Standard Celebration & Acceptance and Commitment with Dr. Scott O'Donnell (Part II)

ABA on Tap is proud to present Dr. Scott O'Donnell. (Part 2 of 2)

Dr. O’Donnell earned a bachelor’s in Psychology minoring in Cognitive Neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Philip Hineline at Temple University where he assisted in conducting an experimental analysis of behavior with rats and pigeons. 

Dr. O’Donnell began working with adults with autism and intellectual disabilities in 2013, youth with autism and intellectual disabilities in 2015, and received his registered behavior technician credential in 2016 working for multiple companies providing autism services. Dr. O’Donnell earned his masters in Psychology and Applied Behavior Analysis in 2018 from Purdue Global (nee Kaplan University) where he studied under Dr. Antonio Harrison, a researcher and practitioner of behavior analysis in health, sports, and fitness settings. In 2022, Dr. O’Donnell graduated with a PhD from The Chicago School for Professional Psychology where he researched applications of applied behavior analysis in non-traditional settings including sports and organizational behavior management under Dr. Jack Spear, publishing his thesis in 2021 reviewing behavioral interventions to improve the performance of competing athletes and conducted his dissertation on behavior analysis with competing golfers. 

Dr. O’Donnell works with under-served mental health populations providing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to clients on medical assistance in Philadelphia. Dr. O'Donnell is the President of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Association for Behavior Analysis. Dr. O’Donnell volunteers with his local civic association and promotes the use of radical behaviorism in government. Some of his research interests include translational behavior analysis (theory to practice), Health/Sports/& Fitness, social responsibility and sustainability, freedom and government, Relational Frame Theory, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, radical behaviorism, and self-applications of behavior analysis.

Dr. Scott is a wealth of knowledge and an amazingly cool dude. We look forward to his next visit. This is a nice, super-chilled, tasty and refreshing brew. Feel free to pour generously and always analyze responsibly. 

Transcript

Dan Lowery: 0:00

Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

Mike Rubio: 0:54

Welcome back to ADA on Tap. I am your co-host, Mike Rubio, and this is part two with Dr. Scott O'Donnell. Enjoy. Wow. Maybe not with charting, but I'm sure, I mean, I think I do, you know, contingency analysis on just about everything. Yeah, I

Dan Lowery: 1:15

think I do lax behavior analysis where I think about things, I conceptualize it, but I don't actually chart it.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 1:22

Yeah, I mean, I know that not everybody charts it. And I know that sometimes people will see this. this scary standard acceleration chart and they'll say oh my gosh it's so scary and they'll say and they'll say oh i can't do it even though even though there are like what eight-year-olds that can't read at the morningside academy that are using standard acceleration charts every single day so you guys have no excuse for that

Dan Lowery: 1:47

we don't we don't there's some like block that people have to math and i think standard acceleration charts fall into that people just shut down when it comes to math. Go

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 1:56

ahead. Sounds fancy. Well, math, it's just dots on a piece of paper. I don't know. So you guys think it's something else. I don't know what you guys are thinking, but I just, I don't know either. I love them because like I, once you, after you put the dot, you don't have to write a number, right? So I'm just putting a dot, right? It only takes a second to do. And then you're, you're graphing, you're graphing at the same time you're recording data, right? So it's kind of like, yeah, you get, you don't have to do anything else except analyze it after, after that point. But I, I No, my big thing is, hey, if we're going to use this with clients, we have to be willing to

Mike Rubio: 2:31

use it on ourselves. ABA on tap is recorded live and unfiltered. Sorry about that. Go ahead. Sorry.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 2:39

I was saying, how can we use this on our clients if we're not willing to use these things on ourselves?

Mike Rubio: 2:44

That's a great question. You've convinced me. I'm going to have to find something, something to chart, something to track. Especially if we say...

Dan Lowery: 2:51

If you're not taking data, you're not doing ABA.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 2:55

Well, actually, I wonder with the name of the show, I do record my alcohol intake, and I wonder if it's going to increase with being on ABA on tap. We'll see. I do have a good amount of baseline data here, so we'll see if there's an increase. I could just

Mike Rubio: 3:14

mark that down. Alcohol intake. That's going to be my thing. That's where I'm going to start. Right there. That'll be something very good for me to track. Yes, sir.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 3:22

I just record the number of drinks I have a day. It's really

Mike Rubio: 3:25

easy to track. What's your sauce? What do you like, sir?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 3:30

Oh, I do. I do like beer. I do like beer probably, but that's why I'm tracking it because probably I probably like beer too much. Um, so, um,

Mike Rubio: 3:39

me, me and bourbon, me and bourbon, uh, we have a really, really friendly, friendly relationship, uh, and, uh, almost too friendly, you know, not to, not to be too worried about me, but the idea is I just, wow, that's, you know, I've been sitting here and I've just enjoyed a lot. I need to track this stuff. You need to try it too. Yeah, no, you got me. That's where I'm going to start applying this to myself for sure. So really quickly, you would think, and I've written some of the show descriptions. I don't know if you've caught them. We do take this whole brewing beer element to it. Dan's not a beer drinker. I will certainly enjoy beer. It came out of sort of a parent education session where this dad was like, man, you guys serve up a good brew. If you guys do a podcast, you should call it ABA on tap. And we were like, That's a great idea. We're going to run with it. Yeah. No, we do. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, no, we're hoping to, and you would have been a perfect guest for this. You know, as we talk to advertisers and show sponsors, we're really hoping that we can hook up with somebody that might be able to deliver preferred libation to our guest as well as then have one ourselves and, you know, spend a couple hours enjoying a drink and chatting and, you know, that'd be a nice touch to it. So hopefully the next time you come around we'll have that up and ready.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 5:03

Well, my thinking was that you guys were going to brew your own and then there's going to be like a special ABA on tap brew because like, what do you need to do it? Like a bathtub? I mean,

Mike Rubio: 5:15

as long as people are willing to drink it and we don't, you know, kill anybody, I think we're

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 5:20

okay. Okay, so if you do, you just send me something.

