retirement System 9:38 – Military Benefits/Healthcare 15:36 – VA Benefits/Term Life Insurance 22:12 – Disability Benefits/VSO's 30:17 – Survivor Benefit Plans 43:13 – SBP Contingencies and Child Coverage 50:41 – Tax Planning 56:26 – Conclusion Resources Mentioned In Today's Episode: Blended Retirement VA education benefits for survivors and dependents Everything About The Military's Survivor Benefit Plan SBP Financial Analysis Tools Daniel Kopp Estate Planning for Military Families | Military Money Manual Podcast Episode 83 Accredited VSO Representatives Transition Planning from a Military Career on the Path to FI | ChooseFI Ep 296 “Military in Transition's Guide to The Survivor Benefit Plan: Navigating the SBP” by Forrest Baumhover How VA Disability Compensation Affects Military Retirement Pay Income Tax and Rental Properties When You're in the Military MFAA ChooseFI US Military Subscribe to The FI Weekly! More Helpful Links and FI Resources: Top 10 Recommended Travel Rewards Credit Cards Empower: Free Dashboard to Track Your Finances CIT Bank Platinum Savings Account M1 Finance: Commission-Free Investing, 1-click rebalancing CashFreely: Maximize Your Cash Back Rewards Travel Freely: Track all your rewards cards and points Emergency Binder: For Your Family's Essential Info (code ‘CHOOSEFI' for 20% off) Student Loan Planner: Custom Consult (with $100 Discount) Get a cheaper phone plan with Mint Mobile

https://atravelpath.com/   Hey Pathfinders, join us as we welcome back Dakota and Courtney to the show. After hearing about their inspirational story of travel nursing and doing two van conversions, they sat down with us to share on of their favorite destinations. We chatted about Juniper Springs Campground in Florida and some of the nearby attractions. Learn all about:   ·        What makes Juniper Springs such a great destination ·        Paddleboarding and kayaking in the area ·        Nearby airports and transportation ·        Destinations within an hour including Kings Landing, Devils Den, and Daytona ·        Swimming with manatees And more!   Chapters ·        00:00 Introduction ·        01:15 What makes Juniper Springs such a great destination? ·        04:00 How far away are nearby attractions? ·        04:45 How long should someone stay there for? ·        06:30 How was it bringing your dog? ·        08:30 Juniper Springs campground amenities? ·        09:45 Nighttime activities? ·        11:45 How was the overall cost in Juniper Springs? ·        12:30 How was the food scene? ·        14:00 What are three things you need to pack when visiting Juniper Springs? ·        15:30 What are two complaints someone might have about Juniper Springs? ·        17:00 What is one thing you can't leave Juniper Springs without doing?   Links ·        Ocala National Forest: https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/florida/recarea/?recid=83528 ·        Juniper Springs Recreation Area: https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/florida/recarea/?recid=83676 ·        Ian and Ana's video (featuring Devils Den, 3 Sisters Springs, and Kings Landing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2ZK09Jd5g&t=1057s ·        Lectric eBikes: https://lectricebikes.com/ ·        iOverlander: https://www.ioverlander.com/   Nearby Attractions ·        Kings Landing (1 Hour): https://www.kingslandingfl.com/ ·        3 Sisters Springs (1.5 Hours): https://www.threesistersspringsvisitor.org/sisters ·        Devil's Den (1.5 Hours) https://www.facebook.com/DevilsDenSpring/ ·        Daytona (1 Hour: https://www.daytonabeach.com/ ·        Disney World (1.5 Hours): https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/   Podcasts Mentioned ·        Disney World: https://atravelpath.com/disney-world/ ·        Florida Keys: https://atravelpath.com/florid-keys/   Nearby Airports ·        Orlando International Airport (about 1.5 hours): https://orlandoairports.net/ ·        Gainesville Regional Airport (about 1.5 hours): https://www.flygainesville.com/     *All content from atravelpath.com, including but not limited to The Travel Path Podcast and social media platforms, is designed to share general information. We are not experts and the information is not designed to serve as legal, financial, or tax advice. Always do your own research and due diligence before making a decision.   Transcript Host: Hi Guest and Guest, welcome back to the travel tips segment of the Travel Path Podcast. So for those of you who missed part one, Guest and Guest came on. They're on Instagram as Kota and Court. They've done two van conversions now. Um, Guest works as a travel nurse. We got into very specific details about getting into travel nursing and also their van build. Um, so if you haven't listened to that one, definitely check it out. But for part two, travel tips, where are we talking about today?   Guest: We're talking about Florida, specifically Juniper Springs area in the Ocala National Forest, and um, some of the stuff is kind of a broad range of surrounding areas, yes. So surrounding areas, there's a lot to do in Florida, there's a lot to do in that area.   Host: Awesome. Now, what made you guys want to share about Florida and the Juniper Springs area today?   Guest: So, we watched it. It was always like a bucket list trip for me. Um, I watched a video on it from Ian and Anna, and at the time theirs was called the other side, and uh, it looked really, really cool. It just looked almost like it was out of this world. So it was always a bucket list trip for me, and um, you know, we finally got to do it and so it was, it was really fun.   Host: What makes Juniper Springs such a great destination? Like, what type of activity should go there?   