Welcome to the Animal Training Academy podcast show. I'm your host, Ryan Carledge, and I'm passionate about helping you master your animal training skills using the most positive and least intrusive approaches. Here at ATA, we understand that navigating the vast challenges you encounter in training requires a comprehensive base of knowledge and experience. It's common to face obstacles and rough patches on your journey that can leave you feeling overwhelmed and stressed.
Therefore, since 2015, we have been on a mission to empower animal training geeks worldwide. We've aided thousands in developing their skills, expanding their knowledge, boosting their confidence, and maximizing their positive impact on all the animal and human learners they work with. We are excited to do the same for you. Simply visit www.atamember.com, join our vibrant community, and geek out with us.
And of course, in the meantime, enjoy this free podcast episode as we explore new ways to help you supercharge your training skills, grow your knowledge, and build your confidence so that you can craft a life that positively impacts every learner you encounter. We will start today's episode where I am really excited to welcome back to the ATA podcast show, the wonderful Chris Jenkins. Chris's work with animals began with a high school summer job at SeaWorld in San Diego.
After earning a degree in psychology from UC Davis, Chris volunteered at the Sacramento Zoo before deciding to pursue a full-time career with animals. In 2002, he was accepted into the Exotic Animal Training and Management program at Moorpark College, and after graduation worked as a wildlife educator at Inner City Schools in Los Angeles. Since 2005, Chris has worked for Natural Encounters Incorporated, aka NEI, where he serves as Chief Operating Officer.
He oversees two shows at a large theme park in Orlando, Florida, and partners with facilities worldwide on animal behavior, staff training, and guest experience. Chris is also a workshop instructor, online educator, and host of NEI Tech webinars, as well as the co-host of the Tech Talk podcast. He is a member of ABMA, AZA, and IATA, an IATCB certified bird trainer, and serves on both AZA and IATA's professional development committees.
So without further ado, it's my very great pleasure to welcome Chris back to the show today, who is patiently waiting. Bye, Chris. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and hang out with us again at Animal Training Academy. Thank you very much, Ryan. It is a pleasure to be here with you and your community. I like that word community. Before recording today, I checked the date of our last ATA podcast episode, Chris. It was August 2016, episode number eight of our show.
So it's great to have you back 239 episodes later. And whilst we're talking about longevity of shows and achievements, congratulations to you and the wonderful Ari for reaching the 250 episode milestone. It's huge. Yeah, we have been doing our podcast, what we call Tech Talk.
NEI Tech was something we formed right at the beginning of the pandemic, which stood for our training and education center, which was meant to just sort of be a catch all term for any and all of our online learning opportunities that we created during that time. And we were thinking of what can we do? What would be fun? We should do webinars. We should do online courses. And I said, I want to do a podcast. And Steve said, great. I don't know what that means. Go ahead, do it.
And Ari said, I want to be your co-host. And I said, we're in. And then we recorded the first episode the next day. So, yeah, we just we just hit that 250th mark. Didn't miss a week ever since then. And in a couple of weeks, we'll hit the five year mark officially. So it's been super fun. Amazing. You said that Steve and for those that don't know, I know a lot of you all, but you were referring to Steve Martin, who is the founder of Natural Encounters. Steve said, I don't know what that is.
And I feel like, you know, Chris, back in pre-pandemic times, do you remember what that was like? I've heard stories about that. Crazy, scary. And I remember reaching out to people and being like, yo, can you come on the Animal Training Academy podcast show? And back then people were like, what is a podcast show? And now people are like, what? You don't have a podcast show? Like what? It's been a very busy time in the podcast space over the last five years.
One of the, I would say, challenging things for podcast creators and hosts is that longevity piece. It's shown up week after week, month after month, year after year. What do you think has been one of the biggest lessons that you've learned over those five years? I think that what we benefited from early on was an agreement that we wanted our show to be a weekly offering that would basically feel like a conversation between friends.
So, you know, I had had experience doing totally non-animal related podcasts with my friends back in 2012. We had started doing that when people really didn't know what podcasts were. And it was never because of who we thought the audience could be or what we could get out of it. It was just we were talking about silly stuff anyway and might as well record it. That was my wife's suggestion. So I think our goal was, you know, this is going to be a time when we don't know what's going to happen.
We're guessing everybody feels like things are a little weird and wouldn't be nice if every week we got to just talk about animal training stuff. And, you know, we had built communities through stuff we had done through some of those organizations that you mentioned, the ABMA, IAATE, that sort of stuff. You know, through the workshops that we do in person at our home base in Florida, we meet people that way. We do a lot of consulting work. So we meet people in a lot of different ways.
But I think the most satisfying thing for the podcast was we took the pressure off of ourselves for it to be highly produced. We never had the goal of it being perfect audio. And to this day have continued with the sort of ethos that it was going to be a show that unless something egregiously technologically went wrong, would largely have no editing either.
Where it would essentially be, you know, I'll probably have some set up to cut off the front, some outro junk to cut off the back, throw some theme music on either end of it. And, you know, that was going to be it. So I think that we made it very easy for ourselves by taking the pressure off of it being nothing other than just a conversation amongst friends. And Ari and I have known each other and worked together for over 15 years. So that's not a hard ask for that, even if it's just both of us.
