#1686 Wonder Woman - Dr. Sabrina Cohen-Hatton (PT1)

a two part conversation. Honestly, one of my favorite chats of the last year with somebody who is smart and all of that, accomplished, successful, all of that, but for me, one of the most inspirational people that I've spoken to in a long time. Anyway, this is part one of Sabrina. Enjoy the shit out of it. Good a Team, your bloody champions you. It's typ of course, it is the

You project. It's Lates, it's Late's Melissa and I. It's six minutes past nine and I turned into a pumpkin at about nine point thirty Melissa, as you well know, because I get up at five o'clock because you know, I'm a high energy unit. And then we stuffed Sabrina around and anyway, we'll get to Sabrina in a moment. But it's a long day. So I have here. Now I shouldn't say this because it'll ruin my already shonky credibility. I've diet coke in this one, and I have tea

in this one. So I have hot and cold caffeine just ready to frontal cortex working like a bloody champion. Melissa, how's your day?

the fire service. She combines her role as one of the most senior female firefighters in the UK with work as a research fellow at Cardiff University, where she specializes in behavioral neuroscience, in particular how humans make decisions under pressure. She's been appointed as the National Fire Chiefs Council International Lead, which will be carried out alongside her position of Fire

Chief Officer in West Sussex. She also is the author of the Heat of the Moment of Fighters Stories of life and death Decisions Could I be reading this any worse? Showing resilience and determination from a young age, Sabrina was homeless on the streets of South Wales when she was fifteen. After two years on the streets selling the Big issues, she was able to secure accommodation and at eighteen joined

the Fire Service. While working as a firefighter, she also studied at Open University, the Open University and then at Cardiff University, completing her PhD Because You're straight up Smarty Pants in psychology. In the Fire Service, Sabrina became one of his highest ranking female women officers. She climbed the rank, serving in some of the largest fibrigades in the country

while maintaining her academic work with Cardiff University. Her subsequent research into high pressure decision making in the emergency services not only one awards but also influenced policy at a global level. So you're essentially an underachiever, Sabrina, I've been sitting on your ass for twenty years doing not much.

and you didn't want to have. But for me, it's just that everyday reminder to keep on going because life is tough and you can't choose what happens to you. You can't even choose how you feel about it, frankly, but what you do have agency over is what you choose to do about it next. And that's kind of been my philosophy through everything from homelessness to challenges of working in the fire department, to the challenges of doing trying to do a PhD while you're still working and

then combining research. You know, it takes a lot of time and effort and energy, and it's not easy. It's really not easy, But it's just that everyday reminder to keep going.

I think they're awesome people. My grandparents were Moroccan Jews, and they were attacked during a pogrom in Gerda in Morocco where they lived in nineteen forty eight, and my grandmother survived a machete attack. She was attacked and left for dead, and when my grandfather went to collect her body, he had to pull her out from a pile of other corpses, unfortunately, and she gasped for air. She was still alive, and so they fled Morocco as refugees and

they started again. Now, despite this experience, my father was terminally ill and so my grandmother lived with us for a while to care for him. And despite those experiences, what I see from her every day this kind of tenacity to keep up and keep on going, and this kind of really realistic optimism that everything will be okay.

It'll be tough, but it will be okay, and such compassion and empathy and love that still comes from her that I look at her and I think, you know what, the world could throw anything at you, and I know that you'd turn it into something good. So I think there is that kind of that element that comes through not just from your from genetically potentially, but also I

think from those experiences that you have. There's things that you learn from other people around you which then inform the way that you respond to the environment around you too. I lost my father when I was super young. I was nine years old, and the thing that that taught

me is that security isn't guaranteed. Are not safe. It's that fire under your feet that tells you that you know things can happen in life that you don't expect, that are really difficult, that it's not always going to be as you might imagine or you might plan, and you have to be able to be reactive to that and responsive to that. And boy did that ever happen when when I was younger. That was a super, super

tough time. But that realization that the future isn't guaranteed, that for me is one of the biggest drivers for making it what you want. And it's tiring, you know, it can get exhausting when you choose to do tough things. But you know what, that's the only way we shift the dial is by being brave enough to do those tough things and being okay with knowing you might fail at it, but that's okay because you can get up and do it again. You know.

four years later on an international podcast. Not that we're a big deal, but I mean talking to people on the other side of the world about your story and about your journey and about your grandma and about your

history and about that like it. But you are where you are as the author, as the academic, as the researcher, as the doctor, as the spokesperson, as this you know, superachiever within the fire brigade, you know, just because not because anyone handed it to you or said here's the key, or not because the opportunity knocked at your door, but because you just, for whatever reason were resilient and ambitious and driven and had a big worth work ethic and

fell down and got up a thousand times. Is that Can we develop that as well?