Mike Rubio: 5:24

So we've thought about this, man. So we've thought about this, again, in terms of show sponsors. The idea at conferences, we got to moderate, shout out to Jennifer, who invited us to moderate, do some moderating at the Clinical Practice and ABA conference in October of 2024. Oh, yeah, I was in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were, you know, we were thinking about that, man, if we, you know, if we get these opportunities, how cool would it be to host ABA on tap happy hours at these conferences where we do hit up some local brewery wherever the conference is at and buy a keg and label it with our stuff or whatever. Yeah, it'd be fun. So these are all show ideas that are brewing. Hopefully we'll get to that at some point because it would be fun to add that element. I mean, again, these have become very comfortable conversations. So you add a nice libation, alcoholic or not, whatever people prefer, I think that would be a good touch for the future.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 6:18

So I also will track how much I'm, you know, listening to like reading and writing about it and listening to behavior analysis. So just to give you an idea, right? So one of these dots is you guys, me listening to you guys, right? Actually, I'm sure several of these dots were. Several of these dots are me listening to you guys. So I'm using ABA to... Listen to your show. We

Dan Lowery: 6:46

appreciate that. And how would that look? What would that look like actually? I mean, we're able to see it, but most of the people that are listening are just listening, not able to visualize that. Can you explain how you would represent that on a standard acceleration chart?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 6:58

Oh, it's a bunch of dots. It's a bunch of dots on a chart, right? And when there's a lot of dots on the chart, that means that there's a lot of behavior going on. Yeah. That's what that means. I just thought that was cool. I thought about that. Wait a second. I'm writing down how much I'm listening to their shows. I think that last dot, the last dot on there were the last probably two or three since I got to hear the rest of the Matt story episode. That was me listening to that. I track that too. We appreciate that. I also track billiards. That's something I've been doing recently because I like to play pool and I want to get better. And anytime there's something you want to get better at, you just use ABA and you make yourself better at it. But it's not all on a standard acceleration chart. I realized I can't put it all there. So there's other sheets I'm using. And I've done a few things. I've tried to look for fluency, how quickly I could run a rack or go through all the balls on a rack and stuff like that, how long that takes. how many turns it takes and stuff like that and they seem to be closely related so i'm not sure how much the fluency is going to make a difference but i i think like well just like get into these variables because i haven't seen any articles on aba and billiards out there i don't know if you guys have like seen anything like

Mike Rubio: 8:24

that no no sir but we'll be looking for yours

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 8:27

Oh, you're thinking, well, I would have to do a whole study with the IRB and everything before I could do that. Just like I did with the golf, though.

Mike Rubio: 8:36

Yeah, it might be worth it. It gets you playing a lot of billiards.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 8:40

Yeah, well, you know what? I'd be doing that anyway, but I want to get better. Might as

Dan Lowery: 8:44

well get paid and research

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 8:45

for it. See, I want to get better at it. You guys are thinking like, oh, yeah, you could publish and let everybody else know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to get better billiards I'm not trying to make everybody else better right now let me use ABA to make myself better then like we'll see if I get really really really really good right I'm already really good but if I you know if I if it really really worked well maybe I'll share it with everybody else but there's no reason why I can't just use this on myself to make myself better

Mike Rubio: 9:17

ESPN billiards analyst well there's a lot of I

Dan Lowery: 9:21

used to listen to Rogan a lot and I know Rogan would talk a lot about billiards and he would talk about how a lot of the money is in like the underground billiards hustling arena. Maybe you get really good and nobody knows about it. I'm sure there's some games in Philly where there's a fair amount of money exchanging hands.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 9:38

There you go. I don't play for money. They never pay. I'm in and they don't pay. There's always some excuse. You got to go around with a bouncer or something like that if you're really going to do that. Then you're paying someone. It's not really worth it. You said you

Dan Lowery: 9:54

got some Jersey connections. Maybe there's some Italian jersey connections that if people don't pay you could have them make a visit

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 10:02

yeah we don't have to go down we don't have to go to jersey that's true just go right down we go right down to south philly all right they're still there we have the italian market and everything that's where they're all that's where they all lived and then before they moved to jersey

Dan Lowery: 10:16

so you make a trip to south philly you know you let people know you got some debts that need to be settled Hey,

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 10:22

I'm free and clear, all right? Like, see, you're talking about this, but you don't understand. Like, my mom's family? Like, yeah, yeah. So, like, but, like, I don't owe any favors. They

Mike Rubio: 10:32

don't owe me anything. Good, good, man. That's the way to be.

Dan Lowery: 10:36

I have a question. So, going back to the clinic that you work at, is it people that just walk in? Like, did you... Is it like a walk-in clinic? People are experiencing whatever? Is it people that have been pre-screened and they... have been kind of referred to you. How do you get your clientele at your, you said your main job, I think you called it, or your full-time job?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 10:58

Yeah. It's, it's, um, people who are like have contacted their insurance company or on medical assistance and they're looking, you know, looking for outpatient therapies. It's all outpatient, you know, stuff, um, you know, which is good, you know, because you don't have to deal so much with the psychiatric stuff. Although we do have a psychiatrist working there too, um, you know, prescribing meds and stuff like that, but it's, it's, uh, all outpatient work, um, different than what you guys are, but I'm wondering if what you guys do, if that's going to, you You don't know. I know you guys get like 40 hours a week if you want. But that might change soon. And if you look at OT and speech, they don't get like 40 hours a week. So I don't know how sustainable that's going to be. I imagine that's part of the field. Part of the growth of this field is going to be like, yeah, we're going to have to shut some hours down a lot. We've been

Dan Lowery: 11:51

fighting against the 40 hours a week as much as that's been blasphemy.

Mike Rubio: 11:54

I think our mindset is we're fortunate to have had the mindset to... to start meeting clients at their availability, not necessarily making recommendations fully based on their availability. I don't know if that makes any sense, but there's a lot of, what should I call these? I wanna be respectful. There's a lot of cool excuses you can make in terms of pointing back to research and saying, You either get this level of service or we can't serve you at all. And it's an interesting premise. I don't want to say anything more about it. But luckily for us, I think, fortunately, to your point, we've gotten very accustomed to saying, okay, this is our recommendation. what are you actually able to access as a family? What other services does the child have? And then we'll go from there. So as much as it's much more difficult to not fit everything into a nice block schedule or something that's already predetermined, we just think it works better. And it is more of a struggle and it is gonna change our pace. But maybe to your point, it'll leave us a little more prepared for that change.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 13:00

Yeah, maybe making the most of your time with the client. That could be important, too, and just having more. I mean, Dan, you were talking about DTT and stuff like that. And I know I've seen studies that say the amount of learning trials is similar, but I think that's BS. Anyone who's done DTT and naturalistic training, too, at the same time realizes, no, the naturalistic training, it takes more time, and you have to get set up, and you have to think ahead. And, you know, kind of have an idea of what's going to happen on, you know, in that learning and that, and it's, and it's unstructured where in DTT, you get a client working on it and it could be, I mean, they could go pretty quick. I've seen clients who really do well with DTT and they just, Hey, if you're creating two situations, here's one, come sit at this table and do a bunch of learning trials with me and get a bunch of, you know, reinforcement versus like go over there and, not or play with your toy, but you don't really play because you, you know, you just kind of like stand there and clap your hands or a stem or whatever. Like, I think they're going to enjoy the table a lot more, um, because it's just more enriching. And that from my experience, that that's what they do is as long as you make it like enriching and enjoyable for them. I think that's the most important point. Yeah.