But, you know, we wanted it to be an opportunity for people to meet other people on the NEI team. So a lot of our early interviews were just with our coworkers. And then we started realizing, well, we know a lot of people in this field. We should just start reaching out to all of them and see if anybody wants to do this. And I think because we said this is going to be something that we would like to listen to if we weren't the ones making it.
And because we also accepted that, hey, things are going to come up where one or both of us might not be able to do this. Let's just do episodes on our own. Let's do an episode with no guests. Ari was the first one who did an episode completely by herself. I wasn't there, and she did not have a guest. And she didn't know what she was going to talk about until she started recording. And then since then, both of us have done that.
We've had other people completely take over the show for us, which has been fun. And I think that's made it easy for us to not miss the mark. We've had to do a few things where the episode that went up that week was essentially an apology because a plan we had didn't work out. But I think that for us, that just reinforced the idea that maybe we should all be a little kinder to ourselves when life doesn't exactly follow the plans that we make.
And since we all work in the professional animal care field, that's the reality most of us live with day to day, right? Things just don't go to plan. So let's just go with that. And now it's just become this point of stubborn pride that we haven't missed a week yet. So we're so deep into it. I don't doubt it's going to happen at some point, but it hasn't happened so far. I think there's some really good lessons in there.
I was listening to a podcast yesterday, Chris, and they were talking about marketing. And they were talking about – and love him or hate him, and I've got no opinion about this person. But it was about Kanye West. Okay. And apparently, he did a Super Bowl commercial. Oh, okay. And all it was, was him being in the back of his car on his phone being like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, buy these shoes. Again, it was like naughty detergent. It was literally just him talking.
But the point was exactly to what you were saying. Like, you don't need all of that fancy get up and gear. And I think that's a barrier to a lot of people. There's probably lessons in that for other areas of life as well. There's so much to be said about taking action. And I get the sense from your story. I was like, yo, Steve just started a podcast. I was like, cool. And I was like, I'll join. I was like, cool. And then the next day, you just jumped on. Would you say that's who you are?
Would you say that's who NEI is? Like, action taking, I think, and making decisions is hard for a lot of people. Yeah. I think it's always been, I've always felt like it was one of the superpowers of our organization, that we are small enough that when we get it in our minds that we want to do something, there's relatively few layers of decision making that has to happen for it to go forward. So, you know, there's probably, you know, we're around, I would say somewhere 50, 55 employees total.
I don't know what the current number is. And when I started with the organization, which was almost 20 years ago, I think when I was added to the roster, I became about the 23rd or 24th employee. So we're about double the size of when I started here. And so that's bigger than some animal facilities, but it's a heck of a lot smaller than most of them.
And because we are sort of an independent organization, as long as it's not done through the filter of one of our other contracts that we have, where we do like permanent shows at the zoo facilities that we do, you know, we can't just do whatever we want there. We have to sort of follow what the client does and doesn't want us to do or say.
But yeah, I think that whole experience of coming up with a new branch of our organization, this NEI Tech Initiative, that was the best example of it that I could think of. So we were in a position where, like many people, we were sort of, you know, our normal operations were sort of shut down and our shows were put on hold. And we were sort of it was felt like a furlough situation. We didn't lose our jobs. We didn't lose our contracts. Everything just went on pause.
And we had no idea what the future was going to hold. And I think our organization and in particular, our boss, Steve, is not comfortable just sitting and doing nothing. And I think he said over and over again that, you know, problems are an opportunity. So what can we do with this global opportunity that got handed to us in March and April of 2020? And that was our way of sort of making the best of it was was coming up with something new.
And I think the thing that's kept it going, in addition to those things I mentioned before, was the fact that ostensibly the show we do is meant to be about animal training and behavior. But I think what it's really turned into has been a human behavior podcast.
It's become about teamwork, communication, self-care, mental health, sort of all of the things that have to go on behind the scenes and work really well with the human animal caretakers in order for the animal care stuff to work out well. And it's one of the things we've really loved about your show, Ryan, is that you've never been afraid to sort of forefront that part of what we do and been able to have really good conversations with people about that part of what we do.
And it seems like that's a thing that a lot of our field is not struggling with right now, but they're looking to tackle in their own way. Some people just sort of wrapping their heads around, you know, we want to do better for our animals. We want to do better for our visitors. But what does that mean for us to do that, but also do well by the people who are the ones who really make this happen? And that's all the frontline animal caretakers that are here.
And, you know, I have the benefit of working for a relatively small organization where I could walk, you know, 10 feet and I, you know, have a complete access to the CFO and our human resources department, who is one person. So it's a it's a very efficient organization. The chief development officer is my podcast co -host and her desk is five feet that way. So we have the ability to put plans together very quickly and execute on them very quickly.
And we've told Steve repeatedly and we did again, even on this 250th episode, when he was one of the people who joined us, was the greatest gift he could have given us for the show was that he just left us alone. And it wasn't because he didn't care or had no interest. But for us, it felt like a vote of confidence. It felt like a level of trust that we weren't going to do anything that was going to, you know, do any kind of material harm to our organization or to him or to ourselves.
