All right, well, welcome to the show, Emily. And to get this started, I'm just gonna get straight into it. As one of the leading experts in acceptance commitment therapy, what drew you to this action-oriented approach to psychotherapy? Yeah, yeah, great question. You know, for me, I think a lot of what was out there in terms of self-help, how to be happy in the world. There were a lot of strategies that seemed like they were about eliminating or narrowing things, you know, get this out of your life, try to avoid thinking this way or feeling this way and act for me, at least how I understood it was all about expansion. It was all about building a bigger life. It was all about making more room for your feelings, you know, opening up to your thoughts. And, you know, that just spoke to me, I think on a pretty deep level that there was room to grow. I definitely think that's one of the biggest challenges that we get in a lot of self-help advice or even when friends and family try to support us is they try to narrow down the problem and get you to discount everything else that's going on, including the context of some of these behaviors. So we discuss human behavior on the show consistently and our audience loves learning about their own behavior but also others and how they approach relationships. What is contextualist perspective on our behavior? Because I think this is gonna be a fun jumping off point for the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think a lot of folks especially folks that are into self-development, self-improvement, we kind of tend to see ourselves as the change agents of our lives. We see our willpower as the source of change or our changing thoughts or it's all about kind of how it is that we think or drive towards change. And what a contextual perspective suggests is that actually what if all of our behavior, everything that we do, including what we think and what we feel, what if all of that is actually perfectly suited to both the environment that we're in at that moment, the situation that we're in in that moment and our entire history with situations like that. Right, in other words, what if everything, our thoughts, our feelings, our drive, our willpower, our hopes and dreams, as well as our actions, whether or not we exercise or walk the dog or clean the house, what if all of that was sort of pulled for and stoked and nurtured by the environment we're in. Well, there would be two implications, right? Or many implications, but two of the main ones would be first that everything that you're doing right now, the stuff that you would love to change, the stuff that you'd wanna do more of or less of, that everything that you're doing right now is exactly right considering the situation that you're in, right, the context and your history with situations like that. In other words, you've learned the repertoire that you've come to, you've learned perfectly from all of where you've been. For me, this is a really hopeful perspective because then what we need to do is put you in new situations, is change the world so that it can nurture you differently towards things that might be more in line with what you want and who you wanna be. When I think of it that way, I grew up in Detroit and drivers in Michigan very much obey traffic laws. They break at a yellow light, they slow down, they let people in with a blinker on. Then I moved to LA and I realized just how hairy traffic is and there's a totally different set of rules contextually to me driving in LA. And when I go back to visit my family in Michigan, they're like bracing the dashboard, they're wondering why I'm accelerating through a yellow light, but my behavior has changed in this context here in LA and I've adapted to a driving style that gets me from point A to B without getting stuff in the traffic. And when we think about self-development, we don't often think about those contexts that things are appearing in in our life. We wanna take that agency ourself and try our best to break through whatever that environment is to take action in areas that really impact our lives. Exactly and contextualism doesn't mean that you're helpless, it doesn't mean that you're just gonna be subject to however the wind blows and stop changing and stop aiming for change. In fact, common acceptance and commitment therapy and key in contextualism in the way that it's approached to wellness is this idea that ultimately what we'd want you to build is flexibility, that idea of expanding, expanding the behaviors you have access to, expanding the room for all the different thoughts. We want you to be able to drive one way in LA and one way in Michigan. And sometimes when we get really stuck on this is coming from me, it's my willpower, it's my self-worth, it's my personality, it's my diagnosis, whatever it is, we can actually become more insensitive to those contexts, to where those labels, those ideas about who we are, whatever it is, they might serve in some circumstances. The behaviors might serve in some circumstances, but in other situations, they completely fall flat. And we can take heart to that. Maybe I'm not as competent as I thought I was. Maybe I'm not as good of a driver, as good of a speaker, as good of a friend, as good of a lover. It's pretty easy, this is the back end of this. It's pretty easy when we see ourselves as the only source of our change in our behavior. It can be easier than blame ourselves in ways that aren't useful when things don't go right. And get stuck in patterns that aren't helpful to us. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Once that focuses on yourself and not realizing the environmental influence that is being moving and pushing you in directions of behavior that you don't want, you do remove some of that power to actually change it by not thinking about it. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, ultimately, I think we can draw differences between sort of goals that we have for our lives and the way we are in the world that are topographical, that are really about, you know, I need to achieve this thing, there's this specific goal, and other kinds of goals that are more functional, maybe more like our values that can be these sort of driving principles. And the thing about driving principles, once we step away from what that goal looks like, what the specific objective is, and instead orient towards those overarching values, one thing that that promises that approach is that our behavior is gonna have to look different when the situation looks different. It's gonna have to be responsive to this crazy changing world around us so that we can be responsive to it and continue to develop into the person that we wanna be. I feel there's also a healthy dose of self-compassion that has to come into the fold here when we really think about the environmental impact and sexualization of our behaviors and actions. I'm so glad you said that. There's something about like zooming it out and seeing what you've done or what you've not done in context and seeing how clearly it makes sense that you would have done or not done that. For example, you know, I work with folks all the time who will kinda say, you know, I look around and I see people doing this thing, whatever it is, you know, exercising every day or I see people making wise investments or I see people making new connections or really demonstrating their ambition and following through on that and why not me. And you know, you can sort of zoom out then and look at how the situation hasn't nurtured you to do that. Like where was it that you suppose you were supposed to have learned that? Can you zoom out and sort of look at your experience and can we see a time when that would have been learned? You know, for most of us when we do that it makes a lot of sense that we never got the opportunity to try that on, to contact trial and error, to figure out what works and doesn't work for us in that situation. And of course the same thing is true of behaviors that we want to stop, right? If we can zoom out and see when are they more likely? When are they less likely? Then, you know, I think it does position us to treat ourselves with a bit more kindness because it's not indicative of our worth. It's indicative of us perfectly responding to the context in which we find ourselves. Our producer Michael shared a quote around contextualism that I thought would be really funny to share with our audience and talk about, every problem has once been a solution. And when we think about this for some of our clients, you know, the solution in the past to their boredom or their social anxiety going to events and meeting people has been to pull out their phone. And then they'll realize that, well now the phone has actually become the problem because it's satiated that anxiety but it hasn't allowed them to move closer to their core values or their goals for themselves of meeting more people, building better relationships, being more social. When we think about it in this viewpoint, you know, this phone example, how can we start to bring contextualism in to change this behavior in ourselves? So I have a way of sort of thinking about problems versus, you know, not problem behaviors. And that's really in terms of the relationship between the context and the behaviors we have access to. When I say the behaviors we have access to, I mean, the choices, the things we could do easily that other people could see and perceive but also our own thoughts, also our own feelings. And if our goal is flexibility, if our goal is breath, you know, then when we think of what we want for folks, what we'd want for the person who tends to pull out their phone in social situations, what we'd want for them is we'd want the phone to be available. But that's a choice that they have. That's something they have access to. You know, they could do that, but also that there's a whole range of other behaviors that they could engage in as well. You know, there's this behavior that might have certain pluses and minuses, certain costs and certain benefits, but they also have access to a tons of other things that they could do. And