Episode

Hello, this is Julianne Good, and this is a special edition of Psych One-on-One. Welcome. We are here to make psychology understandable with tips and information for you and your family and friends to make your life easier. So my special guest tonight is Dr. Chris Stout from Chicago, Illinois, and I'm really excited to have him on. He is just a phenomenal human being, and we are going to be talking about humanitarianism. This is his main drive. We will be talking about his organization called... Center for Global Initiatives, and welcome, Dr. Chris Stout. How are you? I'm great, Julianne. How are you? Very good. Thank you. Just a little glitch in the traffic for L.A., as you know. I know what that's like. We have our own share here in Chicago. Yes, and as you said yesterday, glitch happens, so I love that phrase. So I'm going to do a little introduction of all the wonderful things that you've done. Dr. Chris Stout is the founding director of the award-winning nonprofit Center for Global Initiatives. He also serves on the faculty of the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and their Center for Global Health. He's traveled to over 85 countries and has been honored with numerous humanitarian awards and four additional doctorates for his work. He's authored over 35 books, including The New Humanitarians. He's also the founder of the Center for Global Initiatives, Inspiration, Innovations, and Blueprints for Visionaries. And this is what we'll be talking about this evening. So could you add a little bit to that, Dr. Stout? In terms of the humanitarian work or background? Your background, yeah. It's very interesting. Oh, thanks. It's really kind of a long and winding road over the last 25, 30 years. I started off, as a lot of psychologists do, in clinical practice. I finished my graduate training and got my license and worked in different kinds of outpatients and inpatients in school settings and very much enjoyed that. My focus at that point in time was really working with children and families, and that was terrific. And kind of a parallel to that, I had opportunities to teach at some schools and enjoyed doing that as well. And one thing led to another. I still had kind of a desire to do clinical research, so I had an opportunity to do that also in a hospital setting. And that sort of parlayed into doing a lot of writing, which turned into some of those books that you had mentioned. And it's just really been kind of a neat evolution. A parallel to that, I guess, was some of the other activities that I was involved with. And that tended to be international travel and doing some things kind of on a global scale. And it was always sort of nice to be one of the few psychologists in the room or bring psychology to the table in a lot of those discussions. And over the course of time, sort of a... I think it was a confluence and combination of clinical work and travel and contacts with a variety of people doing a variety of different kinds of humanitarian projects and people that had started their own nonprofits and NGOs led to kind of the late 90s. And I had an opportunity to work as a psychologist at the United Nations for a year. I would travel from Chicago every month and attend meetings and worked on a special project looking at sustainability. Right. And I had a chance to work with a couple of other psychologists from a behavioral perspective. And then that led to a paper and a presentation. That led to some other contacts and led to a couple of books kind of specifically looking at the role of psychology and policy development. And then a co-edited book with another psychologist, Harvey Langholt. And we did a book together called The Psychology of Diplomacy. So I think all those things kind of over the course of the 80s and 90s kind of coalesced and conspired into then in the 2000s, having the first book that I wrote about psychology and policy development. And then I had a chance to work with a couple of other psychologists from the United Nations for a year. And one of my mentors sort of helped me be able to do some of the international work that I was doing, kind of consolidate it into an organization, go through the IRS approval and get it certified as a 501 . And now that's how I spend, you know, we're an all-volunteer organization. So all of us that are participants in it sort of have our day jobs. But kind of our, myself and my colleagues, the passion is doing the international kinds of work and development of the digital world. And so I think that's one of the different kinds of things that we're involved with. That's incredible. And Dr. Stout, since we have you on long distance, I'm going to have you speak up a little bit, okay? Okay. Because we're getting a little buzzy over here. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Okay. So where do you get the energy to do all this work? This is my first question for you. Well, the old joke is it only takes half a day. It doesn't matter if it's the first 12 hours or the second 12 hours. But it's really, I mean, it's... It sounds like a lot. And I guess in some sense, you know, it is a lot of different kinds of things and parallel kinds of things and collaborative kinds of things. But, again, keep in mind the scope of this, the span of this certainly was not overnight. I mean, it's really been... I got my degree in 1985. So over the course of almost 30 years, this is sort of the, you know, the body of work. It's not just, you know, something that's, you know, happened over a short period of time. So over the span of time, you know, it's really been a lot of work. It's not just if you live long enough, you know, you get to do these kinds of things. But, you know, it takes its toll. I mean, there was... I had a very bad year where I had traveled over 100,000 miles in one calendar year. And I missed my birthday, my daughter's birthday, my son's birthday, my wife's birthday, and my wife and my anniversary. So I was kind of in the doghouse, you know, for that year. But, you know, in that part, the travel is never the fun part. The enjoyable part