Dan Lowery: 14:18

I think there was an interesting, I don't want to say falsehood about trials because again, Lovaas proved that, um, ABA worked and Lova's model originally was a lot of DTT. I mean, just looking at it compared to naturalistic intervention, I don't know. Well, we only have to run half the trial. So it's not necessarily the amount of trials that need to be presented. It's the amount of trials of which they have attention to. You talked about MOs are motivated to pay attention to. So I think we kind of got this misattribution of like individuals with autism, they need a whole bunch of trials. Well, no, they're just not attentive because we haven't enriched the environment enough to help them gauge attention. So if we can start like you do with joint attention or... getting their buy-in, then maybe we can actually present less trials because the ones that we do, they're going to be attentive to.

Mike Rubio: 15:32

Yeah, I think that's the... That's the important difference that you're both delineating. And we agree, the idea that you've got that setup, that traditional setup, table and chair, and you've got a kiddo who's bought in and you've got this nice quick flow drill. Of course, that's perfect. And then the other question being when you haven't established that, then what's your next move to be able to get to that? And I think there's a lot of errors that can be made along the way there in an effort to sort of replicate the optics. This, this, this looks really good. We look like we're in control, uh, but somehow that there's, there's no reciprocity to that level of instructional control, meaning, you know, I'm prompting somebody through it or, and I think we've come a long way. So I, um, you know, again, we, we started this, uh, when we started this podcast, uh, we were on our soapbox about like, man, I can't believe people are still doing some of this, uh, or, you know, uh, RBT is coming to us from other companies with a certain amount of training and then we would get into the training situation with them and being like, wait, this is what you've been doing? Okay, this is interesting because there's no way to pivot. There's no way to shift. You're just kind of bulldozing in this linear fashion and you're missing a lot of cues. So I think you make a really good point, Dr. Scott. The idea that we don't want to discount anything about DTT other than the errors that we can make in its implementation. The idea of presenting trials you know presenting some sort of SD towards some response that can be differentially reinforced I think that you know doing that rinse and repeat that is the basic recipe whether the child is sitting at the table standing you know whatever the case may be we can't throw that out and then there's the notion of are we trying too hard to replicate this again back to the lab to living room thing are we trying so hard to replicate this without the experimental control that it's actually being rendered useless Thank you.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 17:29

Well, that's, you know, when you're in a clinical spot and you know all these different things, like a real good clinician, the best ones can bounce between one to the next. Yes, sir. Use whatever, like, you know, because you'll be doing DTT one minute and then TT the next minute, you know, and just because you see that opportunity and you see, you know, you can train them. So even the best ones, but I think when we talk about DTT, we can't, like, we have to specify, and especially when we talk about Lovaas, that nobody's doing what Lovaas did, you know, back then. We just, even if we say we're doing DTT It's not what Lobos did back then. You're talking about he was slapping their legs when they were stimming and would not continue on with the trial until they stopped stimming and started making eye contact. I don't even think we're requiring eye contact anymore with DTT and we're still running trials. So it's not the same thing. And even when you're thinking about that, well, that means it might have included a lot of punishment, positive punishment too. So then you're talking about out completely different schedules of reinforcement. You know, so it's really not the same thing. Even though we call it DTT, this isn't like, this isn't Lobos method, you know, whatever. That's a great point. However you cut it, it's not the same.

Mike Rubio: 18:44

That's an excellent point. You make me think of something in terms of the evolution of systems and procedures and maybe what your thought is about this. And I haven't found a good way to explain this yet. Hopefully I can do okay here. But The notion that if you go back to, if we get into Lovaas' head and his motives, you know, we go back to late 60s and he's starting his project at UCLA. And these are now individuals who, you know, by age 13, as childhood schizophrenics, which was, I think, the general term back then, they're going to be institutionalized. This is where we're going. We've got some political movements at the same time in terms of civil rights. Now you've got this researcher who says... I don't know the many hypotheses he had, but the idea that there is this demographic of the population, and I think I've got techniques and systems and strategies that can apply to them, that can apply... learning theory as it were pretty basic learning theory in a way that hasn't been done before and i'm not supporting any of the things that we can look at now you know in terms of uh maybe punishment procedures or things that were applied i wouldn't look at them now and say yeah we should try those outside of maybe very specific situations where they might still apply But we could be remiss in thinking about some of those things as bad. I think our culture, our society is dealing with a lot of this, even though maybe at that point in time, it was necessary to propel us forward. And then it's up to us to evolve beyond those things. So I'd be hard pressed to think of a situation where I might slap a child's leg at this point. However, I know that it served a purpose back at that time. I don't know. I don't know if I made any sense there, if you have any thoughts on that. I think that we get into Well, let's just say this. There's a lot of discussion about the idea of compassionate ABA. I know what people mean. I'm not going to be critical about it. At the same time, shout out to CJ, our colleague, he would come back and say, well, what have you been doing? Have you not been compassionate? What does that mean? You know, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. And I threw a lot out there.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 20:50

Yeah, yeah. And this has been, you know, this was a topic in the ethics class too, you know, because we're talking about, we're talking to the next generation about the, you know, some main topics that are going on now, which is like, yeah, the shift in ABA to be more compassionate. And I agree with you, like when, if you take something someone did out of historical context and compare it to what the values and the core culture is today then they will often look like you know a real bad guy but that doesn't matter it could be anyone like um one of my um one of my heroes is Ben Franklin and guess who like guess who also used to put dots on a piece of paper Ben Franklin used to do that too so you know so like I see him as the first behaviors but like I also know that he was like really racist but he knew he was really racist too which is kind of interesting that he like recognized his own bias and he would even say How I am now is not going to be viewed that great in the future, which makes me think, what are the things that we are doing now where people are going to look back to us and say, ew, that is just gross that these people would do that. I think it probably has a lot to do with what we're doing to the earth around us. I think that people will probably look back and say, ew, you're throwing things out. Ew, you're such a wasteful. You used a paper plate and a paper cup. That's gross. You know what I mean? And like, but now it's like common, but we've got no problem doing it now. Yeah. Paper plates and plastic cups. Some people are moving on, but people still use them even when they're convenient. And we're not stuck on like, you know, like using regular dishes and stuff like that. Although we should, hey, we have this system in which we can renew those sources. We could use a cup and we could use a dish from like our actual cup and dish instead of a paper cup and a dish. We abandon this behavior for something that is more convenient for us to lower the response effort we've adopted using these these methods and yeah it's immediately rewarding because it lowers the response effort but look at the delayed you know cost it's like it's it's ruining the environment we're like killing the world and we're using our resources too fast and plus it's just wasteful you know what i mean we're using like what a paper cup and a and a paper plate just to walk you know 10 feet and sit down and eat something and then throw it out it's like really kind of wasteful. I don't know. I might have went kind of a long way on that one. No, no. A little bit of a tangent.

