Continuing Studies: A Higher Education Podcast for University Podcasters

[00:00:00] Dr. Jonathan White: We've had something like 10 million downloads. I think because it's simple, right? We didn't call it surgery 501 or 601, we called it surgery 101. We're not teaching you how to do operations. We're just saying, if you have to go and see a patient who needs some kind of surgery, and you've only got 10 minutes to kind of prepare yourself, we're you go to.
[00:00:24] Neil McPhedran: Welcome to Continuing Studies, a podcast for higher education podcasters to learn and get inspired. I'm Neil McPhedran.
[00:00:31] Jennifer-Lee: And I'm Jennifer Lee. We want you to know you're not alone. In fact, there are many of you higher ed podcasters out there and we can all learn from each other.
[00:00:39] Neil McPhedran: Okay, Jen, before we get started, just a quick reminder to please follow our continuing studies page on LinkedIn.
[00:00:46] Jennifer-Lee: Be there, be square. I'm so excited today because we have amazing guests all the time, but we have a fellow Canadian today. His name is Dr. Jonathan White, a general surgeon and professor from the University of Alberta in beautiful Edmonton, Canada. He is the co-creator of Surgery 101, which has over 10 million downloads. Like I just can't even believe it, I'm so excited. He is the University of Alberta's first Tom Williams Endowed Chair in Surgical Education and the first surgeon ever selected as a 3M National Teaching Fellow and also received the University of Alberta's Rutherford Award for Excellence in Teaching. So, he's very, very accomplished and he would be the guy that I'd want in my surgery room if I ever had to have surgery.
[00:01:34] Neil McPhedran: So, Surgery 101, the podcast we're going to feature today, is a series of podcasts designed to help students learn about the basics of surgery. They actually have a website that features a range of these educational podcasts, but they also have videos, a Surgery 101 app and an incredible YouTube channel. We'll talk a little bit about that actually too.
[00:01:54] Jennifer-Lee: Yeah. And I love the, I'm going to tease, but I love the puppets. People aren't going to know what I'm talking about, but that's why he caught our attention, which I just think is so innovative and makes me want to learn surgery, and I'm like the least medical person possible. So, let's welcome Dr. White.
[00:02:11] Neil McPhedran: Let's get into it. Welcome Dr. White. We're really excited to have you here today.
[00:02:16] Dr. Jonathan White: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:02:18] Neil McPhedran: You have been podcasting since 2008. That is quite amazing. And I would have to say you're probably a pioneer. Could you just walk us through a bit of your journey?
[00:02:30] Dr. Jonathan White: I've always been a bit of a, kind of a techno nerd. Like, I'm the first person I know who had their own website or their own wiki, like, I got the first version of the iPod when it came out. And then when I came to Edmonton in 2006, I was trying to figure out how I would take my interest in technology and combine it with the responsibility I had for education because they, they put me in charge of undergraduate surgical education at the university. I actually went to a few seminars and was, was hearing people talking about podcasting and I kind of thought, I wonder, could we just, can we make some simple podcasts?
[00:03:01] And at that point, the iPod and the iTunes music store was really, really new. So, I thought, well, let's do something really simple and really basic. And I'm a general surgeon. So, we thought, let's do some general surgery topics. I had a surgery resident who was working with me at that point called Parveen Boora, and Parveen said, well, I have to do some kind of research project in my training time. So, I wonder, he'd heard me give a talk about, about the possibility of podcasts, but he said, hey, can we work together and actually put out some episodes? So, we came up with some really basic topics, like things that every single doctor needs to know about general surgery, like appendicitis and bowel obstruction, that sort of thing. And we just made some episodes, he just sat with a microphone and recorded it and I think he edited it on GarageBand, and we released them into the wild and gave them to our students.
