So, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. For many of us running a single mile sounds tough, I know it used to be for me. Never mind running an entire marathon. Well, my guest today has not only done that, but a whole lot more. In fact, he's run the equivalent of 172 marathons in a row. In just a minute, I'll be speaking with the ultramarathon runner, author and motivational speaker, Charlie Engel. Charlie has run 4,500 miles through the Sahara Desert and survived 16 months in federal prison. That's an interesting combination that we're going to get into, but it considers his more than two decades of sobriety as one of his biggest feats to date. Wow, what a history. This is going to be good, folks. He released his memoir, Running Man. Three years ago and has touched countless lives with his story of courage, perseverance, and redemption. Today we'll discuss his strategies and setbacks with addiction and incarceration and how running helped him overcome adversity and forge ahead. We'll also chat about his incredible record-breaking treks around the globe and how physical exercise can help you work through your own struggles. Charlie, thanks for joining me today. Truly my pleasure. That was the best intro I've ever had, I believe, so thank you for that. This is impressive, impressively crazy and motivational.  Indeed. My 20s primarily were pretty much a disaster, but addiction doesn't look like what people assume it does always. I was this really bad alcoholic and cocaine addict, yet I was also the top salesman at my company. My idea was that if I balanced the really bad things I was doing with some amazing good things that it would all work out. I always thought that the boss wouldn't fire the top salesman and that absolutely turned out not to be true. Is that most addicts, and I care for a lot of addicts and former addicts, have to hit rock bottom? Is that what happened to you? It is. Actually, the birth of my first son was a real catalyst for me. I was 29. I'd tried everything to quit. I had been successful in short bursts, but never could maintain so many addicts. I was like, okay, my son is going to change all that just by his mere presence. Not surprisingly, what I found with this tiny beautiful baby boy was love and hope and strength that I'd really never had before. But two months after his birth, there I am again on another six day binge and the police are going through my car and there's bullet holes in the car that were put there by somebody who was trying to shoot me. Even after six days of no sleep and all the things I was doing, I had the clearest thought ever. That thought was simple, that nobody is coming to save me. My son can't save me and I had always looked for these external reasons to quit and it took in that moment the realization that I had to do this for myself and that there was no other way. I went to a 12-step meeting that night and I got up and put my running shoes on the next day and I ran and went to a meeting every day for the next three years without missing a single day and through that mechanism began to create a life for myself. So there's a lot of teaching that you will always be an addict but you have to be addicted to something. Indeed. Right? Indeed. So were you a runner before that or did you say, holy cow, I'm going to go? I was and I had a legacy of running. I had run in high school and even in my, like I was a binger, again with addicts, not everybody is like an every day all the time user. I would have a couple of terrible months and then I would get sick of it and I would clean up for a month or a couple months or whatever and running was always a mechanism for me to both get myself physically fit but I also recognized there's a combination of self-imposed suffering, almost penance, self-flagellation that actually goes along with that because of course as any self-respecting addict I felt badly about myself and I felt like I wasn't worthy of love or forgiveness or many of the things that I saw in other people and strangely running began as a way to sort of purge that what felt like craziness all the time and I had the side benefit of I just knew I felt great when I ran, although I will say people assume I love running and I do love to run but they make the mistake of understanding that for me running as a vehicle towards not only, you know, culture, cultural exploration but also it's the stopping that feels great. It's the endorphin release that comes at the end that actually feeds a lot of what I need and what I feel so the act of running, sure, I like it in a lot of ways but I like where it takes me more than that. You know there's a saying in running that the hardest step in running is the step out the door. Totally. Is that 100% not really for me because it's embedded but when I coach people I tell them all the time, you have to trust me like you haven't run since you were 12 years old and think of the joy that you had when you were young, we all did what was natural as a kid as a pre-adolescent, as an adolescent.  We naturally ran everywhere we went because emotionally that's what we wanted to do and physically it was the fastest way to get there. When we get older of course we stop doing that because when you haven't run in 20 years it hurts, it feels lousy. People get motivated and they go train 7 days a week and it hurts them because they don't understand the way to slowly work themselves into it and find something that works for them as an individual. Yeah, when my wife finally convinced me to start running in my mid-40s I had such awful shin splints and I go, this is not fun, why would I do this? But then we got a dog, a very active dog and actually I learned to run from watching my dog. Thanks to the dog. Man, this is great. Let's do this.  It's interesting that even with someone like you with your vast knowledge of physiology shin splints are just a way of saying tendonitis, it's really all it is. It's an overuse injury which means that you've done too much too soon or maybe your shoes are off or whatever but it just takes time like anything else. So did bullet holes in your car help to hit rock bottom? Indeed. Yeah. Well, and it was the, I know you work with addicts, I mean addicts aren't, it's something we're not smart enough, you know, if- No, let's actually, let's dispel that myth right now.  They really are. We're great salesmen too. We can sell anybody anything like we're okay, right? That's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. But I mean you have to be actually highly intelligent to harm yourself as hard as- Voluntarily. Yeah, voluntarily. Yeah, yeah. Certainly it's a mix of, it's a mix of genetics, you know, I'm a fourth generation addict, you know, of some type and, you know, I have two kids. One of them has struggled, one hasn't. I mean it's such a clear, it's such a clear path. It is a proverbial loaded gun. If you have it in your genetics and you choose to pick it up, you got a pretty solid shot of suffering some bad consequences. Yeah, no, it's very true. Okay, so, all right, so you run long distances, but now you run really long distances. I mean 35, 50, hundreds of miles. How does that help you? Wait, is it supposed to? Yes. I hope it helps. No, it does. It does. It is a vehicle of self-exploration for me and I certainly got the question early on in those first three years, I actually ran, you know, I ran, when I ran every day, I actually ran 30 marathons in that period of time, like my first 30 and I absolutely was to a degree addicted to running and I had people ask. Not necessarily in a kind way, you know, haven't you just switched addictions and I understood their point, but the fact of the matter is, you know, addiction is about hiding, about being invisible, about not having any feelings. And if you do have one heaven forbid, you know, you tamp it down with some drugs or a drink and running is by its nature the exact opposite. It's like there is no hiding and running. It's you feel everything both physically and emotionally, or at least I do, when I'm doing this after I do it and for the first time in my life I was fully present, you know, not only during the run, but during other times. Like if I go have a run in the morning, which I do most mornings, like it does set the stage for me to be energetic and a happy mood, like that's done and I feel good the rest of the day.  Well, I'm glad you say that. I think that's a lot of people miss that point. Many addicts tell me that they use a drug or alcohol to quiet the noise in their brain. Do you just run in quiet to your brain? Yes, in a way. I will say that it maybe is like this. There's a roulette wheel normally has like one ball and a lot of slots. You know, I feel like sometimes I have like a ball for every slot and when you spin it, they're all bouncing around and if I go out for a run, like they do all sort of settle into their spot. They eventually roll around and find their spot and, you know, and things sort of click. I learned a long time ago I do take an audio recorder or these days my phone when I run because I do have good ideas or at least what I think are good ideas when I run. So there is clarity there, I think, that I find it harder to have sitting in an office or trying to sort things out on a computer where you've got emails and phone calls and texts coming in all the time and I can't keep one thought in my head for more than 30 seconds because there's 20 more that want to shove in. So running does help me solve that. And I want to say just one quick thing. Addiction is when I ran those first three years, I thought that what I needed to do was like take a scalpel and like eliminate the addict. Like if I could just cut that part of me out that, you know, then I'd be okay. And it took that time to figure out that my addictive nature and my addictive qualities were actually all the best parts of me as you sort of pointed out a moment. Without those, I probably would just be sitting on the sofa like playing video games or, you know, it makes me do things and it makes me pretty good at a few things. No, you're right.  My wife says, you know, use your powers for good. So we've got an addiction crisis again in this country as if it ever went away. So how do you help somebody, you know, kick this problem? Any tricks? Man, that's a tough one. And I mean, it has changed.  They might start with smoking weed. They might start whatever. And it's this progression. What we're seeing with young people these days is they are zero to a hundred in a minute. Like they are going from never doing anything to doing heroin and fentanyl like tomorrow and it's killing them. And so two things that I would absolutely love to put out to your amazing audience is, you know, kind of the idea that we see at airports all the time.  Like we really do see these things. But dealing with that with anybody in our life is a pain, you know, it causes emotional pain and it's hassle that throws us out of our routine. Right. And it's hard to do. Yeah. And that person very often is likely to say, you know, screw you. I don't want to talk to you about this. You know, I don't have a problem, but you have to take a stand with people. And for the people who might be the addict out there that are watching, you have to finally ask for help. Everybody thinks they can do it alone. I assure you I'm confident in saying that I am one of the stronger mental people that you might ever meet as far as like just determination. I could not do it alone. I tried over and over and it wasn't until I looked for, you know, fellowship and support and had somebody to actually help me. You know, we spend 99% of our lives like preparing all of us for that 1% when everything goes wrong. And if you don't have a support network, whether it's addiction, disease, whatever it might be, you're in trouble. So find that support system.  