Because when that happens, when you fail at something, you also learn to grow, You learn how to get back up again because you have to do it. And so I do think that the more times you put yourself in an uncomfortable situation by failing, by making a mistake, by doing something that's tough that you don't have the confidence that you're ever going to finish. You know, by doing those things, you experience that discomfort, but you put

through it anyway. And then when you realize that all of these things that you can do, all of these skills that you have, you can do them when you feel uncomfortable, it means that you're better prepared for them time. But there is something really powerful for me about failure.

I really believe this, because if you don't fail at something, then I don't think that you're trying something that's difficult enough, frankly, and so for me, there is something really powerful about how you respond to failure, not just for yourself, but for other people around you as well. I mean, I'm in the fire service, I work in a team environment.

And it's really important to me that you can create this environment where you know that if somebody fails at something, or if you fail at something, people won't respond with blame or with judgment, but people will respond in the way to say, hey, that's okay, the world will fall down, Let's see how we can pick this up again and put it together. Because when you do that, you create

a sense of psychological safety around you. When you have psychological safety, people are going to be more likely to take a risk, they're going to do something differently, and that means they're going to innovate. So I think that's a powerful and I feel really strongly that we should own our failures with as much conviction as we own every success, because frankly, I will learn more about someone from seeing the way they respond to one failure than

I'd ever get from a thousand successes. And I think this is part of the problem today, especially with you know, so much social media, we see a really kind of curated version of everybody's life. And I got to look at leaders in the fire service, and they would be these great, big, physically imposing, strapping guys predominantly predominantly that

never seemed to do anything wrong. There always knew the answer to everything, that was so full of confidence, even if the answer is wrong, they would say it was such confidence that everyone would kind of and believe it right. And so I see these people and I'd never see them falter. And I used to think, actually, you know, there are things that make me feel vulnerable. I know that I've made mistakes, I know that I've messed things up, So you know, how can I possibly compare to those?

But that's not real. That version isn't real because what you might see is the cherry on top of the cake. You haven't seen everything else that goes into it. You haven't seen all the failures. You haven't seen all the all the repeated, the repeated attempts before they got to that bit. And until we get more comfortable with showing that side of us, it's going to be really tricky, I think, to kind of show other people that actually there is a route through, and it's not clean and

it's not easy. But if you're if you're not afraid to roll up your sleeves, then every problem can present as an opportunity. If you're not afraid to roll up with Steves and get your fingernails a bit dirty.

persona like, that's a fucking act, right. Nobody's that all the time, And of course everybody gets things wrong, and of course everybody at some stage in some situation is insecure, including me. Everybody's got ego, including me. But I think the thing is when you own up to your bullshit a little bit or a lot, people connect with you more.

When you're like a cartoon character of perfection, people can't identify and people go, well, clearly, I could never do that, be that, achieve that because that person he or she is a fucking superhero who's flawless and faultless.

starting point. But look at what you've done and where you've been and what you've seen, you know, and it's that that, you know, I really connect with you when you're talking about like falling down and getting up the failure stuff, because it's it's when we do the hard stuff, the uncomfortable, uncertain, unfamiliar, you know, all the stuff that we tend to avoid because we're kind of hardwired for

pleasure and for instant gratification. Or it's kind of what controls a lot of us is that we love that familiar, easy, comfortable, quick, painless path. But when we do lean into the mess, when we do lean into the pain, when we do lean into the darkness, sometimes that's where we change. That's where we build strength, resilient, insight, understanding, awareness, competence, you know.

And then and then as you talk about performing under pressure, well, if the pressure around ten people is a constant, But in the middle of that, you're the most resilient, the most experienced, the most capable, the most willing to do the hard work. You'll have the best experience in that, or you'll have at least the most control and the most calm.

you know. So it's about starting to feel comfortable with that discomfort. For me, I think is one of the most powerful things as human beings we can do. But look, it's tough, you know, And that point about persona and the reality of who you are is a really important one because you know, as much as we are we want to say we don't care about what people's opinions of us are. The fact is we're human beings and we're hardwired to absorb people's reactions to us as social information.