[00:03:45] And to be honest, we didn't really think any more about it. It was just a; it was a little research project we did. We, you know, asked our students what they thought of them, and they seemed to like them. And then we both moved on to other things and that should have been the end of the story. But of course, it wasn't because, because Steve Jobs had created the iTunes music store. And the easiest thing in the world was to stick these things on the Internet and just let our students have access to them there. One of my colleagues at the time said, you know, if I was you, I would just buy like the class was 125 students. So, he said, I would just burn 125 CDs, or I would get 125 USB sticks and just hand them out. We were lazy like who's got the time to burn 125 USB sticks, we just put it on iTunes and said here's the link go and get it and that's it. And then we got emails from people in Brazil and people in Romania saying we've found your podcast, and we like the episode on this, or we like the episode on that. And we started getting requests coming in, right?
[00:04:44] Somebody saying, well, you know, our medical school doesn't do a good job teaching pancreatitis or thyroid disease. Can you guys do an episode on that? And of course I'm an expert in one narrow bit of surgery. I can't with any credibility do an episode on brain surgery or heart surgery, but I have a friend, in the division of cardiac surgery or the division of neurosurgery who is actually able to do that. So, I would just phone people up and say, hey, you know, can you give me an episode on head injury or can you give me an episode on you know, cardiac surgery and they would oblige. So, we started to kind of get more and more episodes coming out. I was the host, right? Kind of saying, well, this week we're talking about whatever type of surgery it is.
[00:05:21] And then it just kind of went from there with more and more students asking for more and more episodes as we've gone. And we think we're, we're certainly well north of 300 now. I think we're 300 or 450 and we've had something like 10 million downloads, most of the countries of the world. We have a few listeners in North Korea, I don't think we have any in Greenland yet, but apart from North Korea and Greenland, we're in pretty much every single country.
[00:05:42] Neil McPhedran: That is amazing. And thank you so much for sort of taking us through that journey. And I got to tell you, 10 million downloads is an incredible feat.
[00:05:50] Jennifer-Lee: So why do you think this podcast is such a hit?
[00:05:53] Dr. Jonathan White: I think there's probably a couple of things. I think, I think the first thing is because it's simple. Right? We, we didn't call it surgery 501 or 601, we called it surgery 101. So, it's super basic, we're not teaching you how to do operations, we're just saying, if you have to go and see a patient who needs some kind of surgery and you've only got 10 minutes to kind of prepare yourself, we're your go to, right? Like you're, you’re riding down in the elevator to see this patient with appendicitis. Listen to our podcast, and by the time you've got to see the patient, you'll know basically what to do. Kind of get yourself through the first few minutes of this surgical encounter.
[00:06:27] The other thing I, I, I think, and this is, I hesitate to criticize my own community, but if, if the medical education community in the world was doing a good job of teaching surgery in a way that was accessible to students, this would have been a massive flop. Like nobody would have needed a surgery podcast if we were doing an awesome job already. So clearly the fact that we've got so many downloads means that students are finding this useful in a way they're not finding some elements of medical school are, are useful.
[00:06:56] And again, it's because it's a short, sharp thing, right? You're not having to sit in some dull medical school lecture, listen to this person drone on for an hour and a half about some topic you don't care about. Like you're riding your bike in the river valley in Edmonton, and you're listening to this topic that's covered in 10 or 12 minutes. And then as soon as you finish one, you think, oh, well, maybe I'll just listen to another one because that was pretty good, right? I think traditional medical education is maybe not so hot in some aspects and Surgery 101 fills, fills that gap.
[00:07:25] Jennifer-Lee: I think it's a great add on though, you guys do make it very simple. Like when I was listening to some of the episodes like, I have no aspirations of a medical career, but after listening to one on rhinoplasty, I was like, I feel like I could do this. I know that's what you don't want, you want, like, capable surgeons to do it, but I was like, yeah, I could go in the surgery room.
[00:07:43] Dr. Jonathan White: The funny thing is it's based on very basic educational principles, right? I mean, I mean, think about your kind of old-fashioned Presbyterian preacher, like he stands up at the front and he says, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you. And then I'm going to tell you. And then I'm going to tell you what I told you, right? Like a small number of simple messages that you prepare people for, deliver them and then summarize again at the end.