in my work, we refer to that relationship when context really pulls for a big broad repertoire for really what we might experience as freedom, right? Like what do we mean when we say we're free? We mean I could do anything. You know, I suddenly have a cancellation. I've got a whole hour where nobody needs me to be somewhere. That same sort of experience of freedom. We refer to that in my work as a petitive conditions. So a petitive coming from the same word as appetite, right? Another way that you might think about it is a nurturing environment. So when a petitive or nurturing environment, and that's gonna look different for everybody, right? An a petitive or a nurturing environment is an environment in which all of your needs are met, in which the resources that are available in that environment are really well matched with what your needs are. Again, in that environment, right? Our needs might change in different contexts. It's all like very specific to the individual and to the circumstance. The other hand, of course, we can imagine those needs not being met. We might call those environments more aversive. You know, they're not nurturing environments. They're suffering environments. They're environments that promote suffering. And that we would expect that the more fundamental needs that are not met, or the more that the resources that are available in any one context are not matching well with the needs that are uniquely and personally ours, just from our history and our time in the world, to the extent that the environment is not meeting those needs, then we might have what we would call problems, right? To the extent that the environment is aversive or promoting suffering, that what that's a matter of is us missing out on some of those needs. And so our job, you know, with respect to ourselves ends up being creating a context that nurtures. It means knowing ourselves, knowing how our needs take shape, you know, across a couple of different domains. I mean, just across the board and psychology, there's plenty of folks that have talked about needs. The way that I think about it here would be in terms of sort of basics, physiological and health and wellness needs. And every single person, there'll be some stuff that just humans need, but also every single person has unique health and wellness needs, unique biological needs that are gonna change over the course of a day and different contexts over the course of their lives. So we have basic physiological needs. We have belonging and intimacy needs. We have needs with respect to our relationship with ourselves, how we're growing or feeding or nurturing ourselves. And then with respect to those big sort of purposes like our values. And I don't think about these hierarchically necessarily. It's not like you can't care about purpose if you're hungry, but rather that all of them can be me meant or not meant to different levels. So in any one situation, if I'm seeing your behavior kind of shut down and you not have access to a lot of things, you're not experiencing freedom. The thing that you're highly likely to do anytime you get in a social situation is pull out your phone maybe. Then I'd be asking myself, what needs are not being meant there? What are you likely to do in nurturing environments that's not accessible to you here in this environment? And how could we resource you then in that social situation to where some of those behaviors that are you being your best AJ that some of those behaviors would be available to you? So yeah. I think we should define the idea of access and the behaviors that you have access to because I might have it wrong myself. Now I'm going to summarize what I think it is and please tell me if I have this correctly. I think a lot of people would think that they have access to all behaviors. However, if they haven't learned that skill, if they haven't internalized that skill routine, behavior, habit, well then I don't think they do have access to it. They can't access it by learning it, by reading about it and then putting it into practice. And of course with acceptance, commitment, therapy, AJ and I love it and make sure that it is in all of our programs because it is about taking action. So do I have that correct for our audience to understand the freedom of sure you may think you have access to do anything that you want but if you haven't learned it, well then you really don't because I think all of our audience who get involved in self-development, there are certain concepts and ideas that when you don't have access to them, you view them in one way. When you do have access with them, you see the world in a completely different way. Yeah, Johnny, thank you so much. Almost, so yeah, we've got to learn them. We've got to do what we might call internalizing, getting lots of practice with feedback to where it's perfectly suited for us, for how that's gonna look on us, whether it's being more assertive or managing our time better, it might look different on everybody. But also I would say access changes with context. This is part of the kind of radical idea of contextualism. How many of us have been in this situation and had an idea of exactly what we would like to be doing and yet sit there frozen, right? So I might have my phone out and I might be scrolling and going, I don't know why I'm scrolling. This is terrible. I would love to talk to that woman. Gosh, she looks so funny, you know? And I'm sitting there scrolling and I might even be able to imagine in another situation if I only had blank or if there was something else going on here, if I had dressed differently, maybe I wouldn't feel this way. So I think this is part of the thing that's unique about contextualism is the idea that if you think of every behavior you could possibly engage in, everything you've ever done in your whole entire life, that that actually sort of narrows and broadens, it shrinks and grows as we get into different situations. To understand that the behaviors that allow them to feel like a high value individual, that can shrink and because they don't have access to those behaviors in maybe a social situation, a social context, they're now operating at maybe at a supplicative level or at a standoffish level. Yeah, absolutely. Or whatever it looks like on them, right? Like it might be that when I'm in a social situation, if that's aversive to me or a suffering environment for me, it may be that I end up getting really big and loud and take a lot of attention and I'm not as sensitive to the fact that somebody's starting to cringe a little bit or maybe trying to get away, right? So it doesn't necessarily look small, but functionally, my experience would be that I don't have a lot of choice. This is great because for a lot of our audience who do suffer from social anxiety, a lot of times they're like, I don't understand it. I'm fine in these situations, but I'm not here. And in the weeds of trying to figure out what the situation is, and it's like, you just don't have access to those behaviors in this context, so you must learn to be able to access them in this context. Absolutely, and how would you learn that? Well, that context, it doesn't only change, shrink and grow what behaviors you have access to. What's shrinking and growing in the context is the resources. So we would say that in particular context, you're under-resourced. If you can't access behaviors that you can do in this other context, you're under-resourced. Interesting choice of words there. Yeah, well, you know, for me, I think what it is is it allows us to claim that as our own, but also the context is explicit there. The environment isn't resourcing you. You are under-resourced. It also allows us then to acknowledge what are our basic resources? How much sleep do I need? How much do I need to move my body? How much contact with loved ones? How much physical touch do I need? How much time do I need to spend in recreation? And recognize that even the same context, something that looks exactly the same, if I'm under-resourced in some of those basic ways, I might not even be able to access the same thing I did yesterday in this very same context. Today, I might not be able to access it because my needs are higher than the resources that it takes to engage in that behavior. So anytime we're doing something hard, us calling it hard is also saying, I'm gonna need extra resources on board to be able to navigate this. So in moving from that situation where you're in an environment, networking environment or a party where you know no one or you were invited by someone and now they're off talking to other people and you're on your own, and you know that this is an environment that you've suffered in in the past. And what ends up happening with a lot of our clients is they go home, they get very frustrated with themselves and they start researching, they find the podcast, they look for tips and strategies and tactics to use, but tactics don't get you beyond that context. They're helpful, but often when you're under resourced and in a place of internal suffering, you're not gonna be able to do the tactics or strategies that you're learning from the podcast. So with that, what is the best way for us to start to learn to apply those strategies? Do we start in a more comfortable and nurturing context and environment first and bring them in there with people we know and we feel friendly with and start to learn to bring them into more challenging contexts and environments for us? Or do we throw ourselves in the deep end and say, you know what, the next time I go to this event, I'm just gonna do it and push through? I think a lot of that might depend on our style, you know? I'm not gonna say that one strategy that would be right for everybody. What I would say is depending on which strategy, which approach would be right for everybody, that would speak to how many resources we might need to have on board in order to encounter that challenge. So maybe it might be that, and really it's almost the same thing. So let me talk you through it. So if we say on the one hand, the approach could be try on some of these new strategies in an