It's nice eyes, Dan Ray, its ongoing you crazy Boston's News radio, Susie.
And you are incredibly kind. Thank you very much. Here you and I Susian working on Memorial Day.
What's wrong with this picture? Thanks very much, Susan. My name is Dan Ray. No is with us tonight.
Rob is off, Marita was off today. But I'm here.
You're there, and if you're heading on home or heading off off the Cape or down from New Hampshire or wherever, we'll keep your company.
I promise again.
We'll be here from eight until midnight, going to talk about during the nine o'clock I was some Memorial Day reflections, maybe what you did today? Do you get to some ceremonies out there? Do you remember a loved one? Going to talk at ten o'clock tonight on why President Trump seems unwilling to accept the concessions that have been made by Harvard to him already. It's almost as if he doesn't want to declare a victory and then we're going to talk. How would you like it if your commencement
speaker was a puppet? That's what happened at the University of Maryland. We'll get to all of that, but we have four very interesting guests coming up.
Going to start off with Alan Arnette.
He is a long time mountain climber and I have never desired to climb Mount Everest, but I have stood in awe of those who have attempted it, or in the those who have actually summited the mountain. Alan, how are you tonight? Welcome to night Side.
Hey, thanks for having me. Dan, Hey, that just shows your superior intellect.
Well, I don't know about that.
Is there a list somewhere of the number of people, obviously within recent memory who have actually summited.
Reached it's right at twelve thousand. There's been about twelve thousand summits by about six thousand people. So in other words, you have a lot of repeats, and typically those are the shurpas that are working on the mountain.
Sure, yeah, and they're doing I'm talking about people who have come there for once. Look, that is a more exclusive club than people who have played Major League baseball. It's about twenty five thousand people going back the last one hundred or so years, one hundred and twenty years who have played Major League baseball. So this is a pretty exclusive group, and it's not for everyone. I guess you would agree on that.
Oh, absolutely.
Qualified works.
What do you have to do for if you're seriously thinking of it, give me some ideas. If I said to you, yeah, I'd like to climb evers, what would you what would you suggest?
Well?
Number one is that you have to have experience on lower mountains like a Denali or some seven thousand meters mountains in South America like Akakagua. And the second you have to have the physical fitness. I always say that you have to be in Everest shape, not the dust shape of your life, because that altitude is just makes it so so difficult. And then third, most and probably most important, is that you have to have mental toughness.
It's just too easy to give up if you don't know why you're there, because it is it's a supper fest.
I have seen pictures of people who get up to the top of Everest, and it looks to me like it's a very small and dangerous point when you achieve the summit. Am I being misled? Have I looked at it different incorrectly?
Now?
It's about the size. It's about the size of an average you know, maybe living room in a house in the US. But you know, you can come up from either the Tibet side or from the Nepal site, and both of those routes obviously meet at the summit. But the biggest issue that you have to worry about is wind chill. It can be twenty degrees below zero, and if you have a three mile an hour wind, that can be a minus thirty wind chill. So you know, you wear a down suit and you have special boots
and gloves and goggles. So as the saying goes, there's no bad weather, there's only that gear.
So and as you're going up, it's you have to I assume also at different times use axes or some tools to get up. I mean it's not like you're walking up a trail or something like that.
Right, Well, there is a because of the number of people in the mountain. In fact, we're just wrapping up this spring season and there will be about five hundred and fifty people who have summoned over the last two weeks. So as a result, there's what's called a boot path that you basically a trench in the snow, and you don't really need the two handled ice axes because you're not climbing a vertical wall. The steepest sections are probably
sixty degrees, and you're going using a fixed rope. It's a thin nylon rope about the size of your finger, and you attach a mechanical device called an as cinder that has teeth on it, so if you fall, the teeth will dig into the rope and keep you from falling further.
It sounds it sounds like a Harrold experience. I mean, what is the average length of time to go from the base camp to the top? I mean, in reasonable conditions, and I guess none of the conditions are truly reasonable. But how long does it take the average hiker who's going to Summit to summits?
A couple of days at least or more.
Well, this has changed dramatically over the years. So there's two parts of that question. One is how long does an average expedition take?
And this year there was.
