Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: More and more soldiers out of Ukraine are requiring, you know, what was it, such treatments, whether to expedite their, their healing, to get them back to the front or to, you know, safely, what was it, transition them into, you know, into retirement and keep them healthy.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: So removing a barrier to care of being, of actually having to like go and see a physician if once available, if you're in a place where you can have one, so that people don't end up in the hospital, that they could be like monitored and their health could be addressed, like ongoing.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, for instance, what we said in these clinics it provides in the Ukraine, we do it in a bit of a pop up style, of course. I mean, we kind of have to shift things around depending on what's still standing. You know, whereas in, in New York, New Jersey and Florida, we're able to go to people's homes, offices, we have corporate partnerships with hotels, for instance, where we treat both staff and guests. We have relationships with the unions, we supported the unions during some of their strikes, during the pandemic and things like that. Making sure everybody had their testing, their vaccinations or kept, you know, safe and healthy. So it's, it's, yeah, it's breaking down any barrier to access, you know, whether that be physical or monetary, because we are covered by Medicare, Medicaid, all the insurances, things like that.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: So my background in my younger days I was a addiction and mental health therapist in Vancouver.
And it was in the like kind of early, I'm dating myself, but it was in like the earlier days of the Internet. Like everyone had the Internet, but it wasn't what it was now. And one of the big conversations was whether or not online therapy could be useful. Now, of course, at this stage, as we're having this conversation, it's like a totally normal thing, like doing therapy through zoom or even people getting text messages, all of that. But back then the idea that you would do something over the phone or through text message, forget about it. But online videoing was like a really hot debate. And one of the things that I think is so miraculous is like how many more people can access therapeutic support now that, that barrier of having to go in, because some of it could simply be I'm busy, or it could be I have difficulties leaving the house that are either physical or mental, that having to do with my, with my wellness. It could be I live, I live somewhere remote. So there's not a therapist here. So the idea of like removing barriers to service has always been Something that I find like super appealing and I love how that's taken place in regards to like mental health. This is super cool because again, it's that barrier to service of being able to see someone. But where do we need to keep getting better so that people can get service? What other opportunities are there out there?
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Well, absolutely. Far more healthcare in the addiction space. Of course we need far more beds. We need to extend it from 30 days to 90 days covered. There's so many pieces there that we need to do far better on.
And never mind housing, there's, you know, different countries doing some really innovative things to support the unhoused. What was it? And I mean tools like zipycare, like if, if Canada wasn't so, wasn't so hesitant to explore technologies like the one that we're using in the US I mean we'd be able to deploy in the downtown east side and things like that and run primary care pop ups just, just like we do in Jersey at the project.
Because of course we work with social services and various government agencies like that and set up in everywhere from community centers to, you know, the various projects on different days and make sure that just everyone, you know, it gets checked out. Right. And all they have to do is either if they don't want to come downstairs, we'll go up to them know. Plus we also offer service in 20 languages.
So we are able to offer like cultural support, you know, be make people comfortable, you know, who understands where they're coming from, what those culture, cultural barriers or nuances might be to look out for. And you know, and also when we do go into people's homes, we're also able to do environmental and cognitive assessment which creates such a much bigger picture for any kind of diagnostics. Right. And then we're able to bring in resources to address that. So it's much more than 15 minutes in your doctor's office or a video call or things like that.
Continuum of care is essential to keeping people healthy at hospitals, giving them a far better quality of life.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: To whatever degree you're comfortable speaking to this. Where do you think, what's the root of that hesitancy to embrace this kind of technology in Canada?
[00:05:09] Speaker A: Anti risk, what is it Essentially, you know, the Canadian government unfortunately is a little bit anti risk. It's also, I know some people are working toward creating much more streamlined, you know, kind of onboarding of technology such as ours that isn't determined by like who you know, right. Who you're drinking with. And you know, it's unfortunate you know, Babylon was such a hype stock and you know, what was it? It was such a red flag to me when Telus purchased the, the rights, so the Canadian rights to Babylon, the. Because of course, I mean, I have so many connections in the UK where it had been, you know, what was it initially used? Hearing all these horror stories about, you know, what was it? Mistreatment of patient information, how was it patient information from one patient was sent to a different patient and how their, their diagnostic bots were ineffective and dysfunctional. And so I thought it was a really dangerous thing. And when Babylon crashed and burned, it went bankrupt. I wasn't surprised like at all. I think there's far better technologies out there. I think if our government had actually kind of engaged in some of the forums that I have been able to engage in.