environment that's already really a petitive, it's already really nurturing, right? So you are bringing in a new thing, but there's some naturally occurring resources that are in that environment. That's why we're calling it nurturing, right? I could say also, well, there's this work party, so I don't get to try it out with a nurturing environment first. So we'd say, what can we do beforehand during to make it as nurturing as possible? And it literally might be as simple as, okay, when I am in a nurturing environment, when I'm preparing to be in a nurturing environment, what kind of things am I likely to do naturally with respect to my biological needs, my belonging needs, my self growth needs or interpersonal growth needs and my values or purpose? What are the activities that I naturally kind of do when the environment is nurturing? And that can often point us to what the needs are. We might notice that in an environment that causes us to suffer, that we tend to not eat as well. We eat trash or we skip a meal or we overeat. We might notice we don't move as well, right? We tend to overexercise or under exercise. We might withdraw or we might engage in really shallow social stuff that just kind of gets us away. But looking at, for me, what are the activities that I'm likely to engage in? What are the resources that I naturally contact without even thinking about it in a situation that is safe and nurturing for me? And then how can I bring those to bear then in the situation that's more challenging? It may be spending some time with a friend to pre-party that party and really getting in my skin. It may be making use of a family member who could really help me dress in a way that I feel proud because in most nurturing situations when they are nurturing, I love to dress up and to really show my confidence and my appearance. That doesn't naturally show up in this other environment. It's more of a suffering environment but maybe I could resource myself to really be able to do that. Maybe in a nurturing environment, I'm sort of grazing and eating freely. I might intentionally visit the table at the party and make myself have a couple of bites. I say make myself. Ideally, we'd want it to be kind. We'd want it to be an act of self-compassion. I'm like, oh, you're really getting stuck here. Maybe I need to feed Emily so that she can be better resource for this interaction. I feel that developing that level of self-awareness can be a challenge to many when you set very large goals for yourself. So what we find in clients who are perfectionists who expect the world of themselves, when they miss that mark, they tend to shut down and they can't then do even the basics of resourcing that they need for a more nurturing environment. So how can we bring this contextualism into that experience that some in our audience might be feeling around their perfectionism? There's a little sort of trick, I think, of contextualism that contextualism implies, rather, which is sort of like in any one moment, you can't entirely change the context for you in the right now, but you can take care of a future you. And what that points to is some things that are not rocket science and not unique to act and not unique to contextualism. But if I know, for example, that my movement or meditation practice tends to drop out when I get stressed, it just happens, then that might be an important thing to ritualize. Now, the first day that I'm picking where it's gonna be in my schedule and that I'm begrudgingly setting alarms, that's not gonna feel awesome. But for me, and this is actually a personal example, if I wake up at 4.30 in the morning and I do not check my email and I just go and brush my teeth and wash my face, I get on my mat every single day. Every single day, if I do that. That's something that past Emily set up, that past Emily organized, past Emily found the exact right time, it's 4.35, that I can get that extra five minutes in, turns out. Past Emily set it all up, put it all in place and made it really, really easy so that Emily that wakes up every morning, Emily this morning, was able to enter that context that past Emily set up and responded in the way that the history called for. The immediate context was perfect, the alarm was set, the face mask was out, the yoga clothes were out, the mats out, it's easier to go with what past Emily set up with and to let the context pull for it. So creating a nurturing environment, not just in the acute, how can I resource myself for this challenge that's coming up? But how can I build my life in such a way that it nurtures me, that that learning that Johnny was talking about is something that my world is naturally pulling for. It could be something as simple as making it easy to meet the goals that we have for ourselves, like setting alarms or making the resources that we need accessible, the materials that we need accessible. It could be employing the help of other people. It could be taking the time to sit down and say, what are my interpersonal needs? Never really thought about that. Having a list somewhere, you know, here are 10 easy ways I can resource myself. And my list is gonna be different from yours, AJ, and it's gonna be different from yours, Johnny. You know, and that part for me really comes back to the self-compassion and making your life such that the behaviors, all of the things that you've worked so hard to learn and all of the learning that you have up ahead of you, that that's accessible, that every situation is an opportunity for you to be expanding, for you to be taking on new behaviors, learning new things. That really, I mean, that really puts, gets the oomph behind some of those strategies is, yeah, I got this strategy from a book or from a podcast, and then I worked on it and really found out how it's gonna work for me.  And what do you say to the skeptic who says, oh, well, this is just blaming the environment or making excuses around resources when you should just be doing these behaviors and actions. You know what's good for you. Well, two reactions, like one, I feel sort of sad for that person that their context has taught them that they are responsible 100% for everything that they experience, and that they should be expected to be able to engage in any behavior that is the quote, right behavior in any situation. That seems like a difficult row to hoe. I also find myself wondering like that must have worked out for that person in their life. It must be that they have been well-resourced in lots of situations to be able to engage in behaviors and to be able to have access to any behavior they put their mind to. And that sounds really lovely. I doubt that if most of us check in with our experience, it seems like that's often more aspiration than reflective of what we've experienced. You brought up advice and I feel that many of us are not only trying to change ourselves but often find ourselves in situations trying to change the people around us, the people we care about and love. And again, coming back to the earlier discussion, we often do this through stories and our stories are a summation of our resources, our context in that moment and our past experiences that brought us there doesn't often overlap or relate necessarily to the person we're giving advice to or we're trying to help sort through the issues that they're having. If they asked us for that support or if maybe we did it unsolicited. So how can we be more influential with those around us now taking contextualism into the picture? The question that I find myself asking folks who I'm trying to help in lots of different contexts, certainly my clients, but also my coworkers, my students, my colleagues, my supervisees or consultees, how can I resource you? Is there, I wonder, how can we resource you to be able to get that thing that you want? Do you have a sense of what it is that you want here? Can you imagine what behaviors you'd like to have access to if you could just shoot them magically into your, that you in that situation or those kinds of situations? And if so, how can we resource you? We might even go through some specific resources. So tell me if we think about biologically, you've been taking care of your body, how are you doing with that? You know, is there anything I can do to support you with that?  Are you getting some time in? That's a common, I mean, if I could, it's so odd when people first come into the communities that I work in to hear us talk like that. But yet you know exactly what it means when somebody asks you, you know, what resources can I offer? In your experience, Emily, for a lot of the young people that AJ and I speak to, they've been in our classes. And when I ask them those questions about what is it that they wanna learn or what are the goals that they have ahead of them, I have noticed that a lot of younger people, they haven't thought about that. And in fact, to me, and maybe this is just the experience that I've had with it, maybe your experience is different, but on top of that, they really haven't thought through their emotions of what is on the other side of those. They seem to be, in today's age, very reactive to everything. And then when things don't go their way, rather than working through something, it's now about occupying their time, drifting, canceling it out and getting involved in something else. And with social media and all the technology, they can do that forever. Part of what you're pointing to is like, you have to have a certain experience with being able to resource yourself in order to be able to name, you know, what resources you need and actually orchestrate getting them. But there's a whole learning process in that. When you were talking about sort of generational differences, I find myself thinking, yeah, how has their history been different? You know, I didn't grow up at a time where I had to contend with social media. Like I think I was in high school when AOL came out.  