Guest: Just being outside. So, it's really cool. It's in the middle of the Ocala National Forest, it's a campground. Juniper Springs is a campground. And so, they've got like a neat little area that you can pull in and um, they got like a fire pit and tables, but it's really neat because they have the spring area and it's just really beautiful. It's blue water, it's clear, and it's close to Three Sisters, was the other part of that trip that I wanted to take, uh, so you can go and swim with the manatees. It's certain times of year they have them, uh, over there where you can swim with them, uh, swimming, kayaking, yeah, kayaking, hiking is a big one. There are lots of trails, um, actually when we checked in, there was somebody who was lost in the forest and emergency vehicles were pulling up and someone's like, yeah, somebody's like lost or hurt or something, we were like, oh my, so you know, hiking is a big one. I think probably backpacking, there's a lot of land over there to cover but we didn't go backpacking really or hiking, I don't think. We rode our bikes around a lot, um, just explored the area, but definitely like outdoorsy things. And I mean, there's, I think there's off-road trip around there too if you want to take like a dirt B, horses, ATVs, all different, it's really broad, you know, spectrum of things to do.   Host: So a lot of outdoor stuff though, that's perfect, and pretty much anyone going with their camper or their van, that's what they're going for is that outdoor experience. So that sounds awesome. Now did you guys bring your own bikes or did you rent them when you were there?   Guest: Um, we brought our own. We have, um, the electric e-bikes, so we brought those. We brought, um, I don't know if we brought our paddleboard, but we brought our kayak, um, which we used at King's Landing, a little like river flow type thing, um, so yeah, we brought, we did bring our own bikes, and the bikes we bought, they were like, she said the electric e-bikes, so they folded up and they fit in the back underneath the bed, so they're pretty compact and we could get them out and unfold them and ride around nice.   Host: Do you know if you saw anywhere around that you could rent like paddleboards or kayaks or bikes from?   Guest: So like when we went to King's Landing, I know that they had rentals there, you could take your own and that one was a really, really cool place to see as well. It's spring-fed and all the water's super clear, you can walk through lots of it, um, there are gators and stuff so there's like two different parts of that where you can go up one, um, just to see, you know, the scenery and then there's like a wildlife part of it where you're going to see more, um, like gators and stuff like that.   Host: Now, the campground Juniper Springs is in the National FL, and then in these other little areas, how far away are they? How far are you driving?   Guest: Oh, I mean, I think, like, I think like an hour or I think, yeah, yeah, 30 minutes to an hour, um, not super, not super long, all in our opinion, maybe an hour, yeah, which we're used to driving a lot. I mean, right now we're driving 1,500 miles a week and so I mean, our not very far to us can be a lot further to other people.   Host: But I think it's nice especially for the RV community to have somewhere that you can go that does only take, you know, an hour and a half to get to because then you can either just bounce the next day or stay over there. Um, or you can go and enjoy stuff and then head back to that campground if that's really where you just want to be staying now to get the full experience. How long did you guys stay there for?   Guest: We stayed, I think it was a week and, um, I mean it was more than enough to kind of see what was in the area but we moved pretty fast so, um, I mean there's plenty to do for longer than that. Uh, we kind of went in the off-season. Even when you're heading down, there's stuff to do along the way, like Devil's Den is, um, you know, along the way but there's a lot, there's a ton of springs, ton of places to kayak and stuff like that. There's a lot to do around the area.   Host: You said you went in the off-season, when was that? Like early March?   Guest: Yeah, so it was before, you know, all of the, before the summer crowd really. They were just kind of getting things started, even like the spring break crowd. Like I don't even think that we saw a lot of like, but Al weren't by the beach either so, um, we didn't, you know, it was, it was really pretty chill. We went to the beach but it was closed down, like not closed down but there wasn't like a whole lot of stuff going on.   Host: And in March, did you guys have good weather in this area?   Guest: Yeah, I mean for the most part. There were some days where it was kind of cloudy and I mean the, the April-May showers type of thing but it cleared up pretty fast. I mean I think it's not uncommon for it to rain and then be sunny in Florida so, it was, it was good. It was decent.   Host: And how was the temperature of the water in March?   Guest: It was cold. We put our feet in, let the little fish bite our toes but, um, I think it stays around the same temperature most of the year or if not all the year so it, I mean it's pretty chilly but it's not like you can't enjoy it, yeah, absolutely.   Host: Now, you guys do have a dog, did you have your dog when you went?   Guest: Yes, yeah, he was a puppy, trying to think. I was like, yes, we were afraid that the bears, we had to walk out in the dark a few times and we were afraid that the bears were going to come in, which I mean we're not from an area that there are bears, yeah, so like every sound we heard or even like in the van sleeping, we're like, do you hear that? Which now, you know, we're a little bit, since we've traveled more, yeah, it's not like as intimidating and they don't, we didn't see a single bear while we were there, nobody had any issues with a bear. I mean we had bear spray just in case, needed it but, I mean people were out at night, you know, cooking stuff on a campfire and all sorts of stuff. I mean nobody had any issues with a bear, I think it was just because we were new travelers, better to be cautious. They have like warning signs, like lock up all your belongings and so the, they do have, uh, warning signs when you come in, trash cans and stuff are all, you know, and in lock down bin. Yeah, yeah, Hank loved it, he, he was just a puppy we had just, we got him in January of that year and we went in March so he was only like two months old so he had a blast. We were still actually trying to potty train him at the time too so he was still doing really good.   