Mike Rubio: 23:21

I mean, I think it applies. Makes a lot of sense. Again, response effort is what you were talking about. And I think that applies here very easily when we think about, you know, just trying to shoot for compliance, for example, which whatever. There's, you know, pretty minimal value. Yes, there's very clear, but pretty minimal value over all the idea of compliance. You don't want that to be the overall effort. But it can be very easy, especially if you're working with a young kid and that crying is going away very easily and you're not considering the value of or the type of reinforcement that you're using. Yeah, I think people can make a big mess of things based on that more minimal response effort along with the negative reinforcement because you're not getting that distress signal that you're having to deal with. And it's a lot harder to work through that and to integrate the aspects of self-soothing into all the verbal elements that might go into that situation. When it's 30 minutes of your child crying and it's the end of the day and you're tired and they already didn't have dinner and people are going to do some interesting things and young professionals are going to do some interesting things just in an effort to make everybody feel better. That's not a bad motive. And then for us as behavior analysts, there's a lot to examine there to make sure that from a treatment perspective, for example, we're addressing those variables.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 24:40

I've also pushed, I know you guys have done it, well, if you've been in the field long enough, you've done it, like, you know, where you rode the wave and pushed through the extinction burst and, like, you know, just did a blanket extinction procedure. Like, you can't tell me you didn't do it. I'm sure you did

Mike Rubio: 24:53

it. 100%. We love talking about it here. The blanket, the extinction means blanket ignoring equation. That's, we love, yeah, we love that discussion.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 25:01

Yeah, like I also noticed, like, you know, especially when I started working with more verbal clients, like being ignored, they don't like that. Like, you know, so it's kind of averse. Wait, really? In fact, I don't know anyone who likes being ignored. Dan does.

Dan Lowery: 25:16

My girlfriend does. My partner, yep.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 25:19

Maybe at certain times it's like, leave me alone thing, but more of, yeah. But being ignored, that's generally not a good thing. And we have alternatives to that. That's great. But ultimately, I've seen behavior analysis to be the compassion of science just because of our single subject approaches that we do treat people. And I think this speaks a lot to DEI initiatives, too, that we see individuals in the individuals. We don't have to put people in boxes to treat or anything like that. We can measure their own behavior and compare it to what happens after the intervention and still be able to have procedures and methods that can help them that we can try. So different options for procedures or different kinds of procedures and stuff like that. So I think that we've always been compassionate. We've always tried to be compassionate. But if you're going to look back and say, oh, this This is what we did back then. Well, it's just because we didn't know better. We're still trying to do the best for that client that we could possibly do. And we were just, you know, now we have better procedures. You know, same with modern medicine. Like, modern medicine used to, like, what, bleed people. They used to cut your arm and make you bleed into, like, a container or something like that.

Mike Rubio: 26:39

The frontal lobotomy is my favorite example of that. Oh, yeah, the frontal lobotomy. That was our best idea at that time. And it worked. It worked. It was awful. And it took... of a whole lot of other things that you didn't want to address, but at that point in time, it worked. That's my favorite example there of a blunt force. It met the objective.

Dan Lowery: 27:00

Dr. Scott, excuse me. Let me ask you a question about that. That was really enlightening. ABA is compassionate from the single subject design. I'm going to let that marinate a little bit because I think, wow, that's very, very insightful. One thing that... I've trained a lot on, and please educate me on this because I don't have the clinical experience that you have, is this concept of circular reasoning. And you made me think about it with a single subject design piece, just testing somebody against themselves. You work with individuals that may be diagnosed with schizophrenia. And from an ABA perspective or a behaviorist perspective, a lot of times I feel like that diagnosis, we look at it as circular. The person has delusions and therefore they get a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And why do they have the diagnosis of schizophrenia? Because they have delusions, so that becomes circular. What are your thoughts on that? Do you feel that having diagnoses benefits the individual? Because in ABA, we kind of stay away from diagnoses. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 28:04

Yeah. And I guess like, I guess it's not going to, my thoughts on the diagnosis isn't going to vibe real well. Cause I know there's a lot of people out there that are self-diagnosing themselves, which I would say like, if you're giving yourself a diagnosis and you don't need a diagnosis. Yeah. And I see, I see a diagnosis as a way to get help. Not like as like, Hey, this explains, you know, my behavior, this, you know, this will help make sense. But the, the other thing is like when you're exposed to all the different diagnoses outside out of autism you realize there's a lot of other issues there and it kind of makes sense I know a lot of people have been saying like oh autism clinics should be able to diagnose autism well like when I first started working I had that DSM first started working in mental health I had the DSM and that really helped me because every time someone would come in the only two things I would really know are ADHD and autism I would think everybody had ADHD and autism when they didn't and I'm like well this doesn't fit but that's all I know But like, yeah, then you have this whole book and the book can be kind of broken down like behaviorally too. But it is a different perspective, even with some of, some of the clients specifically like schizophrenia. And I guess like, how familiar are you guys with relational frame theory? Is that like a big thing?