is the people that you work with and the work that you do. But, you know, there are sacrifices that come with it. It's, you know, using up your vacation time to, you know, go on those, you know, go on mission trips or whatever and miss other kinds of important moments. So now I've really worked over the course of the last 10 years to try and bring better balance for myself with that. Because if, you know, as you know, and you talked in your program, if you don't take care of yourself and don't, you know, sort of maintain, then you not only risk burnout, but it's harder to help other people. It is. And it sounds like that one year was probably a very deep life lessons with having missed all that family life that you went through and having to make the sacrifices. Yeah, that, it was not something that, you know, that I had planned or that I had even expected, but it was just one of those things that that's the way it turned out. And then sort of having the hindsight and, you know, feeling, you know, sincerely missing those kinds of things. And feeling like, you know, those are going to be events that aren't going to be happening again. So we've really, you know, tried to work to restructure our, you know, all of our time and the kids' time with school and my wife with her work and me with, you know, my projects and my day jobs and things to really try and, pardon me, bind these things together. And I think we've got, I don't know that we've got all the bugs and kinks worked out of it, but I think we've got a pretty good approach to it now. You're probably very well organized, yes. Yeah. Yeah, a little OCD doesn't hurt either, you know. Organized in the nth degree, huh? That's right. But I'm sure it comes in handy. I wanted to ask you, what was your driving passion to become a humanitarian? Well, that's an appropriate and great question. I gave a talk a couple of years ago at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting, and I indicated... I entitled it because someone else had sort of, you know, thought, wondered about that and asked about it and wanted me to talk about it. And I wound up titling the talk, The Accidental Humanitarian, because, you know, I sort of feel like, you know, I wish I could tell people that I had this great plan, I had it all drawn out, you know, I had it, you know, kind of nailed to the last detail, and then I just perfectly executed on it, which is not even close to sort of how this has happened. I mean, it was really... And... And the issue of, you know, kind of being like Mr. Magoo and stumbling into it kind of a thing, I always feel like in the early 90s and mid-90s, I was doing a lot of climbs and things like that, so that was adventuresome and that was, you know, traveling and things like that. But it wasn't until the late 1990s that I actually, I had an interest in getting involved in doing a medical mission. So I went on my first medical mission, and it was three weeks in Ho Long Bay in Vietnam around the Gulf of Tonkin. So we were kind of... Disconnected from folks, and this was, you know, kind of the ubiquity of e-mail and cell phones and stuff, you know, it wasn't as it is today there. So we were in a 100-year-old hospital that had been built by the French. It had no electricity. It had no running water. It had no window, no glass in the window openings. And, you know, it was miserably hot for everybody, and it was just like a life-changing experience for me. It was really sort of like this epiphany, and I came back, and I had this greater appreciation, and I had this greater appreciation for all the things that I sort of neglected at home, you know, just simple kinds of things, you know, of the air conditioning and water when you turn on a faucet and things like that. And I really felt like, you know, that I had even, you know, I was working as a team member, but I really felt like I had gained so much from the teammates that I had worked with, the families and children. I primarily worked with kids and working with a pediatrician and a pediatric nurse. And just really, you know, it was... qualitatively different than any experience I'd ever had. It was different than what I felt like when I worked with families clinically as a psychologist in Chicago. It was just really... It's kind of hard to put words on, but that... So that kind of experience was life-changing for me. And then sort of shortly thereafter, I got involved with a few more international organizations and found that a lot of the people that I was, you know, a colleague with, not as a psychologist, but just kind of like as a colleague. And this membership or as an age cohort, they were founding nonprofits. And they were doing really amazing work, you know, all over the world. And some of those people that, you know, that I got to know pretty well wound up being chapters in the New Humanitarians book. And I had... I always seek out to have a mentor, and sometimes in psychology and sometimes outside of psychology. And I had a mentor that was sort of a startup guy. He was an attorney by training. And, you know, I would always... When we'd get together, I wasn't really talking about developing my consulting practice or my clinical practice or anything like that. I was always talking about these humanitarian projects. And he said, you know, you need to start your own 501c3, and you need to do this, and you need to do that. And he was kind of treating the nonprofit as a startup, and his gears were turning. And I said, you know, that sounds great, but I have no idea, you know, where to start. I have no idea how this works. I have no idea how to get a board together or build a website or do any of this stuff. He said, that's okay. Call my wife. Because his wife was an attorney who did all... Oh, perfect. Yeah. So they became... I mean, obviously, they were friends and colleagues before, but they really became sort of co-founders of the center and just really, you know, have been continuous support, you know, from then. So it wasn't like I really said, hey, I need to start a nonprofit, or hey, you know, I need to... This