A team from the UK that did it in one week, but typically it lasts around four to six to eight weeks. Traditionally it was two months, but there are techniques now people are using to shorten that now. But your question specifically is how long does it take to go from base camp to the summit, and that's a multi day effort. You go from base camp to Camp two, where you spend two nights, then you go to Camp three where
you spend the night. Then you go to Camp four where you spend about twelve hours, and then you take about anywhere from fifteen to twenty four hours to go from the high camp to the summit and back to the high camp, and then you take go back down the camp too, which is another day, and then back down to base camp. So all in all, it's about.
A week and you're in tough conditions. Why is it?
This is it that our spring, you know here in the US, seems to be the best season for climbing.
I love that you asked that question because I'm just fascinated by this. Mount e Versus is so tall at twenty nine thousand feet that had put the summit pokes into the jet stream, and you know that's the winds that are going one hundred and fifty hundred miles an hour, and that jet stream is present on Everest throughout the entire year except for two short windows, one in the spring and one in the fall. The one in the spring is when everybody climbs it because that's when it's
the warmest. The one in the fall is typically a little colder. But there are cyclones that build up in the Bay of Bengaul around May May fifteenth, and this has been consistent since nineteen fifty three, and those cyclones will create a low pressure or a pressure system that pushes the jet stream off of the summit just for about two weeks, and then it goes away and the jet stream comes back. So that's why everybody goes at the same time.
It's unbelievable when people do reach the summit and they and they dissent. Is there some sort of This is a dumb question, but I get paid good money to our stuff. Questions are you given some sort of a souvenir, a metal, a plaque. I kind of imagine a more harrowing experience. Most of us could voluntarily subject ourselves during our lifetime, and you have to have something you could show.
I assume you know it's a fascinating subject. Because mountaineering is a sport that has no rules. Everybody does it on their own way, and there's no trophy, there's no reward, there's no mento. You might get a summit certificate from the government, and that's about it. But you do come home with immense pride for what you did, knowing that you've done something that a few other people have done,
and depending upon what your reason was. I climbed to honor my mother, Ida, who died from Alzheimer's, and for me being able to honor her from the summit of a Mount Everest was the most important thing I ever did in my life.
Do people bring things with them to leave in the summit? I would hope not.
Yeah, you're not supposed to technically, but a lot of people will bring pictures of loved ones, or they'll bring a little momento and just set it on the summit. It doesn't stay there very long because it's so windy.
The window just blown away.
Yeah, wow wow.
And what got you involved? Was it just in memory of you mom? Or was this something that you had thought about before and when she passed you decided what better way.
To honor her?
Yeah? It started when I came to Colorado as a twelve year old and saw the mountains, but I put that away until I was thirty eight, and then I started climbing. My first big peak was Mont Blanc in Europe, and then I did a tract to Everage base Camp, and then I did a major expedition every year for the next thirty five years.
And Dan is just.
Something that gets inside of you. Often say that if you fall in love with mountaineering, it's an expense of addiction for which there is no cure.
Yeah, and I in reading my prep here for this interview, I guess it's it can be thousands, tens of thousands of dollars if you're going to do it properly in the company of guides and things like that. This is not something that you do.
On a lark.
Yeah.
I often just make it really simple and say it's the price of a car, and it can be it can be a Ugo, or it can be a Mercedes. The median price this year at twenty twenty five was around fifty thousand dollars. If you went with an Apoly company, a Scherpa owned company. If you went with an American company or an Austrian or a New Zealand com company, that medium price jumps to seventy five thousand dollars.
Wow, I've learned more about Mount Everest than in this t ten minutes or so than I ever learned before. Who was the first person was it? Who was the first person who climbed Everest?
Yeah?
It was on Tempany Norgay he was and it was a key Lea from New Zealand, Sir Edmund Hillary, and they were with a British expedition and.
Sir Edmund Hillary, if I'm not mistaken, did that sometime in like nineteen fifty.
Two, right, fifty three?
Yeah, fifty three. And I believe that Hillary Clinton had made the comment at some point that she had been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, but she was born a few years before he achieved.
Trimy. I haven't heard that.
That's great.
True, Oh true, she said, she said that when she was ready for presid as she was caught in I guess we would call it a biographical error.