Mike Rubio: 29:22

Very little, very little, but it's, we're going to have you, please talk. The floor is yours, sir.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 29:28

Well, I can't get into relational frame theory, but I will talk about like how clients with schizophrenia are overly, overly we're relating to things, right? And I guess relational frame theory, people think it's like neo-Scanarian or it's different, but it's like really, it needs behavior analysis and behavior analysis needs relational frame theory. And if you think about it, even like the behavioral contingency is like you're responding to the relation between the stimuli. You're not responding to one stimulus in particular, but you're responding to how that stimulus relates to reinforcement or relates to punishment. So like even... our conceptualization of the behavioral contingency, the ABC, is relational responding. But it's significant, especially with individuals who are verbal, and it's all about role-governed behavior. We can act in a way according to something, or we can act oppositional to something, or we can act towards things. We could place them in a hierarchy. There's all kinds of different ways we can respond to these relations between things. They're all arbitrary ways. And we can respond arbitrarily to the arbitrary ways that we respond arbitrarily. We have this special ability as humans to be able to respond in arbitrary ways, arbitrary stimuli that we assign arbitrary meanings to. And that's what makes it special that we can do this to an infinite extent. And I would say that people with schizophrenia have this problem where they overrelate things, where they see things that like an inanimate object as being meaningful or as having some causative issues. Like I have a client that has schizophrenia that I've been with him for a while, which is good. Because if you get a client with schizophrenia, keeping them for a while is important. You want to keep them on their meds. And that's an important part. Otherwise, if they go off their meds, they can have a lot of challenges. But I realized as we were talking to earlier, is it my goal to have him not tell me about his hallucinations? And I would say like, no, when he has hallucinations, and he has delusions, I do want to hear about them. I need to know if these things are happening and how he's like approaching them. But that also like that, like, hey, you might see this thing, you might see three twigs on the ground in a certain and and there. And you might see that as an arrow that points to a certain direction. And you might think that meant is meant for you. Right? But it's not right. This is just reachwigs on the ground. It's just they're not really pointing in a certain direction. And these are inanimate objects that like don't really have any meaning, but they see meaning in it, which is really interesting that like it's so so the behavioral conceptualization of it is still like is very pertinent. It's very important because like you can kind of understand that, hey, these are things that that you see as like related to contingencies, like as you're you're creating discriminative stimuli that aren't. necessarily discriminative stimuli. Interesting.

Mike Rubio: 32:37

Interesting. The term is entailment. Is that the, am I getting that right? Am I remembering that

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 32:42

correctly? Something like that. I

Mike Rubio: 32:44

don't know. Entanglement is all of it.

Dan Lowery: 32:46

I always mix it up with that. That's Will Smith and Jada. That's the entanglement. Okay. Another Philly reference.

Mike Rubio: 32:56

That's when you get your son. Anyway. Anyway, yeah. I wanted to go back to something you mentioned that's very important. For a little while, I tried the traipse into the idea of neuropsychopharmacology with a lot of our clients because a lot of them are on meds and because they're being administered largely by their parents. And I would hear about these med vacations and going, did you check with your doctor on that? Is that what you should be doing? And I thought it was something that maybe we could help with and we did in some cases in terms of uh tracking data and you know phase change lines when there was changes and anything that we could contribute it was a real it was really cumbersome yeah it was really cumbersome to try and and um then collaborate with the medical practitioners for you know various reasons they're busy and we get it could you talk a little bit i mean that's got to be hugely important you just alluded to that with with the population that you serve Give us a general overview on that and where behavior analysis comes in there. I've always liked to say, sure, once the chemical compounds in your body, that's physiological, but the act of taking that pill and putting it in your mouth and swallowing it down, I'm going to call that behavioral. You have to be involved in that to some capacity. Obviously, it's imperative or it's crucial to your work. Tell us a little bit about that and how you get involved.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 34:17

Yeah. And if there is any room for like a motivating operation or something like that, I would say this would probably be the time when you are talking about a medication that like results in like, um, to potentiating different reinforcers. Um, you know, because that's, that's really kind of what we're talking about and the different meds do different things. Um, and like my, my clients, I do realize that, you know, some of them need meds and some of them don't have meds and some are in our meds. So I'm, I'm fine either way. Um, I do like try to, you know, track down that as best as I can when they start a med and, and, you know, just tell them, tell them, like, educate them, because I realized they don't have that much time with a psychiatrist, where, like, where we have therapy, you know, that, like, you'll see me for therapy, they're just doing, how's your med? Is it working for you? Can I, can I refill it? You know, do we need to make a change? Like, that's, that's their, their main things. So, like, understanding how it works and stuff like that, we'll talk about, but, but I guess you guys, I guess, like, you probably, like, would would shade an area of the data sheet to say, oh, the medication was taken at this time, and then you shade that area down to its half-life or something like that so you know the active amount.

Mike Rubio: 35:29

I've never gotten that involved just as much as maybe change in dosage, change in the type of medication. Phase change lines. You just gave me a whole new, I mean, that'd be interesting. That's certainly something that we deal with more qualitatively, and I can see it with a lot of the kiddos I work with where it could be a false attribute A lot of the times I feel like, yeah, I'm coming in, it's after school, and your mom probably forgot your second dose. Hey, mom, oh, yeah, I forgot. Okay, you start seeing certain things, and yeah, I think we could probably use that data. If I could find a good way to start tracking it, you just gave me some good starting points.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 36:06

Yeah. You would like shade, I guess, shade it down in a half-life and then go to a gradient after that, because you would expect like, and the medication is going to peak at some time and the effects are going to start wearing off. So you could probably look at that too and not have it like, all right, you know, instead of like a block of orange or something like that. I just, I remember doing, you know, doing this before. And this is what I taught was taught about behavioral, you know, psychopharmacology, um, you know, during my PhD. Um, but, um, I, you know, other than that, I do tell clients the ones that are, take a depression med. Like we do talk about like what NCR is related to it. Like, hey, this is going to, it might make you feel better. It's not going to change the things around you, you know, so they're not going to change. But, you know, I realized that if I'm just with a client an hour a week and they're having huge problems and there's a lot of things in their environment that needs to change and these things are not going to be changing quickly, right? Then it kind of makes sense, you know, that they'd be on a medication. And a lot of people aren't going to like me saying this because we're talking about like, hey, you know, but I don't see the medication as a replacement for behavior analysis. It's like, you still need the behavior analysis there because you want to get off the medication. You don't want to just keep on taking the medication. The medication just makes things you all right with it. It just makes things you are all right. It makes you all right with the terrible things that are going on around you. But ultimately, like my job as a therapist is like, Hey, let's change these terrible things that are going on around you. And then you're going to feel a whole lot better because it makes sense that you feel depressed or you feel anxious because you have this crap going on your in your life so let's change the crap going on in your life instead of trying to change the feeling or deal with the feeling you know this even though it's the long the long-term solution and might take longer than just taking a pill um and then when they when they take that pill telling them that like hey this is it just makes you okay with those terrible things going on in your life and it's not changing them we got to do the work to change them like we still need the behavior analysis to change those things you know we won't get it from the pill the pill is just it's going to keep things okay just for now you know just for now or for as long as you keep on even not even for as long as you keep on taking it really just for now