In 2007, Matt Damon produced, what, Running the Sahara documentary. Your team ran across the Sahara Desert. It seemed like a good idea to do that. Why did you want to do that? What inspired you? Come on. And I will, I freely admit after the fact that almost looks like I had a great plan and I had some big, I wanted to see if it was possible. I mean, they're firsts in the adventure world, firsts in almost any field are really hard to come by. And for me, having the opportunity to try something that had never been done before and see if it was possible was very alluring. And, you know, and it fulfilled that need for me, you know. And I, again, I freely admit that there is a part of me and maybe it's my addict, maybe, I don't know what, curiosity, that I try to approach every situation with, you know, a curious mind and an open heart and the acceptance of the fact that I'm going to get something out of it. May not be what I want or necessarily even need. But I try to look at the philosophy this way, too. Comfort is like ridiculously overrated. Like, I don't know. It was like somewhere in the 50s, we invented the, you know, electric can opener because we were just like all of a sudden too lazy to open our own cans anymore. And it's like all innovation has been towards like making life easier. Well, what have we ever gotten from that? Like, there's no lesson and easy. Well, so you explain this to me. You slapped on a pair of tennis shoes and stepped out on the Sahara Desert and said, let's go, gang. This sounds like an incredible organizational feat. Just describe some of that. I mean, how do you do this? Well, what's funny about that is you probably, if you predicted what happened in that first week, you probably could. It was a dive into the abyss where absolutely everything imaginable went wrong. Like the 50 things that we thought maybe could go wrong, you know, just weather and whatever else, you know, those things went wrong too. But like we ran out of food, we ran out of water, we got lost. I had two crew people quit. It was 140 degree ground temperatures. So like you can practice and train and prepare at home when it's 80 degrees and, you know, whatever, and you can go take a shower at the end of the day. But then when you get out there, it's a different world. This makes bad water look like a walk in the park. I did bad water a bunch of times. And in a way, bad water is a compressed suffering, as I like to say. Where you do know, at least with bad water, it's going to end. Like somehow, it's in a certain period of time, it's going to be over. And with, you know, with the Sarah Desert, it kind of just went on and on. But, you know, we fell apart, quite frankly. And back to the lessons of addiction, what I realized about a week into it was I was so intent on putting my feet in the Red Sea at the end of the expedition that I forgot that it really is like everything else, this one day at a time adventure. And so like on day eight, I focused on running a marathon in the morning and get to lunch. And then I'd run another marathon in the afternoon and that would be my whole soul focus and get to the end of the day and lay on my mat and look at a billion stars and like give, you know, give thanks for the fact that I was actually able to be out there suffering and experiencing sort of a, I guess, a very life-changing experience for me. And your shoes are melting? Yeah, shoot, well, bad water, that happens for sure.  And so we had to put it this way, I had a unnamed in this moment shoe sponsor who had air pockets in their shoes. And those things, like I'd be running along and it'd be like, like that's higher. So it was a really amazing experience. And the Torrigs and the people of the desert were like so many impoverished places where they would offer you absolutely everything they had. And I'll tell you, anybody who's never, if you've driven into a village in an impoverished country, you're treated one way because you're driving in a car. They can't relate to that really, you're above them.  They run along with you and laugh and have a great time and wave at you as you pass through having no idea why you're there.  Yeah, right, right. Hey, there's some guys coming through your village. But yes, no, it's and it's true. They just kids just run and have fun. And that's that's all that's what they know language barriers aside. It was nothing but just human interaction. And that is why I'm out there. You know, I don't I'm not certainly running across the desert to help myself physically. And I did I pounded myself physically. I mean, it was two marathons a day, basically for 111 consecutive days. So tell me, what kind of physical toll did that take on you? Yeah, I don't know. Stay tuned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was, let's see, I'm 56 now. So I was basically 46 at the time of the run. And I think the other thing that happens is that people assume like, if you saw me run, you would kind of go, huh, that's not particularly attractive. You know, I am a an incredibly efficient shuffler, you know, I mean, it's the other misconception with running is when I when I enter 100 mile race, it doesn't matter how fast I run the first 50 miles. Why? Why would I go fast? You know, my goal is to get from here to the end as fast as I can, which means a really measured approach where hydration and nutrition actually play a much bigger role than than physical fitness.  You have to be in mentally to run 100 miles. But I always like to say that it's 90 percent mental and the rest is all in your head. Very good. I love it.  Can you give people an example of, you know, how do you endure in difficult situations? You know, I think the endurance is a state of mind as much as it is an act of the body. And so very often people want, we all want our results right away, right? And so our experience, though, does tell us that it takes time to get where we want to go. And the journey is, in fact, worth it. So if it's a physical journey, it is a matter of some moderation until you until your body adapts, until you're comfortable. A good example would be if you've ever been to altitude, to high altitude. So how do you feel when you first get there? You know, it's terrible, right?  You know, your body will do its job all on its own if you let it. So I think the thing about endurance is really just a matter of being patient with endurance, both physically and mentally, and setting yourself up for success by understanding it's a long-term commitment, not a sprint. OK, so your book Running Man described, this is a memoir, right? Indeed. OK. I tell it all. Tell me, in 2010, you were convicted of mortgage fraud. Indeed. And the conviction you say is unjust, which is fine. And you went on to serve 16 months in prison. And then how did that come about? Yeah, well, interestingly, it is, in some ways, a direct result of the notoriety that came from running the Sahara. You know, the other piece of the puzzle that we didn't discuss and I'm still very proud of is that, you know, Matt and I created a nonprofit called H2O Africa, which today is called Water.org. So out of running the Sahara is the world's largest clean water nonprofit. And we passed, you know, a billion dollars in funding recently. And so out of a crazy idea with no expectations, you know, good things can blossom, bad things can also blossom. You know, I lived in small town North Carolina, attracted the attention of one particular IRS agent who saw the film and decided that he wasn't interested in what I did, but rather in his opinion, how I did it. And without all the minutiae, it's in the book. And I never came out and defended because in today's society, you know, defending yourself as the surest way to be skewered. And so I actually just kept my mouth shut and let other people, the New York Times, a lot of other journalists and professionals examine the situation and basically make their own choice to come out and defense. Long story short, I was the only person in the United States at that time to actually be charged with overstating my income on a home loan application from 2005. I've heard of that recently happening. Yeah. So there's right. There are it has progressed as we've gone forward, you know, to other people. But at the time I was essentially the only person being charged with this. And I fought it because I didn't do it. And I was actually found not guilty of doing it, interestingly, but guilty of other other things like mail fraud, because I took a closing package and put it in a mail, even though it had information in there, excuse me, that you're getting choked up over this. I've been talking a lot, but, you know, the idea that the idea that this happened to me was incredibly unfair. Yet the addict part of me to bring it all the way back around, you know, part of me believed that I was getting something I deserved. You know, I mean, that psychologically, I understand the way my own brain works pretty well, at least in hindsight.   I fought it. I got sentenced to 21 months, 16 of it that I did actually in prison and two and a half way house. And it needless to say it changed everything.  It was everything. I was kind of purged from my own life in a single day. So you could have taken this opportunity to feel really victimized and maybe head right back down into the gutter. But you took this to inspire you and inspire others. So what happened? You know, I had spent years doing motivational type speaking and telling other people that, you know, what happens to us isn't nearly as important as what we do about it. Things happen to everybody, good and bad. And your response to that is what matters? Well, that's easy to say when most of the things are in this little middle ground. You know, I maybe had more highs and lows than most people, but I finally, through no choice of my own, had the opportunity, let's say, to to, you know, to act in the way that I had been speaking for years.  And I kissed them goodbye and walked through that gate. And I was scared and I was angry, you know, I was angry about what had been done to me. Right. Yeah. And it took about a day for me to figure out that I wasn't going to make it if I was going to be bitter and angry. And this this situation was untenable under those circumstances. And so who I was going to be in in there behind bars was totally up to me. And it was still my decision whether or not I was going to do it in a way that was impactful, not only for me, but for other people. And I did what I always do. I ran. I I went there and I the first chance I got, I sort of running around the rec yard. And if we were in lockdown, I would run for six hours at a time in my cell in place. Well, and I mean, I looked more than a little crazy, I'm sure. But which isn't necessarily a bad thing in prison. It can be helpful. But and people did sort of like steer a wide path.  You know, you can you can talk about things all you want, but people are more attracted to action. They they if they see results in you, then they want to come do what you do.  