Yeah, interesting, Alan, I.
Really enjoyed this conversation. How could folks get more information? I know you have a blog here that we I'd love to have you give you the opportunity to publicize.
Yeah.
Thanks, Just go to my website as Alan Arnett dot com is a l A n A r n e t t e dot com all one word and from there this links to go to my consulting business, into my blogging, to my coverage amount Everston more things than you ever wanted to know about me.
Well, let me tell you that's it's a great name. Reminds me of running back for the Rams in the nineteen fifties. John Aren't played at USC and then at the Rams. You can look it up a different spelling than your name he had. You got a couple of extra letters there, probably related Alan, Thank.
You so much.
All right, thanks day appreciated likeadbye. All right, we get back. We're going to talk about sleep, your sleep with a sleep expert from Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School, doctor Rebecca Robbins. We've got a good lineup of guests for you tonight. Trust me stay with us.
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news Radio. It's night Side with Boston's News Radio.
All right, welcome back everyone. We're joined by doctor Rebecca Robbins. She's a sleep expert at the Mass General Brigham and also at Harvard Medical School. Now, doctor Robbins, I like sleep a lot, but I'm not a sleep expert and as I understand it, uh, we're going to talk this evening about those of us who like to get an extra ten minutes or so.
Sleep when we wake up.
Naturally, not a great idea, dear, as signis, did that good evening and welcome?
Thank you so much for having me. Great to be with you.
So those of us, I don't hit the snooze button. I just fall back to sleep and wake up twenty minutes later. I have an internal clock, I hear, but it's it's the same principle, correct.
Mm hmm, that's right. This paper that came out this week.
We're so excited.
It's really interesting because this area of research is very
kind of limited. Not many people have looked at using this snooze alarm, and it sounds like something so trivial, but believe it or not, our research found that in among the users of a very popular sleep tracking application, a smartphone app that individuals will use to track and monitor their sleep and also as an alarm in the morning, we found that in the individuals that are tracking their sleep, over fifty percent of every sleep session that was logged
on the app ended in a snooze button. And what we're referring to is one alarm going off and then another alarm being pressed is set four or five ten minutes to go off again after that first alarm, and
we refer to this as snoozing or using the snooze alarm. Now, unfortunately, that sleep that you might get in between that first alarm going off and your snooze alarm is not very good quality sleep because that first alarm often will wake us up from sometimes the most restorative sleep of the night because rapid ims mid sleep predominates in the second half of the night, and if we're not getting enough sleep and that first alarm wakes us up before we're
kind of we've gotten what we need for the night. You might be in this vital stage and you might feel like you need a little bit more sleep and reach for that snooze alarm, but if you do fall back asleep again, it's likely going to be low quality or poor quality sleep. So the best thing is to set your alarm for the latest possible time and doing your best to get out of bed at that time.
Okay, now, now you are with the division of sleep as you can disorders medicine at Brigham A Women's Hospital, and you're an expert on this. I was surprised to find out that most of the snooze alarm activity was not on weekends. It was during the week which to me seems counterintuitive that when that alarm goes off in the morning, you got to get to work, you got to get the day going. The time to hit his snooze button is on Saturday or Sunday, But it seems as if the practice was just the reverse.
What's going on with that?
You know, I see what you're saying, but you know, interestingly, we just found that there was much less use of the snooze alarm on the weekend. And I think because people aren't setting on alarms, many of us have the luxury of being able to wake up maybe when our kids wake us up, or when our dog wakes us up, when we wake up naturally and we don't have to worry about an alarm to get us out of bed, or you know, even the snooze alarm reaching for that
in the afternoon after that first alarm goes off. So we did indeed find the most snooze alarm youth between Monday and Friday mornings, and we found on average, it's not a long period of time, but individuals are snoozing on average for about eleven minutes, which again can seem a little bit trivial. But if we do the math, if you're snoozing every day for anywhere between ten and fifteen minutes, that catches up pretty or gets pretty quickly to about an hour of sleep. That would is really
kind of low quality or poor sleep. And so if we all commit to setting our alarm, say you have to get to work at eight o'clock, it takes you thirty minutes to get there, it takes you thirty minutes to get ready. Okay, seven o'clock would be your alarm, But if there's any way to maybe get everything you need to do to get ready and out the door done a little bit faster, there's any way to set a little bit later alarm and commit to not snooze.