is what the structure, and this is all the things I need to do. So we got it together. We put it together. And basically, one of the fellows I had met on a climb years ago, in Tanzania, he and I had stayed in touch over the years. And kind of our first project was he worked at an orphanage. He became a priest in Tanzania. And he was working at an orphanage. And he said, you know, that they were looking to develop a kindergarten there. And I didn't know that they didn't even... I didn't know that they did or didn't have a kindergarten. It never occurred to me to, you know, ask about that sort of a thing. So I got together with some of my colleagues here that were principals and educators and teachers and things. And I said, you know, what... What would it look like? And I said, well, we're going to build a kindergarten. And they said, well, we're going to build a kindergarten. What would it look like if we were to kind of, you know, put together a, you know, a non-culture-bound, you know, model for a kindergarten? What would a curriculum look like, et cetera, et cetera, English-based, which is what they wanted? So we put that together, and we sent it over. And within about five months, we heard back from the Ministry of Education that they had accepted it as our, you know, start for our kindergarten. We were given approval by the Ministry of Education in Tanzania to start that. And it was sort of like, wow, you know, that really... That really wasn't that hard to do. So, again, it wasn't me saying, oh, we should go start a kindergarten. Oh, we should go start a nonprofit. Oh, we should go do this or that. It was always being sort of in response to, you know, someone sort of asking for help or in response to someone, you know, giving guidance or something. And that's really kind of how we've built the center and continue to do... To operate to this day. So can you tell us a little bit more about the Center for Global Initiatives, about what their core structure is about? Sure, you bet. I would invite everyone to, you know, check out our website if they're interested in this kind of a topic or an area or getting involved or maybe they already have some projects and things that they'd like to get some help with. We're Center for Global Initiatives, all one word, .org. And we've kind of evolved. We have projects that are in Cambodia and Benin and Tanzania and Bolivia. And when we had an opportunity to go in for a partnership on a grant with USAID to do a project in Ukraine about five, six years ago, we realized that if we got the grant, we all kind of looked around the room, our board of directors and I, and kind of realized, well, I can't... It would have required like three times a year to spend a week or two in Ukraine and collect data and do this and that. And we all kind of looked around the room and it was like, well, I can't go to Ukraine that often and for that period of time. And the next person, well, I can't do it either. Well, neither can I, kind of a thing. So we sort of realized we had, as a volunteer organization where we all have our day jobs, as I had mentioned, you can't get away that frequently or that often. And I couldn't, you know, anymore because of my bad year away and because of job responsibilities as well. So we realized, you know, we can't always be participant, like boots on the ground kind of participation in the projects that we want to get involved with. So then we decided we had a lot of almost, if you will, institutionalization. We had institutional knowledge and background about developing 501c3s, about doing international work in particular in global health and education. So what we decided to do is to sort of kind of rejigger ourselves, reinvent ourselves, to say a lot of the information that we've collected that, you know, that we had available to us that we used in our building blocks, et cetera, we should just make available to other people so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. So that's kind of what we serve as now. It's sort of really a resource of tools. So if someone comes to our website, they can come to our, literally, we have a section called tools and they can go to the first paragraph in that page. They can click on a little link. It will open up a spreadsheet for them that they can download. They can edit it. They can keep it. They can, you know, make it theirs. And it's got all the sorts of things that people doing nonprofit work might want to know about. It's got things about donor databases. It's got things about web, using the web and fundraising. It's got a thing about. It's got a thing about managing your board and managing volunteers and things like that. So we've kind of made it just, you know, low tech in the sense that everybody knows how to use an Excel spreadsheet. It's not like a fancy app. It's not like you need to buy something or download something or do a plug-in or anything like that. It's just all very, very easy and very user friendly. And we've got a library section. So we've got probably about seven or eight books that are downloadable free of charge by chapter that deal with all sorts of. I think it's about a hundred and fifty books that are downloadable free of charge. And we have a lot of resources that are available to people that have global health kinds of issues. We work with people. I consult with people with helping them with their projects or starting startups. That's all free of charge. We have a Dropbox link, Dropbox files that have probably over 1500 articles archived in them as a library that people can have free access to. Just they let us know what they're interested in and we hook them up with the proper links. And anytime we update it. It's really in whatever else, you know, other kinds of resources that we try to imagine and think of, we put in there and we've we've also kind of reconfigured our blog. I had a we had sort of a catastrophic crash and we were able to bring back everything except our blog on the website. So everything that had been written up to the crash is still there, but we can't very easily upload