But what happened in there is guys started coming up to me saying, hey, you know, can I can you teach me how to run? And when I got there, there were probably three or four guys running regularly. And when I when I left, I had a I had a running group of 50 guys and I had 25 of them doing yoga with me like three days a week out on the softball field. And 11 guys lost more than 100 pounds. And, you know, most of these men had never had any any body ever pay any attention to them in a positive way, you know, physically and emotionally. And so it, you know, when I left, they thanked me. They're like, oh, you know, we're so grateful. I'm like, could just stay a couple more years. I was like, I got to go, but sorry. But the no, I say the same thing. And the thing is what they didn't understand at the time is what they did for me. I mean, they that experience actually got me through it.  And it gave me energy and power and humility. And a side note is, you know, I'm in there with, you know, I feel sorry for myself for getting this 21 month sentence.  And like had his whole life taken away. So it's it's perspective very often. And it gave me a perspective that I'm a pretty freaking lucky guy. So you weren't in a white collar crime country club. No, this was a prison. This was, you know, this was a prison.   Well, like that's, you know, the hardest part is being away from family.  So finding a way through meditation, through, you know, I did my best to eat healthy as I could with really unhealthy choices.  So OK.  So what happens after that? I mean, that was just a few years ago. Yeah. And it and it is the once again, I feel incredibly lucky to be who I am because most people get out of prison and they they they can never get a job, you know, and and they've got this F felon, you know, practically tattooed on them. And they end up on, you know, the public bowl for the rest of it. I mean, it's a it's a terrible fiscal decision for society, too, because it it's it punishes everybody. It punishes all of society not to give people better ways to reintegrate. But for me, I basically just did again what I always did. I started running and I took my energy and organized something called the icebreaker run, which was me and five other recovering drug addicts ran across the United States. We ran a relay 24 hours a day for 24 consecutive days to the like NAMI Mental Health Convention in Washington, D.C. And and it was to raise awareness for the need for greater mental health services in this country, you know, because so much of what we all experience in the news and personally daily and certainly out here in beautiful Southern California, where you've got a ridiculously difficult, homeless issue, it's so much of it is wrapped around mental health. So I just, you know what, doc? I just kept doing the things that I do and kept moving forward because continuous forward movement pretty much will always win out over over the rolling up in a fetal position option. So good for you. So OK, so you've done all this wonderful stuff and now you're not satisfied. You're going to do a four thousand five hundred mile trek from the shore of the Dead Sea to the peak of Mount Everest. You're not just going to go to base camp. That would be why, you know, it's like it's pretty at base camp, but I hear it's prettier on top. So so when and why when and why are you doing this? Yeah, so the idea actually came about, you know, 10 years ago, the way so many things do they take a long time to work out. But I metaphorically speaking, I'd had a lot of high lows and highs in my life and it literally just popped into my head. Why don't I go from the lowest place on the planet to the highest and carry a little flask of water from the Dead Sea and pour it out on the top of Everest and join these two ends of the earth in a symbolic gesture. So symbolism is great, but then there's hard work. Yeah, so I'm very happy to say that I have even just recently put together an amazing film team, a group of sponsors and partners that are that we're announcing soon. And I'm actually not just doing Dead Sea to Everest. What I'm actually doing is going from the lowest place on each continent to the highest point on that continent. And the first one's only only a couple of months from now, Africa. So I'm going from the lowest place in Africa, which is the lake over in Djibouti across Ethiopia through the Rift Valley in the Kenya with the Masaimara region to Tanzania and up Kilimanjaro to the top. So yeah, I'm doing it with a buddy of mine, Andre, who I was lead with this. You know, Andre is noticeable for a lot of reasons, but Andre has no legs. So he won the White Ironman World Championship Disabled Division a few years ago and he's hand-cycled across the U.S. And, you know, it's, as you can tell, I like telling stories. And the mechanism for me to do that is to go out and do things and hopefully have an opportunity to, you know, hopefully gently tug some people along with us, either online or even a few in person and just remind people that, you know, yes, their balance is needed in some ways in life, but you can't find balance on the sofa.  So, you know, you've talked about the mental aspect of running. So what kind of what kind of tricks can you give people to get them through taking on a new activity or taking on an unpleasant task to get where they want to go? So I've one I've one trick for sure, because people do this to me all the time. They come up and they say, gosh, you know, I really want to be I really want to run, but I hate running.  Guess what? You know, you really are putting yourself in a place where you can't win. So a certain amount of self deception can be healthy. You know, so if you're going to try any kind of exercise program, any kind of new nutrition program, you in my view, you can't start it from the premise of I hate this. You know, that kind of self talk really makes it difficult. So find a way around that by you don't have to say you love it, but maybe at least don't say out loud that you hate it. I think that's it's not even just a trick. It's just a basic idea of ingraining yourself with a positive outlook towards this new challenge. You referenced earlier that that first step is not even, you know, the first step is really out the door. And I think the biggest mistake people make is I am an instinctive trainer. I'm an instinctive runner. So if you ask me how many miles I'm running tomorrow, I have no idea. I don't know how I'm going to feel tomorrow. And I think people become a slave to schedule and without listening to their body and sort of taking in the information that they've got in any given moment. So I think finding a way to be more intuitive about it, hopefully that intuition doesn't say stay on the sofa. But, you know, to be intuitive and to actually to actually just budget your time because most people, their biggest problem they say is time, right? So if I tell them to go run five miles, it seems daunting. They're staring at their watch constantly. If I say budget 30 minutes, can you budget 30 minutes? They're like, yeah, I'm like, OK, all you're going to do, you're just going to go walk. You're going to walk. You're going to start walking. If you feel good, you might jog for five minutes, then walk some more and 15 minutes into it, you turn around, you go back. And if you just get yourself to do that a few days a week. I mean, just like with nutrition, you've got to make the commitment to try it. And if you give it one week and quit because you haven't seen the results, then you were wasting your time to begin with, right? You know, if you're only going to give it that short time or whatever, then you weren't serious about getting the results, in my opinion. Yeah, I've said this before, but I actually write people prescriptions to get a dog. I literally on a prescription. Can you write me one? Yeah, that would be fantastic. We really needed that.  Absolutely. Yeah.  And you really do. Well, that joyful feeling is what people can get if they if they do it the right way. And you sharing it with other people, finding a buddy to do some running with is a much easier way to do it also. All right. So as you know, I think nutrition is way up on the pyramid of important things for your health. Tell me about nutrition and what you do. Where is it in the scheme of things? Yeah, good question. So I grew up in the South. We'll we'll preempt it with that and a very meat centric kind of an upbringing. And about 20 years ago, I decided I did decide to make a change. And I went to a vegetarian diet today. Of course, we I don't use the word vegan, but just because it's it brings up so many weird connotations today. But plant based is what you would absolutely call me. And, you know, I am fully plant based and have been for a really long time at this point. And it has worked really well for me, you know, for the for the challenges that I have. That said, here I am sitting. I mean, one of the things that I pride myself on is this idea that I always have more to learn. And I think one of the big mistakes people make, whether it's physical activity or nutrition or anything else, is they they think they've got it licked and they close their minds to, you know, new ideas. And I am I'm very interested to read your book and to find out a little more about. Well, I am very much plant based, but I try to tell people there are certain plants that like you and certain plants that don't like you. And anytime anybody worries about getting protein, I just remind them that a gorilla and a horse are plant based animals and they have more muscles than we will ever have, even you. Totally. No, I could not agree more, actually. And and I'm I'm really intrigued about some of the things that I've read that that you promote and that your studies have shown. And it'll be a fascinating journey for me. So stay tuned. All right, great. Keep us in mind one on the way up. Yeah. OK, before we go, you know, I am a huge proponent of exercise and I write about it, but I do believe there is too much of a good thing. And off camera, I mentioned to you that Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple and the Primal Blueprint, who was in his prime, a great marathoner and a great ultra marathoner. Sure. Now at least tells me, and I think he said this publicly, that the farthest a human being should run is 100 yards because of the toll. Long, long term cardio has in my view on the heart, what say you? Well, what if the police are chasing you, Dr. Ghandry? I mean, then can you run more than 100? I mean, well, yeah, believe it or not, I think I think we actually were designed to run about 100 yards to get away from a wild boar. Well, for hunting, I mean, I will all do respect to Mark. I mean, I, you know, the one thing that takes that doesn't take into account is, in my view, what Mark should be saying is that Mark should not run more than 100 yards at a time, because it's none of his business how much I run, you know? And it's and it really is the mistake that I think a lot of experts make is putting a massive blanket over everyone. And that blanket statement covers everybody.  And for me to not run would be I could find another way. Look, I'm a cyclist. I do hot yoga. I do like I like doing all kinds of physical activities. You know, I mean, to not run. I mean, for for someone to say blanket that nobody should run more than 100 yards, I think is is trying a little too hard to make a provocative statement that he can get a response. I don't I don't, you know, all right, I'm going to I'm going to put in a softball right over the plate for you. I'm left handed. OK, so what do you say to all the people? Look at the people who are dying during odds. Yeah, I got the question two weeks ago. A guy said three marathoners died at the Chicago marathon. I mean, is running dangerous? I said, yes, it is.  Because to me, that is a place that clearly kills people. So sitting kills, no doubt. Well, and, you know, look, I am I don't claim that running people people look for absolutes to say that running is absolutely healthy for everyone.  