And when we do get those notes that he listened to one or more of our episodes, it's tremendously gratifying. So, you know, we've told our staff that as long as they keep letting us know that some of them are listening, we really don't care about who else listens, because the fact that people who get paid to listen to us all day would also do it voluntarily in their cars or during their commutes or at home, that feels like we're doing something right. Problems are an opportunity.
I just want to highlight that part because, I mean, that's one facet of what makes NEI, I think, and Steve driving the ship, such an impactful organization. It's small things, I think, like that. Just the ability to see that and think like that. So I wanted to make sure that I highlighted that, because I think they can easily be brushed over, but that's just like that. Those four words are a small hinge, I think, that swing a massive door.
Like if you can really embrace that in your life, you can achieve things like the NEI Tech Podcast. And I love that you're focusing on all of the things you talked about. I got a beautiful message this morning, Chris, from someone who'd seen me talk at our Australasian Animal Training Conference in 2023 at SeaWorld in Australia. And apparently they'd come and talk to me and I had disappeared unintentionally.
But what they wanted to tell me was how impactful the contribution I gave in my presentation about mental health and how that really changed their life. And I'm grateful that that person was brave enough to reach out and tell me, because I think what you do and what we aim to do here, we're never going to know all of the little ripples that it creates out there in the world. But little bits of reinforcement like that are very motivating. Can you share?
We're going to talk about community today, everyone. I think everything that we're talking about now fits so well under that umbrella topic. But I do want to give a shout out to you and your team. And just for those listening who might not know, because you do such great work. Can you share a little bit about Natural Encounters? I mentioned it in your bio, obviously, but expand on that and kind of your role in that space.
Yeah. So, you know, I need to find a more elegant, brief way to explain what it is that my organization does. But the way I think about it is we are an animal training and guest experience creation engine. I've never said those words before, but I kind of like it. I'm going to hang on to that. And now it's going to be part of this recording. So that's going to help support that for me. Yeah. So we we do a lot of things.
We have a home base in central Florida, which is about 40 minutes south southwest of Orlando, where we have the majority of our animal collection, which is mostly birds, 400 some odd now, probably. That number may be way off because we have so many locations where where people and humans and birds are spread out. But that's that's where our kind of home base is. That's where the bulk of the animals that we have live. And that's where we do all of our in-person training experiences.
So we do a bird of prey workshop. We do a animal professionals workshop, which is sort of a catch all for anyone who does anything animal related professionally. And and then then we have our actual physical tech center. The training and education center is a is a physical building that we created that Steve designed and and our executive VP, Rob Buells, helped design. And we were very proud.
And because of the timing of how everything worked out, I think the building was complete and ready for visitors in about April of 2020. So that thing sat unused by anyone but our staff until somewhere in 2021 or maybe early 2022, when we finally felt comfortable enough about inviting people back to us to share physical space. But so there's that. And then we have two permanent show facilities that are at a big theme park in central Florida. Both bird themed.
One of them is a mixed species show that has all kinds of different stuff. Chickens, vultures, storks, eagles, owls, parrots, and lots of things I'm not thinking of right now. And then we have a free flight Macaw experience where we have the number keeps growing ever since we started. It's the 10th year anniversary of that show. Last year was the 10th year anniversary. We opened it in 2014. And there's around 100 parrots that we free fly in the park. They live in in four separate flocks.
So it's not 100 at a time. But each of those flocks does a flight or two during the day to go out to this sort of, you know, unadvertised experience in the park where just a bunch of birds just show up and people kind of have their socks knocked off. That was always how it was designed. So those are our permanent operations. And then we also do a large amount of animal training consulting at other zoos, aviaries, aquariums, you know, wherever they would have us.
And my boss started doing versions of that. I think as early as the 1980s was the first time he started branching out of just doing free flight bird shows and then doing consulting. Because as you and your listeners will know, the principles of behavior change apply across species. So the stuff that made Steve a very good free flight bird trainer, turns out also made him a pretty sensitive trainer of just about any species you can think of.
The way we like to think about it is when you work with animals, that the consequences of making a poor decision might mean you never see that animal again.
You you get to be pretty good at reading body language, knowing when an animal is comfortable, when an animal is uncomfortable, and then changing your behavior and body language as a result so that you can keep a strong relationship, keep a high rate of reinforcement and focus on what you want the animals to do, not worry about what they could do if they decided to do other things. Which is funny because I just got off stage doing the show here.
And that was the last thing I talked to a guest about who just could not understand for the life of them, how it is these birds would choose to come back when given the freedom to do whatever they want. So that consulting work is based on those sensitivities that was built out of that. And then we also help other facilities set up new interactive animal experiences. So sometimes that's full blown stage shows like we do here. Sometimes it's free flight bird experiences.
Sometimes it's intimate, you know, sort of small animal encounters. What we would sometimes call pop ups in a park where, you know, you'll just turn a corner and all of a sudden there's a toucan there or there's a raven running around or there's a beaver crawling on the ground. You know, whatever it is that that facility might have that they want to focus on training. And we've done that in a number of different facilities. And I forget what the number is right now.