It tells us a lot. So if I think back to the time when I was experiencing homelessness, it was super tough, and people would decide my value. They would decide I was worthless within seconds at nothing more than a glance, you know, and to have people judging you and worse, you know, people were really cruel with the things that they would say. And I've been kicked and punched and spat out more times than I care to remember.

But when you go through that and you experience that, I could rationalize, and I could look at that person and think, there are seven billion people in the world, why should I care about your opinion? You know, you don't matter to me, so rationally your response is irrelevant. But then why do I feel so bad? And the reality is you're absorbing that and it informs the way that you expect the next person to respond to you.

Well so, and then it becomes part of your inner narrative and the way that you speak to yourself, and eventually you start to absorb that. So, you know, the way that people respond to us does have an impact on us and how we feel about ourselves and how we perceive the world and how we subsequently respond to that, and that can be super tough. So there is something from me that I've learned throughout this experience about how I can't control how people respond to me. I can't

I can respond how I control to other people. And being really aware about the impact that you can have on somebody else, I think is really really powerful and it's something that I try to do every day with whoever I'm with. And some of the people who showed me the most compassion when I was experiencing homelessness were other people who were also experiencing homelessness, and these are the people that others were crossing the road to try

to avoid. But for me, everybody has value. Everybody has potential. Sometimes circumstances mean it's really difficult to find the opportunities that you need to achieve that potential, but it's there.

Everybody has value, And do you want to help someone find that value just in the way that you're conducting yourself day to day, in the way someone might respond to you, or do you want to hinder it because it's easy and you can just let out whatever you're feeling or thinking instantly without putting that filter, that filter in place first, Hey, is me responding in a really judgmental way going to help this person? Or is it

going to make them even worse? You know? And the likelihood is actually, if you're responding to someone who's already in a really low place by telling them they're worthless, you're not going to motivate them to do anything differently. So you know, there is something for me about how we contribute to that great, big, universal soup that we all live in. And are you going to do something positive with that or are you going to make it a bit worse for someone that day? Yep?

hit by the shrapnel. And that was totally the case in our family. And by the time I was fifteen, nearly sixteen, it was too much, it was too difficult. I couldn't cope and I left and that's when I started to sleep rough on the streets of Newport, which is a town in South Wales in the year UK. And if I can describe Newport to you, it's it's a it's a town with it was a town then it's a city now. But it's a place that has its challenges. It is Deprivation is high, drug use is high,

crime is high. It's not a lovely place to be and I can say that with love because I'm from there, but it's not. It's not a great place. As a sleeping rough there, of all places, was even harder. I think we had a social worker. But when you're when you're raised by someone who loves you very much but doesn't have either the mental or the physical resources to care for you. Then you see any kind of authority figure through a lens of mistrust. And so I was

terrified of going into care, absolutely terrified. So I started to sleep rough and i'd sleep in shop doorways. I slept in the porch of a derelict church and till we got moved on, And then i'd sleep in a derelict building sometimes when when I felt safe enough there too, because lots of other people also slept there. People used it for drugs and things. So I would go to sleep and i'd have to by literally by the light

of a lighter. I'd be looking around to make sure that there weren't any dirty needles on the floor before i'd bed down for the night. So I didn't always feel safe there. Even though it gave some shelter, it wasn't the safest place to be. But I still went to school every day because I didn't want people to know what I was going through, because I didn't want to end up in hare And that was really hard. And I'll give you I'll give you an example of how tough this was. One day I decided I wanted

to go to sleep somewhere light. And that sounds a bit daft when I say it out loud now as a grown woman, but it was just fed up of not even having the control to turn a light on or off. So I went to sleep in a subway because it had the strip lighting there, and I put my cardboard down, because when you go to sleep on concrete, it's so cold, it doesn't matter how warm it might be outside. It's so cold it like literally leeches the heat from your bones. It's awful. So I'd always sleep

on cardboard. I had a sleeping bag and I bed it down for the night, and I had a stray dog, straight dog. I was a stray girl. It seemed to work. And he used to sleep in the bottom of my sleeping bag. And we'll touch on dogs a bit later, but he would sleep in the bottom of my sleeping bag. And the one this day, I woke up, it must