nowadays, which was sort of OK, because now one of the other things that we provide is that I'm a blogger as a LinkedIn influencer. So yeah, I love that. And thank you for sending that. I've yeah, I've gone into so many of those links and they've been great and very inspirational, motivational. Well, thank you. That's that's been the hope. And we really hope that we'd have kind of a wider reach with our audience and things as well. So kind of the trick with LinkedIn is being there's like around 450 influencers. And I think sort of the the idea is, you know, everybody's got kind of like, you know, some people are business and some people are sales and some people are whatever. And I've kind of carved out the niche of trying to just as you said, I mean, it's nice to hear. It's nice to hear of being inspirational. And then also I write typically in the humanitarian space or global health or health and medicine. And I try to provide lots of links in every one of my blogs as well, too. So probably if if anyone's ever read one, they'll they'll tell you at random there's at least, you know, five different links that will provide you with other kinds of. Reference. I know it's like, wow, you know, it's just the tip of the iceberg at first. And it's just like it goes here, it goes there and like, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is just a ton of information. I mean, I have not with the not with the LinkedIn stuff that I kind of do by my myself and I feel like I can't even write a letter to my mom without using HTML or something in it anymore. But the other things, like the new Humanitarians work, that was done with the help of four graduate students. They then became, we did interviews and things like that, so they got to get co-authorship of any of the chapters that they, you know, did the interviews on and stuff, which was kind of fun for them and helped us be more productive. And I've had a number of graduate students also that have helped with a lot of the content construction on the, like the tools part that I told you about with the spreadsheet. One semester I had a student, and it just took her, bless her heart, 10 hours a week all semester. Her project was literally to go through, I don't know, how many banker boxes of files and things and kind of sort through them and then organize them and then, you know, just kind of get them all tightly, you know, well organized. In my OCD kind of way, she did just a wonderful job. And then the next semester we had another new student, and then what she did was a yeoman's job of then digitally scanning them and then getting them organized in digital files, and that's what wound up loading the content in our Dropbox. And then the websites and things like that was done by yet another student, and that was what's in the spreadsheet in the tools section. So a lot of these things. Wow, quite the labor of love. Yes. Yeah, really, really accelerant and hopefully, you know, kind of gave a... a bit of an exposure to, you know, kind of the nuts and bolts of what it's like to, you know, do that kind of work on a nonprofit website. Yeah, that's wonderful. Dr. Stout, we are going to take a commercial break, and when we come back, I'd like to talk to you about your experiences in Bolivia. Okay. Okay. That'll be fun. Are you searching for answers and insight to life issues? Is the behavior of family or friends questionable or concerning? Find tips and possible solutions from the convenience of your own... PC, cell phone or tablet at TherapyCable.com. Therapy Cable has the most comprehensive library of contemporary therapy videos online. Help may be as easy as a few clicks away. Therapy Cable offers comprehensive therapy videos ranging from addiction to self-care and contact information for qualified providers. Find the answers to your life challenges at TherapyCable.com. And thank you for returning to Psych 101. This is Julianne. Good, and I'm talking to Dr. Chris Stout in Chicago, Illinois. We are talking about humanitarian efforts around the world that he has done. And I would like to ask you, what happened in Bolivia? Well, I like to say I spent about 10 days in Bolivian prisons. Wow. Which isn't too much of a stretch. We worked, our center worked with collaboration with a local indigenous NGO in Bolivia, in La Paz, which is the capital city. And La Paz is a very, very urban area as well. So I think sometimes people think like here in Illinois, like our prisons are kind of far away, very, very far away from Chicago. They're kind of in rural areas and just sort of surrounded by, you know, cornfields and pastures and stuff like that. And in Bolivia, the three prisons that we worked in were, they were all urban. Literally like just downtown, you know, and right across the street might be a, you know, storefront or apartment building or whatever. There's no kind of, you know, separation or anything. And the, we worked in three different prisons. Probably the most notorious was one where there's a book called Marching Powder that if someone just simply plugs in marchingpowder.com, it'll take you to a website that talks about that book. And the, sort of the thing that was interesting about that place years ago is that tourists could go there. And for the price of an admission ticket, they could tour this working prison. It wasn't like going to Alcatraz and seeing an empty prison. This was people are in the prison. But the more surreal and bizarre thing about prisons in Bolivia is that if you're a parent and you have a child and there's no one to take care of your child back at home while you're in prison, that child comes into the prison with you. Wow. So the men's prison, they bring in their wives. They bring in their children. They, the, because they're in prison. Because it's an urban area, the wives may leave the prison to go to work. The kids leave the prison to go to the local school. They get enrolled in the school in that area. And it's a, it's a bizarre, but it's kind of like normal life because the, everyone except dad can leave the men's prison. But you can also imagine that