Host: So, obviously, you drove there but how does transportation work like where is this National Forest in relation to some of those major airports if someone doesn't have a van and wants to fly and enjoy the campground in the National Forest?   Guest: Yeah, I mean there's, there's airports you can fly in, you can rent cars and get to all those places. Um, say we, the closest we were Orlando, yeah, it wasn't far from Orlando, it wasn't very far from there, maybe some closer options but I know that there, you know, it's not very far from a lot of those airports that are, you know, down there in that area. I think there's quite a few of them, um, I'm not sure right off the top of my head which ones exactly they are.   Host: Why don't you, um, tell us just a little bit about the campground and kind of some of the amenities that they had there?   Guest: Yeah, um, I mean they had biking trails, uh, they had walking trails, you could go backpacking in, uh, that specifically that area, they had like, um, they, a shower room, they had like a little room, um, beside the showers so you could go like with a sink and I think and you could go and wash your dishes, um, the Ocala National Forest is huge so, um, I think there's a lot of stuff just right there by it, there's different lodging and and stuff like that.   Host: Awesome, we love National Forests because a lot of times you can do dispersed camping there so it makes it nice where you can just kind of explore, pull off, find an area that doesn't have a no camping sign and you're usually good to stay there for the night and that's some of the best spots that we've found so it's nice that you have the option for the campground but you're also in the National Forest, you could probably drive out and stay somewhere for a night and you know, feel like you're really in the middle of the national forest.   Guest: Yes and things, I think things are a lot harder, you know, when you get, I think somebody said east of the Mississippi is a lot harder to find, you know, dispersed camping but it's definitely doable. I mean you, we use apps like iOverlander and stuff like that that help out too so, yeah.   Host: We've used eye Overlander a lot, and that has almost always pointed us in a good direction. So in this area, what is there to do at night?   Guest: We did a lot of just, you know, camping stuff. I mean, we just, you know, make s'mores or roast, you know, hot dogs, have a campfire. I think it's just mostly like outdoor stuff. A lot of the stuff seems to kind of close down at night. I mean, you can travel into some of the other places like Daytona Beach. There's a lot of stuff to do around there, so it just kind of depends on what you're looking for and what you like.   Host: Yeah, definitely. In Florida, there's something for everybody.   Guest: It's not too far from other things to do at night, but where we were at mostly, it was just, you know, kind of campfire activities, hanging out with each other, relaxing.   Host: Yeah, so that's perfect. That's what, you know, being in nature is all about. How was the stargazing? Were there open areas for that?   Guest: There were, for sure. I mean, you could get out of the campground and drive kind of through the forest, and there's places to pull off on the sides of the road and stuff, and you can get out. I mean, it's really dark, easy to see stars and stuff like that, but where we were at, there was a lot of coverage.   Host: Yeah, very good. Sunset or sunrise locations, did you get to see any good ones?   Guest: Yeah, more towards like the beaches. So, good pictures at Daytona Beach of our van with the palm trees and stuff in the back. So, in the Ocala National Forest is, you know, mainland, I guess you would call it, or inland, I think that's the word I was looking for. So if you travel more towards the beaches, I mean, that's not to say that there could be other places that we didn't see, but a lot of the sunset pictures at the beach and stuff like that were really, really cool. I mean, it's, there's not really anything like seeing a sunset at a beach.   Host: So, as far as overall cost for this trip for you guys, was it more expensive or less expensive than you expected?   Guest: I think it was less expensive than we expected, just because we had budgeted more just for activities and stuff, but a lot of the stuff wasn't very expensive. Like, we brought our own inflatable kayak to go on King's Landing. It was less expensive than renting a kayak there. And a lot of the amenities were just free, you know? I mean, we had to pay for our campsite, but it was fairly cheap. The biggest expense was gas to get there, actually.vSo under budget that we decided after we left that we were going to go up to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and see that too.   Host: That's always nice when you have extra money in your budget and you can just add something else in.   Guest: For sure. We did that. Yeah, it was fun.   Host: Awesome. Now, did you guys have any good food spots in the area that you were in, or did you have to really pack everything in and cook at your campfire?   Guest: That's, we kind of packed everything in and cooked everything, you know? We made sandwiches. At the time, she was T of money. She was a staff nurse and I worked at the school, so it wasn't like we had a ton of money. We were kind of on a budget then, so we just ate, you know, sandwiches and cooked cheap stuff and really just traveled to see the place, you know, and experience it, not necessarily spend a bunch of money. We've never been, you know, huge on like going and doing all these attractions and stuff. Ours was just really to see the environment, get to say we've been there, and just enjoy it for what it was, you know, what it had to offer. And I think we were excited to cook and do everything for the first time in our van, too.   Host: Absolutely, just really be in the van and experience that, of course. Plus, with the new puppy, you probably didn't want to venture out too far from him. Very cool. So if you haven't mentioned it already, are there any other nearby attractions?   