have been early hours of the morning. I couldn't tell you exactly, but I woke up to the sound of some drunk guy laughing, and I kind of I poked my head up on my sleeping bag with felt warm and wet, and I just thought my initial reaction was Oh my god, my dog's gone to the toilet my sleeping bag. But as I poked my head out, I could see this guy leaning back on his heels with his kind of belt undone, just laughing. He was urinating

on my sleeping bag. He thought it would be hilarious on his way back from the club or the pub or whatever to do that to the first homeless person he saw, which happened to be me, And it was the most dehumanizing and humiliating experience. But look, I don't think that he thought this through because, as it transpires, dogs don't particularly like being urinated on in the middle of the night either, And that's not the kind of thing you want to wave around it. And I don't

think you'll be doing it again anytime soon. But you know, but the hang on, hang.

cleaned myself as best as I could. I went into the toilet cubicle. I locked the door behind me. I put my bag on the toilet seat, and I pulled out a scrumpled up school uniform, and I took off my urine smelling clothes. I put my uniform and then I waited for the bus and I went to school. No one would have known why I was responding the way I was that day, or behaving the way that I was that day or had no interest in learning or anything. No one would have what I went through,

but I did, and it was awful. And again it's another early lesson in empathy for me, because we meet people every day right that we think, I really don't understand your perspective or no idea why you're responding like that, you'll bang out of line, But actually we never know what they've been through that day before we've had that interaction either. So it was a really timely reminder. But

I had some really difficult times. And I just want to touch on that point about a dog, because I know lots of people have opinions on people experiencing homelessness who have dogs. And I say that very deliberately because homelessness is an experience. You're not a homeless person. That shouldn't be part of your identity. But lots of people would pass judgment at me because I had a dog. He was my companion, and it was really horrible some of the stuff that people would say, you know, you

can't even look after yourself. Who the hell do you think you are having a dog? You're cruel, You're this, you're that. But actually no one ends up experiencing homelessness unless they are completely socially isolated. So that dog, he was the only source of social comfort and emotional comfort and stability that I had for me. That relationship was so meaningful. He was where my world started and where it ended in a place where everything else was super chaotic.

He was the one stability, piece of stability that I had, and he got cared for better than me, by the way. But dogs are a super important part of my life. Now I've got three. I'll always keep dogs, and I just love that point of connection that they can give and that companionship that they can offer when you can otherwise be completely isolated and lonely from everything else. They're amazing, amazing.

But as a result, I've been looking at loads of the neuroscience around dogs, and they actually get something very specific about their interaction with a human in comparison to their interaction with another dog. And so the amazing thing about dogs is they've survived for thousands of years predominantly by living by cohabiting within human social groups. So they've evolved these exemplary cross species communication skills that are unparalleled

in the rest of the animal kingdom. So I can guarantee you that when your dog looks at you, when your dog is gazing into your eyes, the research has shown that they're releasing oxytocin, which we know in humans it's been associated with trust and social bonding and even love. It's a really super important neuropeptide. So anyway, dogs are releasing that when they're looking at you, so they may well be experiencing some kind of rudimentary form of love.

But they certainly get something different from their relationship with humans than they do with other dogs. And it's not just it's not just the dopaminergic pleasure pathways that they get by going, oh, you're going to give me food, I'm associating you with food. It's a deeper, different kind of relationship that is also linked with their social bonding that they have with you in.

so it was a place called Monmoth. I would get on a bus, I'd sit there from seven o'clock in the morning till seven o'clock at night, till i'd sold a stack of magazines, and eventually I managed to earn enough to put a deposit down on a very cheap and very nasty rented flat in the South Wales Valleys. There are a few failed attempts at secure accommodation, including a shared house that I managed to get a room in, but I was quite violently attacked one of the guys.

They put me in hospital, so I was back out on the streets. I spent some time living in a van, but eventually secure accommodation became a reality for me, and it was at that point I started to think what else might become a reality for me. And the reason I started to think about the fire service is because I think it's actually a real privilege to be a firefighter because people trust you to know what to do

when they're having the worst day of their lives. They don't call you unless they don't know what to do next. It's an extreme situation and so to be the one that's trusted to know what to do to either stop that or at least stop it getting any worse, that's really incredible. And I felt like I could relate to it because I'd had the best part of two years of feeling like I was the desperate one in need