A pretty accurate one is on our website. But I mean, Steve and his team, we've consulted it. I think the number is somewhere around 140 zoos across the world. And that's been really eye opening for me ever since I started doing that. And I've been with the organization since 2005. And I've started doing the outside of NEI stuff, I think, in around 2011.
And then pre-pandemic, that's when I was doing the most traveling I've ever done of just bouncing around a bunch of different zoos, getting to meet those teams, getting to figure out what their cultures were and figure out how best that we could support them and what their goals were. So that's that's most of what we do.
The other thing I should definitely mention is that we also, not us directly, but Steve is a member of the board and then other people operate a nonprofit called the National Encounters Conservation Fund, where we support a large number of species in their in-situ conservation projects through money that we raise at things like those bird shows that we mentioned.
So, for example, we did a show at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island for two years and had a little money box, which Ryan will remember because he saw the money box when he came and helped us out with our State Fair of Texas show in Dallas years ago. And all of that money that was collected over the summer goes directly to those projects. So it all gets collected through NECF and then the board meets to decide how to divvy all that up.
So that's pretty satisfying that we have that opportunity to sort of directly contribute to conservation, too. And then Danny I Tech, like I said, was just sort of a kind of catch all that we named for anything we were going to do, which was now virtual. So I feel like our organization grew up right alongside the meteoric rise of platforms like Zoom and all of the technical challenges of us figuring out what did we need to pull this off? How do you make these recordings work?
How do you monetize this? How do we make this look good? How do we make ourselves sound good? And just all of the learnings that have come from that. So it's been a blast. And so, yeah, we touch on all of those different things, I guess. Yeah, I think we, Animal Training Academy might still contribute directly to the conservation fund via, is the raffle at the IATA conference contributing to that fund or is that a different fund? It's a good question. I don't know if that goes directly to NECF.
That might go that might go to other places. See, that's why you have to have Aerie on the show, because as a longtime former board member, she's the one who could give you all the ins and outs of how the IATA stuff works. We give free or yearly memberships for the raffle every year from Animal Training Academy. So I know that money goes to some good cause that Aerie would be able to tell us more about. That's right. You said the word culture in there.
You travel around to these organisations, different zoos, and the words you chose was something along the lines of to kind of see what cultures they have in those organisations. And I want to talk about that word today and the word community. And you said earlier as well that it's a nice compliment for you when Steve tells you that he listened to one of your episodes.
So I was really grateful to know that to get the feedback from you as well that you'd listened to a recent episode with the wonderful Dr. Christy Alligood, where we talked a little bit about if you're working in an organisation where you want to contribute to growth and progress in the specifically animal training, behaviour management, enrichment space.
We talked about some ideas that you could take away from the episode and go and run with and hopefully be able to add that to achieving that goal. And basically, we ended up talking about culture. Can you, before we go on, before I ask any questions about this, can you just define for everyone listening what those two words mean to you, community and culture? Oh, that's a really good one.
And that's a fun one, because I know that, you know, there are probably specific objective definitions for some of the stuff. But but when I think about community, I think about, oh, that's a tricky one. I haven't really thought about that specifically. I think I would say that it's an organisation based around, you know, shared interests and sometimes shared goals. But I think, you know, it's anything that somebody would want to put their time, effort and energy into.
And when they find other people who want to put their time, effort and energy into those same things, oftentimes, you know, that relationship that forms out of that, I guess I would call a community. Could you have a community of two people? I suppose so. And and I think one of the things that can be really exciting about community is it doesn't mean that everybody agrees about everything. And it just means that everybody has an interest in whatever the broad topic was.
Like, I don't know what professional sports would look like if everyone agreed about everything. There probably would be no industry built up around it. But people have strong feelings around things. And, you know, whatever community, whatever group forms around some of those things, that's a strong feelings are about. Maybe that's what community would be.
When I think about culture, I think it's it's basically that's mostly about shared beliefs, shared values and shared sort of expectations of behavior that sort of show how people are or how people should interact within an organization. So, you know, a community will have a culture. Right. And, you know, we can go into what a good culture looks like versus a poor culture or what some might call a toxic culture, which probably doesn't even mean the same thing as poor.
But that's roughly, I guess, how I would think about those sort of things. And the reason I think about both of those things when I do the consulting work, particularly maybe even more than I think about it in other avenues of my life and my work, is because I'm coming in as an outsider and my job is to help influence behavior. Maybe I've been hired to influence the behavior of animals, which I will not do directly.
I will do through the people who work with those animals or influence the behavior of the people themselves. So we will be brought in to do consulting work that really doesn't have much to do with animals. It's about getting teams to function better together, to talk more to each other and to help understand each other better.
So so I think that, you know, understanding that every organization is different and therefore every organizational culture is going to be different is really important for somebody who wants to do that kind of work. Because even though you may have a goal, either personally or because of who has brought you in, you know, the client, the truth of the matter is you can't affect change until you have a good understanding of what the current state of things is.
Which I believe I also got the same advice from Sabrina Brando, who was also recently on your show, saying that it's so important to spend those early bits of time when with another organization, just not trying to affect any change at all. Just trying to understand the makeup of the organization. Just trying to understand what people do. Whose job is this? What are the relationships with the animals? What are the relationships with the people?