In Boston in particular, there's a lot of health forums which, you know, basically pulls together all the big players with the, you know, the next gen technology that you can, you can try out. And you know, because it was so interesting to me that Alberta, they were the one province that did an actual kind of diagnostic assessment on the, on the data protections, data security of Babylon and refused to implement it until those defects were corrected. And whereas, you know, what was it? Ours has military grade data security. Right. And so there's, there's better stuff out there.
The government just needs to explore a lot more and just open up the world a little bit more, I think, in order to make better choices before they invest so deeply so heavily.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Yeah, but why the hesitancy? Like, I mean, it's so interesting to see like the rate of adoption in the US for new technology and how things move, especially in the health tech space. Like why, like again, to your own level of comfort. Speaking to this, like, why the hesitancy?
[00:07:57] Speaker A: You know, I, I truly don't know. I think they're always worried about making the, you know, the wrong choice because unfortunately they've been burnt a lot by their choices and that's unfortunately their own fault. But then, you know, progress gets inhibited by these situations that they have created for themselves.
I mean, I know so many amazing technologies that were born here, right here in Vancouver that, you know, might still operate from Vancouver, but they are getting, they are being sold in the us, Europe, you know, what was it, you know, Middle east, where have you. And, but not in Canada.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: And I think we should be really be concerned about that because like, that's a huge brain drain. Right? Never mind, you know, huge economic, you know, what was it Concern, given all the, you know, it was that all the potential, you know, everybody's filing in Delaware, right?
[00:09:00] Speaker B: So it's such a.
Yeah, there's a lot that I could say here. I spent a lot of time in health tech, medtech worlds with different organizations and leaders. And I think the Canadian story around this is fascinating. Such innovative minds and businesses with low adoption rates by the government.
It's an interesting conundrum that I don't think the average Canadian knows about.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Well, another problem as well is that, you know, technology that is born outside of Canada cannot receive funding inside of Canada, like, not through the super clusters or things like that. It has to be, you know, born in B.C. or born in Canada, made in Canada. And so there's some lost opportunities there as well.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Totally, 100%.
What can you share with us, again, to whatever level you're comfortable with about the work that you're doing in Gaza with this technology?
[00:09:58] Speaker A: It's the same as Ukraine. So basically, so our CEO is Ukrainian.
And then, so when that kicked off, we, you know, jumped through the regulatory hurdles. We made sure that we were European compliance and so on and so forth. Just like we have to be with HIPAA in the US and so and so forth, got all the legal hurdles, you know, created relationships with the Ministry of Health in Ukraine, what was it formed about a dozen partnerships with different NGOs with boots on the ground there. And so we. So that was going well when Gaza kicked off, but we said we sent five more kids there. We were already working with physicians from Israel, so they were already familiar and they requested it.
And, and it's interesting because of course, the tensions, the, you know, what was it between Israel and Palestine is a really complex.
I doubt will rationally resolve itself anytime soon. It might temper, but I don't think it'll ever truly be, you know, fixed, you know. But physicians, however, look at healthcare a lot different from, you know, civilians or politicians. Physicians treat whoever's on their table at that time. You know, we don't check the cards, you know, what's your name, where do you come from, you know, who do you identify with it? You are. You're a human being. And it's literally in the HIPAA oath that you have this, this responsibility as a person. You know, what was it to treat everybody equitably? And so, so it was great that politics didn't have an impact on what we wanted to do, and we were able to deploy. And that was at invitation of some Israeli physicians who were already working in that space.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Is there anything else that you want to say around the organization, the work that you do, or are you comfortable pivoting over to your work at sfu?
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Sure, let's pivot.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: All right, so how did that all start up?