of help but no one was coming. And although the context was different, I think the sentiment was the same. And so I started to look at the fire service and I must have applied to about thirty different fire departments before or fire services is there in the UK before I actually got a position. It was super tough and super competitive. I started off part time as a retained firefighter. It's like a volunteer firefighter and then eventually got a whole time position, and I was woman number

seven in a workforce of seventeen hundred men. When I first started, nationally, only one percent of operational firefighters were women, so they were very, very few of us, and I naively kind of went in thinking, Hey, this is going to be amazing and it's going to be like one big, happy family. And it was that point that I realized

what sexism actually felt like. You know, it was super And Whilst I worked with some incredible people who are still like big brothers and sisters to me to this very day, who pushed me to do things that I never thought I was capable of, I also worked with some people who took exception to the fact that I was a woman and if I could do it, then I think it made them feel less matcho. It was a It affected their sense of identity and their sense of who they were, so it doesn't didn't matter who

I was. The fact that I was coming in is something that was so far removed from how they saw themselves and was doing it, you know, I was, I could do it, I could do the job. That then says to that person Hey, that's completely different to the way that you see yourself. And so I think some men have found it slightly emasculinating. Not everybody, but some, and the ones that did were really prepared to let me know about it. In fact, there was this one guy that I used to come across who worked at

a neighboring station. Every time i'd see him, without fail, he'd say, Yeah, the thing is, I just don't agree with women in the fire service. No offense to you, Sabrina, you know, but I just don't agree with it. It's not a thing. It shouldn't happen. It's dangerous. You know,

you'll get firefighters killed. And eventually, bear in mind, I was eighteen at this point, and I kind of thought, I need to apologize for my own existence here do I. But then eventually I kind of got to the point where I'd be like, no, I'm not having this, and I'd say, yeah, you know, I get it. I feel you. I feel exactly the same way about morons in the fire service. We shouldn't no offense to you, fella, but here we are, you know, idiot.

against him. Everyone can change. Everyone is entitled to have an opinion, regardless of whether I agree with it or not. But it's a harmful one, hey. It gives us a chance to call it out and talk about it. And here I am now, you know, twenty one years later, being able to talk about it and talk about the damage that it does because people still have those conversations today. So it's an opportunity.

they've been they were really tough to talk about. You know, it took me more than twenty years to talk about my experience of homelessness because it made me feel a

shape it shouldn't, but that's that's the truth. That's how that was, that kind of aching feeling in my stomach that I got every time I tried to talk to anyone about it, and it made me feel like I couldn't be like those other leaders that I'd see in the fire industry, in the fire department that would be you know, that would always know the answers and they would always be the ones that you want to say and you what to do and made everyone feel safe

and secure, or so I thought. The reality is actually when somebody is so imposing on you, it can make you feel insecure, not secure, because you have those vulnerabilities. Right. So for me, it is about being self aware always and leading that humility and putting other people's needs in front of your own. You know, when anyone goes into a workplace, right I see it. I choose to see it like a family. And I know there are lots of reasons why you may not want to do that,

because you know family and work boundaries are separation. I think for me, in this industry, given its high risk, given you rely so deeply on those other people around you to be able to do extraordinary things to save people's lives. I think it is important that you recognize that bond and that element of trust within that. So I do see it as a family. And I look at my own daughter, and she's twelve now, and you know,

I send her to school. I try to give her all the experiences that I can, so she'll grow up to be a successful hum Hman being right, and she'll be good for the world generally, and she'll be good

to people in the world. So as a parent, try to give your child all that, and then they go off and they go into the world of work, and you let go of the reins, and then you're trusting that whatever organization they go into are going to treat them with the same kind of dignity, the same kind of respect, give them that opportunity for growth, give them the opportunity to be part of something that's bigger than themselves.

And so I think, certainly for me, when you talk about leadership style, I want it to feel like that. I want it to feel like we're caring for people, like they're part of our own family, and we might not always get it right. You know, not everyone is going to have the perfect experience within that but as part and parcel of it being real because you respond to those things and you make it better, so someone else has a better experience that comes in behind them.