You know, if we think about the threats, you know, and needs and resources that appear, it suddenly allows in any moment for you to have be accessible and potentially be in a challenging situation and suddenly need resources that you wouldn't have any idea to expect that you needed. Well, we talked about here how the phone was the solution that's not a problem. And I have said this on the podcast many times and this is something that is so simple and it is in everybody's lives and we've grown up in two different generations. And I use this example of going to the bank and then it's busy and then you have to stand in line. And when you didn't have a cell phone, you had to stand there and deal with yourself. You had to figure out how you felt, what was going on, what are you making for dinner? You're in thought, you're checking in. You're being reflective in that moment and now it is getting in line, well, if you're even in line, but you pull out your phone and start swiping, instantly distracted from an opportunity to check in with yourself. We had those check-ins all day every day and now they're becoming more rare, which leads to, in asking these questions, what is it that you want? What do you want to learn? What are you excited about? What are you interested in? And I get a lot of times I get, you know, I'm not really sure. I haven't really thought about it. And just from my experience, at a very early age, I was obsessed with music, as you could tell. And so, I never had that question. It was my curiosities and interests and aspirations were right there in front of me. And I would be happy to discuss this. I just don't know from our young folks. Well, there's so much to contend with right now.  And I think about my 15-year-old boys, the history that they've had coming up and where they're landing right now at 15, they haven't had the opportunities that you're talking about, Johnny, those opportunities to pause and to be with themselves. There's so much stimulation all the time. And not only that, but the access to information is so broad that there are literally things ready to sort of not meet your needs, you know, or to suppress or to hide your needs. That's available 24 hours a day. And in any situation, you have this way to ignore the needs. So a first thing that I might wanna train somebody is can you tell what's resourcing? Can you feel when you're well-resourced?  Can you feel what openness feels like? Can you feel freedom? Can you notice, you know, when you are feeling more free? Just that discrimination is the very first piece. And I might stop there, like go out in your life and spend some time noticing, is this am I well-resourced right now? And if not, is there a tiny acute need that I can name? And if I'm engaged in a behavior, I can ask myself, is this resourcing me? I mean, I remember a few years ago I was, I started keeping books on my phone like I had the Kindle app and I started keeping little novels on my phone because I've realized that what was happening is I would have this little stretch of time and then I would start scrolling, you know, I get on Facebook or Instagram or whatever and I'd start scrolling and I might spend 10, 15 minutes. You know, not a huge amount of time. I don't have a huge amount of time. But at the end of that, I was not more resourced than I was 10 or 15 minutes ago. If somebody came up to me and said, here's 10 magic minutes where you don't have to be anywhere. Nobody's expecting anything of you. You know, with that kind of intention, now go and resource yourself. I mean, I could tell you 15 things right now that I'd like to play my ukulele. I'd like to snuggle with my cat. I'd like to walk my dog. I'd like to just go outside and be in the sun for a minute, you know? And yet like we can take that 10 or 15 minutes and completely miss, not check in on what needs we have on board, not check in on activity we have is engaging and resourcing us or not. So for me, what I ended up doing was actually, I didn't even take Facebook off my phone. I just gave myself another choice and I made it to where they were right next to each other. So every time I went to kind of get on the social media, there was the Kindle app. You know, there was the book app right next to it. And I would sort of go, is what I need right now? What scrolling has to offer me?  Is that what I need? Or could it be cool to spend 10 minutes reading this little, you know, this little bit of a novel? I mean, I was reading novels. Like I don't have time to read novels. That's the story I tell myself. And yet, like I was putting away, you know, a couple of novels a month, just without making any special time to read, just saying, okay, before I make this choice, I'm gonna make it a real choice, right? So the first thing might be, what do I feel like when I'm resourced and not resourced and building that skill? And then setting up the environment, right? Putting the Kindle app right next to the Facebook app and setting up the environment to where those resources are salient. One resource is Facebook. It's not very resourcing. The other resource for me was that Kindle app. It actually was a lot more resourcing for me. One of the experiences that I've had working with our clients, especially the younger ones like Johnny, and I share this story with our clients of, you know, being on this path that my family defined success as becoming a doctor. And as I got into graduate school, I just really realized that it was not resourcing me in any way and struggle with imposter syndrome. And I made a choice to move closer towards my core values than the goals that my family had set out for me and the story that they created around those goals with my experience going through the education system. And I'll hear time and time again from clients who are feeling that same pressure from their parents around, be the doctor, be the lawyer, be the engineer, not feeling in any way, shape or form that that's truly what they want and so adrift from their core values because they're moving towards someone else's goal. And oftentimes are told, I don't care if you're under resourced or not. Like that's the key to success. Why are you worried about resourcing? Like you just need to take another step closer to the goal. And in sharing this story, you know, I'll also hear, well, I could never do that. My family would disown me or they would not be happy. And in all of the stories that they then tell themselves of why they have to stay on this track, they know internally is not for them. That is under resourcing them and then leading them so far from even being able to define their core values. And I'd love to hear your perspective on this as you not only have children but also work with graduate students and undergrads who are living this experience as we speak. Absolutely. Oh gosh. And it's such a common experience. It shows up in the clinic all the time. It shows up certainly, especially in grad school or in undergrad. It's this academic environment. Everybody's got expectations. And then of course, as you're talking, I'm going, have I done that with my kids? Where have I done that with my kids? I try really hard not to. It's such an important piece. A couple of things come to mind. One is I think a lot of people find themselves in this situation where this person's hopes and dreams for me are so big and they're the opposite. Their disappointment in me is so big and so salient to me. It feels so here and present. And as Johnny was mentioning, I might not be as in contact with what my own hopes and dreams were. My history may not have nurtured that in me. I may not have been well-resourced to know what I really hope for, what I really dream about, how I see myself. If my history hasn't picked that, hasn't nurtured that, then that would be at a loss. That would be something that would be really difficult. And maybe I don't even know what is hard for me or what would make me sad or disappointed.   You know, it can feel a lot easier to do that even though it's not resourcing. One thing that I end up telling parents sometimes or telling graduate students sometimes is something like, you know, there are plenty of really, really unhappy people with PhDs. There are plenty of really, really unhappy medical doctors, you know, that turns out that we can have something that everybody in the world would look at and point to and say, that is what success is. And we could be not meeting any of our needs.  I mean, we could be not feeding our body, not sleeping, you know, not moving our bodies in ways that grow us. You know, reminding folks, I think when they're in the position of being subject to those, you know, sorts of opinions, big opinions, big ideas about me that they might actually need a stretch of time where what we're resourcing is the pursuit of a relationship with themselves. Who am I? What do I hope for? We might need to try on some things that you never thought you would like, you know? Just to try some stuff and see how it suits you. That is certainly incredibly important. I don't think you're gonna be happy in life unless you're evolving in the way that you need to be evolving. And for AJ and I both, when we first learned about core values and arranging your week to be engaging in those core values and then using those core values to guide you, changed the way that I looked at each and every day. It changed the way that I looked at the future. And then of course, those core values and how I engage them have been able to change over time in certain ways, but it's always been towards the main goal, backwards engineered in the steps that it's going to take to reach that goal and the core values that I wanna embody and engage in to reach that goal. And once that had taken shape, then my days became consistent and how do I maximize the enhancement of each and every day? And then it, so for me, which is great because my work is something that I love, AJ and I have put this together because we were, this excited us. So to be able to then maximize those values in the work that we're doing and then enhancing that life. Once that happens, it's easy to go to bed because you're excited for each and every day. There's something that people sometimes can miss there in that you can have all of those, all of those needs are important. So you can have something that