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Well, it was interesting because of course I had been running this clean tech engineering consulting firm for many years and you know, we were in such cool spaces, you know, while like we were newcomers, right. I remember being a member of BCTIA when it was still called that now BC Tech. And I was like the only, only woman in that space, right.
And it was cool to see so much going on and you know, like LEDs were coming on the market and that was. But there's some issues about that. We were able to dive in and address the, you know, some of them used to explode, you know, they had issues with moisture getting in and boom. And so we were able to work with various universities to correct that problem.
That became open source technology. And just, you know, moving around in that space from there, being able to really dig into what new opportunities were out there like hydrogen fueled airplanes and, and so on so forth. And what was it? And what automatic gas shut off systems and what was that? Boiler controls and, and you know, that was, you know, is such old technology now, right? Because, you know, coding and things like that, you know, evolve ever since. So anything that we had created back then is now completely antiquated. But it was such an amazing time to be on those front lines. And there was something called Alliance 2030 when Canada first signed on to the UN, when Trudeau first got elected, all these organization, you know, organizations. Because basically signing on to the SDGs meant that everybody kind of had to see where do they fit into this picture and what are the SDGs and so on so forth. So there was this huge meeting brought together of, you know, what was it? The, the leaders of various NGOs, funding leaders, university directors, like you name it. Just basically all the power in the world, including government leadership was in the room and you know, to have a discussion about, you know, what next. And I was fortunate to be part of that discussion. And it was, it was interesting because the, we were able to kind of voice our thoughts like, okay, everybody's here now what? And I'm like, okay, we are here all together. Basically all the decision makers are in this room right now. You know, why can't we actually develop something?
You know, what we said, you know, start closing some of these gaps and you know, in meeting spaces like this and engagements like this, who can do what with what? And then we can start addressing these SDGs immediately. Right? Why do we have to mull things over so long? Right? And so it was interesting. So SFU actually responded almost immediately and set up Dev Lab. And, you know, some private funders put forth some seed money and there was a bit of a competition that I was called in to participate in. And we were basically able to bring our, our thoughts together, you know, and pitch them within in one afternoon. And what would we do if we had this seed money? Right? What, you know, systemic change would we create? And so that's when I proposed what we call the NEAT Project, Nutrition through Engagement in Agricultural Technologies. And we received the seed funding. And the funders, they already had a community in mind that they had a personal relationship with and, you know, introduce us to the Kitasu Heihei Nation. You know, it's about halfway up the B.C. coastline, beautiful home of the spirit Bear. And you know, we, we started there. That was our pilot, pilot community. And you know what we said, building community greenhouses, community gardens, develop corrupt curriculum within a school like the, the First Nation School there. It was a huge partner, still is a huge partner of ours.
It was set up workshops on like, food preservation and nutrition and just the gamut of things. And, you know, what was. It also played a part in assisting the community secure $4 million to expand their small hydro system. So they stopped getting the brown outs that they had more clean energy in the community.
So, you know, as well as, you know, offer some different opportunities to individuals who brought forth their, their personal ambitions and interests. You know, so we were able to connect some different people, make some introductions, bring them to some cool things and, and, and it went from there. And, you know, then other communities heard about the work that we were doing and now we're working in six different nations and it's, you know, I hope that we can grow this Red Cross Canada and just, you know, continually, you know, continually growing our team.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Heck yeah. That's amazing. And how long has that been going on?
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Since 2018.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Wow. Good for you. That's, that's amazing.
Let's, let's touch on, on your work with the boards. So for people who are unfamiliar with it, how would you, well, how would you describe, like, board work? Like, the purpose of it, like, what a board member would do anything like that?
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting because, you know, some of the, you know, councils and committees I said about, they operate in different ways. You know, if you're working strictly kind of as a board, you know, board of directors and whatnot. It's, it's very financially, you know, and, and logistically oriented. Right. Whereas my work as an honorary governor with the, the other, other honorary governors at the Vancouver foundation, we worked more around the, the mission, vision and values of the organization than the nuts and bolts. You know, we leave that to the board, you know, and then of course, the Advisory Council on Diversity with the Joint Task Force Canadian Armed Forces is much more about cultural change. You know, what is it advising on, policy development, implementation, you know, things like that. Just any kind of, any, anything that we can bring in from our outside engagements, knowledge, experience, so on, so forth, to assist the military in, you know, developing inclusion, equity and diversity within the, you know, the organization is, that's, that's that direction. But yeah, board is more about like the nuts and bolts of things as well as who, you know, who you can bring in as new funders and things like that, making those, you know, strategic connections.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: When did you start getting involved in this level of work and why?