Mike Rubio: 38:17

do you think it's is it possible for you to to to look at the therapeutic therapeutic effects of a medication or sort of see a client maybe experiencing those versus side effects and is there any level of positive or negative reinforcement that you think we as part of the environment could add to that? What are your thoughts on that? So, I mean, if somebody, you can tell they're feeling better and is saying that of any assistance, for example.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 38:43

Well, I'll give you the opposite example in a counter-therapeutic situation where like, yeah, this client, like I see twice a week, she wasn't going to have a med check for another month. She's taking this antidepressant and it's like, she's like falling asleep during the day. She can't sleep at night. And she's like having the worst, worst time. And like, I don't even know if her sleep is like, if it's, if, if she's really getting sleep, you know, I think her sleep was disrupted too. And, and then she's having suicide. suicidal thoughts and I'm like oh you gotta you gotta stop taking it and she's like not even realizing it's a medication I'm like this you weren't like this like you know a few weeks ago it takes a while for this medication to like build up in your system now there's build up you're having all kinds of problems um so like you gotta stop taking it um and you know just because like hey if it increase your suicidal thoughts and your doctor says stop taking it if it increases your suicidal thoughts and stop taking it um so that's happened before but also like It is interesting and tracking like, you know, with the schizophrenics, like tracking their delusions. How many did they have this session? And then how many are they having while they're on medication? And then seeing that like, oh, yeah, there's a big decrease. And they're just I don't know if they're just not having delusions or they're not talking about delusions, you know, but if they have them, they'll talk about them. And so it seems like they're just not that interested or not, you know, not relating so much, I guess, on that delusion.

Dan Lowery: 40:13

That's interesting, and that makes me feel better about what I've told parents in the past about medication. Like you said, medication isn't necessarily the long-term answer. If the individual is overly stimulated, is there a way for us to... help this individual calm down so they can access their environment in which then the medication kind of fades away as the environment takes over but if they're so stimulated they're not able to access their environment well maybe there needs to be some intervention there to allow them to access their environment or what you're saying on the flip side of things if this individual's accessing their environment in a way that's traumatizing or overwhelming for them is there a way for us to blunt that for a period of time so that we can change the environment to then fade down the medication is that kind of accurate to what you were thing uh dr scott

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 41:00

some of the plans we make and changing that they're you know people's lives the things around them like you know i have some clients a lot of my clients who are medical assistants so some of them are in bad spots and trying to get out of them like in shelters you know and don't have jobs or maybe just got out of jail or something like that and it's like yeah you could do the woe is me approach and and just feel bad about yourself and be you know and be miserable and be a We're working on getting a job and we're working on getting you out of the shelter. But how long does that take? You know, that's going to take some time. And how much are we going to get done in an hour a week? You know, when when part of the time is like you get your chance to gripe if you need to gripe about things that you're right and therapy to gripe about things that things are not happy about. And that gives me an idea like, oh, here are socially valid targets, you know, things that like they're griping about it. So they want these things to change. But yeah, it doesn't matter like how good of a therapist you are. You might not be able to get someone who just got out of jail, you know, like a job, like, and is in a shelter, just got out of jail and a job overnight. And then it might take months and might take months and you have to keep them applying and working. You can't do a form. You got to keep them doing it. So they got to keep on applying and then failing. Right? So we're talking about being on really thin schedules of reinforcement. So it kind of makes sense. Like a medication during this time might help them. And I've seen that where people were on medication and then like got out of that spot and then, you you know, didn't have to take it anymore after that because, like, yeah, the things around them changed, you know, and they were doing better, so they didn't have to take the medication anymore.

Mike Rubio: 42:39

Tremendous amount of response effort to very thin reinforcement. I think that's really important. I mean, that speaks to a lot of other topics that we could probably apply that same concept to where people are. I mean, you're almost training or implementing a behavior of endurance. You know, it's a little abstract, but that's what you're asking. these people to do is to endure a whole lot of really tough circumstances for a real glimmer of hope. It has to feel amazing when you see somebody get there. And I'm assuming that that happens more often than not, hopefully.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 43:15

Oh, man, it does. And I don't get to talk about it because you can't talk, you know, which is the toughest thing. You got to keep, you know, people with their personal information private and, you know, and confidential and stuff like that. But it's like really, yeah, it's really rewarding when you get to like the text like, oh, yeah, it was all up it's all because of you and like you know i'm doing so much better now and yeah like it's yeah you know people turning people's lives around is cool it's fun and then it's like and you wish you could do that for everybody and it's just sometimes you just can't you know and you want it but you also got to understand that you can't be like dragging people along by the hand they have to be climbing their own ladders you can't be dragging them up the ladder you know so it's like that's that's the thing we i gotta get you climbing i gotta get you do it you know, really, really teach you to help yourself as much as possible. Well, that

Dan Lowery: 44:07

payoff

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 44:08

for you, that

Dan Lowery: 44:09

payoff for you has got to be so important too, because you were talking about response effort for payoff. Like your job has a huge amount of response effort. You come and have to listen to all of this negativity, which I'm sure wears on you after a while, just hearing all of this negativity and things people are going through. And I'm sure it's hard to decompartmentalize that outside of your work and not think about, is this person going to be okay? Which is taking a strain on your, you know, mental wellbeing. So getting those payoffs of my life has changed now as a result. I mean, obviously there's a monetary payoff, but none of us get into this field cheerily because of the monetary payoff. Right. Really?

Speaker 03: 44:43

Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's why I'm in it. What

Dan Lowery: 44:46

are you talking about? But that payoff has to be just so amazing and reinforcing for you.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 44:51

It is. But like, have you done, have you done the act therapy? All right, Dan. No,

Dan Lowery: 44:57

no. Which is, was going to be my question. And I want to open that up to you. Go ahead.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 45:02

All right, well, that's what I'm saying. Like, I tell my clients this. I wouldn't do any therapy on you that I haven't tried on myself first, right? So, like, I definitely, like, you know, do the act therapy on my own. So like, yeah, they're complaining. I don't interact with it like that. I got to hear this all day. And this is some horrible thing, you know, and like that it accumulates some kind of burden on me or anything like that. No, I'm just trying to help people. So what does that act

Dan Lowery: 45:29

therapy look like when you say you do it on yourself? Can you describe it? Because I'm still very new in it. I'm not really understanding. So can you describe it for our listeners?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 45:37