nominally, logically fits with your core values. You know, let's say a job that you love, but if you're under resourcing yourself and expecting that it's gonna be enough that just the job at some point you decided that job was perfect for you and it fits with your core values, but you haven't arranged the context to support you actually contacting those values that you are not resourcing yourself in some of those other ways. So for example, I have graduate students all the time that sit down and go, I'm so frustrated with my thesis and I'm just not being inspired by it anymore. And I don't know if psychology is for me after all. And we might pause and they're often surprised when the first thing I ask is like, how are you sleeping? You know, are you getting some rest? And I'm wondering like, what's your eating look like? Cause I see you in the lab a lot and I see you in class and you're doing this practicum. Like, do you get food or, you know, how are we feeding you? What about interpersonal connection? You know, so it might be that you hate psychology now or wanna do something completely different and are just coming into contact with how this isn't meeting some core values, but it also might be that you're so under-resourced that you're not able to contact some of the resources that are there, you know, so you might actually need to provide yourself some support and love in some of these other domains so that you can continue to contact what's really important there and be, like you said, optimizing, you know, how it is in every choice. You know, one of the things that happens, I think when people start to move in this direction towards creating nurturing context for themselves and start to sort of feel themselves grow towards flexibility, one of the things that happens is you start to realize how many choices you make in a day, you know, cause when you're experiencing them as actual choices, remember that experience of freedom, when you're experiencing them as actual choices, then suddenly there's just one behind the other, one behind the other. And that's what opens the door to understanding what choices are leading you to your goals and values and which ones are not. And when that happens, it's quite mind-blowing because you're like, whoa, I've been choosing wrong and how long have I been choosing wrong? Then begin making those decisions to go towards your goals, towards your values. You then will start to see, talk about context, the community that you've surrounded yourself with and whether or not they're supportive of the changes and the choices that you need to be making in order to be resourced. And sometimes you might even find yourself in a position where you go, this choice would grow me this way, this choice would grow me this other way, this choice would grow me this other way. Which way do I wanna grow? That is a well-resourced human and the moment that you can go, you know, is what I wanna do is confront this person and really grow in my being assertive and advocating for myself is what I wanna do is set this aside and draw a boundary and grow like that aspect of my social navigation is what I need to do is go to the gym and take the rest of the day off and really grow in my capacity to respond to my acute needs and then resource myself that way, that kind of choice, that kind of freedom. The funny thing, I mean, the really paradoxical thing about this whole orientation is how empowering that is. We started by saying that we have this fantasy that we are in charge of all of our behaviors. We have this fantasy that it's all up to our drive and our willpower and having the right personality and the right tips and tricks or the diagnoses under control or whatever. And that if we pause and let the context, you know, let the role of context be apparent to us, one of the things that actually ends up happening as we get better and better and better at this is that we really come to feel our own power. We really come to feel our own freedom and that illusion of agency that we talked about, you know, is more real than ever and more effective than ever. It's a funny trick, you know, to let go of being the ultimate source of control of everything in our lives actually empowers us to have the experience of lots of control and that we could kind of do anything. I couldn't agree more and I made a major change in my life in quitting drinking, tied to starting a family and health. And what I realized was contextually, environment was not right for me. So going out, staying out late in bars if I'm not drinking, not good for me making good choices. And also some people were not good for me in that environment, in that context. It doesn't mean that I remove that person from my life. It just means that I need to hang out with them in a different context where we're doing something healthy, where we're grabbing lunch or a cup of coffee and I'm not putting myself in that position that I know is gonna lead to me staying out later and feeling bad the next day, missing the gym, maybe eating something poor because the only thing available at 2 a.m. is, you know, taco trucks here in LA. That's the level that I think, especially for our younger audience, they don't often realize. Now, my core values have shifted and changed, you know, it's starting this company, being social and being a night owl, like that was core to my identity and core to me helping provide service to all of the clients who had come out to LA to work with us. And now reorienting my life around, okay, starting a family, wanting to be there for my kids, really caring about my physical health to be there for my kids.  And I think what we often hear from our audience when we get into core values and we talk about this on every act episode we do is, well, how do I choose them? Like, you know, every core value on this list is something that I really aspire to. And then, well, what happens if I choose the wrong ones? And those two questions just go sort of hand in hand and we often hear from our audience, well, you know, I didn't move forward or I have 20 and now I don't know how to set goals and I don't know how to involve this in every day in my life. So what is your advice there, understanding the value of core values for those who might be early in their experience of shifting from goals to values? I love the kind of orienting people towards investigating and experimenting in their own lives, you know? So for me, it's like, whoa, okay, 20 of these feel compelling. Well, you got some work to do. You know, let's go out and let's engage each of these sort of in turn, let's spend some time with each of these, let's try them on and see which version of you you've fallen in love with, you know? Where is it worth the work? Where is it if you could set this and orient towards that way of being in the world that it would make sort of the struggle of being alive worth it, that it would motivate you and orient you.  You know, so I think sometimes we have the sense that there's a right one and if we don't pick it right, like we have to discover, like uncover the value, it's in there somewhere and we might be fooled or something, but I think you make a good point in saying, you know, this can change and shift and it should in a contextual sense, if values like anything else are sensitive to context, then as our experiences grow, as our life continues, then our values will shift with our experience. I've certainly heard folks, you know, suggest that values should be the thing that kind of carries over into any context or, you know, that carries over over time. And I think some people have that experience. You know, for me, I think for a while now, although it means something different than I'm noticing, as I say, it means something different than when I first said it, but I remember around 2005 or something, I started saying that the thing that I really care about is to make spaces around me where people can do extraordinary things, like for themselves, you know, whatever it is that is extraordinary to them, like I wanna be a context where people can do things that feel extraordinary, that are beyond the ordinary for them. One thing that I can notice is that, you know, I happen to be in a graduate program where we were doing act, where there was lots of work that encouraged us to put words around our values. That means something completely different to me today than it did 17 years ago, completely different. So even if the words are the same, you know, what comes to mind, what it feels like and what it looks like in my everyday life has shifted. So to the individuals who aren't sure or who find that sort of bewildering, you know, what do I value? I'd say like, let's go on a values adventure, you know, let's see what that would look like on you, whatever the value is, you know, being compassionate or hardworking or see what that value would look like on you, in your world as it is, how you would have to resource it and pick, you know, you get to pick. That is true, you do get to pick and I love trying all of these values out. Speaking of extraordinary, we love asking each of our guests what their X factor is, what makes you unique and extraordinary in your own right? What do you think your X factor is, Emily? You know, I think I've gotten pretty good over the years at meeting people where they are and sort of joining with folks where they're at and even if that's a place of great suffering and really meeting them there and being able to connect with them. It's something that I care about deeply and is actually like a fundamental part of that whole thing of creating spaces where they can be extraordinary. You know, we gotta be willing to be with folks in the suffering places in order to nurture them into bigger and bigger lives. Absolutely, and given the permission to be extraordinary at times. Thank you so much for joining us. This is a beautiful conversation and I know our audience is gonna get a ton of value out of contextualism and resourcing and looking at potential problems or frustrations they have in their light in a different lens. So we really appreciate it, Emily. Thanks so much. Thank you.