And when we've had to lay out for other organizations who want to bring us on to do that kind of work, well, what is this going to look like if you're here for three days or for 10 days or for three months? The start of it is always just I just want to see how this works. I just want to meet everybody. I want everybody to tell me what their days are like, what their teams are like. And then we'll take all of that information and then we'll discuss, okay, well, why are we here? What's the goal?
And we can kind of figure out, okay, if there's a gap between those two things, then how can we start bridging those things? Awesome. Just going back to, I had the liberty of using a search engine whilst you were talking to say define community. Because up until you just answered my question there, I'd kind of lumped community and culture. I was kind of having a definition that was interchangeable between those two words. But there is a difference.
And I think there's potentially value in us just teasing that out a little bit. So the definition that Google offers is a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common. So I was thinking of like where our community. So we've got online communities. We've got natural encounters. We've got animal training academy.
But then you'd also use the word community to describe, as this definition stated, those living in the same geographical area as you. So you and your neighbours, for example, we've got a little community. And that community changes because people sell their property and new people move in. But that's different in culture because we talked about agreeing about everything. And I've definitely lived next to different neighbours. There was a different culture, I would say.
Yeah, that's an appropriate way to describe it. And disagreeing about things is something that's going to happen between neighbours. It's something that happens in teams. And then as you were talking, it reminded me of something Susan Friedman told me. And that was that disagreements are good. We want disagreements. And it's not about disagreeing or not disagreeing. It's about how we disagree. When I say that, how does that land you?
What force does that generate with regards to everything you've shared so far? Yeah, no, I think it's really important. And, you know, if we had to try to come up with an objective definition of what a good and healthy culture community, you're right. I see how easy it is to kind of put those things together. Disagreeing well, I think, is an important part of that. And that, again, I think was a relatively new learning for me.
Supported by people like Susan and other people who are very smart about these things. And have read many books and articles and studies. And understand that the benefit of disagreement is that we get new perspectives. And we help develop understandings outside of our own personal sphere of experience. So if we all have what I know Susan and others will refer to as a latent database of information based on all the experiences you've had in your life.
Nobody's database is exactly the same as yours. So their perspective is going to be shaped by all those experiences. So when somebody disagrees with me, I like to have the perspective of saying, okay, that doesn't necessarily mean, depending on what the conversation is about, that one of us is objectively right. One of us is objectively wrong. We've just had different experiences. And those experiences have influenced our beliefs and our opinions about things.
So I think we focus really heavily in the last couple of years with some of our staff that people like Arie and I were directly responsible for of helping to encourage disagreement when disagreement can be well. And I think be done well. And I think one of the ways we would do that is feel more comfortable when if we're in a team meeting for somebody to question something openly.
Which I think has direct implications for things like psychological safety, which I feel like is a term that I still need to understand better and I need to do more reading on. But I know one of the important qualities of that is does the employee, if we're talking about organizations, does the employee feel that they have the ability to openly express their opinions, even if they are different than those of the organization, without fear for retribution.
And I think that one of the things I've heard most consistently across a wide variety of organizations in the time that I've been a part of the animal field is that's a thing that unfortunately for a lot of people they feel is lacking in their organization. And I specifically say they feel because I don't know that it is true or not that they can't or can raise their voice and disagree with people.
But something has happened in their experience base that has told them that if you do that, that's probably not a good idea. So exploring that I think is an interesting thing to talk about, particularly with leadership. Because I think there's this dichotomy that happens where, you know, sometimes leaders think their teams aren't doing enough and they aren't being creative enough and they aren't, you know, moving the needle, which is something you and I have talked about.
Maybe we'll talk about some more. But then also with the tendency for some leaders to, in the minds of people being led, to sometimes shoot down most new thoughts and ideas that people might have within the organization. I think that when we talk about, you know, the inertia that comes from, for some people, years and years and years of working either in the field or maybe at the same organization or maybe even on the same team with the same animals.
You know, you put decades of experience back behind that. And by experience, I mean practiced behaviors that have resulted in consequences that have reinforced some behaviors and punished others. Then it's really hard to convince somebody that doing things a different way is maybe what's beneficial right now.
And I think that one of the more interesting things I get to do when I help people with that work of organizational change is how do we parse out that ability to suggest that we consider something new, that we consider something different without creating for the listener a sense of, I'm saying this because I'm criticizing what you are doing. So how do I say, what if we considered this in a way that doesn't make you hear, what you are doing now is wrong. So we need to do something different.
And I think one of the things that's really, I try to keep in the back of my head, and I think Kim Scott who wrote Radical Candor, a good, you know, resource for people to check out if they're interested in human communication is that, you know, communication is measured at the listener's ear, not at the speaker's mouth. So it doesn't matter what your intentions are or what you meant to say or the meaning behind what you said. It matters how the person who heard it took it.
And we don't have control over how people perceive a lot of what we do. So I think that's when we get into these, we want to be in these feedback loops, right? I say a thing, I express an opinion, I ask if everybody understands what I'm saying. And then I think if I'm a good communicator, I will then say, is there anything I might be missing here? Should we add some more, a different perspective to what I'm saying?