Yeah, it looked just like that. I was just telling you. Yeah, I'm in it to help people. That's my value. That's an important thing. All right, so I guess I'll give you this analogy. I'll give you the latter analogy. And this is part of analogy. This is a later part of the analogy. But we have these values. And these values are, if you're looking at it through a Scenarian lens, this is our rule-governed behavior that we conform And we can form it in a couple of different ways, tracking, right? Which we are paying attention to the environment and we're making rules off the environment, right? So like, so this person was mean to me, this person is always going to be mean to me, right? And then we have plies, which are, you know, certainly important culturally. Like, you know, mom always told me if I don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all, right? You know, so there might be like those things and they call them plies because we're complying, you know, to that rule. And for the most part, like our, our values, um, are, are, uh, applies, um, the, and these thoughts that like for mine is going to be, I want to be a good behavior scientist and I want to be a good father and I want to be a good husband and, you know, a good, you know, son and brother. And, and I want to be, you know, it's not, I want to be a good pool is I want to be fantastic at pool, you know, cause I'm already good. So like that's kind of shifted up and I want to be a good golfer and good at playing guitar, you know, and those are important things, but there's never going to be a day where I say, oh, I'm a good behavior analyst. I'm done. I'm done. Like, I don't have to do it anymore. No, I'm always striving for it. And that's the thing with our values is like things. Those are the things we're always striving for. So, you know, when I think of a ladder and I really like ladders. I don't climb ladders all day, just like the idea, the concept of the ladders. And I think about how the ladders have these big, long sides, big sides, big, thick sides, easy for you to grasp onto. And they go really far up. They carry you all the way up, right? And these ladders remind me of our values, how they both kind of go up. They're both going up in the same direction, you know, because our values aren't going to, you know, intertwine or like conflict with each other. They're consistent and they're easy for us to hold. But then I think about the rungs. And the rungs are the most important parts for a behavior analyst. Because the rungs, they cannot be too close together. Otherwise, we can't fit our feet in between them. But the rungs can also not be too far apart. Because how are we going to get a 20-foot ladder that has two rungs on it? Dan, what would happen if you tried to climb a 20-foot ladder with two rungs?

Dan Lowery: 48:15

Even with my height, I would fall down and bust my butt.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 48:19

Right. And the rungs are like the goals, right? And so we know that as behavior analysts, if we put these goals too close together, then our clients are going to be able to do them. But if we make these goals too big and too far apart, then they're not going to be able to climb off that ladder either. They have to be able to see that next step and be able to grab onto it and pull themselves up. And I tell my clients that while they're climbing that ladder, do not look for a rope. A rope is something someone might, you know, hand down to you and say, hey, hey, I'll help you. I'll pull you up, right? And I tell them that because if they grab onto that rope, then they're not climbing their own ladder. Someone else is doing it for them. Someone else is pulling them up and then someone else, they might be pulling on this rope and be like, oh, this rope is really heavy. And then be like, well, there's my own ladder. Let me climb my own ladder. And then what do they do with the rope? They just let it go. And then that person is back down at the bottom of the hole. And then sometimes people will toss them up a rope from the bottom of the hole. And you know, where that rope is going. It's not going up. Right. So I coach people that like, hey, stay on your ladder. You know what's important to you. We'll come up with some goals for you to accomplish what's important to you and you to make progress. And yeah, you might look over and be like really impressed with how high someone else has climbed. But most importantly, stay on your own ladder and don't let anyone help you. I'll be on my own ladder cheering you on from over here. Like, keep on going. I'm cheering you on. But ultimately, I'm climbing my own ladder too. Right. So don't grab for a little bit. help yourself stay on your own ladder and let's keep on making progress in a direction that we want to go that will make us happy in the long run i'm going to cut that

Dan Lowery: 50:01

clip and use that for training at the end yeah that's amazing

Mike Rubio: 50:05

gentlemen we are exactly on time uh we could probably we could probably continue to i mean literally like you're the end of your lovely analogy there uh put us right at the end We're going to have to do this again, please. So we'll reach back out to you. So many more things we want to talk about. So many more things to talk about. It has been... tremendous honor, Dr. Scott, to have you on the show. We learned so much and so many more things that I want to ask. We'll do our research before the next one so we can revisit some of these topics. Yeah, real pleasure to have you on and to share your wealth of knowledge with our listeners. Any closing thoughts, Dan, before I give my little wrap-up?

Dan Lowery: 50:48

Well, Dr. Scott, do you have any closing thoughts, anything that you would like to add, any place that we can direct listeners to? Any

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 50:57

closing thoughts from you? There is the one thing you guys didn't talk about that movement that's going on now. I don't know if you guys are like, I know you haven't been on LinkedIn as much. You guys know what I'm talking

Mike Rubio: 51:09

about. Please, no. I'm not on LinkedIn.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 51:11

Yeah. So I had maybe complained a little bit about the BACB and then on LinkedIn. And then some people kind of felt the same way. And I guess people were kind of feeling that the BACB has been very focused on autism. And then there's some of us that do behavior analysis outside of autism. And there's needs avoidance. because the people who do it outside of autism are trying to say like, Hey, we could do really important work here. And like, and there's, there should be jobs for us, but there's not, it's, it's all the focus is in autism and like, or do we really have a voice? And a lot of people wanted to create a new board. And I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not, but I know, but we've been meeting and there's been a lot of important, you know, significant people in the field that have been interested in this and kind of pushing for it. And I'm just kind of riding the wave right now. So, but I don't know, you guys didn't, you guys are like looking at me like I was a stranger.

Mike Rubio: 52:18

No, no, no, no, not at all. I mean, I think that you're talking about something very important. We've, I've delved into that topic very minimally and also with a very related venture. So the idea of behavioral pediatrics as a developmental guy, that was sort of my soapbox in saying, I mean, this has more applications than just autism. So, I mean, yeah, the idea of if somebody can't integrate, the idea of doing your own thing makes a lot of sense. And I'm glad you brought it up because we don't have to stop now. We've got plenty of time to discuss it a little further. So what are the the next steps? Where do you think this is going? What kind of feedback have you gotten? What's next?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 53:02