[00:08:04] It's interesting working with students because a student will come forward and say, hey, I want to make a podcast on something, right? And I say, okay, so step one is like draft me a script. Then they send the script in and it's like 14 pages long and it's ridiculously detailed. And I say, no, no, no, we got to like, got to strip this right back, like four- or five-pages tops. If you want to break it into like several episodes, that's okay, but you've got to have specific learning objectives. And they do not get past this point unless the learning objective says, after listening to this podcast, you will be able to, and then it's verb, verb, verb, verb. It's all sort of basic educational principles.
[00:08:40] The worst thing in the world is you listen to some podcast, which is like 45 minutes or an hour long with some guy rambling on about something that he cares about, but nobody else cares about. Like probably his mom is going to listen to that podcast, but nobody else is going to listen to it because it's not really going to deliver the goods right. You've got to have a short, sharp thing that delivers a small amount of material and kind of pins you to the wall and gives you the material you need and then gives you a summary at the end and then you can walk away.
[00:09:05] Neil McPhedran: I love that. I don't think you're just talking to the higher education world. I think that is a message for the wider podcast world. Obviously, it's intended to serve as a brief introduction or reviews of surgical topics for medical students, but do you find that the aperture is a little bit wider on who ends up listening? Do patients end up listening?
[00:09:25] Dr. Jonathan White: Absolutely. So, I mean, we released it in the wild and it kind of leaked. And we did a survey of listeners a few years ago, and we found there were plenty of people are listening who are not medical students. I think about two thirds of the listeners were medical students, but the rest Some of them were actually residents, but there were a lot of like nurses as well who were listening and there were some patients.
[00:09:43] And I've actually had the experience where I saw this lady in clinic, we were getting her ready to go for surgery. And I said, well, I need to explain this operation to you. And she said, don't waste your time. And I'm like, well, no, I have to explain the surgery to you. And she said, no, you did it already. I'm like, what are you talking about? And she said, well, I Googled you before you, before I came to the clinic, I found surgery 101, I looked up the condition that I have, and I have actually listened to you explain the surgery on the podcast. So, like I heard you already, I don't want to have to hear it twice, right? So, I said to her, well, tell me what I said, like how much of it can you actually recall? And she was pretty good actually, she got most of it. So, I guarantee you there are lots of patients listening and I think we should be encouraging that because I think the more information that you have before you go into surgery, the better. You've got to know, what it is you're, you're getting yourself in for.
[00:10:32] Jennifer-Lee: But they always say, don't Google, don't Google your diseases, but you can Google, I guess, your surgery.
[00:10:39] Neil McPhedran: That's funny. How have you used this as part of your curricula? Like, how are you using the podcast as part of the overall mix of your educational tool set?
[00:10:51] Dr. Jonathan White: We went through a few different phases. Like, at the beginning it was just starting with general surgery because that's who I am, right? And then we were getting requests, and we were basically doing episodes as we went along. Or sometimes you'd get the, the neurosurgeon would come back, and he would say, well, so you asked me to do that episode on head injuries, but I'd like to do another episode on such and such a thing.
[00:11:09] And it turns out a lot of our best teachers have what I would call an embedded teaching script in their head, ready to go. So, if you're sitting down with a medical student and you've got 10 minutes before an operation, and the student says, tell me about some topic, you've got that in your head, just ready to go, right? You can talk about it; you've done it a whole lot of times before. So there actually went through this phase of kind of, of pulling those out of people, like saying, well, you've got the script in your head, let's turn it into a podcast so you're not just teaching one student at a time over a cup of coffee, you're teaching like 10,000 students globally.
[00:11:44] So we started getting all these teaching scripts elaborated in the podcast. And then we were doing a curriculum redesign, this is about five or six years ago. In common with many medical schools in Canada, there's a kind of a curriculum crunch. You know, people are saying, well, do you really need to have six weeks of surgery? Maybe you can get away with four weeks, we want to shrink it down a bit. So, our medical school did that as well, and we lost two weeks in the curriculum. And the question is, well, we have all these learning objectives that we're not going to get rid of. Like the students still need to know all these things about surgery, but now we have to deliver that in four weeks rather than six weeks. Where's that actually going to go? So, we sat down with the curriculum, and we said, let's make a podcast for each and every learning objective in the medical school curriculum to do with surgery.
