In this episode, Angie and her guests delve into the challenges of choosing a career and the importance of making mistakes along the way. They discuss the invaluable practice of informational interviewing and why it’s imperative to follow one’s passion rather than financial incentives. Also featuring an informative segment from Jeff Kerr on PETA’s recent lawsuit, the episode rounds out with a heartwarming story about a zookeeper’s dedication to raising baby gorillas.
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SPEAKER 04 :
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 07 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news along with Dr. Cheryl Lentz, the academic entrepreneur. She works with so many young people and she’s also had foreign exchange students live with her in her home. So she is also probably somewhat of an expert on young people. And I’d lump myself in there to some degree since I’ve got three teenagers in the house. Hey, Dr. Cheryl Lentz.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hey, it’s good to see everybody. Happy summer, one and all.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, as we’re headed into summer, I thought this might be kind of fun. 18 things we all wish someone told us when we were 18. But I think a lot of these things still come into play. And if we don’t finish them all today, we’ll do another segment and do the rest in the near future. A lot of kids, they get asked things like, what do you want to do for a living? What do you have a passion for? Blah, blah, blah. And I think a lot of kids don’t know yet. They just kind of go by. Like my daughter, I think she sees mansions and we take her on great vacations and she sees me. are on canals and she goes by multi-million dollar estates and she’s like, well, I want to live there. So I looked up what a lot of those people do because there’s something like called Millionaire’s Row on some of the canals down in Florida. And a lot of them were business owners or like maybe they’d inherited a business from a parent or a grandparent and worked their way down the line. But most of them were either business their own businesses or big mucky mucks within a business. But she also knows that you can make good money as an attorney or a doctor. And so those are the two things she thinks she wants to do. And she said attorney like for many years. But I’ve cautioned her, like, don’t pick a career for the money. You’ve got to go intern in a legal office and see what you think of what they do. A lot of it’s contracts, which isn’t so exciting.
SPEAKER 06 :
So I talked to a lot of attorneys who have decided to go. They take the bar. They practice for about a year or two and then they’re out. That’s a heck of a lot of investment of time that they could have done with your daughter is go find out if you like it before you want to commit to all that.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah. Take a year maybe to do some internships or, you know, I just try some jobs once.
SPEAKER 06 :
I’ll tell you, give this example. Your daughter did an internship once for six weeks. I was all excited about it. After a week, it was like poke a stick in my eye. Glad I only wasted six weeks because it was like, nope, not doing this. Not what I thought it was. Next.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah. And so many kids have no idea. And like you said, they finish law school. My cousin’s daughter wanted to be an attorney and she also worked in a legal office and same thing. Didn’t love it so much. Another one of my really good friends went to Pepperdine and became a lawyer in California and And something completely different because she didn’t enjoy it at all. And that was a very expensive education for her parents. Very Pepperdine.
SPEAKER 06 :
Now, I can tell you my dad’s in there. I remember having a conversation with my father, baby boomer, 85. When I was thinking, well, if I’m going to do something when I grow up and spend 40 hours a week, I better enjoy doing it. My father’s response was, what does enjoying it have to do with anything? You take your responsibilities, you pay your bills, and that’s what we do. And he walked away and I looked at him and said, like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Such a different work ethic from the baby boomers to the millennials, you know?
SPEAKER 07 :
Right. And I get the impression that, you know, you’ve changed jobs a lot, but that you on a day to day basis enjoy what you do.
SPEAKER 06 :
I would say in the most part, but that’s part of the reason why I do so much of what I do is because I am easily bored and I’m easily distracted. And so my lifestyle came out from the military, having moved 38 times and had to adjust to all the different careers I’ve had. I’m not always by choice, but I like project work. I like doing something and I know it has an end. That’s why I love teaching the end of the semester, the end of a book publishing, the end of something in there. I have this grand sense of accomplishment. And I know I have finished something and finishing something is probably why I earned my doctorate, too. It was like that’s the next logical conclusion to finish your education. Right. So that’s why I do a lot of little things. Sometimes I can overextend myself by doing a little bit too much because I like exciting things. So you just got to be careful. You don’t do too much. But that just works for me. Others, they like the nine to five. Same thing every day, every time, like clockwork. So you just got to know what you like.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, yes. And change if you need to. I mean, from TV to radio wasn’t much of a change for me. But I like talking to people. I like asking questions. I think it’s fun to find out people’s story. And everybody has like a really interesting story. And I looked at some old emails from you. Like, we’ve been doing this for years.
SPEAKER 06 :
I know. Somebody was asking me today. It’s like, what are you doing today? It’s like, oh, I’m doing some radio stuff. She goes, yeah. wow, that’s exciting. I was like, it has to be at least four or five years with Mike, you know?
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, girl. I mean, I don’t even know how I initially found you, to be honest.
SPEAKER 06 :
No. And that’s the part I was trying to think of the other day. And I have no idea because it just we found over time that we had so many common connections, but that those weren’t what brought us together. So I can’t honestly remember.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, I can’t either, but I was looking at old emails, and some of them went back to 2018. I know that. But just fun to work with someone so long that you’ve never met in person, just like you were mentioning, Mike, my former co-host. I couldn’t believe how far our emails went back. And then Dr. Roizen, who I don’t interview on a regular basis anymore, but he and I, it was almost a decade, I think, that we had been doing interviews. That is so sad.