My name is Chuck Armstrong, I live in Brownsville, Vermont and I grow about 30 acres of vegetables and cover crops. My main vegetable crops are sweet corn, green beans, winter squash and peas. I guess today we're talking about cultivation and I start off my season by chisel plowing and then I follow that up with harrowing and field cultivating with a perfect field cultivator. All the crops I plant are pretty large seeded and I can use a laly weeder on those and so after I plant I'll use a laly weeder before the plant comes up and also after. A good way to judge whether you need to laly weed is to just run your hands through the soil and if you see a lot of white thread seeds germinating it kind of looks like a sprout salad then you know you're ready to cultivate. When I'm using the machine on crops that haven't emerged yet I usually dig up a short section of row to see what the crop is doing, how far along it is, whether it's close to how close it is to coming through the surface and then I'll know how much pressure I want to put down on the tines and the way I adjust the tines is by raising and lowering the whole machine the lower you push it the more pressure you're going to have on the tines and as I start down the row I'll get them all in the ground and I'll put it down a little bit and if I feel like I'm starting to pull some crop up then I'll raise it a little bit and you know trying to keep it down hard enough that it's still pulling out the weeds. The other cultivation techniques I use are some Bezzarides weeders. I'll use the Bezzarides tools and there's a torsion weeder that you can get real close to the plant and it has a springing action so that it will bend away from the plant but it will still kill the weeds but it's less likely to kill the crop plant and it has a very minimal amount of healing so you can do it when the crop is very small and then there's another tool called a spring hull that's similar action but it gives a little bit more healing action so that's a little bit more aggressive so you can come through that on the second time through. This is a tool bar cultivator I use it on my corn beans in winter squash I try to use this as soon as I can after the crop is up and just big enough for me to get in there. These are called spiders and they're a Bezzarides tool and I've got them set up now so that they're taking soil away from the crop and you can reverse it so that you can heal up the crop and supposedly it's a little bit more or less aggressive according to which way you point these tines they have a little bit of a curve to them if you point them forward they're supposed to be a little bit more aggressive and I point them to take soil away from the crop when it's small so that the last tool that comes through which is this won't have very much soil that it pushes against the crop and it won't bury it and I can I've got this these I've got one on each side of the crop and they go just under the soil like that and it'll and I've got them so that the distance is only it's about three and a half inches apart and use it really similar to a shovel but it's a little bit more forgiving because it's doesn't have a sharp edge here so it's less likely to cut your crop and it will flex as it's in the soil will flex around a little bit so you can get a little bit closer than you probably could a regular sharp shovel and in between that that's what I have for the last two and in between I have some side knives and that's just to I'm finding if I just had this just had the spiders in the and these that there I was missing some spots so I just put that in there sort of clean it up and it sort of also levels back out whatever kind of a healing action that this tool makes


We are going to go to beaches and cream and try the kitchen sink the reason is Because we stumbled upon a video the other day of a nice channel called 407 eats We just started their channel. They just moved to Florida and at the end of it They said that they'd get the kitchen sink again But maybe if they had two more friends and then they paged mr.  Morrow, so then we responded and said absolutely. Let's do it Do this We're kind of in a bit of hurry because our reservation And it's 220 so we're 10 minutes late and we parked at the yacht club instead of the beach club, so We gotta go And here we are hello This is 407 eats this is beaches and cream This is our first time here Wasn't me. Oh, yeah, you're going just for the kitchen sink It's not on here. We got the og og original original. Oh, yes, it is The original og I don't see it. I see that Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the one that's the one mark That's the silver tuna Look at our foodie isn't here They have ice cream hanging from the wall It reminds me of the 50's scene inside of carousel progress I don't know if you can hear me, but I'm just telling you guys what I think Carousel progress, yeah, yeah, yes They have these fancy doodas here I So if you're not familiar with the kitchen sink it serves for people it is a hefty amount of ice cream and toppings So much that we need to share it And they're gonna bring us out little bowls and it's gonna be delicious and it's literally served in a kitchen sink I think something's happening Or two I guess that's not coming here Whole can of whipped cream What look at this massive massive thing So here it is 8 k8 I'm not a and here it is eight scoops of ice cream and a whole can of whipped cream and a whole can of cherries Can of cherries I feel like yes One two three four brownies four cakes for Oreos. There is a lot. This is massive This is going to be the ultimate first bite And we've already dived in No, come on not the monorail shot I Went for the mint ice cream Too much We are feeling the hurt already and look at this there's still a lot to go And if you didn't know this is why it's a kitchen sink is because it's in a sink Oh Yeah, yeah get straws to drink the rest of it. Oh boy. Look at our little cherry stem collection on the bottom You have to finish it It's okay little boy Ice cream All right guys round to round to here it comes Thank you, I would just get it that's too much that's too much As if they don't hate us here already They have decided to start working here. Yeah, I actually forgot my wallet, so we're gonna have to work this off a little bit The straws right there. Oh, we have a straw holder. We have I Thought they would all pop out All right, this kitchen sink has now turned into I Feel like it. I didn't do my magic trick Is everybody ready for some magic here? Are you worried that I'm filming bad me? It has now become ice cream soup And we're gonna have to resort to straws This is gonna be a challenge or we could do it like pie eating contest style against behind her back. Oh Me and Tyler have to finish this we can't get defeated I should just right out of here. Yep. We are not gonna get defeated by the kitchen sink Oh, no, no, try it again Veronica, what are you doing? It is done look at that and half of it is on Veronica's shirt This is all that is left.  I've never been in beach and cream before you're delicious, and I never invited back again Yep, they said lady If you come back with them like that, we're gonna put it all over ourselves But it was delicious well worth the money feeds up to four. I didn't say six Yeah, like honest to God it feeds a lot. We enjoyed it. Yeah, it was a lot of fun I've always wanted to do it. Yeah, and we had great company. Yes 407 eats make sure you check out their channel description We'll put the link right in the description if you like food or if you like Disney, you know subscribe to us you might like it You might like it We're just starting. They're starting. They're starting. Yeah, and they're got great.  We'll see you next time


All right good morning everyone all right without taking too much of your time I would like to welcome mr. Venkat Subramaniam my mentor my friend it's an honor to have him over here all right I'll leave the stage to Venkat you have one answer thank you thank you very much it's definitely a great pleasure to be here with you to talk about certain things that I care about the most and I'm certain that you care about the most as well it would be nice to get the slides on the screen great so I want to talk about something that has been in my mind for quite a while I one of the things that I love the most is is developing software programming that's my passion I am a programmer I love being a programmer and I can't imagine a day when I don't code is like a day with no sunshine that's how I feel about it and I like to really code and the reason I really like to code is it is a really a fantastic form of expression it is a way that we can express our thoughts our ideas and then we can go back and refine it to change it and evolve it so as a result I would like to go pick up different ways to do that and so along the way I realized that there's a lot of fun doing it but there's also a certain treacherous path we have to take so the title of my talk today is it could be heaven or it could be hell the pleasure and pedals of being a polyglot programmer we'll talk about what that means along the way but let's talk about why we should do and the entire talk is going to focus on just one thing about you why should you care to do any of these but before we do that a quick show of your hands how many of you are programmers here that's great I'm in the right place how many of you are testers by any chance a few of us great I'm gonna have to do other things in software development quite a few of us and I'm not if you will not raise your hand no matter what I ask okay good excellent there's one Neil thank you so so absolutely that's that's basically we are in the right place we are among programmers who are passionate to learn and of course there are several programmers out there but what makes you different is you care about your craft you took the time away from your rigor and what you do so you can actually learn and get better but the reason why this is important to us is after all it is so true that we really are what we eat and we have to really keep out for what we eat and of course I'm talking about eating as food but it is not just food that goes through our mouth but the knowledge the content the things we hear constantly we absorb we see this makes a huge difference why am I so worried about it and that's because there are so many companies out there trying to sell us all kinds of things like this one kind of scary isn't it