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Oh, goodness, I'm not sure.
I just, I feel like I've been doing it always.
I've always had volunteer work or been doing volunteer work in one capacity or another. Even ironically, during university I used to teach disabled children how to ride horses before I became disabled.
And you know, so I was always involved in one thing or another. But then I actually can't remember which was the first board I sat on. I was always interested in that level of engagement because I was able to assist kind of steering the ship, if you will, because quite often I, I saw these really like, well meaning NGOs kind of like steering off course and I, I, I, so I, I always have this analogy. I bring it back to like when you're watching Jeopardy. On the television, right, and you're yelling at the screen, right? What the answers are. You, of course the guy on the other side isn't going to hear you, right? And you're just like, try to will him to answer it correctly. And you, you know, I didn't want to be that in these various causes, right. I didn't want to be the person kind of yelling into the void. I wanted to be able to help steer that ship, right? Be the whisper in their ear. So that's kind of why I, I got involved. I'm, you know, I, I enjoy it so much and to see what these incredible organizations are working toward and what they accomplish, you know, every day it's, you know, you know, like for instance, Salal, we said just finished building the very first Brick and mortar facility in Vancouver to assist victims of sexualized violence. Completely, you know, inclusive of all women, including transgender women, and with indigenous healing spaces, reporting spaces with advocates medical clinic, you know, medical clinical space for rape kits and so on, so forth. So, you know, rape victims are no longer having to be dragged around from, you know, police station to nine hours in the emergency room to, you know, this or that. It's the first space of its kind. Right. And to be able to see that being created is just. Is so rewarding that this is happening in our community and it can be done. Right.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I have like, a few just, like, pragmatic questions for you. So you're involved in a lot, and on a local level and a countrywide, a national level, but also on a global level. So here's the first pragmatic question. How do you do it from just finding time in the day to not just be involved, but be involved to the depth that you need to be involved to make meaningful change? How do you have the discipline of time to make this happen?
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Google Calendar.
I have everything mapped off, including, you know, the essentials like when to do laundry, when to run to the pharmacy, things like that. So, yes, no, unfortunately, you know, I am extremely structured in that way. You know, I usually work up to 20 hours a day and, you know, having cell phones handy that can do absolutely everything these days is mixing so much more versatile. You know, I was still able to address work when I was in New York or, you know, I'll be in Iceland next month and, you know, I won't be dropping the ball on anything. It just there. There's so many ways to keep connected other than being in an office that, you know, I really, you know, hope that employers reconsider this mandatory in office push that's been happening because I know a lot of people have been able to balance their work, you know, in a lot more of a healthy way.
Being able to, you know, throw in a load of laundry while, you know, what was it in between meetings or things like that. And then they get to spend more time, you know, time with their families and whatnot.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll go in on that one. So, like, my. The company that, that I run is like executive coaching, training company. We do like, leadership development coaching, all that. And then all our courses are based on, like, workplace mental health, company culture, but also like, you know, how to write a good email, how to give a. Give a good presentation, all of those kinds of things. I get asked a lot about this one, and I'm like, oh my gosh, like you should 100% let people do distance work all over the place. And you know, there's all the different models and different models are going to work for different, different companies. My company is 100% remote and I've never had an issue.
But I'd say there's a couple of things here. It's like making sure that you hire people who are like 100% self starters and they know how to do that. And for the people who aren't that, that are already within your organization, giving them the training and support to help them with that. So it's not like you're not just hiring one kind of person, you're accommodating, but you put those things in there and then just know how to like fail quick with people. So if someone's not doing it, like not able to do it, that's okay. But that's what our business is. It's totally fine. I think companies should go all in on this.