You have to find what that thing is for you.  And hydration is the other thing, which apparently I'm not well hydrated today, but I think that that's the other big thing that people miss is that they forget the one key ingredient that we're all made of and and and maybe don't drink quite enough. So going to all these exotic locations and spending huge amounts of time with it. Does it ever feel like it's taking you away from more important things? Yes, you know, and I and I write freely about it in my book in the sense that my my kids it's really not a running book. It's a it's a life book.   And and I do say to them that I understand and and that they are they're right, but there's also the I think some parents forget that giving your entire life over to your children, all of it and and having your singular focus be raising those kids is not a sustainable. I mean, I guess it is maybe the definition of sustainable, but who wants just sustainable?  And so hopefully it's been a balance. All right, because my new book, The Longevity Paradox is out and on the New York Times best soloist and thank you, everybody, ask everybody on the program. What's one thing that our listeners can do for a healthier, longer life? And I think we've kind of talked about that. But one thing, hydration, I know I just said it a moment ago, but I'm actually going to I'm actually going to hammer that. And if I want to make an addendum sleep, I was one of those people who thought I was special for a long time. And I only need four or five hours of sleep. And, you know, and I'm I'm just I function at a higher level than other people. Right. Right. And when I made a commitment about five years ago, is how long it took to just to make sure I got my eight hours of sleep every night, it changed everything. It allowed for good nutrition. You know, you can take all the great supplements and you can do new all of that you want. And if you get in lousy sleep and you're not hydrated, it doesn't give your body a chance to even use that. So, right? You're absolutely right. No, you're absolutely right. We had Ariana Huffington a few months ago on, you know, I saw that who really thought she could get away with four and five hours until she broke her face on a desk, you know, just high succeeding people have a very high opinion of themselves. And I mean, I don't need that. Right. I don't need that. That's for that's for lesser people or people who need sleep. And we all need it. And we will function better during our wake day times, you know, hours when when we get good sleep. So thanks for asking. All right. Yeah, that's a great advice. All right, Charlie, it's been great to have you on the podcast today. How do people find you? How do they support your track? Thank you for that. Yeah, just I'm super simple. Charlie Engle dot com. All my social media is just my name, Charlie Engle, and it's latest project, which links to everything else is just five point eight project dot com five point eight project dot com. So on that note, that's it for the Doctor Gundry podcast this week. Thanks for joining us. See you on Everest. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because I'm Doctor Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.


president of the United States. I have just been looking over some of the sketches made in Vietnam for the motion picture that you're about to see. These are wonderfully strong pictures. They capture the spirit of the people of that country. Now just take a look at this one. Throughout Vietnam you see strong faces like this, determined and patient. The story, the hope, and the determination of these brave people of South Vietnam and what they're doing to build on their hopes has not been told as often as has the story of war in their ravaged land. But it's just as true. Here are some others. They are really building something over there. They are building the foundations of a society in which they and their children can live in peace and freedom.  They are doing it with their muscle in their hearts, but they're doing it at the ballot box too. In hundreds of hamlets across the land, they are demonstrating their faith, faith in themselves and in their future. They're also proving their faith in us because we have taken our stand beside them. No one who really knows what these determined people are doing can doubt the rightness of their cause, nor can they doubt the rightness of our help. For we are making possible the conditions under which they can build their nation. Their effort to build that nation is a story that needs to be told. It is a story of men who prize freedom and it is a story honoring men who put their lives on the line for freedom. The story of Vietnam today is the story of war and of the men of different nations who fight that war to end the enemy's aggression. It is the story of war's effect on the people who live in this troubled land. But the untold story of this historic moment in Vietnam is one of heroic adventure. It is a revolutionary undertaking by the people of the Republic of Vietnam to transform their national life and construct out of the chaotic legacy of the past a social order that will work for the betterment of all. They have a people building a nation for themselves and building it amid the Holocaust of war. Could have said with certainty where or what Saigon was. Today no city in the world more urgently commands our attention. It is the capital city of a nation that war the strangest war in which Americans have ever been involved. It is also the capital of a nation in the throes of a social revolution. America's participation in that revolution is just as urgent as its involvement in the war. Being the capital city Saigon is the source of South Vietnam's revolutionary effort. But you have to come out here in the countryside to see what it's all about. The Defense Department has asked me to help bring you this story of Vietnam's attempt to build itself into a nation. And to do this I've called on some expert help. This is Lieutenant Mark Nelson U.S. Navy. He's commander of a division of the patrol craft which prevent infiltration of enemy troops and supplies along the coast. And this is Sergeant Shelley Blunt of the Air Force. Sergeant Ken Sanders with a third Marine amphibious force at Da Nang. And spect five Dale Camry with the 25th Infantry Division. These fellows are stationed here and they know the country at least in a special way that American fighting men have come to know it. So from their own experiences and observations they know the story and together we're going to try to give you an informed picture of what it is that's going on over here. We're in the hamlet of Niton about 15 miles north of Saigon. It's a peaceful looking rural community and life goes on here much as it has for hundreds of years in this part of the world. There's an operation going on a mile or two from here and the peace and quiet of this little village is shattered by the sounds of war. The drones of helicopters overhead and every once in a while this rumble of artillery. That's one thing you learn after you've been here in Vietnam for a while. The war is never very far away. These hamlets and villages are the real soul of the country. Orphous of the people of South Vietnam live in them and it is here in these dusty trails through the country side these thatched huts and farmland in jungle that the thrust of South Vietnam's great social revolution is directed. Vietnam revolution is a double-edged word. The enemy uses it. It's what they call the aggressive war. They're using against people all over here. That's the story and there's nothing mysterious about the kind of revolution the enemy has in mind. It's the same thing we've seen in many parts of the world ever since the communist revolution 50 years ago murder, assassination, terror and over here they've killed over 20,000 civilian leaders. That is the story of the civilian population. It is public knowledge that these people in their fight for freedom have lost proportionately already more troops than we lost in the whole of World War II. And yet in spite of this there have always been men brave enough in this country to step forward and take the leadership from those who have been killed. And it's these same brave people who have had the will and the guts to conduct their own revolution, a real revolution for the betterment of their people.  What the government of Vietnam is launching is a national effort to eliminate and defeat a pattern of social misery which has plagued the people of Vietnam for generations. They intend to replace it with a society in which the needs of the people can be met. Now they call it revolution and it certainly is and they call it nation building and it's that too. The people over here have never had very much and they want their share. They want the things that are important to them. That is what they mean by revolution and what it's all about. They want a better life. They want social justice but the guy in the rice paddy wouldn't call it that. As a matter of fact he probably wouldn't know what those words mean but it's the same thing. He wants to be left alone. He's tired of being frightened kicked around and beaten up. He wants some personal dignity and he certainly doesn't get very much of that over here. These people want education. It's the key to the future for them and health is another big problem. Disease is the serious thing and life expectancy is pretty low. Well the war helps that along. It sure does but some of these people never get to see a doctor. You ought to see the way they crowd around some of our medics. These people want dispensaries and clinics so that they can get taken care of and get their families taken care of so they can live a little longer. Social justice if that's what you want to call it or simply the desire not to be beaten up education for the children health facilities the hunger for land and to make the land more bountiful. These are the ones of the people. They are the objectives of Vietnam social revolution. Trouble is the Viet Cong have told the people that give them the same thing. Yeah and they shoot anybody that doesn't believe them. Well but sometimes the people don't know who to believe. That's why the government has to make good at its promises right now. If they don't the revolution is dead. But we can't wait on it. We've got to get this war one. If we don't there won't be a nation to build. Yes we in the South Vietnamese must win this war. The social revolution cannot be successful unless the people feel secure and safe from communist aggression. Was proud of the technique he had developed for pursuing what he called his wars of national liberation. Who could stop him. Not the Americans or so he thought. The leaders of the North Vietnamese military forces said that the organization composition and training of American forces were not fit to tackle a revolutionary war. I guess they forgot 1776. Anyway we Americans who do something about revolution developed a revolutionary answer in the field to these cutthroat terrorists. The myth of Viet Cong invincibility is dead. The ground sea and air team in Vietnam has killed it. America decided a long time ago in principle to take it stand in Vietnam and laid the foundations for that decision when it recognized that aggression against the weak could never be permitted to succeed if freedom was to survive. Fighting men in Vietnam are the inheritors of that decision and now they are its agents. Accolades and war are easy to give but there is a general agreement that never before in its history as America put into