Think about that. That could be ten or fifteen minutes more each and every night, and for many of us, that could be a lifeline if you're not getting enough sleep. That supports all of the very rich and nuanced areas of our lives that are impacted by our sleep.
Okay, so here's a question. This is sort of off we're going to talk about. I'm a big proponent of power naps. I got up at five point thirty this morning, had to drive back to where we live, spent ninety minutes in the car, and this afternoon decided to watch a little bit of the Red Sox game, and I said, you know what, you need a little power nap here. So I sent my clock for forty five minutes. Got a great forty five minute power nap in the afternoon, which I don't often do.
But I am a huge believer because I got a.
Broadcast tonight until midnight and I have to stay awake until the end of the show at least. Are you a proponent of power naps under those circumstances or no?
Absolutely, that was the perfect scenario. That was a perfect storm for a little sleepiness in the afternoon. If I'm hearing this correctly, yes, you were up earlier than usual. You got, if I'm hearing this correctly, about five and a half hour of sleep and far below what your brain and body needs.
I went to bed, No, and in all honesty, I got I went to bed at nine thirty last night and slept till five dies, so I got eight hours, but I still really go to midnight.
Was that earlier than usual, was five thirty earlier than.
Oh, yes, dramatically.
Earlier, usually up until twelve, up until one, and then I sleep until maybe eight in the morning.
I am a seven hour.
Person because of course you're working until twelve and you need to unwind and get ready for bed. So I think what might have been going on and what the
truth is. We talk a lot about sleep duration, getting enough sleep, but believe it or not, the consistency of our sleep is as important, if not more, And that all comes down or comes back to a principle called our circadian rhythm, and it's one of the driving forces behind our sleep, and that system of hormones being secreted or kind of retreating, and that all operates really in this beautiful symphonic way, and our internal circuitry of our
circadian rhythm and those the hormones are associated with our ability to know when we're tired when we should be alert, though that process does not change on a dime. We truly are not built to make sleeping changes to our sleep schedules from one day to the next. So when we find ourselves in a different sleep schedule than normal, it is very common to maybe if you're falling asleep or waking up earlier or lier than usual. That can
be challenging. If you're falling asleep or you know, or if you're waking up earlier than usual, that can of course cause some sleepiness, likely because you're probably not getting enough sleep. And so in those circumstances when you're not able to get enough sleep, or you find that you have a schedule that is mismatched with your typical routine,
that can cause some sleepiness. And so I think it's a terrific idea that you took a power nap and that can pay back some of your what we call sleep debt some of the basically when we take time away from our sleep that doesn't dissipate into thin air, and we refer to this as our sleep debt.
And I'll bet you I'm going to be able to stay awake until midnight tonight as a result.
There we go, perfect strategy.
Then, how can folks get more information from you? There's an article that you're referred to. Can we can you direct folks to that?
Yes, thank you so much. Was published in the journal Scientific Reports. My colleagues and I are are excited that that is out in the peer review literature, and it's an open science journal, so you don't have to pay for it. You can go right to them. If you any any search engine, use the term Snooze Alarm and Scientific Reports. You should be able to find the article and you can find our research also at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. We're in the division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders.
Thank you so much, Doctor Rebecca Robins, thank you for having me.
It's great chat with you.
I love your enthusiasm. That's what's that's what's great.
The people who I talked to us, it's just so enthusiastic about exactly what they do, and I really it's it's it's very obvious. Thank you, Thank you so much, and that I'm sure makes you a great sleep expert. We'll talk again.
I hope you're very kind down. Thank you all my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great scouting with you.
Back, catch you bye bye. When we get back.
Right after the news, we're going to talk about scouting Boston. There are no more boy Scouts and Girl Scouts ht Scouting Boston, and we're going to be talking with the CEO of Scouting Boston, John Judge on the other side. By the way, if you haven't pulled down the new and improved iHeart app, do it now and make WBZ your first preset, so we will only be a fingertip away from you on whatever device you have us pulled
down on, wherever you might be in the world. Back on Nightside, right after this.