Now, I would like to pass it on to our Dean of Students, Jim Nyland, who is going to welcome you today and take it away. Thank you, Anna. My thanks to everybody involved in the organization of this fabulous event to lead to the entire events and comms team. It's great to have you all here. Special thank you to our Uni SQ elder in residence, Uncle Wayne, who was a gift to this university, always interesting, always engaging, looking great for 73. I have to say, which is marvelous and gets us off to a fabulous start. So with those few thank yous in mind, let us begin. Provost, Deputy Vice Chancellor's, Pro Vice Chancellor's, Presidents and Co-presidents, Deans, Directors and Teaching Fellows, Registrar's and researchers, professors, principals, practice leads and educators, lecturers, learning advisors and librarians, chairs, co-chairs and coordinators, academics and professional staff. Most importantly are students. Can I welcome each and every one of you to this very special occasion, the 2023 student voice Australasia symposium themed exploring quiet voices for impact. And can I thank you for caring about the student voice in our cherished university sector. My name is Professor Jim Nyland and I'm the Dean of Students here at Uni SQ, who is very proud to be hosting this event. And I'm also privileged to be chair of the SBA Steering Committee. Nearly 200 participants join us today. A very special welcome to those of you who join us here at Uni SQ's Springfield campus and a warm welcome to those who joined us online across Australia and New Zealand. You reach an age in life when you think about the impact that you have on your particular sector. It's normally an age when you have less years ahead of you than you have behind you and one or two more gray hairs than you might like to admit. And as I hurriedly scour around this room and look at colleagues online, I am hopeful that I'm not the only person who falls into that particular category. But if I was to project myself 20 years ahead and look back on the next two years facing as I firmly believe that what we will achieve together through the student voice Australia will be momentous over this next two years in putting the student voice front and centre of our cherished sector. Part of the rationale for that is that much of the hard yards has been done already by way of background. SVA began as a pilot led by Professor Sally Varnum in 2019 from the research conducted from her 2016 Australian National Senior Teaching Fellowship. This research sparked the development of a national framework for student partnership in university decision making and governance, the setup principles, along with toolkits and good practice guides. And I'm pleased to say that Sally joins us online today. After being developed and piloted at the University of Technology in Sydney and spending the following three years housed at the University of Adelaide, we are proud to take over the SVA hosting duties here at UniSQ. This university was part of the original pilot project led by Professor Karen Nelson, our provost who joins us here this morning. Under her leadership UniSQ has developed our partnership framework and established a new system of student governance, including our Student Senate. So exciting times for us here at UniSQ with an A team of university leaders putting students at the heart of everything we do. And in similar fashion, we hold great aspirations for SVA in the next two years with a focus on growth, strengthening the network through engagement and continuing to bring value to all of our members. For now, it's my great honor to introduce the newest member of the SVA Steering Group, the DVC Education of Griffith University, Professor Sean Ewing to share his thoughts as we open today's proceedings but just before I do. I will share with you that I did have the honor and privilege of working at the same institution. As Sean, albeit quite a bit before his time, in fact, 20 years ago when I came over to Australia, it was to join the team at Griffith University, then led by Professor Glyn Davis, not sure what Glyn's doing now. I think it's some government job or something maybe. But they were exciting times. Glyn was only in that position as VC of Griffith for two years before he was headhunted by Melbourne University. But in that two years, it's interesting what has been developed. I came over from the UK to help run the Office of Community Partnerships that was flagged in the Griffith project, one of the key projects they wanted to put in place. It's interesting that now flourishes as the Office of Engagement. Another key project there was the Griffith Review, which this year reaches its 81st edition of Australian authors and has made great headway in that time. And it created the IR Association, the Association of Innovative Research Universities. Again, that's lastly the test of time, moving from five original members to seven that they have today. The other thing it did was to rebrand Griffith University. And in all of that, those big achievements, the student voice was paramount in those. The rebranding is an interesting one because of course we know Griffith to be read. And Glyn would say it was the student voice that really sort of made that the focus and they said in consultation that if you're going to go red go really red red. So the intensity of Griffith's red is entirely down to the student voice. It's my time there in the successive roles I've had. I've always taken that on board in terms of the student voice, whether it's creating a physical learning environment for a master planning process, whether it's creating a live curriculums part of course offerings in a university. I've always given the onus, not just the listening part, but the onus on the student partner and the student voice because you get better decisions and long lasting decisions that will last the 10th test of time. And when I look back 20 years ago now, and I think about what was achieving that two year period. It gives me great hope and belief that we can achieve marvelous things over the next two years through the student voice Australia enterprise. Back to Sean, if I may. I am personally thrilled that Sean has joined the SVA board. I have spent many years trying to attract Sean to other boards without success. So I know he is really choosing, which is why I'm so delighted. But he's joined SVA and is here with us this morning to open this symposium prior to working at Griffith, Sean held key leadership roles at the University of Melbourne and is renowned for his work in indigenous health. As he played a pivotal role in the leaders in indigenous medical education, the Lyme project, fostering collaboration among all medical schools in Australia and New Zealand. Professor Ewing is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in higher education, believing they are fundamental prerequisites for academic excellence. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Sean. Thanks, Jim. You're very kind and really had your coffee this morning. Uncle Wayne, thank you for your welcome. And I might make a few reflections on that, which is from time to time, welcomes and acknowledgments, mostly acknowledgments actually of country really annoy me because they're not based in meaning and not connected with the purpose of the event. And in that spirit, they become an important but could be seen as tokenistic expression of recognition. Yours was very far from that and I know it was a welcome to country so thank you for welcoming me and us here. His reminiscent of the 20 years that I lived on Narm Melbourne, I need you I Murphy Wondon would always bring in Manne gum, which was specific to the region and share that with us. So thank you for grounding us and connecting us to place into where we are. And I think that's a critical to how we set the tone for the day. As Jim's mentioned, I'm one of the newest members of the I think the newest member of the steering committee of this group and it's, I wasn't going to say anything about saying no to Jim several times in the past, but he brought it up so I, I think that this group has a really important role to play and I moved to Griffith about 18 months ago from University Melbourne where I left where I was Pro Vice Chancellor place and indigenous so we led the indigenous portfolio but then started to think about what that meant for place. And a couple of things around moving to Griffith is not about me this is about institutions and student voice. There weren't many universities across Australia that I actually would have moved to I've done my time at Melbourne there's nothing anti Melbourne. I'd spend a wonderful year in 2020. We landed in London in the middle of January for a year long sabbatical which was going to be Stockholm, Singapore, Vancouver, and ended up being the kitchen, the lounge room, the balcony. And what was fascinating riffing on the theme of red was that the depths of the lockdown in 2020 in London. The buses the red buses kept going around and around the city in exactly the same pace they would go if it was full of traffic but there was no traffic and it was like a weak pulse a weak heartbeat just going and going and going. The opportunity of the COVID for us was lots of time to read and to think and to reflect on things like purpose of universities and the role of student voice. And I often reflect that on a meeting that I had at an unnamed institution where they're about half a dozen of us in the ninth floor of a building talking about the international student experience. Firstly, we were all male and I know the gender diversity at least but interesting imbalance in this room. We're all male. We all went to university last century. And we were pontificating about the student experience and we're all locals. We're pontificating about the student experience for international students and I was like guys with dinosaurs. I mean that genuinely but affectionately was possibly career limiting because we have no lived experience of living in an overpriced shoebox size apartment in reveal the institution if I say where but it might have been Carlson or Parkville. And making decisions about how we support student experience and my thought about that quite a lot when I was in London as well. So I think for most of you and I won't make a comment on Jim's hair gray or otherwise but for most of us, most of our executives that that make decisions about what we're going to do in this space did actually go to university last century. I did, but I don't look at so thank you for saying that Diana. And for me that's a really important part of all thinking through what co creation might look like and how we how we deeply engage with our students to craft an experience that is as much there as it is as it is ours and the flip side of having a voice and developing a voice is listening and I think a great skill. That we need to work at as part of the executive units is to think about how we listen to the student voice. So, it's just some kind of random thoughts the only other thing I want to reflect on from what Jim said is in is that times do change quite quickly. When we established it was in Anderson that established it but then I let it after Ian went to Canberra. It was an indigenous medical education network. One of the aspirations of that network and there's a conference in a couple of weeks back in Canberra was that we wanted to reach population parody for indigenous medical students across the country parody with domestic students not international. And we reached that surprisingly in about 2016 17. That was in some ways unheard of. In fact, when we started the network in the early 2000s. The other example was at Melbourne we established from a very generous philanthropic gift. The Melbourne Poat Center for indigenous health and one of our aspirations when we started that I think in 2015 2016 was to have 20 new indigenous PhD students by 2020. And they smashed that out of the water a couple of years before that and when we set those targets they were things we thought oh their aspiration we're not going to get there. There's a tsunami is the wrong word but there's a very big and healthy wave of indigenous students coming through our universities now at all levels undergraduate postgraduate PhD. I think there's something like not up with the latest data but 500 or so indigenous PhD candidates across the country. 