Guest: Yeah, there's lots. I mean, there's, um, Orlando's not like crazy, crazy far, so you can go to, you know, Disney. We went to Three Sisters, we went to King's Landing. I mean, there's a lot to do.   Host: Perfect. And on your way, I guess you can stop and listen to our podcast with Eric Adventures. She did on Disney. Stop there and do that, and then head to the national forest and listen to your guys's podcast. That's perfect.   Host: All right, guys, well, it's time for the final three questions, the 3-2-1 countdown section of the podcast. So, what are three things you have to pack when you go to this Juniper Springs area?   Guest: Bug spray, yeah, bug spray for sure.   Host: I was gonna ask.   Guest: I think another one would be, if you can, like a bike or a kayak or something to kind of entertain yourself outside. So, I mean, you don't even have to have those, just like some sort of outdoor activity, whether it be like frisbee or ball, or you know, I guess you don't have to do that kind of stuff, but, you know, that was something that was important to us. And then with staying at the campground, it's not like it's super, super close to town. I think it's like 15 or 20 minutes to the town. So, you know, pack your food in there and then, you know, take your trash and dispose of it on the way out.   Host: Perfect. So bug spray, food, and something to do outside, some sort of activity, yeah, whether it's a bike or a kayak or a football. That's a good point. I feel like I've gone to the beach so many times and there you go to the beach, you lay down or you go for a walk or you go for a swim, but I remember thinking repeatedly, I wish I had like a football or just something to throw around, a frisbee, football, you know, whatever.   Guest: I'm the same way. I'm not much of a lounger. I like to do stuff that's, you know, fun, whether it be ride a bike or a one-wheel or, you know, whatever. Yeah.   Host: Yeah, I like to lounge, but it's good to, like, work up a sweat, throw a ball around, and jump in the water and just repeat, right?   Guest: Right, for sure.   Host: What are two complaints that somebody might have about this area? And not necessarily complaints, but things people should be prepared for. And I feel like I know the answer to one already.   Guest: Yeah, so like driving would be one. The other would be maybe like cell phone signal and service. I don't... which one were you thinking that I was thinking?   Host: The bugs, but.   Guest: Oh yeah, yeah, bugs for sure. That's the first one that came to my mind.   Host: So, in terms of driving, it's just the drive to get there or are you driving kind of for long periods to get back and forth to the town or like a grocery store is a little ways away?   Guest: So, like, like I said, it's like 20 minutes. So, it's not like you're just driving right on into town to get something. You know, it's a little bit of a... get something. So that may be a complaint some people. The other one is like signal, you know? There's not... now there's Starlink. When we went, there wasn't Starlink. So you may be able to have something like that, but for us, we didn't have any cell phone signal. We didn't have any way to contact anybody if we needed to, which I, you know, that's a blessing and a curse, I guess.   Host: Well, whether it's a blessing or a curse, it's still something you should be prepared for, so that's a good tip to bring up.   Host: And last question, guys. We talked about a lot of things in this episode, but what is one thing if you had to pick that you cannot leave Juniper Springs without doing?   Guest: I'd say going to do King's Landing. It's just a lot of cool, like, photo-like opportunities, like it's just really that, like, photo-like that picture-perfect moment that not even, like, really even your camera can capture. Like, it's just so beautiful. And we have tons of pictures of it posted, I think on our Instagram or maybe our separate Instagrams, but a very beautiful place. I think that's one place that I would... Yeah, like if you look up like videos of it or whatever or see pictures, you know, when you show up to that place, it's going to be exactly if not better than what you've seen online. So, it was just really beautiful, clear water, it just felt like you were in, you know, an oasis, yeah, but the trees over top of you and yeah, it was just a unique experience that I don't think you would get anywhere else.   Host: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of those places where, like, you know, photos, they're always going to look better in person, but oftentimes, like, a thing that looks really cool in person, it doesn't look that cool in a photo. But the King's Landing is one of those things that it's both. In person, it's amazing, I would imagine. I haven't been there yet, but the photos of it look amazing too.   Guest: You've been to places where it looks really cool, you know, and you get there and it's not quite as NE, yeah, but this one, yeah, it's everything that you would imagine. So, we even tried to paddle, like, when we were... I think when we were heading up, we were going like with the current. So, we were like trying to slow down just so that way we could like just take it all in a little bit slower. Maybe it was on the way back, I'm not sure. When you go up, you go against the current, on the way back, you go with the current.   Host: Sweet, guys. This was another super informative travel tips segment. One more time, listeners, if you haven't tuned into the first episode, they talked about their travel nursing and their van builds, so definitely check that one out. And yeah, Hope and I, we're excited. We're going to go to Florida over the next couple of months here and we definitely want to add this to our list too. So maybe Disney and then we've got Florida Keys and we'll have to stop in Juniper Springs too. Awesome, guys. All right. And one last question, where can our audience find out more about you?   Guest: We're on Instagram @Kodaandcourt is our name. And we have a YouTube channel. Maybe we'll start uploading to it. We'll just, you know, see what kind of happens.   Host: Sweet. All right, Dakota and Courtney, thanks again.   Guest: Thank you.