[00:12:29] So we basically went through and said, well, we've got this one covered check. We've got that one covered check, but we don't have these six. So, then we literally became a much more deliberate team then going through the whole curriculum to make sure there's a podcast on pretty much everything. So, if you are learning any surgery topic at the University of Alberta in our curriculum, there is a podcast for that currently. And that caused us to expand into videos as well, because some of the things we want students to be able to do are like practical things like inserting this or sewing that, so we ended up having to make some, some videos to support that as well.
[00:13:00] So now we've kind of covered most of the, of the kind of standard routine topics. So, the area we're in at the moment is actually a bit more interesting to me because what do you do next when you've covered the whole surgery textbook for medical students? What, like, do you just stop? Is that it? Surgery 101 is done, right? And that's not it at all. So, we're actually expanding into some other areas now. And we're starting to look at things like, you know, resilience or wellness or burnout or caring for transgender patients, like those sorts of things. Like if you're talking about appendicitis or breast cancer, that's like a super safe topic, that's like settled medicine, right? But if you're starting to talk about wellness and burnout and transgender stuff, that's a little bit out there.
[00:13:42] And I'd, I'd quite like to do some episodes on like, what does decolonizing education look like in surgery? How can we start to talk about the legacy of all the things that have happened in Canada and how they affect care and the health care system? And how can we do that through a podcast that has a platform like this?
[00:13:59] Um, the other thing is I'm, I'm actually the senior medical director for the surgery network in, in the province of Alberta as well, so basically, I'm doing a lot of health system leadership at the moment. So, I'm quite interested if I can get some time later on this year in doing some health systems podcasts to say to medical students, so, so you're a single student in a single room with a single patient, like doing your best. But I want you to kind of zoom out of that a bit and say, well, can you see the system that you're in? Like, can you see how the hospital runs? Can you see how patients flow through the system? Can you see things like safety, like quality?
[00:14:31] I was just talking to somebody this morning about doing a podcast on non-technical skills in the operating room. Like it's all very well if you can operate and do the operation very well, but you need to be able to communicate, you need to be able to do situational awareness, you need to be able to figure out how you function with the team in the operating room. So, we're, now that we've covered the basic curriculum, we're starting to branch off into some more interesting areas, I think.
[00:14:52] Jennifer-Lee: You said so much in there. Yes, obviously I'd want somebody that's highly skilled to operate on me, but there are other skills that you need. So, do you actually see a change in the students after they listen to these podcasts? Do you notice any difference? Do you feel that these podcasts are giving them a more rounded scope of the actual role?
[00:15:12] Dr. Jonathan White: I think that the whole point of this is to, is to cater to people with different learning styles, right? So, the way I look at this is you come down in the morning to get your breakfast and there's a smorgasbord on the table, right? And you can have whatever you want. You want to have some cereal, some coffee, toast, want to have a muffin? That's fine. You don't, not everybody has to eat the same thing. So same thing for learning styles, right? There might be somebody out there, I don't know them, but it might be somebody out there who actually enjoys reading textbooks, so go for it, right? There might be somebody Who enjoys drawing pictures, might be somebody who, who, who enjoys kind of social learning and talking to people who are doing the work. This just gives students another option to kind of have some way to listen to the content and see if that's helpful for them.
[00:15:55] And I think, I mean, I've had a few conversations with people about kind of studying, you know, the podcast to say, well, maybe you could have one group of students that has listened to the podcast and one group of students that hasn't listened to a podcast and then put them on a standardized test or something. That would be wonderful if we were working with like laboratory animals, but it's not really realistic with people in the real world. And I've said before, I'll, I'll do that study the day after you do the study where you, you give group A the textbook and you don't give group B the textbook. Like, that's not how learning happens, it's, it's lots of different sources coming together. So, I think the podcasts are working. I think students like them, but I, I can't kind of demonstrate it from a psychometric perspective, and I, and I would never want to.