it's a men's prison. So, so it's not the most pleasant of, of places. Or safe. Yeah, or safe. And also in Bolivia, when you go to prison, you're provided with a locked door. And two meals. And that is it. You are not provided with medical care. You are not provided with three meal, a third meal a day. Your family is not provided with any meals. And you're not provided with a place to stay. You're not provided with clothing. You're not provided with medication or dentistry or any, anything. So it's almost like being quasi homeless in a sense. I mean, you, you go to jail and then you have to figure out how am I going to stay here and, and not sleep out in the courtyard. How am I going to, you know, get out of prison? How am I going to, you know, I'm hungry. I want, you know, a third meal a day. Or I want to eat more than just what the prison food is or something different. So making this even more bizarre is that in these courtyards and in the, the, the confines of these urban prisons, guys sort of share, they act like roommates with each other. So they'll share their, their rooms. And usually that comes at a, at a fiscal cost. So if you have an ability to cut hair, you get somebody, you know, we'll give you scissors for your lunch that day. Now you're maybe in business as a barber and then you build up from there. So bartering system, in other words. Yeah, exactly. Bartering and then actual, you know, currencies and things like that. So there are, one guy has turned his cell into like, he got a photocopy machine in it somehow. And if you need a photocopy, then you go to his cell and he will do photocopies for you. And there's guys that are barbers. There's guys that are, will fix your clothes. There's, you know, there's whatever it is that, you know, you might need in the world. There are three restaurants that are sort of, if you will, for-profit restaurants made by people there. And they get deliveries of food there that they pay for. And then they, you know, have cooking equipment and they, they have bought or rented space from someplace else to be able to do that. And you actually, it's like buying a condo. You, you buy your cell and if you can't afford to buy your cell, then you rent your cell from someone else or you cohabitate with two or three other individuals. And you all split the rent, so to speak. And it's just the most bizarre kind of circumstance. So. Like a micro city in other words. Yeah. And, and it's just, you know, there's, there's bad things that happen there. And there's, again, bizarre things. They do segregate the population, not by male and female and stuff like that. I mean, the husbands and wives and kids all stay together. But they do separate Bolivians from non-Bolivians. Because oftentimes I think they had found that there has been a lot of turmoil between, you know, for whatever reasons, people get into fights and things like that. But one of the things they're also known for is that they have some of the best cocaine, some of the best narcotics are available in the prison. Because there's a proliferation of the coca leaves. They, it's, I don't know, you know, the guards turn a blind eye to it. But they cook things up there. There's very little cutting that goes to the narcotics that are, are developed there. And people get these sort of horrible highs. And there's one fellow that we treated that when we did a physical, his whole chest and abdomen were just sort of cut up. And I talked to the physician afterwards that I was assisting. And I said, because I didn't know what the history of that was. And I said, you know, is this guy getting in a lot of fights or what's the deal? And he said, no, he cuts himself purposely because the nature of the drugs that they use are so potent that they actually have to have physical pain to help bring themselves down. It's almost like they get, they get too high. So, and so... It sounds so dangerous. You are kidding me. Yeah. So, so our project there, one of the hospital or pardon me, hospitals, one of the prisons that we worked in, they had a minimum security women's prison. So husbands don't get to come in when the women are incarcerated, but the kids do. So it's in, since it's minimum security, the kids get to leave, they get to go to school. But the saddest circumstance was the maximum security women's prison because the kids don't get to leave there. So the kids are basically incarcerated. They're incarcerated along with their mothers and their kids still need to have, you know, schooling. So the teachers come into the prison and they've devoted a couple of rooms there to being able to provide education for the kids there inside the prison. So those teachers... Excuse me for just a second. What does that do to the children psychologically then when they're, they're in prison too? Yeah. It's, it's a perfectly appropriate. And, and... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a wonderful question and I have no idea. I don't know of anyone that's actually ever studied that. I think it's sort of one of those quasi dark secrets that, you know, the government doesn't want to take a look at or, or what have you. They don't... Their system of who runs the prisons are actually their police. They don't have like a separate, you know, warden and, and penal system, so to speak, in that respect. So they just have like, you know, police officers that... And we, we treated just as many of the guards as we treated the women and their children. And the guards stay in bunks. They stay in residence at the prison as well too. So it's a very sad, difficult kind of situation. And the, the teachers are very low on kind of the, the social strata in terms of prestige or anything. They have very little resources. So our project has been about every two years we collect information that might be classroom management skills, non-competitive play, basic kind of parenting skills, communication skills, and so on. And we have a lot of students that are in prison. And we have a lot of students that are in prison. So that's an important point that I would like to point that