In this special collection of episodes, Ryan Manion, CEO of Travis Manion Foundation, explores her deep journey with grief over the last 16 years and how grief has transformed her life. Through her own personal experiences with grief, Ryan is sharing her lessons learned to help others on their grief journey. If you are struggling with grief, supporting someone in grief, or simply learning about grief, this is for you. In Part 2, Ryan sits down with Mary Katharine Ham, journalist, author, speaker, and podcaster. Mary Katharine discusses the loss of her husband, actionable tips for supporting those in grief, and how each of us can overcome our own fears to step into a supporting role.CONNECT with The Resilient Life Podcast:Instagram SUBSCRIBE Get the latest video podcast on YouTubeGet the latest audio podcastCONNECT Ryan Manion on Social Media:Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - LinkedIn  LEARN about Travis Manion FoundationMEET Mary Katharine HamInstagramSubstack

Need to file a claim for veteran's benefits? The best place to start is with a VSO, and it's FREE! Shawnee Young, Director of the Butler County Veterans Services Office, joins us on this episode to talk in depth about the great work they do being advocates for veterans and helping file claims so they can get the benefits they deserve.

California has more military bases within its borders than most states: a whopping 32 bases are in CA, some from every military branch. There are 158,000 active duty members of the armed forces in California. There are 1.35-million military veterans in California.Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo is the new Chair of the Military and Veterans Affairs Committee.In the Northwest San Fernando Valley, Assemblywoman Schiavo co-founded an organization that helped secure housing for Veterans experiencing homelessness.Assemblywoman Schiavo is the daughter of small business owners. Her father was a logger who became an electrician after two battles with cancer after exposure to Agent Orange while serving in the military, and her mom was a bookkeeper and managed the family electrical business. Assemblywoman Schiavo lives in Chatsworth with her daughter Sofia where they love to hike in the Santa Susana Mountains.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. In this episode, Leah addresses questions related to Veterans Affairs (VA) disability claims, specifically focusing on gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) concerning other service-connected conditions. The speaker confirms that medications for service-connected orthopaedic ailments, such as NSAIDs, can lead to GERD and highlights the possibility of hypertension being linked to orthopaedic conditions due to pain, NSAID use, and weight gain. They express scepticism about hypertension's direct link to tinnitus but acknowledge connections between tinnitus and mental health issues, migraines, and vertigo. The speaker advises veterans whose claims, like GERD secondary to NSAID use, are denied, to carefully review their rating decision letters and consider various avenues for recourse.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.#veterans #va #medical

This week we talked with Jason Berger, VSO of Eastern Hampden District, Ally Rodriquez, VSO Taunton MA, and Kim Emerling, VSO of Salem, MA.  We get their propective as VSOs and learn what they do in their communities. 