I've had a sensitivity created for me in the idea of saying, does that make sense to everybody? Because the implication is that if you don't understand it, then somehow it's your fault for not understanding as the listener. I forget where I heard that. It was on some podcast somewhere of someone suggesting, be careful if your response is, does that make sense?
Because if it doesn't to you, you may not feel comfortable enough to say, no, actually, despite your confident explanation, you just gave everyone, I don't get it. And how people can do that in a way where they don't feel like they have failed somehow by not understanding the communication. Does that make sense, Ryan? No, I'm too stupid to understand. Well, you just proved my point. Thank you for that role play that we just did.
Here is something that I've just thought of in the spot to aid you, the listener, to do this. When you have an idea and you think your idea is solid and you think you're confident about the idea and you're not. And you want to proceed, open up technology that is available to you today. JetGPT, for example, put your idea in there and say, can you tell me 20 things that I might be missing? And within the space of 10 seconds, you will have a list of possible things that I might be missing.
That's something that I've actually done with ideas and it's completely changed. Yeah, absolutely. And it's completely changed my approach to things. So this is really interesting because you're the first person I've talked to who I know who has personally done that. I've heard that recommended from some really pretty influential people, like leaders of very large, very influential organizations have said that. And I'm like, oh, that's an interesting idea.
But I haven't spoken with anybody who's actually done it themselves. So what was there any particular kind of insight or like an example of something specific that you learned that made an impact from doing that particular exercise? Let me just have a look. So this is how I rock and roll. A lot of the time I will be out with my dog walking and I'll have my phone open and I'll just clear my head.
I've got some muddled thoughts about some ideas and I'll just open up the ChatGPT app on my phone and I'll push the microphone button and I'll just start rambling into this device. And then I will say at the end of that, I'll say, these are muddled thoughts. I'm trying to gain clarity on them. Can you feed them back to me in a clear and concise way? And then 10, 20 seconds, boom, you've got this mess from your head and this tangible thing in front of you.
And then I'll kind of just flow from there. Oh, that was pretty interesting. Brainstorm 10 ideas about this. And I'm just looking around because I'm walking my dog and I'm just using this microphone function. And then you can actually talk to it if you want. And then I'll just use that time as a brainstorming session and get a whole bunch of things out. So, for example, lately, I've been having great thoughts about what happens if I die?
Because I've got two kids, property, a wife, and Animal Training Academy provides for my family. And I thought, oh, crap, like what happens if, you know, you and I were talking about this a while ago. And so I thought, OK, let me get life insurance for myself. So if the unthinkable happens, then my wife and kids are taken care of. So I just started to get all these thoughts out and I was like, OK, cool. This is my plan. What am I missing?
And it's like, well, you might want to think about this type of life insurance and that type of life insurance. And you might want to think about income cover. Like what happens if you don't die, but you're seriously injured? And I was like, cool. And then I started to explore all these avenues. So this afternoon, I've got a call with an insurance broker that a friend recommended. And we're going to discuss those things. So that's an example, non-animal training related. Right.
But that's just one that's been really recent in my mind. Well, it makes sense to me. And I think we've been talking about this a little bit. I'm going to do my best to not go on too much of a tangent about this. But is thinking about where we want the the function of A.I. to fit in with our organization. And I think I'm on the side of people who are a little bit more resistant to it.
Not because I'm overly concerned that it's going to feed into some Terminator like machine that's going to eventually kill us. But more along the lines of and I fully admit I told somebody the other day they were asking why I don't use it to correct my writing and proofread things like that. And I said, because my sense of self -worth is too tied up in my ability to do these kind of things for myself. And that's something I've got to unpack for myself.
But I think when I think about it less in terms of I'm going to get a machine to help me and more in terms of I'm going to get something that's aggregating the sum of all human knowledge and experience in history. To come up with some ideas that you might want to consider as one little speck across the timeline of all humanity. Then maybe I can get a better sense for that.
And yeah, somebody was telling me, hey, wouldn't it be great if you knew you wanted to use this quote you think you read in this book, but you have no idea where to found it. What if something could just tell you where that quote was? I was like, okay, yeah, that's pretty helpful. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's validation. Oh, sorry, I can't find a word right now. But I think your fears are real. Like, I mean, it could go either way.
But I've found benefit in it and use it for, for example, what I've just described. You mentioned in there moving the needle. And you and I were talking about this before we jumped on this podcast today. And you're going to present a webinar on this soon for NEI Tech. What do you mean when you go to an organization and you move the needle? What are you referring to? And tell people about your upcoming webinar.
So, yeah, so one of the things we started talking about when you and I were kicking around ideas for what we would talk about on the show was I mentioned that, you know, we created this NEI Tech initiative. And one of the big places we put a lot of time and energy into right at the beginning was putting together these informational webinars. And we started with a crazy frequency. For a little while, we were doing three of them a week, I think for multiple weeks in a row.
And then we spaced that out to one week a month, which was still three separate presentations every month that we would put together. And these were like 90-minute talks, each of them with then Q&A time kind of built in for whoever would appear to join us, which at the outset was a really large number of people, I think because a lot of folks were stuck at home. And if they were at work, they might have had more time than they normally did because there was no guest-facing work to be done.