The thing that I understand is like when people are like, oh, well, if you're not in office then you don't have that organic connection point.
By nature, things like this, like video is transactional, like by nature. Because very few people are on video more than five seconds longer than they need to be. Because it's like, you know, like on video, it's like kind of weird. But if you make it the norm, the same way that email became the norm, same way cell phones became the norm. So there's like you just, instead of calling someone, you just video call them. And there's the whole psychology of norming to it where it becomes no longer transactional but relational. This is just the frontier, this is the new frontier. And companies that are trying to force people back to work I think are going to damage their culture. They're going to have retention issues, they're going to have hard time like recruiting the best people. And it's a waste of effort because it's going this way anyways. So like, why fight the future? Just get really good at it right now. That's my take on it.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Well, and they're going to push, you know, a lot of women back out of the workforce again.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Totally. No, it's, it just seems like such a. Why are you doing this? Just roll with it. Don't fight the future. It's here. Let's get really good at it right now.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, because the nature of my work is inherently remote, you know, it's not like I'm driving up north Every day, you know, it's like by necessity and what was it? I have to be remote. I mean I could be in one of three offices I have. But what was it? You know, what was it? Most of the time, you know, I prefer to, to be here or I have client meetings, I take them up at Highcroft. You know, my, what was it? The people I work with love that, you know, a little bit of schmoozing in a beautiful location. Something, you know, that gets them out of the office and you know, is changing things up, you know, so you can still have those personal, you know, communications develop, personal relationship. I mean, when I first started working with the team in New York, I mean I didn't meet my CEO for like two years. I think after I was hired.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: Like there's people that work on our team now that I have maybe been in a room with them two times ever that I've worked for the company for a long time. It is totally fine. I coach people literally on a global level. Like I deal with people all over the place who I will never ever in my entire life see face to face unless we just happen to run into each other at an airport. It, it is a. I understand why people are, why businesses kind of fixate on this and especially so I think part of it is like they've committed to long term leases or own buildings and they're like, we want people in these things. We've. I get it, but it limits your talent pool. It's going to hurt the culture. It's going to be a bunch of wasted energy with a lot of bad feelings. Don't bother, just do it. Get it, get on it really well. Okay, let me ask you my second pragmatic question. You are clearly a very, very involved person. You got a lot of stuff that you're doing. You said you work up to 20 hours a day sometimes. Where, where's the self care? How do you manage taking care of yourself? Especially when you're dealing with things that have some also some very, very like heavy emotional sides to it.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: You know, that's interesting because the people I work with know that I, I give it my all that when I do have to take some me time like I, after coming back from New York, I always, I got some bug that like knocked me out and my team, you know, just kind of rose to the challenge and, and took over. And so there's that understanding that, you know, I've been pulling my weights that you know they're going to take up some of the slack for me, when I'm down and you know, and if I have to disappear for a few days, you know, there's no problem with that. But. But also at the same time, like, I love my work. I love the stuff that I do, I love the people I work with. Right. Both all my teams as well as, you know, what we said. So the people we collaborate with and partner with and so on so forth, like all over the world, like, they're just, they're great people, you know, and so I, I love being able to kind of merge that, you know, that kind of that work life.
Sometimes, you know, some of my social events are actual like, you know, kind of business oriented. Ish.
You know, when you're going to these so called, like business events and receptions and things like that, and you're hugging like 30 people and you know, it's kind of like they become a lot of your social circle and your supports as well, you know, both professionally and.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Yeah. All right, so we're about to get into the. Moving towards the end of the interview and we're going to go into what we call the crucial three, which is three questions that are going to scale in difficulty as we go through them. But before we get to that, is there anything that you want to mention, anything you want to call out, any questions you want to ask me or anything you just want to put in the conversation? Conversation in general?
[00:30:13] Speaker A: No. No, not really.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Okay. All right, you ready to go?
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Okay. So question number one. A lot of people can want to help and a lot of people could see a problem and say, geez, that should be different. So a lot of people critique it and point it should be this or that. I, I loved earlier, your Jeopardy. Analogy. It's like, oh, like just say this thing. There's a big, there's a big difference between seeing a problem, critiquing it and saying this should be the solution versus taking on the responsibility of making something happen.