10 years ago that was was unheard of and and I reflect on those comments from my area partly because change does come and it does happen.  And you set those aspirations earlier so I'm looking forward to seeing what this group can do and the change that it can affect, which will come if we work hard at it will come quicker than we realize. Today is all about ensuring that all voices are given a platform to be heard and I'm really looking forward to listening to the keynote from Lucy shortly. How do we provide space for that to happen. We have been designed has been designed with students and practitioners practitioners in mind as an opportunity to dive deeper into the question of how we enable diverse representation of student voices in higher ed. I know at the time but I got just a couple of very other brief comments Jim talks about my passion for diversity and equity. You actually those things are actually a precursor and a precondition for excellence you cannot have excellence without having those things beforehand. Otherwise you have a very watered down narrow version of excellence which is probably a privileged groups version of excellence. Publications in high ranking journals which have publishers with is done in the US so the names are that they define their categories don't ask me about them. Names that came from different cultural contexts and backgrounds jointly on publications were more highly cited were better publications. And if you had people from around the world on the publication, it gets further and is read more. And is a better publication just as one tangible example of thinking about diversity and equity is a precursor to excellence. It's not a nice to have it's a precondition and we need to think about what that actually looks like. So enough from me we hope you feel empowered to engage in the discussions connect with others share your thoughts and questions as I said I'm really looking forward to the next session and hearing about different kinds of voices. And are they silenced or are they not we kind of living in a bit of a Orwellian phase as well so that will be interesting to think through my perspective what those things look like. I'll now pass the final words over to Anna who coordinates SBA and have some fabulous directions to get me here and on time which is good. And who led the uni Southern Queensland team to bring us together here today so thank you thanks for the invitation and it'll be a good day.


Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and this is the Cube and we are live on-site at the Tug event It's an entrepreneurial experience. Basically what Tug is It's it's technology underwriting for the greater good and what Tug does it was founded by Jeff Fagnan and some other VCs and entrepreneurs and essentially what they do is they fund Non-profits they got that are gonna that are startup nonprofits that help with the greater good So that's why we're here tonight. It's the seventh annual wine event is about 900 people here It's really rocking and there's a big data community here That's why we're here talking to the entrepreneurs Finding out what's going on in the Boston scene and I'm here with Jeff Kelly whose Wikibon's lead big data analyst Jeff thanks for coming on Thanks for having me. Well, so We've been tracking this market for a while and you are deep into it give us an update since since you last talked to the Community, you know, let's say last fall. We run at hack reduce. You've been writing a lot of stuff What do you see as the the the big? Transition points that were at in big data. What's going on in the business? What are the mega trends that you're tracking? Sure Well, you know, we're seeing a few a few different trends that are happening one is the technology itself from a functional standpoint is really evolving and Big data is really moving beyond simply an infrastructure play more to the layer of applications and waste actually extract value from data As analytics as well The other thing we're seeing is something to interrupt when you say infrastructure play you're talking Hadoop, you know Basic Hadoop infrastructure and and the no-sequal database on top of that and obviously some hardware infrastructure But the hardware to date has largely been irrelevant right to commoditize hardware So that's what you mean by infrastructure that that's software layer HDFS the stuff the cloud air is doing map are Adapts guys like that Horton works etc right exactly So you know that was kind of the first first wave where the idea was well now We've got some technology to store and process all this data and that's a very important part of the equation of course But then the next question is well, okay Well, how do we use that data? How do we access it? How do we analyze it? How do we draw insights from it? And that's where we're starting to see a lot of activity in 2012 You know, we were hoping to see more activity in the big data application space We didn't see a lot, but it's really starting to come alive now You know, we've talked to tonight. You talked with squirrel. They're doing some really interesting things around analytics You know, that's a a database play, but it's really providing some Additional value on top with the analytic functions. So that's where we're starting to see some activity and that's good That's a good sign now. Don't you think if we take squirrel for example, so squirrel essentially Is is from what I understand Building an analytics platform on top of a cumulo, but it's really targeted to developers, right? So Your premise about application Applications really coming to four. There's still got to be some time there, right? They got to simplify the development process and then the applications have to get developed Do you expect to see that this year? Is that a 2014 trend? Well, I think we're going to start to see some of that this year I think you know, you know my Real my real premise is that we're going to see less off-the-shelf Applications or what we're really going to see is a focus on application development Platforms or an application development layer Where ISVs and others are going to really start to build more custom applications for for the enterprise because really when you think about big data and Business analytics the whole idea is to create competitive advantage to find an insight that your competition doesn't have and act on it And win the market you can't really do that without the shelf applications like you can do in a CRM world or maybe something like ERP so, you know, I think we're going to see more focus on application development a little bit less on off-the-shelf You know ready to go applications, but to your question. Yeah, there's certainly some a ways to go in terms of Creating that application development layer. We're seeing that players like squirrel others like continuity with their data fabric Continuities of top Papianos company exactly. So they're starting to see we're starting to see some movement there. There's other companies Offering big data applications as a service are good for an abimetta at Triseta is I have it on pretty good knowledge They're making some some pretty good traction delivering financial


firms generally maintain two books, one as the shareholders book and the second as tax books. Now let's see how the accounting treatment of an acquisition deal is done by the acquirer. Acquirer generally uses purchase method to account for assets acquired under the acquisition deal. This purchase method allows an acquirer to report target firms' assets at their fair market value and depreciate them according to their remaining useful life. This method allows the acquirer to create a goodwill which is the access of the purchase price over the fair market value of the acquired assets. Now if the goodwill is accounted for in the books of accounts by the acquirer then yearly assessment is required this goodwill impairment loss and it will be treated accordingly. So far as the reporting of acquired asset is concerned it will be appearing in the books of the new firm at their new values which are the fair market values whereas in the acquired firms books of accounts these assets will be maintaining at their old or existing values. Let's see an example where A acquires B creating a new firm AB if we see on the screen we see that the B's book value on acquisition is 10 million dollars whereas an appraiser has estimated 14 million dollars to the building of the B. This means that the fair value of the B's total assets is equal to 16 million dollars whereas this sum is equal to the 14 million dollars on the fair market value of the building and the existence of 2 million dollars of cash. A makes payment in cash to acquire these 16 million assets at 19 million dollars which means that there is the presence of goodwill to the tune of 3 million dollars and this 3 million dollars is the difference between the acquisition price of 19 million dollars and the fair market value of B's total assets which is equal to 16 million dollars. This board of payment is through the mode of debt so the company A is using debt of 19 million dollars to make a payment in cash to the shareholders of the firm B. Now the total assets of new firm AB is equal to 39 million dollars this is the sum of 20 million dollars of the acquirer is the total assets and 19 million dollars of the fair market value of the company B or we can say that this 19 million dollars is basically the purchase price of the company B. So far as the reporting is concerned now A's assets will be appearing in new firms book as their new value whereas goodwill in the new firms book will be required to test for an impairment loss at each year end.