[00:16:35] Neil McPhedran: So, I think that's really insightful. But I think specifically I'd love to get into humour. You infuse humour into the podcast and there's also a YouTube channel and you incorporate Muppets, believe it or not. Sort of unpack that a little bit for us, like, like, why do you see humor as an important component to this and how did you get to Muppets?
[00:17:03] Dr. Jonathan White: One of the problems we have in the medical education system specifically and in the larger education system generally is that it's very serious, right? Like we kind of, if you have any creativity or artistic ability, we kind of hammer that out of you very early on, because we must all be serious. You know, scientists and writers and historians and that sort of thing. That's not my lived experience. And in fact, I have quite a lot of fun when I'm practicing surgery, we often tell jokes and there's music in the operating room.
[00:17:32] So I think probably the first time that this came up, we did our first few episodes on general surgery. And then somebody said, can we do an episode on something called benign prostatic hypertrophy, which is just people who have big prostate glands and who have difficulty peeing. We decided it wouldn't just be some guy talking, we wanted to sort of to break it up, partly to kind of say, well, this is the first bit and then there's some music and then the second bit and so on. We decided to punctuate this podcast about prostatic hypertrophy with sounds of running water and toilets flushing, just because we're talking about peeing, right? That sort of thing. Uh, so that was probably the first thing we did that was a little bit creative. And then we kind of, we kept going from there.
[00:18:10] So sometimes when I'm doing the introductions, I'll make a little joke about what the topic is, or I'll try and have some alliteration when we're talking about, about the title of the episode or something. So, we've always had that idea of creativity. And then we actually, when we did that survey of our users, we were asking them, like, are you happy with just podcasts or would you be interested in branching into video?
[00:18:31] And about two thirds of them said, yeah, we'd be interested in seeing some video. So, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology is just across the street from the hospital where I'm at, the Royal Alexandra in Edmonton. So, we managed to get a couple of co op students from there, from their digital media program to come across and work with us. And one of those two students, like me, is a big fan of The Muppet Show. We said, well, if we're going to make some videos, what should we make? And we said, let's do some Star Trek ones, let's do a zombie one, uh, and let's do some Muppet ones.
[00:19:02] So we actually bought proper, uh, like professional puppets, and then we made some scripts. And the senior surgeon was, Dr. Scalpel, and then the resident, is Thumbs. And Scalpel's very serious and Thumbs is very naive and basically we did this series about surgery and we took the kind of content that you might need to know, we basically put it in Muppet Voices and we're there like under the camera you know doing the doing the puppet thing and doing the mouths and everything.
[00:19:29] We actually got a local Um, Puppeteer who saw this work and said, hey, I want to come and help you. So, she came and actually did a, did a class for our students on, on how to do proper puppetry. And the same thing we, we did another series on, on, on Lego surgery and we actually got, well, a local stop motion company that just phoned me up out of the blue and said, hey, can we come and, and work with you a bit? We want to show your, your students how to do this and, actually trained them how to do it. So, we got a lot of support from the local community.
[00:19:55] We ended up doing, uh, two seasons of, of, uh, Muppet surgery. The second season actually introduces a new character called Alex, who's our medical student. And Alex is basically learning all the different things about surgery and scissors and bleeding and suturing and all that kind of stuff. So, it's actually quite serious content covered in a kind of lighthearted way. So, the way I think about it is you kind of, you come for the Muppets, but you stay for the surgery, you know, you will actually go away from learning something about surgery.
[00:20:22] And I think that probably our most popular video in the Muppet series is a video where we talk about how you tell the difference between like a thick suture and a thin suture. So, some of it is actually quite technical. And I've had people say, well, these videos must be for children, right? No, no, no, they're not for children at all. They're for serious adult learning. But it's just, it comes at you in a way that's really easy to engage with.
[00:20:49] Jennifer-Lee: And you've had no, uh, lawsuits or written letters from a Jim Henson company?
[00:20:54] Dr. Jonathan White: No, no. Although it's funny because we, we took the position that we did not want to profit from this. So basically, we don't run any ads on our YouTube channel, so we're not making any income from them. Because we're taking Lego figures, right, we're taking Muppets and stuff, they are our characters and our script and our, and our material, but they're free on YouTube, so anybody can watch them anytime they like. So, we try to stay away from that whole copyrighted thing.