in that respect that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that in terms of that things like that. And we have some like Spanish coloring books that they can kind of print on demand and print off the CDs. So we probably, when we were there, we realized like, you know, we had these medications and the teachers came to us and said, well, after you've, you know, dispensed all the medications, could you give us the boxes that the medications came in so we could, you know, use them as toys? You know, it's sort of like, wow, our discards, our trash are so coveted that they just, they need them just even as toys. So we sort of took that on as one of our ongoing projects that, you know, show respect for the work that the teachers were doing to try and have some kind of impact on the, you know, the interaction of the teachers, the guards, the moms with their children, but also, you know, trying to provide tools and materials free of charge that otherwise we feared that they wouldn't have. Boy, that's incredible. And how many years have you and your people been down there now? We've been, well, we do. We do content here and then we work collaboratively with the NGO that's already down there and then we've worked actually with two different organizations, but it's about, we're on a cycle of we update the, our timeline is to update it every two years and then we mail the discs to our colleagues in the states and then they take the discs down with them. And then how many people go down at a time when they, when, when they do that every other year trip? Well, a typical project on something like that is probably about 12 to 15. And it just, it tends to be kind of a heterogeneous, it's so weird to recruit pediatricians to go to a women's prison because it just never sounds right. Right. Really? But we, you know, we get, it's, it tends to get, you know, pretty well known and a lot of the people that go, you know, consistently go each year and then a lot of, you know, as we have done, you know, we, we start to find that we develop relationships, you know, with some of the other folks and then they start to develop their own, you know, getting dollars and fundraising and things like that to be able to provide other kinds of services or, or materials or things to them as well. Though the women there have to be self-supporting just as, you know, like in the men's prison. So what they've come to do, the, the one warden, so to speak, that we worked with at the maximum security was kind of an entrepreneur and she took in people's laundry. So where she and the guards obviously could leave the compound at certain times, they collect local laundry, bring it into the women. Right. Right. And the women do laundry. So you would go through like the, their open courtyard inside the, the walls and it was just, you know, like a, just streaming with, with hanging sheets and people's clothes and stuff. So again, it was like brilliant. Hopefully they can keep track of who's, who went closed. Yeah. Yeah. They must have been a great, great organization, but it was just, again, so real to be in this prison compound and, you know, you, you look like you were in some kind of fantasy land laundry land or something. So it was, it was quite, quite a memorable experience. I bet. Very. Interesting that Dr. Stout, we're going to take a little bit of a music break here and I would love to talk to you about your books and your upcoming book that you're working on right now. Okay. Super. And I've always tried to keep my head with all the men I've known before. I've seen many places that I'll never see again. I've seen a hundred thousand faces and only called a few my friends. But it's a mystery just how you came right in and stole my heart away and left me there again. Feeling like a stranger to my happiness. To my happiness. Feeling like a stranger to my happiness. Now if you think that it's a thing that only evil men can bring, let me skim this cat another way. There was a man who had a plan to settle down with Marianne, but she left him on his wedding day. He said, darling, I've been in and out so many doors. I've always tried to keep my head with all the girls I've known before. I've seen... Been in places that I'll never see again. I've seen a hundred thousand faces and only called a few my friends. And welcome back to Psych One-on-One with Julianne Good and Dr. Chris Stout from Chicago. And Dr. Stout, can you tell us a little bit about all of the books that you've written, but the most recent ones? Sure. I guess and probably maybe they're some of the ones I'm the most proud of. It's kind of a weird combination. I had a lot of the work that I do in my consulting practice and I still do to this day is around helping people with startups or starting their clinical practice or getting published and things like that. And a few years ago I had done a book for Wiley called Getting Started in Private Practice. We wound up doing a series that was called Getting Started. We did one for Enrique. We did one for Dr. Stout. We did one for Jim Zieg, one in coaching and stuff like that. And Wiley was happy with how they were selling. So then I went to... Or they said, well, let's do an updated version. I said, well, let's kind of tweak it a little bit. So we wound up doing an edited version called Getting Better at Private Practice. And typically I still do these mountain climbs as fundraisers for the center. But the time I was working on this project, I was just too swamped with it and really couldn't get away that time. So I sort of thought, well, I didn't get to climb this year to do fundraising for the center. The profits that I would make is royalties off this book. I spent the time instead of climbing, I spent the time working on this book project, so we'll just have that be donated. So that's been kind of a neat thing that we've done that book royalties for Getting Better at Private Practice now go to support the center. So that's been nice. And then that's a model that we're very proud of and a book we're proud of on its own, although it's not so much in the