combat a force so composed of men ready for their job. They serve the cause of freedom well. They're fighting men and not philosophers so they don't talk much about freedom but they know their job and they know how it figures in Vietnam's effort to build a nation. We've got to get this war one. If we don't there won't be any nation to build. The final outcome of the Vietnam story will not be determined in the cities or even in the places of open conflict with the enemy but out here in these small clusters of rice farmers and fishermen. That captain over there is Peter Dawkins. Just a few years ago he was making all-American at West Point but now he's up to his eyeballs in a really historic adventure. The effort of the Vietnamese government to create a nation where no real sense of nationhood has ever existed before. With his help I hope that we'll be able to show you what nation building means in thousands of Hamlets across the country like this. Pete you're on. Well you know this this nation building is an abstract term and so is social revolution which is the other term the Vietnamese use for what they're trying to do but what these terms really boil down to essentially is an effort to bring a better way of life to the millions of Vietnamese that live in these villages and Hamlets across the country. This is a staggering undertaking but one of vital importance the peasant of Vietnam is well overdue his claim to a better shape. The unusual thing is that the government is trying to give the peasant that better shake even while the war is going on. When you look at that fact closely you discover something truly unique about this war. Improving the lives of these people is not just a humanitarian idea it's a military necessity and every American who comes over here to fight soon becomes aware of this. Tomorrow about midnight you'll surround the village of Thanh Phu Khon and completely seal it off. You encounter any VC you'll and you'll take your normal combat action.  At first light we're going to take the government of Vietnam to Thanh Phu Khon. It's going to be a large group of people going into this village that you've surrounded and it's going to be their job to show them that the government of Vietnam is the best choice and your job is just as important and that you've got to convince these people that you as soldiers are on their side.  Basic kindness and generosity are not unknown in the tradition of the American fighting man overseas but no one ever expected that they would become military weapons as well but that's the kind of a war this is. Military assistance is also a major part of America's contribution to Vietnam's struggle and has been from the beginning. My name is Mike Rola. I'm with the United States Agency for International Development here in Vietnam. I've been here about three years now working in the province of Jaden. My work is involved almost everything that is non-military from the building of schools, maternity dispensaries, roads and bridges. Basically what we've been trying to do though is work with the people and help them as much as they can to realize their aims and their wishes. Basically what we're trying to do is help the government of Vietnam respond to these needs and these wishes helping the government respond to the needs of the people. The U.S. is not alone either in the contributions it is making. This is one of a number of social centers used also as schools during the day which the West Germans have set up in the crowded and poor districts of Saigon. Iranian surgical team provides badly needed hospital services in one of the districts. Such activities document the very important fact that 39 nations of the free world today are helping or have promised to help the Republic of Vietnam in one way or another. All of this is enormously important and helpful to the common cause but these activities can only be considered as the initial steps to help get the process started. No matter how successful our troops or our AID representatives are in winning the support of the people in the end that job can only be done by the Vietnamese themselves. As good friends and allies we can help strengthen the ties of the people to their government but only that we can only help. The Vietnamese know this and they're doing something about it. As a matter of fact what they're doing constitutes the heart and soul of their effort toward building a nation. This is a training center at Vung Tau a very special training center. It's for the training of what the Vietnamese call revolutionary development cadets. The men who come here 5,000 of them at a time 20,000 a year literally hold the hopes for Vietnam's social revolution in their hands. They come here to assimilate the principles of their government's plan to revitalize the country and learn the skills and techniques with which to translate those principles into effective tactics. You may not believe it to look at me but I'm Captain Jean Savagio United States Army. This is a uniform here at Vung Tau. I'm an advisor here but only that. You see the Vietnamese are running the show and it's an arduous one. About half the total training is taken up with military subjects. The job of these men will be to move into areas which American or Arvin troops have cleared but subsequently passed on through and their first responsibility will be to take up where the military had to leave off in providing security for the area. They are the sons of farmers and fishermen and have lived all their lives close to the soil. They don't need much instruction in how to harvest a rice crop or bring in a cat but techniques for improving the crop and the catch are important parts of the curriculum. Someday a village's loyalty might turn on just such instruction. They become well-schooled into causes and progress of the war probably as much as any national spokesman and one fact is drilled into them constantly the necessity of reaching the hearts and minds of the people among whom they will be working. When their training is completed at the end of 13 weeks they are formed into cadre groups who take their revolution the social revolution to the countryside. The program in which these cadre groups are involved actually begins well before they move into a village. First of all regular forces either ours or South Vietnamese sweep through the area to clear it destroy capture or chase out any Viet Cong or main force enemy units then regional forces companies of troops employed within a province and popular forces platoons and squads within a district secure the area with their patrols and small-sized operations. Then the cadre groups move in dressed in the black pajamas of the peasant trained to look at the world as the peasant sees it but also as a soldier must. This black pajama uniform is very important because it is the traditional garb of the peasant it's easier for the peasant to identify himself with the cadre groups. It complicates our problems of identification of course for the Viet Cong wear the same uniform. The cadres work with the people to gain their trust. This is made considerably easier by there being assigned to the districts they grew up in among the people who know them. They're not left entirely on their own military units on the periphery helped to deter the enemy from coming back but these men still carry a heavy share of the responsibility for village security. Within this screen of security the cadre teams begin rooting out the VC infrastructure if one exists. At the same time the spade work of the social revolution begins with a full explanation to the people of just what the cadres are in the village for and what they hope to accomplish. This is not always an easy step. The overwhelming majority of the people of South Vietnam are dead opposed to everything that the enemy stands for but their experiences made them worry. Too often they've watched the VC murder anyone who has cooperated with the government. They have to be persuaded that this won't happen again. It's the job of the cadres to do that persuading and also to persuade the villagers that their welfare is actually of deep concern to their emerging nation. One team starts out right away to find out what the people's particular problems are what is needed the most to improve life in the village. Once the problems have been determined another team starts organizing the effort to solve them. This is where the people's first commitment takes hold. For what the cadres must do now is encourage and lead the villagers into tackling the projects themselves. The team will find the necessary materials and supplies to be used often from U.S. sources but the people have to contribute their labors and energies. As their work progresses the cadres encourage and supervise the election of community leaders when a village gripped with fear or mired in apathy awakens to a sense of its own importance and feels the stirrings of faith in itself and in the far off government which is demonstrating its compassion and concern when the people of a community begin to take their destiny in their hands. That is the transformation of social revolution and it is precisely this which the revolutionary development cadres are endeavoring to bring to the villages of Vietnam. They stay in the village for several months sometimes a year when their job is through if they've done it well they will leave behind them a community of people who now are able to believe in their future or are determined to work for it to share in the defense of it. One of the final missions of a cadre group is to train a self-defense force from among the able-bodied villagers. A force prepared to help meet any attack by the enemy. When this happens the people's commitment is complete. Vietnam has a lot of writing on these men. We all have. That's right. We all have. One can say with absolute certainty that Vietnam is going to succeed in building the nation at once during the hardships of and trials of war but powerful ideas generate their own growth even in the most bitter of climate. One of these is the belief in individual man's dignity and his right to determine his own course. It is this idea which animates Vietnam's spirit today. It is an idea with which we Americans are familiar. It is to honor our commitment to this idea that we take our stand and will hold our stand in this troubled land of a worthy and brave ally. Understand to really understand what the Vietnamese are trying to do today we can think of our own country just less than two centuries ago. We had won our revolution, won it on the battlefield, and it took from 1776 to 1787 11 years for our founding fathers to build a substance and structure that is now our great nation. The Vietnamese are trying to do both of these things at once not because they want to but because they must because history will not give them the luxury of the time that it once gave us.