[00:21:19] And again, I think like our attitude throughout all of this has been ask for forgiveness, not for permission. So, we basically said, we're going to go ahead in the most open way possible, all of our stuff is published under a creative commons license. We get emails from medical schools sometimes saying, hey, is it okay if I use surgery 101 in our curriculum? And the answer is yes. But because it's creative commons, you don't really need even to ask, like, just go ahead and use it because it's out there and it's free to use.
[00:21:47] I was a little bit disappointed in my own university. Because originally when, when this started to take off, we actually said, so, you know, would you like us to put a university brand on this? Would you like it to say it's an official university product? This is back when it was just podcast, it wasn't, it wasn't videos or anything. They ended up getting some legal opinions and the legal opinions basically said there's some liability here, so we don't really want anything to do with this, so don't say it's an official U of A product. And so, we always said the start of the podcast brought to you with the help of the University of Alberta, but there's no U of A logo on it because they were afraid of liability issues. I think kind of 10 million downloads later, maybe they would have had a different opinion.
[00:22:28] Neil McPhedran: Yeah, I bet you they're regretting that now. I think that one of the things that I've found is it's kind of still the wild west. And I think, I think universities and institutions are trying to figure out like how to get their arms around it. And when you start talking about putting, a university brand on something, there's real consternation. I think there are some universities that are out front of it oxford being one, University of Chicago being, being another one where they've, they've definitely created parameters of how to apply their brand and whatnot. And I think as a result, it’s helped them catapult forward both for those podcasts, but also sort of a network effect.
[00:23:06] Dr. Jonathan White: I've been down to the States a few times giving workshops on how to make a podcast. Like we're basically giving secret sauce away and say, this is how we did it, you should do the same. And I had people come up to me and say, why didn't you charge for this? Like, why, why didn't you charge like a dollar per download? And then you'd have like 10 million dollars. And the first question is, I'm like a white, male, middle aged surgeon practicing in Canada, I'm like about the most privileged person you will ever meet, so I don't need the money, thank you, I have enough money.
[00:23:36] And the second thing is, if we didn't give it away for free, it wouldn't have gone so far. Right, like that Like having to sign up for something and click on something and make somebody pay for it makes them hesitate. So, I think we're taking the privilege that we have in Canada and we're giving this knowledge away to people across the world and that should be free.
[00:23:55] Neil McPhedran: You're speaking with an Irish accent but you're saying a very Canadian thing. And I think that you're bang on if you would have tried to charge for this it wouldn't have evolved and disseminated around the world like it is and I think that Your position, which you've held to is admirable. Any, any sort of additional tips or insights that you could share for other higher education podcasters?
[00:24:21] Dr. Jonathan White: I've spoken to a bunch of people who've said, hey, I think I want to make a podcast on such and such a thing. What's your advice? Right. And I basically say, well, if I was you, I would do this, this, this, this. But the hardest part is actually just sitting down in front of your laptop or in front of your microphone and just pressing record and getting on with it. Like, if you think you've got something to say, press record, like release it out in the world and see what happens.
[00:24:45] We didn't have some big plan. We didn't have some big giant, you know, business plan or dissemination plan. We just said, we think we have something to say, we want to get it out in the world, hit record, minimal editing, send a thing out into the world. And the number of people who have, who've got some interest in doing this, but never actually reached that big red record button is kind of depressing to me. So, I think there should be a like a gynecology 101 podcast and a psychiatry 101 podcast and a dermatology 101 podcast because people have all this knowledge ready to go, but for some reason they're just not able to get it out in the world.
[00:25:22] And that applies all across higher education, and I think, I mean, students are kind of crying out for this, so I, I think if somebody's out there listening, thinking, I wonder could I do something similar to this? The answer is yes, and I'm happy for people to get in touch, jswhite1@ualberta.Ca, give them some advice or something, but the best advice I can give them is just hit the damn record button. And say something and put it out in the world and see what happens.