SummaryHow can the feelings of people who work in organizations both facilitate and suppress change?What makes people attach reputation and credibility to another person? And how does this relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and these may work out in practice?What's the problem with think tanks from the perspective of a decolonization goal, and what has been the problem historically?In this NGO Soul+Strategy podcast episode, I interview Ajoy Datta,  consultant, policy researcher, and coach, on decolonizing think tanks, policy research organizations, and consulting agencies. Ajoy's Bio:Independent consultantOver 20 years of experience in the global development and humanitarian sectorSupports leaders, teams, organizations, and networks to collaborate, perform better, learn, innovate, and changePerforms designing, monitoring, and evaluating work to engage with and influence policy and practice as well as strengthen decision-making systemsWorked 12 years at the Overseas Development Institute (DI)'s research and policy unitWorked 3 years at the On Think Tanks (OTT) consulting groupStarted at VSO, the British volunteer agency, in Zambia We discuss: The useful role of psychodynamics in organizational development: what goes on in our minds, consciously and unconsciously, while working in organizations. Some of these feelings are suppressed and below the surfaceDecolonizing organizations means that we aim to do away with hundreds of years of Western, global North power, such as philosophical underpinnings, concepts, frameworks, assumptions, knowledge systems, and leadership profiles. When organizations recruit people who are dissimilar in demographic or experiential profile from those that were thus far considered the 'norm',  the 'default' -- if their organizational culture, expectations towards staff, and org systems don't adapt to these new profiles, tension will be the result. These people will be at higher risk of either leaving or being ‘spit out'The phenomenon of the glass cliff: when people with demographic profiles different from what was the norm thus far are recruited to high-risk leadership positions, and then fail. What to do about all of this? 1/ Name and acknowledge what is happening. If we fear talking about it, it will never be addressed; 2/ “decriminalize bias"; 3/ create a safe container for discussion; 4/ communicate externally but also internally Resources:Ajoy's LinkedIn profileAjoy's Medium blog postsAjoy's WebsiteSample blog posts: 1, 2YouTube video of this podcastClick here to subscribe to be alerted when new podcast episodes come out or when Tosca produces other thought leadership pieces.Or email Tosca at tosca@5oaksconsulting.org Twitter LinkedIn Facebook 

In filing for VA claims there are various ways you can go about it. You can connect with a VSO to help you, maybe a lawyer. Some immerse themselves in forums online to get information. Some get connected with an education-based coaching and consulting company like VA Claims Insider.There are different ways and they produce different outcomes as well, so be intelligent in deciding what path you're gonna take in pursuing your VA claims.*********Got some questions? I'd love to answer them!Email me at docontheroad@vaclaimsinsider.comAre you ready to get the VA rating you deserve? Work with my team at docontheroad.com and start your path to winning your VA disability claim.VA Claims Insider Veterans helping veterans get the VA Disability Rating They DESERVE.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. Leah provides a detailed tutorial on how veterans can access their VA medical records online. She explains that veterans can log into the My HealtheVet platform to not only review their medical records but also refill prescriptions, communicate with their care team, schedule appointments, and view lab and x-ray reports. Leah demonstrates step-by-step how to navigate the website, starting from logging in at myhealth.va.gov to downloading medical records. She emphasizes selecting the appropriate date range and types of information to ensure a comprehensive record is obtained. The process involves clicking the “Blue Button Medical Report,” choosing records from the desired time frame and submitting the request, after which the records can be downloaded as a PDF. Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.#veterans #va #medical

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. Leah discusses the emerging use of ketamine for treating chronic pain and mental health conditions such as PTSD, depression, and OCD. She highlights that ketamine, traditionally used for anesthesia and sedation since the 1960s, is now being explored for its neuromodulation effects on mental health, especially in veterans. Leah notes that while ketamine has a reputation as a street drug, its medical application shows significant benefits in brain function repair, particularly in cases where traditional treatments have failed. She mentions ongoing clinical trials and the possibility of insurance coverage for these treatments under certain circumstances. Leah also points out contraindications like active psychosis or substance abuse and emphasizes that the treatment is not universal but depends on individual assessments by healthcare providers. Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. Leah discusses Battlefield Acupuncture, a technique developed by Air Force veteran Dr. Nimitzau. This form of auricular (ear) acupuncture is designed for rapid deployment among healthcare professionals in military settings, offering non-traditional, pharmacologic pain relief for various conditions, including orthopedic issues and migraines. Frequently used in the military and available in VA clinics, it involves placing small, semi-permanent ASP needles at five specific points in the ear. While not a universal remedy, many service members report benefits such as reduced stress and improved sleep. Leah, sharing her personal experience, mentions possible side effects like minor discomfort and infection risk, advising veterans to consult their healthcare providers to determine if it's suitable for them.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Knowing how to effectively use your veteran benefits is a key part of post-military success. On this episode, we uncover how to navigate your benefits with help from Dr. Paul Lawrence. As a businessman, author and passionate veteran advocate, Dr. Lawrence served as the Under Secretary for Benefits at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs where he was in charge of the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) and led a team of 25,000 people with an operating budget of $4 billion. Each year, he administered $120 billion in benefits to veterans. Dr. Lawrence wrote Veterans Benefits for You: Get What You Deserve, an easy-to-read, how-to guide, that was released on July 4, 2023. Paul served in the U.S. Army, having completed his ROTC requirement as an Airborne-qualified Captain. You can learn about the different benefits to which you are entitled by visiting https://www.va.gov, attending the Transition Assistance Program, utilizing veteran service organizations or by reading Dr. Lawrence's new book. The only way to initiate any veteran benefit is to apply for that