In this video, you're going to learn how to design services in a very siloed environment, which is primarily focused on the short term. All the right ingredients to design great services, right? Well, here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm your Ron Nargess. This is the Service Design Show, Episode 118. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about empowering you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can design services that win the hearts of people and business. And the guest in this episode is Iran Nargess. Iran is a service designer at the city of San Francisco. And the reason why I'm so excited to have her on this episode is because we're going to explore what the role of service design is in local government. Iran has applied service design on very long term and large scale projects within the city of San Francisco, but also on projects that require a very rapid response, like setting up a COVID test center. I think the lessons and stories you'll hear in this episode will resonate if you have to work in a very siloed environment where there is a really strong focus on delivering short term results, regardless if that's in a government setting or in any other organization. The conversations with people like Iran really show us what the skills are that you need next to learning the tools and methods to actually be an impactful service designer. And if you want more of that, make sure to subscribe to the channel because we bring a new video at least once a week that will help to level up your service design skills. So now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Iran and our chess. Welcome to the show Iran. Hi. Hi, Mark. How are you? Good. And we were preparing our chat and you're based in where are you? I'm in San Francisco, California. And we're recording this the day after, I don't know, how should we call it? The coup, what was it? Well, there's some discussion out there about what it actually was. The word interaction keeps coming up. It's insane. So it's just for the context of the people who are listening and watching this episode yesterday. The capital was stormed and we're recording this conversation in that context and will be coincidentally or maybe not touching upon some topics that relate to government. Not some, but a lot.  Sure. That'll be most everyone out there, I'm sure. I am the lead service designer for San Francisco Digital Services. So I work for the city and county of San Francisco.  And my team in general is a fairly young team. It's been around for about four years now. And we are tasked with delivering human-centered digital services for the residents of San Francisco, California. This is mostly a digital team. So UX designers, content strategists, engineers, product managers. There's usually been at least one service designer within digital services even from the beginning. I joined in 2019 and at that time I was the only service designer. In 2020, I was able to hire a couple more service designers. So we're now a team of three. How did you end up at the city and the county of San Francisco? Well, I've lived here for a very long time since the late 90s, but this is my first government job. I never thought that I would work for the government because the early part of my career, the first 15 years, I was a graphic designer and art director in the city government. Well, there's really no level of government that you associate with a great creative career, at least at that time. I sort of more or less by accident became a service designer and that process of becoming a service designer started in 2013 when I joined Adaptive Path. Adaptive Path always had clients that paid the bills, but also took on clients for social impact and I continued to do that a little bit after we were acquired by Capital One. You know, I like money, I like paying the bills, but I also really like doing work that makes me feel like I'm some kind of way making the world a better place and so I had an increasing number of friends who were working in civic technology. That movement really took off in the in the 2000s during the Obama administration and just through people, I was introduced to Carrie Bishop who runs Digital Services and she recruited me for a particular project and that was a time when I was between full-time gigs and it was a very interesting project and I was really excited about the opportunity to be in public service and try to make service experiences better for residents. I know that it's interesting. There are some countries where service design is predominantly present in the public sector and while in other countries it's primarily in the private sector, so I don't think the US is one of the countries where service design and the public sector are sort of very known for it, so I'm really curious to be hearing your experiences. Before we get into the nitty and gritty and the meaty stories, I want to get to know you a little bit better by using a 60-second question rapid fire, so I'm going to ask you five questions and just answer them as quickly as you can. Are you ready? Okay. What's always in your fridge? Eggs. Good. Which book are you reading? I can't remember the title. It's a mystery. I go through a lot of them and I get them on my iPad from the library. Hmm. What superpower would you like to have? Flight. Flight. Good. What did you want to become as a kid? An archaeologist. And finally, do you remember your first memory of service design? Yes. I had never heard of service design until I was talking to Adaptive Path about joining. I was recruited by a friend and she said, oh, you probably want to look up service design. At that time, Adaptive Path was really known for UX. Adaptive Path was and probably will always be kind of synonymous with UX, but they had started incubating a small service design practice several years before, so I went and popped it into Google and didn't actually. Another one of came up probably back then. Not a lot that really helped me get my head around what it was. We've had some people from Adaptive Path. They definitely made a mark in the field, so it's good that you're on. We'll be talking about service design in local government and when we were preparing our talk, what I especially found interesting and I think something a lot of people will be able to relate to are the challenges like doing service design in conditions where people have a short-term focus, where you are maybe not set up for success, where the organization is siloed up. I think the examples in government can quite easily be translated to many other situations. For the people who are listening, I think your stories will be really recognizable. You already mentioned something about why you got into public services and the government, but why is this important to you? Why do you feel service design needs to be in places like the San Francisco city and county? So many of the problems with the way that people experience government services are related to the core things that service design is equipped to take on. There are so many organizational silos and so many breakdowns and drop-offs. On the upside, it's an environment where mostly people really do want to be effective and serve the public. There are people who are passionate and idealistic. There are people who are maybe less passionate and idealistic, but still want to do a good job. The organizational siloing is a big contributor to bad service experiences and frustrating service experiences. And unfortunately, the diffuse organizational structure also can make it hard to get stuff done, get decisions made and make change. Before we get into some examples of the work you did, maybe we can set the stage a little bit. What is it that we need to know to better understand the projects that we're going to talk about? Okay. I was actually hired to work on the permit center, which is a place for getting permits. Housing permits or what kind of permits? So the vision was construction, business and special events permits, but construction, so and that's mostly building permitting. There's some other types of permitting and construction. That's sort of legendarily complex and challenging all over the world, actually. San Francisco is certainly far from the only place where it takes a long time to get a building permit and where the process is complicated, but San Francisco is right up there with the complexity and time-consuming process. So the city and county was building a new building, and the entire second floor of that new building was envisioned as the permit center, and we were to have our grant opening in August 2020. The permit center does exist, and there are some limited public services being delivered there, but we didn't... What's your role there? Because you were brought on in the context of this permit center? Yeah. I was brought in to try and help the experience be good, basically. How was the experience? What was the trigger to actually start developing this? Well, I started with research. I think where most service designers would try and ground their work. There had been quite a lot of preparation and planning over the years, because we're talking about the construction of a new civic building, but the project was starting to gear up. There was a permit center director, and she was on her own for a few months, and then she started hiring people, myself included. So I always looked at it big picture long-term, which is the overarching experience of permitting, and then at the level of the visit. So what's the arc of the experience of coming into the place on that day? And there are so many different departments that are involved with these processes. There was a lot of facilitation and co-creation and working group initiation and identifying and prioritizing problems. There was some in-depth qualitative research, a whole lot of discovery with staff, and then just ad hoc discovery with applicants who came our way. So like the research part, I hope that sounds familiar to the people who are listening. Now, I can imagine that when an organization is siloed, how do you translate the ideas and the insights into actually a better service? So when you make a service blueprint or a customer journey map and you show the fragmentation and you present a vision of how the experience might be, like how do you connect all those different people who have different ownership, different responsibilities? How did it go? That is very much still a work in progress. I can imagine. You can also imagine that one service designer does not do that by herself. That was something I grappled with as a team of one over the year and a quarter that I worked on the project before COVID hit and changed everything. You know, I consoled myself and still do with all of the opportunities that I had to influence direction. I was not able to conduct a service design process exactly the way it would have looked at, say, adaptive path with a team of four. But I was also working every day with decision makers and leaders. So I think one of the big wins for me was starting to introduce different concepts and different language. Like what? Well, so we came up with kind of an experience vision statement for the in-person experience that it was really a synthesis of a lot of stuff that we had learned and some actual kind of competing needs that we learned about also. So the spectrum of people who try to access these services is vast. There are people who are just total experts in the system. There are people who are experts in some stuff but have no idea about other bits. And then there are people that amateurs. I'm a homeowner.  