humanitarian sphere. It certainly supports the humanitarian sphere. It certainly supports the humanitarian side of things. Definitely. But as I mentioned, when we were first starting the Center for Global Initiatives, I had friends that had started really amazing programs all over the world, and Unite for Sight and Braille Without Borders and Geek Corps and a variety of others. And I just really respected the people that I knew them first as friends and colleagues and then found out more about their work and things like that and just was really blown away by it. So I wanted to know more about it. And in the process of being a person that likes to write and has this curiosity about these folks and has a mercenary stripe of saying, well, I want to figure out how I can learn from them to do my own and learn what not to do and things as well, I pitched it to my publisher Prager instead of Wiley because it was more a Prager's alley. And they said, well, that sounds fine, but you've got a lot of colleagues. Why don't you make it a book? Why don't you make it more than one book, like a set, which Prager loves? So I thought, well, I'll just – I said, I can't commit to how many or whatever, but let me just kind of do a poll. So I contacted and emailed a few friends and then a few more and a few more. And then that was going well, and they were saying yes. So then I got my gumption up. And I had not ever worked with anyone at Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders, but I thought, well, what the heck, the worst they can do is say no. So I contacted them. I contacted them, told them about the project, told them who had already gotten on board with it. So they said yes too. So I was like, oh, this is so great. You guys are my heroes. I get to really learn about how you guys do stuff too. So one thing led to another, and I was then quickly overwhelmed with the deadlines that Prager had and all these 45-ish different organizations. So I went back to good old graduate students and said, hey, I've got this kind of neat opportunity. How would you like to help me? How would you like to help out with getting to know some of these people? And some were local to Chicago, so they would just go meet them. And others would do it telephonically in email and stuff like that. And so one thing led to another. And actually over a fairly short period of time, I think it probably took us probably just a shade under 12 months from getting the contract together to actually getting three finished manuscripts going. And so I think that was the time that we were able to do that. So they sort of naturally subdivided into areas of, so they're called the New Humanitarians, but they're the three-volume set. One volume is sort of dedicated to kind of, you know, health care and global health kinds of things. Another one is looked at sustainability and development kinds of issues. And then another one is education. And sometimes there's overlap between, because there might also be medical education as well as medical services and things. So sometimes they're not super distinct amongst each other. But they're kind of a combination. And so we kind of categorized them as best we could with it. And then a dear friend and colleague of mine, Mamet Oz, was kind enough to write the forward to them. So we were real happy to have his name and support with that project as well, too. Dr. Oz, correct? Yep, Dr. Oz. So that came out about four years ago. And then since, I've done a variety of talks kind of all over the world. And really trying to help spread the word around these organizations and the work that they've done, which has just been great fun. It's terrific to get invited to go someplace and tell people stories about your friend. Yes. So that's been just wonderful. And then most recently, just literally this last month, we had also had a, just kind of being responsive to the audience, so to speak. we put together a, we called it a field guide because we kind of didn't know what else to call it, but a field guide to, the Humanitarian Field Guide is what it's entitled and it's available on Amazon as a, you know, Kindle book or as a regular paper-bound book. And it's basically sort of a distillation of a variety of different kinds of tools, again, back to the audience being people that are wanting to do humanitarian work. So part of it is just sort of honestly kind of dull tools. But here they are, here's the websites and here's what's what. It's almost like a reference text like that is one of the appendices. And then the front end part of it is a lot more opinion pieces, op-ed kinds of things, trying to be more inspirational. We pulled from some of the content from LinkedIn, we pulled some of the other things that we've been doing. We, you know, had written in the past and just wanted to kind of have it be an easy, digestible, you know, stick it in your backpack kind of a read or read it on the airplane kind of a thing. And I had been, I guess maybe impacted, Brian Eno had written a book a number of years ago called, The Year with Swollen Appendices. And I write in the introduction of the book that that was really kind of the model that I used for this because we had new content and original content, kind of the first, maybe third of the book. But really, the first, maybe third of the book, the balance of the appendices really are kind of the dominant part of the book. And that was the whole idea because we wanted it to be kind of, you know, an access to tools. So if people are wanting to do these kinds of things, like I talked about, all the different kinds of content that we have in our Dropbox file, well we give a fairly detailed alliteration of what all is in there. So then someone can see that. They can also see the links. So if they want to have access to those materials and also, since it's Dropbox, anytime we update something, they'll always be fresh with that access and they'll always kind of be up to date with it. So, we just want to make it. Yeah, and that's a plethora of information. It's incredible. Yeah, thank you. We want to make it as