But a lot of people were spending at least half of their time, in some cases more, just sort of stuck at home, but oftentimes with their employer encouraging them to do something kind of work-related. So these webinars worked out really well for us. And life just got so busy in the sort of year-plus beyond when we started that, that we just couldn't really keep up with that schedule anymore. So then we started going down to, well, instead of three talks in this week, let's just do one.
And then it's like, well, instead of every month, let's do it every couple months. And then it just kind of – we didn't end it. It just stopped. And we did other things. And we talked about for 2025, we'd really like to bring it back. And Steve did a presentation in January about choice and control, how they're different, and what their implications are for animal welfare. And that was really fun.
And for February, I'm going to do – I had to pull up the email, which hasn't officially been sent out to the mailing list yet. But what it will say is that this month's talk is going to be called Organizational Progress Through Personal Behavior Change, colon, Advice for Aspiring Needle Movers. And the background of that is I wrote an article for IAATEs, and that's the International Association of Avian Trainers and Educators, if we haven't said it.
They have a quarterly newsletter called The Flyer, which is a really beautiful publication that the board puts together. And it's just a great group of resources. I'm a part of the Professional Development Committee with IAATE and have been for just over 10 years, I think. And every issue, the committee submits some article that goes along with the theme of professional development. And a couple years ago, I wrote an article that was called Advice for Aspiring Needle Movers.
And it was built out of – you know, it's funny. I'm going to tie this into chat, GPT, because it was built out of an agreement that I had made to be the author for the upcoming newsletter. I had a thought about what I wanted to do and realized relatively late in the game it was going to be impractical. And I won't say what it is because I might still be able to pull it off one day. But I was at the time doing a lot of consulting work at an organization in Arizona.
And so me and other employees with NEI were taking turns rotating through this shared rental house that we had. And I was there either by myself or with one other person at the time. And it was one night. Nothing else was going on. And I realized I needed to figure out what I was going to do for this organization. So what I did was I said, I think I'm going to make this this week's episode of our podcast. Well, this is really tying everything we're talking about today together.
Where I'm just literally going to hit record and I'm going to start talking and I'm going to say, OK, my challenge is that I'm going to talk about this. I kind of have this idea that I want to talk about behavior change or whatever it was. And I just talked for 90 minutes or two hours. And by the end of it, I had an outline for an article and that article turned into this needle mover thing.
And the inspiration for it, I'll tell just the backstory and then, you know, we can chat some more, was that I had the experience in 2015 of attending the AZA conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. And Steve and I attended a talk. I don't remember even what the topic was about, where, you know, there was a number of different leaders from pretty well-known organizations within North American zoos talking about some new technologies they were using.
You know, timed microcomputers that were randomizing feeding schedules and things like this. Pretty cool. They're talking about new ideas for stuff. And one of the speakers kind of touched on this idea of, you know, everyone in the audience who was listening, who were largely frontline animal care staff. They were the ones who were going to be responsible for the breakthrough ideas of the future. Sort of sounds like graduation speeches that you hear somebody say. Right.
Like you are the ones who are going to make our future and you're going to shape the future of the animal field. So the idea was you're this person focused on this phrase. You are going to be the ones to move the needle. You need to move the needle. Everything you do should move the needle. And one person, as the talk was wrapping up, they raised their hand when it was time for Q&A.
And they essentially said, you know, I've heard a lot of people this week, you included you, the panel, use this phrase, you know, move the needle, move the needle. We have to move the needle. But I want to share my perspective with you. My perspective has been I care about my animals a lot. I want to do the best I can for them during the day. And part of that is I sometimes have ideas about ways that we could do things different or that we could save time or that we could do things better.
And my experience has been and it's the experience I've seen a lot of people have at my organization. And I've heard stories from other organizations is that when I bring up these ideas about ways to, you know, move the needle, in my opinion, what I get told is why we don't have time, why we don't have energy. We don't have money. We don't have resources. So I just repeatedly get told no, no, no, no by my leader. So panel of people encouraging us to move the needle.
What the heck am I supposed to do about that? And it was this really interesting moment because Steve and I were sitting way in the back of the class. And as I could kind of tell that this person's level of frustration was sort of becoming evident in their voice and they were getting a little bolder in their tone when they were done talking. I think there was sort of like this, you know, little yelps and sort of smatterings of applause from amongst the room.
And the panel kind of, you know, they dealt with it however they did. They kind of backpedaled a little bit. Oh, well, what we actually meant was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Didn't really answer the question, but it got me thinking about, okay, what do we do about this dichotomy where, you know, I think all of us would agree there are things we need to do better. There are things we need to move forward with.
But what do you do about that when you're not the one who is the decision maker in your organization? How might you influence the behaviors of yourself and others to help start changing things, to start in your own little way moving that needle? So the idea is I'm going to take that article and see if I can turn it into a webinar. And hopefully part of that will be giving people the opportunity to share the successes and the challenges that they've had in trying to do that themselves.