Night Side with Ray, Boston's news Radio.
All right, welcome back everyone. A little change in our line.
If some of our guests sometimes kind of nod off, I think so. We have been delighted to move up
in our batting order tonight. Doctor David Hill. He's a member of the Lung Association's National Board, the American Lung Association's National Board of Directors, immediate pasture of the Northeast Regional Board of the American Lung Association, and a practicing pulmonary and critical care physician, Doctor David Hill, you're pinch hitting well, actually you're just moving up to batting number third from cleanup.
How are you this evening?
Very well?
Thank you, thanks very much.
Where do we find you tonight? Are you a local guy in Boston? And we have you from somewhere in a far flung part of this country, great country of ours.
Not far away from the great state of Connecticut.
Oh, that's the Nutmeg State of course, next door neighbor, Okay. So essentially we're always trying to get better air quality. And as I understand it, at this point, about one hundred and fifty six million Americans, many of whom are on the East Coast, are living in areas that they the air quality is not what it should be. Those of us who grew up, you know, in this seventies and the eighties, we remembered the smog of Los Angeles, and that was the place where poor air quality was.
So what's happened, Well, you know, a.
Lot of this has to do with changing climate. We've seen the wildfires of the last several years an issue on the West coast, but a few years ago Canda sending their smoke our way. And you know, over the last couple of years, even here in the Northeast, there have been significant wildfires, all of which lead to increased
particle pollution, which worsens air quality. And then they are concerns about ozone pollution, which comes from automobile exhaust and from factory pollution, and particularly here in the Northeast, that pollution tends to travel up on the jet stream and land around us. So all of those have led to worsening air pollution definitely connected with warming climate and change just due to that.
Now my sense and I live in Boston, I live in New England. I'm a lifelong New England resident. My sense, again it's non scientific, is that the ear that I'm breathing is better today than it's been in the past.
Is that just a psychological.
Belief that I'm caring and that science would prove me wrong.
I think that you know, the Cleaner Act has been very successful.
In nineteen sixty three, right.
Right, improving certain forms of air pollution, but particularly ozone pollution and particle pollution have been worsening more recently, and the driving factor behind that being climate change and having unhealthy air can be hard to detect, so we all kind of feel it on hot, humid days. But here in the Northeast with high traffic carters and with that jet stream pollution that can that can be significant, and by the time the air quality is bad, you may not be aware of it, so it's.
Not not too much.
I guess that we can do about the wildfires in the Great Canadian Northwest. How long does it take before that bad ear to dissipate?
It really depends on what's happening in local weather systems, So it's important to pay attention to air quality. The federal government has an AirNow dot gov site that you can look up your local air quality and see what's going on. There may be times of day that air quality is better. It tends to be worse in the hotter portions of the day when there's more traffic and it's it's very variable depending on where you live.
So okay, okay, So let me ask this for those of us who are baby boomers, and I'm a baby boomer, Okay.
Era did we breathe? Was the ear the.
Cleanest during our lives? So I'm talking about people who were born post World War Two? Did the ear quality get better after the Cleaner Act of sixty three and then we've let it slide? How would you if you would have put it on a spectrum for us? What was the best decade? If there was a best, there had to be a best or the least worst?
When? When? When?
When were we moving in the right direction? And when did we stop moving in the right direction?
You know, I think we were moving in the right direction late late seventies and early eighties. Part of this is us being aware of the science and knowing that air quality levels we may have thought were safe in the past, we know are more dangerous based on improving scientific data. And definitely over the last several years, the
worsening air pollution has become a big issue. And I think you're right to say, we can't control what happens with Canadian wildfires, but we can do what we can to minimize air pollution from other sources and minimalize activities that are driving global warming and meeting to these fires occurring.
Okay, so let me ask you this is always my toughest question, and that is this.
I look at the map of.
The world and I look at us, and I see that New England's like this little speck in the world. And I know that there are countries all over the world that have no controls like we have environmental controls India, Pakistan, China, and probably a lot of countries that you know that
people haven't even heard of, Kazakhstan or whatever. How can we win this battle if we, you know, do everything we can here, But China, India, Pakistan and the other big pollutas around the world don't get their act together because it all, it doesn't just stay over those countries that are big polluters, It migrates towards us.