I'm like, well, I can do this myself. I walk in and I have no idea what's happening to me. So being able to articulate a vision statement that pulled in, like the mayor and some of the department had to come up with a vision statement for the department center. So we intentionally pulled in language from that. The big words were, I think, what streamlined, efficient, friendly, right? Like these are not earth shaking. And then it became a friendly guided experience for the novice, streamlined, efficient path for the expert. So trying to balance these needs and deliver. And just, I mean, this sounds really basic and a lot of the stuff that I did that we did sounds really basic. But the process is so oriented around a specific department experience. And then sometimes it's like a specific group inside of a department and they're very siloed. And that is the mindset and the orientation of most of the staff and the departments are thinking at that department level. They're not thinking like, oh, we're going to deliver US city experience. And so just saying over and over, we need to have a connected experience and not make people navigate the individual departments. It doesn't sound radical, but... I can imagine, again, this sounds so familiar to me. And again, I think a lot of people were, as a service designer, you're sort of in a really awkward place where you see the opportunity, you see the vision, but you usually don't have the execution power to align the different stakeholders. And then how do you move forward? The feeling that I'm getting is that you're just or maybe that's the strategy, like nudging people forward, like keeping reminding people, like, is that the strategy? Do you feel if you're a team of one and this is the situation, like, how do you actually make progress maybe beyond the research? Because the research is the thing that we're really good at. And I think we can show the plans, but that still doesn't necessarily instill action and implementation. Yeah. Well, you've nailed the most frustrating part of my job, and I think just being a service designer in general. I was very lucky to be able to practice in kind of consultant mode and learn the craft that way for a few years, because it is a much more tidy and rapid process, and you get to a finished product. But of course, if you're doing, say, a three-month engagement, the finished product that you deliver is probably not going to be like a robust new or newly redesigned service experience. It's going to be more like strategy and at best pilot stuff. So I mean, that certainly was a consideration for me in wanting to do this work, is to be closer to delivery. And I am inside of a digital services team, so they are delivering technology, which is valuable. But the epiphany that I had not being in consultant mode is like, oh, this work is organizational. My work is about changing the organization, helping the organization change so that they can deliver a better service. Especially coming from a graphic design background, where graphic designers are the ultimate control freaks. You control everything. So that's always been a struggle. When COVID hit, so before COVID, I had been working very closely. I was embedded with the Permit Center team, and I was doing a lot of work with the departments. And so that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about different groups and be up close with their work and interact with applicants of various kinds, from the more professional to the more amateur. When COVID hit, all the digital services went fully remote. So I've been working out of this studio every day since March. And the emphasis in the permitting work really shifted rapidly from the place to how can we get some of these services online ASAP so we can stop staff and applicants from contracting a deadly disease while they're trying to get these services. So I came home to be much more embedded with digital services and working shoulder-to-shoulder metaphorically, of course, with them to try and deliver really accelerate the development of digital permitting specifically for building permits. So the building permit process had been tremendously paper-based. There is a system of record information goes in there. There's a website where you can go and see some stuff in the system, but you applied with paper. And if you had architectural plans, which most of these things do, you brought in big rolls of paper. And that's, you know, there had been attempts to digitize that process going back years. And it's very complex. I won't even go into all the complexities and the challenges. But when COVID hit, you know, the fact that it was a an emergency and of such an unprecedented and unpredictable nature really forced some dramatic rapid change. Well, I was thinking about it like there isn't maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but there isn't much change in sort of the back-end process of the permitting process when the interface is like a physical experience center compared to a digital interface. Like the interface is different, but on the back-end, although all those departments still need to collaborate, cooperate, make your process more efficient. So did you also notice a difference there when COVID accelerated everything? Oh, yeah. So the only reason, I don't know, I'm not sure if it's the only reason. I would say the main reason why the attempt was made to digitize that process is the permit center team had been coordinating this process to adopt a digital plan review tool. And they'd had this whole long working group process that had plan reviewers from all the different departments. There was a consultant that had helped people adopt this tool in the past. It went on for months and months and months and culminated with a few pilot projects in March. And that was the first time that there was an official sort of digitally reviewed project. So they had done three projects. And so when we went into this emergency digital mode, we took a few weeks to launch. We actually launched something that allowed you to do fillable PDFs within a week or two. And then we had a digital native form up about four weeks after that. And it is a very long and complicated form. And that is not how we ever wanted to do this. I mean, our team was always like, no, we can't just take your form and put it online. But under emergency conditions, we all made different choices. And so what happened was, well, I'm not going to go into all the gory detail, but basically the system was not ready to do that. There were certain pieces in place. But the translation of the in-person experience into a digital experience was not it wasn't enough of a translation. It was actually like a really terrible machine translation where if you've ever seen something where it's like the literal, like a literal meaning of each one of the words, but it's the wrong literal meaning and they're all in the wrong order. Yeah. So we learned there was a lot of stuff about that interaction. And there were a lot of things outside of the sort of artifacts that would happen, like staff would really tease out a lot of other information. And then they would have to shape that information so that they could feed it in the right way to the system. And yeah. Do you feel that now in hindsight, this process could have gone any other way? Like maybe this was needed to get to the point where it is today as a maybe this was just a research step. Oh, I don't know. There is no way that that we could have learned as much as we did in that kind of time. And there's probably things we never would have been able to learn at all. But there was a very painful and costly way to learn these things. But it was a quick way. I can imagine compared to how long these processes might take otherwise. Yeah. I mean, that's probably a fair statement. The amount and the depth of knowledge that we gained through this experience, there's probably no other way we could have gotten that information in months and not years. But the the upshot of it is that they had to dial back the online process because there were pieces in place that just there were pieces that were missing systemically to make it a really efficient process. And it just wasn't it was a prototype. Well, basically, it was a prototype. Right. And yeah. So again, looking back at this, what would you say to somebody who's in a similar situation like a team of one in a really siloed organization where they have done the research, they see sort of the vision, everybody sort of sort of agrees that we need overarching experience, we need a holistic experience. How would you move forward as a service designer? What would you advise to people in that situation? Well, I mean, I'm going to be brutally honest here. And this is advice that I've been giving people for a long time. Like, some situations are just doomed. And you should be honest with yourself. If you're looking at the setup and and you're seeing you're not seeing a path forward, go find another job. Like, don't put yourself through that. Which this is not I'm not giving like my two weeks to anybody in the moment. But I feel like if anybody is watching this, especially someone who is struggling with with the situation, especially someone younger, as a not younger person, let me tell you, you can just quit. So that's my PSA. But I'll like my real answer there is like, if you're not going to quit, figure out how decisions get made. Because as a team of one as a service designer, like service designers, it's not our job to be making those those final decisions for organizations. But what we can do is inform and influence and facilitate and kind of herd people along. Like if if the organization or organizations that you're working with actually want to do a thing, and they're just having trouble kind of getting organized, you can help a lot by arming them with information. You can tell you can tell them the story. As designers, we have tools for for communicating and storytelling and and learning and synthesizing that are are unique and valuable. And you know, the other thing is like, there is no more more powerful storytelling mechanism than a pilot, something that's actually working or not working. It's really intangible. That is the most powerful tool for bridging the, you know, the the strategy with the execution, you have to be able to cross that gap. Because even if it seems like a narrow gap, it's such a deep canyon that people don't want to fall into the team thinking doing. Yeah, yeah. And I think if you recognize these these characteristics in your environment, like very siloed, many decision makers, diffuse decision making, you just have to set your expectations that this is going to be a long ride. And that's maybe the ultimate question that you need to ask yourself, are you are you patient enough to to sit it out and to guide these people who probably want to be guided, but it will just take a lot of time and energy and right, that's just maybe just the nature of the work in some situations. Yeah, I mean, I don't, again, like I'm at a point in my life in my career where I understand that that any sort of real meaningful change is going to take years and not months. And I think that goes double and triple in government where things do often tend to move slowly, although things don't move at a uniform speed like their their pockets, right? But a little rapids in the river was where something is moving along at a faster clip. And so it's good to look for those opportunities. But yeah, I'm fine with things taking a long time. But I need to feel some sense of progress. So talking about things that move fast, the COVID virus, you had, you had some involvement in setting up the, it's not a vaccine center, it's the testing, testing facilities, sites, testing sites. Very little involvement, but I'm proud of tell us about it. Tell us about it. What does a service designer contribute in that kind of environment? Yeah, as is the case with so, so much of what I've done here, like just basic, basic tools of service design can be really helpful. And it's that it's that holistic end to end view that we have that we bring to the party that maybe. What did you do? Don't marginalize it. Well, I, you know, we were working with a lot of different groups who were all contributing a piece. And so facilitating a service blueprinting session where we actually went through the whole end to end experience, you know, and, and, you know, I made a Google sheet and it never made it beyond Google sheet. But it was the one thing that kind of tied together all the bits and pieces. And it helps us kind of think through like, okay, you know, I'm working with the digital team, they're building the technology right now to, to start taking that application signups for testing. And so where's like, where's the data going, like kind of tracking all the systems and all the actors and you know, and the groups that we were working with, they really had their act together and they had done a lot of the important work. And so they didn't need to have the whole thing service designed. But, but I was still able to come in and just, just help create that truly end to end view. Do you feel, why do you feel that this worked at the pace it did? Like, why did this move so quickly? And why, why were you able to add so much value in such a short amount of time, compared to the, to the other, to the work that has a different kind of nature? Well, it, so it's funny because both of these, these, these projects were happened under COVID emergency conditions. So there's sort of a level there, but with permitting, first of all, there's enormous inherent complexity in the codes, right? So there are a lot of legal mandatories. There are a lot of different bodies of code that can apply to a particular building permit application. But another thing is they have legacy technology, right? Like that, that system of record that I talked about, and the different departments have different systems. So when you're dealing with legacy systems like that, it, it's a different world. Whereas with COVID, that the actual thing is really simple.   