[00:25:46] Neil McPhedran: That's great advice. And we'll put your contact, uh, information in our show notes for sure. This has been incredible. I think we’ve; we've learned so much.
[00:25:54] Jennifer-Lee: It's been super incredible. So, thank you so much. I'm going to take your advice and stop the damn record button. You need to know when to start and when to finish. And so, I don't want to take away from all the brilliance you have just talked about. So, I think it's time to get out.
[00:26:08] Dr. Jonathan White: All right. Sounds good.
[00:26:11] Neil McPhedran: Okay, Jen, I really enjoyed our conversation with Dr. White. So many takeaways for us, but first one I'm just going to address the elephant in the room. 10 million downloads. That is incredible. That is a massive show. I'll tell you, like there is thousands of podcasts out there that wish they had 10 million downloads. And it just really, to me, hammers home the power and the reach of podcasting. This is a super niche subject, and it just shows you how through podcasting we can reach so far outside of the classroom and have a massive impact. And just for context, we looked it up, there's 6. 4 million docs in the world, obviously a small portion of those are surgeons, so just to put it into context of that big hairy number.
[00:26:57] Jennifer-Lee: I wish we had 10 million downloads, so you know.
[00:27:00] Neil McPhedran: We can only dream, Jen.
[00:27:02] Jennifer-Lee: But yeah, he's like a celeb, but I don't think he knows it because like, he should be getting flown around and doing like the today show at this point. But anyways,
[00:27:10] Neil McPhedran: Totally.
[00:27:10] Jennifer-Lee: Another thing that I like is the fact that it's not just for students and I don't think he ever thought about this. I really love the story about him sitting down with a patient and the patient was like, oh, I've got this. I already listened to your podcast on my surgery we're going to do. So, I love the fact that your kind of putting patients at ease but then I do think it's, it leads us down a slippery slope because like I said, in the interview, I think I could be a plastic surgeon now.
[00:27:33] Neil McPhedran: Yeah, I don't want you operating on me. I would say though, Jen, that, that Although he recognizes and he has that great story about his patient, they're still true to their target and it shows you the content is, is super approachable that it works for surgery students that have years and years of education already under their belts, but it also works for you, Jen, who thinks now that you can be a plastic surgeon.
[00:28:00] Jennifer-Lee: I love it. I want to do a rhinoplasty right now.
[00:28:02] Neil McPhedran: Oh, it's so funny. It reminded me of our conversation we had in the summer with, uh, Dr. Van Slyke from Louisiana Tech. So, if you want to listen back, please do, that's episode six. But Dr. White is another example like Dr. Van Slyke of an incredibly passionate educator that is truly seeking innovative ways to educate and doing that with podcasting. I just think it's such an inspiration and you know, take the risk,
[00:28:30] Jennifer-Lee: take the risk, just jump in and do it.
[00:28:33] Neil McPhedran: I think the, like, risk is definitely, like, he jumped in with risk, but I think he risked humor, which I think we can all learn from. And I just want to leave one last little point, like, don't you think the University of Alberta really regrets not putting their name on this podcast now that he's hit 10 million downloads and he's a worldwide sensation?
[00:28:51] Jennifer-Lee: As a university, I would be like totally taking that and running with it. And, uh, I think it was a big mistake.
[00:28:57] Neil McPhedran: Yes. Jen let's leave it there. This was another episode of continuing Studies. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:29:06] Jennifer-Lee: Thank you. Let's get to 10 million downloads.
[00:29:09] Neil McPhedran: Yeah, baby. 10 million downloads, here we come. Thank you for tuning into the Continuing Studies Podcast, a podcast for higher education podcasters. We hope you found this episode informative and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, we encourage you to follow and subscribe to our podcast on your preferred platform, so you'll never miss an episode.
[00:29:30] And if you've found this episode particularly valuable, please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues who also might be interested in higher education podcasts. We also invite you to join the University Podcasters Network group on LinkedIn. Just search for University Podcasters Network where you can connect with other podcasters in higher education and learn from others in the field. Thank you for being part of our community. We look forward to continuing to bring you valuable insights and conversations around higher education podcasts. See you in the next episode.