Well. I think it requires a combination of both national action and international action. The model I talked about ozone being a bad pollute net ground level ozone is good up in the stratosphere, you know. So we came to gather together internationally when the whole on uzone that level was occurring to have international changes to help fix that.
That closed up right that that actually has closed up of the sun as I understand.
That was international global action to deal with a global problem. We've attempted that on a global level, you know, with the Paris Accords and other action on climate. We haven't been a successful one getting consensus, and we need to work towards that consensus. And I think part of it is leading by example, and part of it is by pressuring our international partners to follow that lead, you know. So it's you know, a complex situation, but I think we can't look to the rest of the world to lead.
We need to be able leaders in progressing towards a healthier planet.
Yeah, I hope that they will follow. I know when I try to set good examples for my kids, sometimes they followed that. Sometimes they didn't clean up your room, you know, clean up, take your plates to the sink. I find that sometimes as much as we might try, it doesn't really work.
Doctor Hill.
Really enjoyed talking with you, and I would love to get back and talk about the impact that this has on diseases in this country and whether or not are we're being any more successful fighting diseases that are you know, lung diseases and other similar diseases. But I think we'll save that for our next conversation.
If that's okay, that sounds great. Look forward to talking to you in the future.
Thank you very much, doctor David Hill. Remember the Lung Association's National Board of Directors and Immediates Past Yere of the Northeast Regional Board of the American Lung Association. Appreciate your time to sevening, doctor Hill.
Thank you again, Thank you. Thanks.
We'll be back for one final segment. And I don't know if Noah has Las sued our prior guest or not. Noah talked to me here do we have the prior guest as he checked in, Okay, then we're working on that even as we speak. The entire night Side staff is working out on that right now. They have their people across the country is alerted, and if not, I'll be able to give you a little preview of what's coming up tonight, beginning at nine o'clock and on for the balance of the evening.
So stay with us here on Nightside, coming right back.
It's Night Side, Boston's News Radio. Hi, you're on night Side with Dan Ray. I'm telling you Boston's News Radio.
All right.
Well, our third guest, John Judge, the CEO of Scouting Boston, is a no show tonight. Now that's a little disappointing, but that can happen.
I don't know.
We'll figure that out. That was confirmed for us earlier today. Not my producer's fault, that is for sure, but not a good not a good look.
John.
If you're out there tonight, many driving and I don't know, I hope you're okay, hope nothing bad has happened to you.
But that leaves us.
With a few minutes here, and what I'm gonna do is take advantage of that few minutes to just go over what would what we're gonna do for the rest of the night. During the eleven o'clock hour tonight, I heard a story over the weekend which I thought was really interesting. You know, you send your children off to college, or or maybe you go after college yourself, and you spend four years working very hard, and you're looking for the graduation day when you're going to walk across the stage and.
Get your ceremonial diploma.
And whatever it is a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science, or I don't know, it could be a master's or a doctorate. So you always are interested who will be the person who who would speak at your graduation, your commencement. Well, I read over the weekend and found out that Kermit the Frog was the headliner of this year at the University of Maryland's graduation ceremony.
We will talk about that later on tonight. Apparently the University of Maryland has a connection with the late great creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, who was a graduate in the class of nineteen sixty.
So this would be.
That this would have been his what forty sixty sixty fifth year as a graduate of nineteen a graduate of nineteen sixty, and they decided it was a good idea to have Kermit the Frog join that commencement speech. So
we'll we'll talk about that later. And then at nine o'clock, or rather the ten o'clock I going to talk about Harvard University's fight with President Trump, or I should say President Trump's fight with Harvard University, and there is a I'm amazed that the President wants to pick this fight and is not willing to accept the concessions that Harvard has made. And the next hour, at nine o'clock, we got to talk about your reflections on this Memorial Day. A solid day, but a day in which we honored
the memory of a lot of American heroes. I'm told by my producer, I believe he was talking in my ear. Noah, do we have our guests? Our fourth guest, Okay, without any further ado, we're going to go to John Judge. He's the CEO of Scouting Boston. John, we almost missed you.
How are you.
Great?
Thanks Dan, Thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Yeah. Well, we were supposed to talk to you at eight thirty.