Um, right, right now is just meetings. We're meeting again and, and, uh, actually two Sundays from, from now we'll be meeting again and we're going to actually, we're having meetings more frequently now. So momentum is kind of picking up and, you know, I w I was just complaining about the BACP a little bit. Like I kind of, I didn't think that there was going to be a lot of other people out there that were like, Hey, yeah. Um, yeah, we need this. We do kind of need something. And I, I guess it was kind of born from the whole, um, uh, not everybody feels comfortable with some of the ethics the BACB has with operating in other areas. And we kind of feel that like our that some of the things we learn in our science are applicable to behavior outside of autism, not just not just applicable to autism. So absolutely. So when when they say you need like all this, you know, education and training and this and that and like some of the other areas, some of us just don't see it that way. I'm used to using it in whatever area I want to apply to, you know, without regard to like, oh, I have to get a mentor or supervisor or something like that. Sometimes, that's just not possible. I don't know anyone who's doing behavior analysis in billiards or anyone who's really interested in using behavior analysis in their community and politically. Who am I going to look up to? I don't even want to. I don't think it makes any sense to. I think it would be bad for science to also because that means getting someone else's idea and kind of going along with their own application instead of saying like i'm very i'm very strong with my my fundamental knowledge of these methods and i can take these methods and i can apply to any human behavior or animal behavior you know sometimes too that i don't need to have like you know a special someone supervised me that has a lot of experience in this area or a lot of education in this area and it might even be bad too because that would be both of us you know translating you know really me going off of his translating instead of me translating it from the original text, you know, from that original thing. And I think that's kind of like what happened, what has happened in sports too, and why it's kind of become like a little more biomechanical for behavior analysts instead of like more functional. And it's because like, yeah, like look at how much work has come out of Florida from Milton Berger, you know, and they did a lot of dance stuff and it makes sense for that, but does it make sense for a sport like golf? And it's like, no, that's not even our goal and plus there's people out there that do it better than us and and also like hey there's some metrics that they're interested in that have nothing to do with you know swing mechanics or anything like that then the loser should be the metrics we're most interested in maybe how close you get it to the hole not like how big your backswing is you know what i mean so like and and ultimately like we see this as selectionist so we're selecting you know some of these topographies too um so if we just worry about schedules reinforcement like on on the variables that are most important to the offers then it will take everything else will take care of it itself you know or you have some other people like that are there to do it um so i guess i guess like um in totality it's like yeah we need to have um behavior analysis for everybody else yeah um and like including start using it on yourself and i encourage you guys to do so you got me um live a live a behavioral life you know like i got i don't know 20 standard acceleration charts i think i spend like a I don't even think I spend five minutes a week on them because it's like I'm just putting a dot on a piece of paper. You could do the same. You could spend five minutes a week and have 20 standard acceleration charts and accelerate 20 of your behaviors. You know what I mean? You have those skills to do so. Why can't we just go do it? Yeah. Wow. I like that.

Dan Lowery: 56:55

The biomechanics of a golf swing are really interesting because you bring that up. Yeah. If we're focused on that and somebody's teaching us how to play golf, by virtue of us focusing on that, that person's going to be teaching us through their biomechanics and what worked for them and then attributing that to us and saying, well, the way that we need to hit this, like you said, because you hit it better with your backswing being like this, I'm going to say that you need to do that and teach it through that. That premise, that's really interesting for focusing on the function.

Mike Rubio: 57:24

You all meet on Zoom or live or a hybrid? Yeah, we've

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 57:27

been meeting on Zoom.

Mike Rubio: 57:30

So maybe we could do a, I mean, if we could set up one of your meetings as a show. Maybe let's check back in on that. That might be a really good way to just get the entire premise out there.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 57:44

It is really interesting. The way it's going right now, we're in the early phases and we adopted Robert's Rules of Order. I don't know if you guys have been in organizations on boards or anything like that. If you get active and you get into activism, then you might get on nonprofits. Robert's Rules of of order or like rules for democracy. So, um, so everybody has a say, no one can talk a second time before, like, you know, or no one could talk a second time before someone else has talked, you know, once. Um, and then, uh, we go through like, you know, like, oh, I motion to do this, or I moved to have this done, or like I moved to substitute this verbiage and we're creating bylaws and we're creating purposes of this organization and, and committees and, and, you know, and just like what everybody does and everybody's involved. from the get-go it's like really is like kind of like a democratic um behaviorist board like where people who like people what is not just jim carr doing it it's like it's not jim's car say it's like everybody say um and i think it's it's different and like just seeing things getting put together like they are now where like everybody's involved and it's not like just me coming up with these ideas and we're all voting on it and stuff like that it's neat where do people

Dan Lowery: 59:07

uh Where do people find this resource? How do people get involved?

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 59:12

All right. So this just started, this movement just started on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. I would be a good follow on LinkedIn anyway, because I do talk about behavior analysis a good amount. Just out of the blue, I'll just say like, I'm thinking about this today, you know, or I'm thinking about how this applies to this, you know, just like, you know, it's like a sounding board for me. And also it's a great area to network with behavior analysts. There's a lot of them on there. And a lot of marketing people, you know, they say behavior analysis has a mark I disagree. I think that because all these marketing people do is they send me DMs and I don't want to talk to

Mike Rubio: 59:50

anyone. That's why I said I have LinkedIn, but now you're inspiring me to go back on. I will find you for sure. And we will add his LinkedIn into the description as well. Yeah, if that's okay with you. I'm glad we took that extra time to talk about this. Let's certainly check back in. We'd like to get involved.

Dan Lowery: 1:00:08

He hit us with that bombshell at the end of the episode. He's been waiting. He's been sitting on it. I know. He's been waiting. Now we know what our next episode will be about.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 1:00:15

Well, Suzanne knows about it. I'm surprised she didn't prompt you guys

Mike Rubio: 1:00:19

to be like, hey,

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 1:00:20

talk to him about this.

Mike Rubio: 1:00:21

Okay. Now, I mean, I think it would make sense for us to get involved as well, even just as business owners in the autism intervention piece. We are looking for other ways to utilize our skill set and provide different services. So even if it's related and still working with families, the idea that we're taking it outside the scope of autism treatment, I think is a very, very needed movement for sure. So man, Dr. Scott, we're We're going to have you back on. This is a great connection. It's a real pleasure to meet you. I like to end you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll make sure to include the relevant links. I know Suzanne's good at finding those. Make sure those are part of the show description and we'll find a very good excuse to have you back on soon or connect with your group. A little wrap up for us. I'm going to say climb your own ladder, live a behavioral life and always analyze responsibly. Cheers, Dr. Scott. Thanks a lot,

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 1:01:14

man. Can I say I feel nice and refreshed, like I just had a nice cold one? Yeah, please. After this talk, yeah.

Mike Rubio: 1:01:20

All right on, man. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We appreciate you.

Dr. Scott O'Donnell: 1:01:24

See you guys. Thank you.

Mike Rubio: 1:01:26

ABA on Tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for the day. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.