accessible to people as much as possible. So we go web, we go talks, and we go books. Yes. And as we're starting to wrap up, Dr. Stout, what would you, with all of your experience and information, what would you say, as one, of the most important humanitarianism opportunity and challenges right now? Boy, you ask good questions. Thank you. I guess, you know, the, I have great hope that people have interest in this. It seems like there's more interest in it these days than maybe what I saw 10 years ago, which is wonderful. That is. I see it from graduate students. I see it from retired students. I see it from retired students. I see it from hiring professionals. I see it from early career professionals. I see it across different disciplines from psychology to business to medicine to kind of you name it. And I think, you know, part of the challenge I think for some people is that they get a little overwhelmed and they might say, well, you know, gosh, there's so many things to do and there's so many problems, you know. And I want to do something, but, you know, I don't know where to start. I don't know how to, you know, I don't know, do I have to start my own, you know, charity or nonprofit or whatever. And I would just, you know, suggest to people that, you know, no you don't, there's a number of great volunteer websites. They're on our website. They're in the humanitarian field guide that we just published that you can just Google it, you know, that sort of a thing as well too. But there's a variety of tools out there now that, again, our center is trying to provide to people for free to make that process all that much easier. So when people have a goodness of spirit and their heart's in the right place and they're trying to get their head, you know, around things and, you know, how to actually operationalize some of the desires and things that they have, it's very easy to get overwhelmed because of the overabundance of information. So what we're trying to do is help support people so that they can do those kinds of things, you know, the proverbial, you know, Johnny Appleseed or teach a person to fish kind of a thing, but we just are trying to make it that much easier for people to do what they, you know, probably always wanted to do anyway but never thought they could or thought it was too difficult to get started. Or start in your own neighborhood. That's a great place to start. Just start with baby steps towards doing humanitarianism work and we all benefit. It is such an incredible win-win for everybody. There is just, there's no better thing to do. And I thank you so much for doing all the incredible work that you're doing. It's just so inspirational. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you for your show and creating a platform so that you can educate listeners around all the different kinds of topics. And I think that's what you've done. I mean, this is what you do, I think, is very much in the humanitarian spirit of making the world a better place and doing it, you know, one listener at a time. Thank you. I certainly hope so. We never know where our work is going in the world, do we? That's absolutely correct. Hope for the best. Okay. So if the listeners are interested in purchasing your books, they can do so on Amazon, correct? Yep. Yep. Everything's on Amazon. So, you know, they can look around and see what they're doing. They can look around and see what's what. I think every book we have has got the look inside feature so they can kind of thumb it and see what looks good. And most all of my talks are also available on SlideShare. So the PowerPoints are there. I'm going to be doing a talk actually soon at the APA convention on global tools and humanitarian work. So the PowerPoints for that I've actually already uploaded before I head out. So we do try to just make a lot of our content freely available. You know, in a variety of places where people can stumble upon it and hopefully put it to use. Okay. And can you also let the listeners know about the website once more and any contact that you would like to give? You bet. I'd be happy to. For the tools that we talked about in learning a little bit more about our center, it's the center... Well, the website is centerforglobalinitiatives.org. And if anyone would like to get in touch with me, they can... Okay. You can go to drchriststout.com. So either of those will work out fine and you'll be able to reach me and get lots of content on either one of them. Okay. And that's d-r-c-h-r-i-s-s-t-o-u-t.com, correct? That is perfect. Thank you. Yes. Beautiful. Thank you. And thank you so much for being on my show. You're just a wonderful person and yeah, I was just giddy to have you on. Well, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you. Well, the pleasure is all mine and when it comes to wonderful people, it takes one to know one. So again, I appreciate your work and the work that you do with this and the other things that I know that you're involved with. It's equally as impressive, my friend. Thank you. Thank you. And keep your incredible energy up and I will definitely get in contact with you soon, okay? I will look forward to it. Thanks, Julianne. Thank you, Dr. Stout. And thank you so much for listening to Psych One-on-One. If you would like to download this, you can do so from iTunes.com. From iTunes under Podcasts at Psych One-on-One, P-S-Y-C-H, the number one, O-N and another number one. And also, it will be downloaded to the archives section at skidrowstudios.com within 24 to 48 hours. If you would like to contact me, you can do so at 562-209... Excuse me, 562-234-4650. Thank you. 562-234-4650 or at J-G-O-O-D-E-8 at verizon.net. I would love to hear from you. And any future shows you would like to hear, please contact me or any help that you need, please contact me on that also. I really appreciate that you're tuning into this special edition of Psych One-on-One. This has been Julianne Good. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. And thank you to Janie Kuzmin. Thank you. 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