What happened was it a miscommunication on our end or what I.
Just oh it was it was my fault. It's my nine year old daughter's birthday and my in laws came in and yeah, one thing led to another.
I gotcha. Okay, Well, thank you very much. Confession is good for the soul, So thank you very much. But we want to take whatever time we have left to talk about Scouting Boston. You're the CEO of Scouting Boston. There is no more Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. I mean the terrain has changed, correct.
Well, yeah they so, Boy Scouts of America is now Scouting America. In that that's cub Scouts Scouts BSA, which is the eleven to eighteen year old program which a lot of people know culminates in the Eagle Scout rank. And then there's a career program called Exploring, which is very popular, especially the police Exploring, Exploring with different careers including we've got a new aviation post at Logan Airport with about twenty Chelsea High School students participating in that.
So just to try to get a sense of this, and I know I'm a little rushed here, which you kind of understand. If a girl, if a young girl wants to join Scouts. Is Girl Scouts still in existence or is Girl Scouts in Boy Scouts now combined in Scouting America.
Now that's a great question. Girl Scouts is still in existence. So Girl Scouts USA and then Scouting America went co ed back in twenty fifteen twenty sixty, and.
So therefore young girls could either affiliate with Girl Scouts or they could also affiliate with Scouting of America.
They have the.
Choice, that's right.
Fact, girls are attaining the Eagle Scout rank, which is really impressive for any teenager to get to. The girls are doing it in about three years, while the boys are taking an extra year to do it. So the girls are coming in and really doing amazing work. That we've got just about eight thousand young women who have become Eagle Scouts far.
So that either that proves girls are just smarter than young boys at that age or the boys are just goofing off of that. Yeah, but worth to go thatw My understanding is one of the things you were going to mention tonight was you're going to be recognizing two community leaders at the forty fifth Annual Salute the Scout in Gala.
On June fourth.
Former Boston Police Commissioner Willie Gross, great friend, former Scout Explorer leader, will be your master of ceremony and you will be recognizing a couple of I think individuals here in Boston, But the one that I probably would like to mention is Bob Rivers. Also investments pioneer Amy Dumini. But Bob Rivers is the president of Eastern Bank and an Eastern Bank, I believe it has been very supportive of UH Scouting Scouting Boston or Boston more more specific, but
I guess it's Scout. Yeah, it's Scouting Boston and UH and and Bob and Eastern Bank have been big supporters of your group. And you guys are going to honor honor Bob Rivers. And I know him very well, and so I want to make sure he gets a congratulations from me. Tell us about your relationship with Bob Rivers in Eastern Bank. Oh?
Thanks, Bob, is you know he's an incredible community leader. And when you think about, you know, the top three corporations in terms of corporate social responsibility and the community work that they do, the volunteerism that they do, I mean, Eastern is at the top. Of any list. It's and it's driven by Bob's cheer of Eastern Bank. You know, he's a he's a stone Hill grad, Stonehill College grad.
He's a local guy and just never forgot, you know, the community that he came from, and it certainly has been very involved in the work of inclusion and access working in cities. He's doing a lot of work now in Brockton with that the new minor League.
He's fought a little a.
Little bit of work with the Boston Rocks.
Will do me a favorite Bob as a dear friend, and please tell him that that. I just wanted to send Mike ngratulations on and also UH send I don't know Amy uh Dominie, but I'm sure she epitomizes the leadership and community service uh and values that are inherent in the in the Scouting program.
UH.
And of course Willie Grosse is just an incredible individual.
Uh.
And also himself grew up in the He led the Boston Police Boy Scouts Explorer program.
John.
I hate to do this to you, but time tempest has fugit. The temp is fugit, as the Latin has say, and so we will have to you know, I hope we've got a little bit here, but uh, we'll get back to at some point and we won't hold this against you for sure.
Okay, thanks very much.
Getting your scouting Boston dot org. If you want ticket or information.
Yeah, we're going to give you a demerit on your your your attendance record, okay for being tardy. Those of us who went to Boston Latin School back in the day know what a demerit on our tarty list looks like. So it's it's not you know, it can be a rased at some point. Don't worry about it. Okay, thanks again, Joe,