But I'm not afraid to fail, and I'm not afraid to talk about those failures because I think that that is a SuperM or part of how other people can then find what they need to be able to do something difficult, or to do something innovative or something that comes with a degree of risk, because they're not afraid that failure means that that's terminal. So that's the way that I tried to look at it. It's not always

it's not always easy. I try to combine. I do combine my research work with my day job as well, and we do a lot of work around firefighter safety, and that's based on the same principle for me about how we can genuinely make things better, how we can

help you. And that research actually came from an experience that I had where my husband and I, before we were married, were both firefighters on neighboring stations, and one day I was called to deal with an incident where another firefighter had been severely burned, and there was a one and four chance it was him, and so I had awful sinking feeling where I went down. We were in the appliance bay, the bells had gone down that a couple of guys were stood at the teleprinter looking

at the sheet of paper. And it took me a few seconds to register why everyone was kind of looking so worried and so nervous. And I said, what is it? And I said it's a firefighter injury. It looks really bad. And I said, well, why aren't we going? And they

said it's it's Mike's truck. It might be Mike. And I felt what a world collapsed at that point, And I felt like I was about to become one of the people that we see every day who wake up to a bowl of corn flakes and complete normality, only for something to happen unexpectedly and their entire world gets

torn apart. And as we were traveling there, I remember thinking that I was really torn between the role of a responder and all of the kind of responsibility and accountability that goes with that, but also the role of a loved one and all of the kind the kind of fears and anxieties that go with that as well. Anyway, we turned up and thankfully for me at least, it turned out not to be him, but it was our

colleague who was also a friend. And it was after that that I al really started to think about this and it played on my mind. And what they've been called to was an exploding pavement. I don't know what your experiences of either explosions or pavements, but they don't traditionally tend to go together. So they turned up eating

it as a hoax. They thought it was nonsense. What it actually was was an underground electrical junction box that had a fault in it, and periodically, as electricity went through it, it would shoot up flame like a jet engine at the ground. And Mike had been lying on his belly with his head in the pit, poking around, wondering what on earth this so called exploding pavement could be. And it was as he got up to put the lid back in that it exploded and caught our colleague

clean in the face. Thankfully, he survived and he's made a full recovery now. But if it was seconds earlier, there's no doubt in my mind that Mike would have been killed outright. And so after that I started to feel this intense sense of guilt because I felt like by not wanting it to be him so much on someone else. And I found that really difficult to reconcile.

And it was then that I started to look at what we could do to make it better for other people in the same kind of circumstance, And naively I thought, if we can develop a better burns pack, maybe we'd be better prepared. So I started off trying to do that, and as I started to look into it, I discovered something that astounded me, and that's the majority of injuries across all industries, not just fire, happened as a result of human error, Not a problem with a piece of

equipment or a flawed policy, but a human mistake. The wrong choice in the wrong place at the wrong time. For that meant someone would get hurt. And so that for me was the driver to go back and look at what we could do to understand human error to reduce it. And so, as you know, I left home really early at fifteen. I left school at sixteen, so I didn't have a degree or qualification, so I thought, Okay, I'll put one foot in front of the other and see where I end up. So I went back to

night school. I did my degree part time while working all the way up to a PhD, which I did d'd around work. So I'd go into the lab at five o'clock in the morning, I'd run my experiments. I'd go and i'd pull a full shift in the fire service. I'd go home, put my new one baby to bed because that was amazing timing, wasn't it. And I'd go back to the lab for the night shift and I'd be there until kind of twelve one o'clock in the morning sometimes. So I finished a seven year part time

PhD in three years. They had to re register me as full time so I could submit early. And then since then for the last decade now, well it will be more than that was twenty ten that we started, so more than a decade. We've been looking at how firefighters and frontline responders make decisions actually in the heat of the moment, actually at incidents live. We can understand them better so that we can find techniques that can

help them to make better decisions. And we developed some techniques in the UK that actually changed our national policy for the way that we respond to incidents, for how we train our firefighters differently now to make decisions in a different way because of this research and this work that we did, and so, you know, coming from such a kind of small a corner of an idea, you know, I'm so pleased that we were able to do something practical,

and we've notched the science along as well. We're up to our I think tenth Global Science Award for the work. It's been incredible and I never ever would have thought when I look back to how I felt when we were on that truck and I felt like my entire world was going to collapse in that moment. When I look back to that particular point in time and I think where we are now, what we've been able to do, I would never have been able to see it at

the time. Someone would have said, Hey, this awful thing is going to happen, but you know what, it's going to be the biggest opportunity that you're going to have. I wouldn't have paid them. There's no way I could have seen it. But it's true. It's true.

really blessed. Actually, we've had no shortage of volunteers for the for the research that we've been doing over.