benefit. While some applications are easy to navigate, others can be complicated. Dr. Lawrence advises veterans who think they don't deserve additional benefits to understand that benefits are not an entitlement, they are earned through one's service. For those seeking disability compensation, remember that as you age, conditions will get worse. It's easier to start the disability compensation process earlier, rather than later, because you often don't have the documentation you need, or the conditions can get more problematic. Even if a person applies for a benefit and is denied, there will still be a record on file. This is helpful when science advances and conditions can be attributed to exposure to certain chemicals for example. As a person ages, they can file a claim for increase. Dr. Paul encourages people to review their conditions every 3-5 years. One of the most utilized benefits is the GI Bill, a benefit that is not just for college. It can also be used for technical training and certifications. In addition, it is a benefit that can be transferred, while on duty, to a dependent. Many states have additional education benefits for veterans and their dependents. The home loan guarantee is another popular benefit. Veterans can purchase a home with no money down.  A benefit that is often underutilized is a safety net benefit called pension. If a veteran's assets and income fall below a certain level, and the veteran served during periods of war, then that person may qualify for a small pension. The veteran does not need to have served 20 years. It's not a lot of money, but it may be enough for someone on the cusp of homelessness. Another benefit that could be useful is life insurance. For those that are service disabled, it may be difficult to obtain life insurance for certain amounts. The VA has an insurance portfolio that should be considered. If someone is having issues accessing their benefits, reach out to a VSO. Many organizations will help you find a VSO, including Wounded Warrior, DAV, VFW or American Legion. Each state also funds VSOs.Subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://tinyurl.com/llforvets22.    You can connect with Paul on LinkedIn at:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/drpaullawrence/Order Veterans Benefits for You: Get What You Deserve at: https://www.amazon.com/Veterans-Benefits-You-What-Deserve-ebook/dp/B0BGYD2B3KSUBSCRIBE & LEAVE A FIVE-STAR REVIEW and share this with other veterans who might need help as they transition from the military!

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7 AM. Leah discusses the significance of reviewing VA rating decision letters when assessing medical records and evidence for veterans. She emphasizes the usefulness of these letters in providing a historical perspective on previous claims, especially those that were denied. Leah highlights how these letters can offer details about service-related conditions, reasons for denial, and evidence considered or overlooked. She advises veterans to obtain their "C file" or previous decision letters, either through their accredited agent, attorney or directly from the VA, often with a quick response time. Leah also mentions the importance of ensuring all submitted evidence is acknowledged in the VA's review process and suggests that overlooked evidence could be a key factor in denials. Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.#veterans #va #medical

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7 AM. Leah offers an in-depth guide for veterans undergoing a Compensation and Pension (C&P) exam for knee pain. As a US Army veteran, former C&P examiner, and physician assistant, Leah discusses various knee conditions eligible for VA disability, including patellofemoral pain syndrome, meniscal tears, and arthritis. She explains how these conditions can be service-connected directly or secondarily due to other injuries or issues like weight gain. The video outlines the preparation for a C&P exam, detailing the contents of the pre-exam packet and the importance of the Disability Benefits Questionnaire (DBQ).Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7 AM. Leah explains that while obesity itself isn't directly service-connected, it can act as a bridge linking service-related conditions to other medical issues. For instance, a veteran's service-connected disability might lead to obesity, which in turn causes another condition. Leah delves into the definition and categories of obesity based on BMI (Body Mass Index) and mentions the landmark Walsh vs. Wilkie case, which set a precedent for obesity as an intermediate step in such claims. She outlines the criteria for establishing a connection between service-related disability, obesity, and subsequent health issues. Leah provides examples of conditions like mental health disorders, orthopedic ailments, and asthma, which can lead to obesity, and secondary conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and sleep apnea that might be linked to obesity. Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #obesity #veterans #health  * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. Leah  explains the importance of range of motion (ROM) measurement or goniometry in evaluating orthopedic or musculoskeletal conditions for VA disability ratings. She clarifies that the severity of a condition doesn't directly determine the disability rating; instead, it's based on functional limitations as assessed by ROM. Leah demonstrates how to measure elbow flexion using a goniometer, explaining the process of measuring both active and passive ROM. She emphasizes that the degree of motion measured corresponds to specific disability ratings according to the 38 Code of Federal Regulation 4.71a. Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7 AM. Leah provides an overview of what veterans can expect during a Compensation and Pension (C&P) exam for diabetes. She explains that the Disability Benefits Questionnaire (DBQ) is a crucial document used by examiners to determine rating criteria, available on VA.gov for review or completion by a private provider. The video focuses on Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, discussing their connection to military service, including direct service-related cases, secondary connections through conditions like obesity, and presumptive conditions linked to Agent Orange exposure. During the exam, veterans can expect to discuss their medical history, treatment details, the impact of diabetes on their daily life, and potential secondary conditions like neuropathy or retinal issues. Ratings for diabetes in VA disability claims are determined by the level of management needed, ranging from dietary restrictions to insulin injections, and the severity of symptoms and complications.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to Double Tap, Episode 299 Our CAST is Jeremy Pozderac, MG Moses, Nick Lynch and my name is Shawn herrin.  Dear WLS  Alex W: I’ve been thinking a lot about government overreach. As was mentioned in the last episode I listened to when you had VSO on, I believe that, especially at the federal … WLS Double Tap 299 – Butterscotch Pudding Read More » The post WLS Double Tap 299 – Butterscotch Pudding appeared first on Firearms Radio Network.