I mean, I think one of the things that I feel very, very lucky about is that my organization, and by my organization, ultimately, I mean, Steve, because he's the one who makes most of the big decisions and in consultation with the rest of the leadership team, has always been very supportive of people taking part in other animal organizations outside of our company. So you mentioned I'm a board member through the ABMA, the Animal Behavior Management Alliance.
Arie Bailey, my podcast co-host, has been a member of the board of IAATE and has been the president and has had all kinds of positions within that. And we have a number of other staff members who are pretty heavily involved in a lot of those organizations. So I think Steve feels that there is an importance in having people be able to, if they're so inspired, to be able to not only do the best they can within our organization, but also to somehow give back through service in those organizations.
And so for me, that service is important. And one of the things I want to do is I want to help people deal with those broad challenges of, you know, what are the walls that we're putting up for ourselves in these organizations that are getting in the way of us doing the best we can for our animals, particularly when, you know, in the last five years or so, it feels like some of those walls have been bigger than maybe folks have dealt with in a long time.
And when, you know, the expectations for what people should be achieving in their organizations just continues to get higher and higher and higher. No one's relaxing standards for anything. No one is saying, hey, remember how we focused on animal enrichment really strongly for the last 20 years? We're going to back off on that. We're going to, that was a good experiment, but we don't need to do that anymore.
So I think for most people, the experience feels like they're just continually being asked to do more. And in many people's experience, they're being asked to do more with less because, you know, the reality is for a lot of animal organizations, the face of what that organization looked like for many of us changed pretty significantly around 2020. And some organizations were able to completely bounce back from that, keep all of their original staff, keep all of their numbers up.
The vast majority of organizations did not. And in some cases, those reduced numbers that they went to never really went back to normal after that. So I think it's tempting, especially if you're somebody who looks at a budget who says, hey, we always had 25 people who did it. Y'all just showed me over the last two years, you can do it with 17. So tell me why I should give you those eight people back because it doesn't look like we need it. So it's a really interesting challenge.
So and I don't I don't pretend to have all the answers to that sort of stuff. But I think there is tremendous power in exploring what an individual can do for themselves, how they can change their behavior in order to help change the behavior of others, because that's all we do in animal training. Right. We control antecedent and consequence conditions so that we can make some things more likely to happen and other things less likely to happen again.
And I think it's exciting to me when I see organizations like yours or like Behavior Works, Dr. Susan Friedman and her team or our organization where we are really trying our best to figure out how to really, you know, walk the walk of what does it look like when you apply these behavior change principles well to the two legged animals that you work with? And it's a struggle. It's not an easy thing.
But but I'm hoping that this topic, you know, and the people who choose to show up for it, get something out of it and can share some of their insights. I think one of the most exciting things about being a teacher is how much you get to learn. You know that because you run a whole organization that's based on that. So I'm excited to learn what insights I will have when this is over that I don't have right now. I'm excited too and wondering where you where people can go to move the needle.
To move the needle. If you want to hear about moving the needle. All of all NEI things live at naturalencounters .com. So there will eventually be an email blast that gets sent out to anyone who's been involved with us in any way. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. We were working on it earlier today. And that's as of time of recording. So I think by the time this episode goes up, it should definitely be available for you to sign up for my talk, which will be on February 27th, which is a
Thursday, 2 p.m. Eastern, which I think is like the year 2027 for you guys in New Zealand. I'm not sure how that works. But yeah, you can you can register there and be able to come hang out with us and be able to be part of that recording. I'm excited. I think it's going to be interesting. And yeah, we'd love to have folks show up and be a part of it. Just clarify, is it naturalencounters.com? Naturalencounters.com. That's correct.
Because people, if you search NEI, you might find the Neuroscience Education Institute or the National Eye Institute or the Nuclear Energy Institute or any other Institute. So head to naturalencounters.com and we will link to all of that in the show notes as well. Chris, I could just keep going because I feel like we didn't even really scratch the surface of a lot of the things that we could have talked about today.
But let's be grateful that people have, if they're still here, decided to hang out with us and listen to us for a solid hour. So thank you to you if you're still listening. We will wrap it up there, Chris. This has been so much fun. From myself and on behalf of everyone listening, we really appreciate you taking the time to come and hang out with us geeks over at Animal Training Academy. Thank you so much.
Keep doing what you're doing and you guys continue to help support that community that you're a part of. I think everybody's very lucky who's found Ryan and what he does. So I am flattered to be able to be some little part of it for the week. And thank you so much for listening as well. This is your host, Ryan Cartlidge, signing off from this episode of the Animal Training Academy podcast show. We hope today's conversation inspired you and equipped you with new tools for your trainer's toolbox.
Remember, every challenge in training is an opportunity to learn and sharpen your animal training geekery. Embrace the rough patches, learn from them and keep improving. And don't forget the path to growing your skills and expanding your knowledge continues beyond this episode. Visit www.atamember.com to join our supportive membership where you will find a community of trainers just like you. Together, we're making a huge positive difference in the lives of animal and human learners worldwide.
Until next time, keep honing your skills, stay awesome. And remember, every interaction with an animal or human learner is your opportunity to create ripples. We're here cheering you on every step of the way. See you at the next episode.