So why you? Why did you step into that breach and then continue to step into that breach?
[00:30:55] Speaker A: You know, if not me, then who, you know, in these situations? And I believe in, you know, leading by example. So a lot of people come on board because they see how passionate I am about the work that needs to be done, they become passionate.
And also, I mean, I also believe in mentorship. Right. So being able to assist younger generations in doing this work, showing them how inspiring it is to be involved on this level, both locally and globally and what potential is out there for who career. That's not, not just Some nine to five. That's going to pay your bills. Right?
But. But I think that, you know, what was it like doing this work is. Is just something that, you know, we can all do a little bit of. And I think, you know, back in the day, you know, it was that there were more social service organizations. You know, there was like the women. What was it at home, you know, during the war, you know, making soup for the homeless and knitting socks for the war effort and things like that. And they were kind of filling these government gaps. And then kind of governments, you know, started taking over and trying to fill in a little bit more, but then they still left these enormous gaps. And so we need people who are interested in filling those spaces because, you know, we're taking. We're looking at things like volunteerism, for instance, is becoming less and less.
So we need to just basically inspire, you know, our communities around us to be able to step in. But the thing is, it's also about assessing what you're good at. Right. You can't just go in and say, this is going to fix everything. Right?
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: You don't know what you're talking about.
You know, it's like think about your own skills, your own strengths, you know, your own connections and networks and what, what you can give and then start thinking about where's the best place for them. Right. Like, a lot of people want to start up their own NGOS, but you know, there's so many NGOs out there that's would benefit from someone's collaboration instead, instead of building an entire new system that would be competing entity. So there's just ways to kind of do this. But I do hope that more people get involved in their communities because there's some really neat work being done.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: We touched on this to some more moderate levels and then it kind of danced around it a bit again to your own level of comfort. It feels like to me that we are in this increasingly polarized time and that it's just like Covid accelerated that like a thousandfold. So I would agree with how you captured it.
I talk a lot about this on the program.
The world's got a lot of real problems, right? Like serious, serious problems. And how do we create a shift that we can bring people together again to work on problems? And I know it's a huge, huge question, but whatever perspective you got on that, because you seem to be someone who does that every day.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting because there's no one answer to that. It's like a multitude of Things that need to pull together. I mean it's both a top down and bottom up effort that needs to happen, happens on the community level, needs to happen on the legislative level.
Like for instance, like our governments are being threatened right now. And the overarching umbrellas, like the United nations for instance, are which kind of enables our human rights, you know, at least like the base points of human rights through the various conventions that's being threatened. Like for instance, if Plebier gets his way, he's going to remove us as a member state from the United nations, which would basically, you know, what is it?
Not give us those overarching protections. So, you know, the UN Convention for, for women, what was it? People with disabilities? Is it undrip? Like all of these poop gone? Right. And then we would be reliant on federal and provincial government to ensure our, the protection of our human rights. And with, you know, Rustad spouting off about removing, you know, all these, the indigenous rights that was, it's denying climate change, you know, all of those things, then that's of course going to be problematic for the next four years at least for, you know, our province. And anyway, so, so it's a bit of a mess. So it's, for one, we need to find better ways disseminating truthful information, scientific data that people can understand and believe, you know, and who is to deliver that? Right?
You know, nobody's trusting Trudeau at the moment. So, you know, he's not the one always that. But, but who would be identifying those people that people can implicitly trust? Right? Can we get like Jane Goodall in here and people like that too, you know, people who have had respect for many years from, you know, what was it, what was it across, you know, all demographics, people in here to start addressing truth to people too. And then of course there's the whole process of change management. I mean, when Covid came into play, there were too many scare tactics out there.
You know, what was it that I don't think that the provincial government or the federal government had enough of an emergency plan, emergency preparedness plan in place.