So they had that all planned out. We had a medical partner that does both testing and also some technology development. So initially, digital services built the front end. So, you know, just we put up a site on our website, doesn't take that long. We connected to a scheduling tool via APIs, doesn't take that long. And, you know, the, the, our testing partner actually took, took on the front end of that after, I don't know, a month or so. So it was an emergency. So we had that time pressure. The technology was relatively simple and defined. We weren't dealing with legacy systems. Yeah. Yeah. And I can imagine that legacy and legal stuff just slows down everything. And I was making my notes here. And I was also thinking like maybe a crisis makes sure that everybody is aligned on what we need to do and align on budgets. But if that would be the case, then we would always need a crisis to actually get stuff done quickly. So I'm not sure if that's, if that's the case. Yeah. I mean, people were willing to in the, in the early days of COVID, like people were moving fast, people were being very flexible and open-minded. And, you know, sometimes the, sometimes that's not enough. Like you really have to do, I mean, if I could do that the whole, that part over again, what I would have wanted to do would be to have an actual end to end pilot and then like actually measure the whole thing. Like what is actually happening? How long is it taking? I think that would have given us the information we needed. But I think then in that case, the answer would have been, no, we can't do this. When you hear people who are also involved in the project and you hear stories about your work and the thing that you contributed, like you're mentioning, I did just the basic service design stuff. How do other people in the project perceived it? Like what was the value and how did they express that to you? Yeah, I think the biggest compliment, and maybe it shouldn't be, but I feel very flattered when people find my work useful. So having engineers go and like refer to the, to the spreadsheet and that, you know, they're like tracking row by row. They're like, okay, what's happening here? You know, that's what they're, the thing that they're referring to to kind of get the information they need to make the decisions that they need to do the thing that they need to do. Like when engineers are kind of pouring over your blueprint. And it helps them to make decisions, right? That's basically, and it helps them in the end to create something that it's more pleasant, more valuable, more better in all senses. Yeah. I and also my team, now that I have a team, you know, we also work very closely with content strategists and sometimes like the COVID testing site is not the only thing that we had to stand up really rapidly. There were a lot of those kinds of projects and there still are where we have to stand up, you know, kind of a lightweight form and some sort of service front door and it's almost all around COVID. And so there was one case where the service designers had done this, had done a service blueprint and the content strategist was working on a million things, like it was all COVID related, everything was an emergency. And so she was able to just sort of look at the service blueprint and be like, oh, okay, here's what I need to do. As opposed to having to do all that discovery herself. What is the biggest lesson that you take away from this specific involvement? You know, I'm just struck by how useful the fundamentals are. We don't need shiny objects, right? Yeah, I mean, my experience of doing service design post COVID has really been around reinforcing the fundamentals. You will always, always, always be more successful if you understand the end-to-end experience. It is always, always important to understand the handoffs and the edges and the boundaries. You've been with the city of San Francisco now for one and a half year, right? Since... Two years. I think next week is my two-year anniversary. If you look back on that period, what has surprised you the most? COVID. I was a little obvious, but I think I'm surprised by the ratio of time that I spend really doing very organizational and kind of bureaucratic things versus doing more designerly thing. I thought I would be doing... I don't spend that much of my time right now doing research, which is unfortunate because I love doing research, but I do spend a lot of time in cross-functional working groups. Then when COVID hit, I was able to bring the subject matter knowledge that I had to the digital team because I had not been marinating in that world full-time for over a year. I knew a lot of people. I had relationships from these cross-functional working groups. When we had questions, there were lots of things I couldn't answer, but I knew who to ask. I guess that's the kind of skills and the type of service design work that they don't teach you in service design schools or you don't learn in service design books, but it is a really big part of our work. It's the very next thing that comes after creating a customer journey map, like working with other departments, communicating, helping to make decisions. I wouldn't say where the real difference is made, but that's where you can create a lot of leverage as a service designer. I hope so. I'm really in the thick of it. Also, I have a tendency to discount my own work and my own contributions. I and my team, we are right in the middle of a lot of stuff. We have to figure out how can we be of service? How can we help progress happen based on where we find ourselves? The world is now changing literally every minute, but do you have any vision for the next one or two years? Where do you hope to take service design within local government? What is your dream? We're a very young team. As the service designer who is part of Digital Services, when I was a team of one, I was really off in my own world with the permit center team, but post COVID, the first service designer joined a month before Shelter in Place and the second service designer joined actually in May, several months after Shelter in Place, and so she's had a fully remote experience. Given just the madness, all of our work was COVID related one way or another, everything was an emergency. Digital Services itself is a fairly young team and so we're a really young team within a fairly young team and we're kind of this different function that didn't really exist as a function within, so we're still building our practice. We're still kind of, oh and the other thing is none of us have worked in government before, so we're doing a lot of learning on the job. My intention early on was to sort of do more thinking and communicating about how I thought things might work and turns out no time to do that in an emergency when things are flying at you thick and fast, but also so we don't have our process as well documented as I would like, but also some of the things that I thought we would sort of talk about and then try, we just did them and so our colleagues sort of learned with us how we might work with them in different situations. So my big goal for, one of my big goals for this year is to not be in emergency mode all the time, because a lot of the things that we do, ideally we would have some longer lead times and so having a little more planning around our work so that we can get a running start on some activities, you know, rather than trying to do everything simultaneously like the strategy and the design and the execution, we're going to do it in a week. And label that as a sprint. No, no, we're done. We have to deliver the thing in a week now. Is there anything that we forgot to discuss in the last, what is it, 45 minutes? Oh, wow. Where has the time gone? I think we covered a lot of stuff. I mean, it turns out I have a lot of stuff to say about permitting. It's an exemplary of a lot of other projects and challenges in service design, I guess. Maybe the question that I have for you is, if people want to exchange experiences and learn more about your work, service design in government, what are good resources and can people reach out to you? And if so, which way? Oh, yeah. People can definitely reach out to me. I try to be responsive on LinkedIn. This has been a hard year for that. LinkedIn is a good way to find me. Digital Services has a website. It's funny. We launched the City of San Francisco's new website, SF.gov. More and more departments are coming onto that platform all the time. Our own site is like a, it's a microsite somewhere. But if you Google San Francisco Digital Services, you'll find it. There is a blog on that site that has, so far, zero blog posts by yours truly because I've been busy actually delivering and designing services. Yeah. But it's moving up my personal goals list just because it's embarrassing. We'll see. Well, I'm sure to include all the links in the show notes. I wish you a lot of wisdom in the coming weeks and months because I'm sure your work isn't over anytime soon with what's happening here. Definitely not. Every day is, you know, the situation remains dynamic and there are still a lot of, yeah. So who knows? And in that sense, I really appreciate you taking the time in your busy schedule, helping to improve the COVID situation and the City of San Francisco, sharing with us the challenges that you've been facing, the solutions that you have found. So I hope people have been inspired. So thanks again. I really hope you enjoyed the conversation with Iran. And if you made it all the way to the end, make sure you leave a comment with the hashtag commitment. If you know somebody who might enjoy this conversation as well, just grab the link and share it with them. That way you'll help to grow the service design shop family. And that helps me to invite more inspiring guests like Iran here on this show for you. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next episode.