Welcome to Double Tap, Episode 299 Our CAST is Jeremy Pozderac, MG Moses, Nick Lynch and my name is Shawn herrin.  Dear WLS  Alex W: I've been thinking a lot about government overreach. As was mentioned in the last episode I listened to when you had VSO on, I believe that, especially at the federal … WLS Double Tap 299 – Butterscotch Pudding Read More » The post WLS Double Tap 299 – Butterscotch Pudding appeared first on Firearms Radio Network.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7 AM. Leah explains the concept of presumptive conditions related to military service and how they are handled by the VA. She clarifies that presumptive conditions are illnesses or injuries likely caused by military service, as defined by the VA, which may include specific illnesses for veterans exposed to Agent Orange. Focusing on disabilities manifesting within one year of service separation, Leah emphasizes that not all conditions diagnosed within this period are automatically service-connected. She urges veterans to review the VA's list of presumptive conditions within this timeframe, available online, to better understand which conditions are covered. She uses arthritis as an example, explaining its logical inclusion due to its development over time, making it likely service-related if diagnosed shortly after separation. Leah also touches on other types of presumptive conditions like Gulf War-related illnesses and exposure-related conditions, emphasizing the importance of veterans educating themselves and consulting with professionals for claims processes.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health  * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. Leah explains the significance of 'buddy letters' in VA disability claims. These letters, formally known as "Statements in Support of Claim," provide personal accounts of a veteran's injury or illness, offering insight into their medical history. While not required, these documents can strengthen a claim by depicting a veteran's condition during and post-service. Leah emphasizes that buddy statements can be written by various individuals, such as family members, supervisors, or fellow service members ('battle buddies'), detailing the onset and progression of symptoms. She advises that, although not mandatory, certain elements like the date, reference to the veteran, and the writer's signature can enhance the letter's impact.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health  * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. Leah discusses the importance of veterans describing to their healthcare providers the impact of their disability on their lives, both before and after its onset. She emphasizes the need for veterans to be detailed and open about the changes in their personal and professional lives, such as alterations in social interactions, family relationships, hobbies, and work performance. Leah provides examples like the effects of PTSD or back pain on daily activities and suggests maintaining records of changes in work performance or missed days. She also mentions using administrative documentation, like social security disability papers, to illustrate these changes.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. In this episode, Leah emphasizes the importance of detailed communication between a patient and their healthcare provider, especially during compensation and pension (comp and pen) exams or regular check-ups. She suggests that patients keep a symptom diary, noting not just the pain or discomfort but also its nature (like stabbing, sharp, or dull), triggers, time of occurrence, and any factors that worsen or alleviate it. Leah stresses that this approach helps give a comprehensive picture to the healthcare provider, enabling them to understand the patient's condition better. This detailed documentation, which could be in various forms like online diaries, apps, or hand-written notes, is crucial for effective communication during the limited consultation time. Leah also mentions that understanding the frequency and duration of symptoms and their impact on daily life, both professionally and personally, is vital.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.#veterans #va #medical

Welcome to The Veterans Disability Nexus, where we provide unique insights and expertise on medical evidence related to VA-rated disabilities.Leah Bucholz, a US Army Veteran, Physician Assistant, & former Compensation & Pension Examiner shares her knowledge related to Independent Medical Opinions often referred to as “Nexus Letters” in support of your pursuit of VA Disability every Wednesday at 7AM. In this episode, Leah addresses how active duty service members and veterans can document medical conditions for VA claims. She emphasizes the importance of DD Form 2807 (Report of Medical History) and DD Form 2808 (Report of Medical Examination), which are filled out during military entrance, at various military schools, and upon exit. Leah advises service members to thoroughly document all ailments on the DD Form 2807, suggesting they schedule separate appointments for each issue to ensure thorough documentation. For those exiting service, this approach ensures that their medical records accurately reflect their health concerns, aiding future VA benefit claims. Leah also explains how these forms provide a comprehensive medical history snapshot, beneficial for veterans to illustrate the progression or aggravation of conditions during service.Take control of your medical evidence related to your benefits and visit https://www.prestigeveteranmctx.com for more information and support.#veterans #va #medical #health  * This Podcast episode is not medical or legal advice and should not be substituted for advisement from your VSO, accredited agent, or Attorney.