They had forecasted something like this happening many, many years ago. There's been a lot of talk about what to do, but no actual like rollout and trying to convince a lot of people who are really scared, like terrified that they're going to die. I mean, you know, what we said so. And they don't know what to understand and what to hear, especially if perhaps they don't have a scientific background or don't trust doctors or authority figures or things like that, then you know, then what? Right? And so then we get, you know, anti vaxxers and flat earthers and things like that. We need to be able to, you know, it's funny because we're talking about controlling speech essentially and freedom of speech, of course is inherent. Right. But should there be some kind of censorship so that it is freedom of true speech, of freedom of truth. Right.
And so that is a huge conversation. I think we have to have, you know, what we said in order to assist everybody coming to some kind of discussion and understanding with more accurate facts that are closer to what is, rather than these wild ideas all over the place that are, are continuing to scare the, you know, bejesus out of people and will, will never get any kind of consensus or understanding or reason. And there's so many things that we have to look at, unfortunately, and a lot of really difficult conversations to have about how much is too much.
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Yeah, who, who does the talking? Who has the conversation? It's like, it's so wild because I just feel like, and I'm not going to say everyone, but there seems to be like the cynicism of like, we don't trust politicians, which of course is kind of traditional thing. We don't trust politicians, but we don't trust the media. We don't trust like local government, we don't trust doctors, we don't trust scientists. Like, well, who do we trust at this point? Right? And it, it's so concerning because there are like real things going on, like real serious things that in the future, but also right now that we need all the minds on, not just a couple of the minds and most certainly not like absentee debates about what's going on, like people really getting involved. That was such a really thoughtful answer. Thank you. Okay, last one. Everybody goes through stuff, everybody. And some people experience like high levels of crazy stuff throughout their life. Some people medium, some people a little with like a couple big things.
But the one thing is that everybody goes through it on some level, no matter what, no matter where they are in the world.
You have had a really epic impact on the world. You've done a lot of stuff and continue a lot of stuff.
What was the psychology of how for you, of how you recovered from your accident to stepping back into your power and engaging with the world, putting both hands on the steering wheel and going, was that something that was natural to you or was that something you had to scale up and really like reflect on to do?
[00:40:36] Speaker A: That's interesting. So when it happened, the year it happened, 97, a lot of my friends died that year, childhood friends that I had grown up with that I was incredibly close to. I was one of the only childhood friends from that group left. And that was one of the major kickers, was that they lost their lives to all sorts of different horrible situations. So. But I haven't lost mine. Like I'm, I'm still here, right?
Be running things on my arse, but I'm still here, right? And, you know, and that was a major thing. And another thing too. Rick Hansen used to grow up, you know, he grew up down the road front from me up north. And mutual friend of ours who was his high school principal who was like an uncle to me, told Rick that, you know what we said, that this has happened to me and whatnot. And so Rick showed up in the hospital and that was a bit of a kick in the pants too, because it's like, oh, this dude can do that.
I better do something.
I better do something with my life. But I was given a second chance and so I might as well, you know, bloody well use it.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Heck, yeah. Amazing. All right, listen, we're. We're coming to the end. Anything that you want to mention, of course we'll put all, you know, the links to your company and all of that in the, in the show bio. But is there anything that you want to shout out that you want people to check out before we, before we wrap up?
[00:42:11] Speaker A: For sure, for sure.
If. For anyone who hasn't heard of the Prosperity Project, you might have seen some of the articles about the organization in the Globe and Mail. If you are interested in becoming a mentor or being a mentee through its Rosie initiative, you know, please check out the website. I think it's the Canadian ProsperityProject.com if I remember correctly.
So that's something that I'd love. We're always looking for new mentors, both male and female.
And there's some great research publications that we put out there, you know, some national research that we've done on leadership diversity, the, you know, economic well being of women, you know, post pandemic and things like that. So there might be some interesting things for you to read.
[00:43:03] Speaker B: Heck, yeah. And we'll put links to everything in the show bio. Carrie, thank you so much for your time. I had an awesome time talking with you today.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: Yeah, you too. And thank you so much for giving me the opportunity.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: All right, everyone, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. It's always fun talking to someone who just is just out there doing it, and I feel, like, totally energized. So thank you so much, everyone. We'll see you next time on One Step Beyond.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: One Step.
One step.
What's that beyond?