SPEAKER 06 :
I’m sorry that we still haven’t met. We’ve tried to on several occasions. It’s never quite worked out yet. But isn’t that just amazing? And yet I felt like I’ve known you my whole life that we would just be the best of friends if we actually lived in the same, you know, universe kind of thing. But yet here we are. That’s funny.
SPEAKER 07 :
I know. I’ve got over 500 emails from you. And I think you’ll be shocked at how far they go back because I reversed them to see. It’s been nine years.
SPEAKER 1 :
2015.
SPEAKER 07 :
It’s been nine years. March. Wow. Of 2015 is the first one I have from you. And Steve Ebling was my producer.
SPEAKER 06 :
And I still Okay, that’s how it is. It must have gone because I had my own radio show. And I think Steve was the connector. Because I had Steven who’s he works for Voice America, right?
SPEAKER 07 :
Uh, I don’t know where he, no, I don’t, he worked with me, but he did work. Well, I don’t know. I mean, he’s worked a couple of different places.
SPEAKER 06 :
Steve’s the link because I remember I had my, I had two radio shows each 18 months each. They’re both in syndication right now.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 06 :
And I, or somewhere. And so, but that was long, long time ago, but Steve may have found, or I was a guest on someone’s show in there and made, but oh, isn’t that, but nine years. Oh my goodness. I feel old. Well, I have to tell you a funny story then. I went out dancing with, again, one of my folks that’s staying here is a gal from France. So I wanted to take her out and show her music. And so the band was playing 80s cover songs. These kids were 30 some years old. They don’t remember the original when they came out because they were in kindergarten. And I’m sitting here. It’s like, boy, you weren’t there when they first came out with these boys and girls. But I was.
SPEAKER 07 :
That is hilarious. I just can’t believe that I have over 500 emails from you, which says I need to clean out my box, but that’s what I was doing yesterday because I have on our 19,000 or something ridiculous like that. But anyway, I needed to go, um, you know, uh, delete a bunch of things because my memory was getting, you know, short per se and what I had available. Okay. Let’s get into these 18 things we wish, uh, people would told us, um, when we were 18, uh, And I love this one because I think a lot of people pursue careers because of what their parents tell them to do. Don’t worry too much about what other people think of you. I think some people and I know there are some family lineages where there’s a lot of pressure to do a certain thing that you may have no interest in doing. But also a lot of people worry about like I was with a group of young people this weekend and one of them that’s going to Princeton and then another one going to another great state in California. was making fun of another kid that’s trying to save some money and go to community college for two years and then go to a bigger university and making fun of him for kind of being a loser. And I was like, oh, my gosh, like that.
SPEAKER 06 :
He’s a smart one.
SPEAKER 07 :
That is why. Well, the other the girl, for instance, paying 80 grand a year and is playing sports.
SPEAKER 06 :
She’s going to have and that kid isn’t. That’s the smarter play. But short-term sacrifice, long-term game. They can’t see the long game, right?
SPEAKER 07 :
But kids will pay all that extra money or have their parents pay all that extra money and not go to a community college. And I found out if you go to a community college, by the way, which one of my kids is considering for the first two years, you – those grades, like let’s say you got C’s, that’s not on your GPA. So if you take your hard courses like calculus and stats and microeconomics, and let’s say you get a C in those, and then you go on, you know, to your bigger university or more prestigious university, those grades are not in your GPA. My understanding is they take the grade.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. We used to take extra classes so that we could graduate in four years. And you would save your hard classes. You wouldn’t have a semester-long class. You’d have it condensed in the summertime. So that angst and frustration would last six weeks, not 16.
SPEAKER 07 :
I love that. I love that. Okay, don’t worry. Don’t make your life choices on what you think others will think of you or wanting them to admire you. Because my opinion of those kids went way down when I heard about, you know.
SPEAKER 06 :
They just don’t have enough trips around the sun to understand the larger context. That’s all. I know. I know.
SPEAKER 07 :
All right. Commit yourself to making. Oh, you’ll love this. Commit yourself to making lots of little mistakes when you’re young because you talk a lot about failure.
SPEAKER 06 :
Absolutely. You got to have the ability to do it when there’s a safety net in there. That’s why I like my students to fail in school. Let’s try all those new skills. Let’s try all this stuff when your job’s not on the line. So you can learn more and fail less. But my whole point, fail faster, succeed sooner. But failure is part of the game. You got to learn how to do it and do it early.
SPEAKER 07 :
Find work you appreciate doing. You know, I used to love doing the news. I still do. Well, I mean, I wouldn’t say I do news now. I talk about life, you know, and faith and family. But find work you appreciate doing. Like, as I’ve thought about what my next act might be, you know, I really, as you know, love animals. I have five pets right now and I spend a lot of my day caring for them or walking them, feeding them. I make food for them. You know, last time I was cutting up red peppers for them. You know, it’s like I like animals. And so maybe I’ll get involved in some way, which I know it’s not lucrative. It wouldn’t have been what I would have done in my 20s. But maybe working with animals in a way, helping with adoptions, it may be a no-kill shelter. I don’t know if I could handle working at a kill shelter.
SPEAKER 06 :
I don’t know if I told you this when I was back in Albuquerque. I started my own Siberian Husky Rescue in Mexico. And it eventually became… A 501c3, and that was back in 1998. The group still exists, and I’ve been gone for almost more than a couple of decades. But that is the cool thing is that I had the courage to begin, and everybody was better at it than I was, has continued that legacy. But it is so cool to know that I did that small thing, and it’s still carrying on. And we used to do a couple, maybe, I don’t know, 10, 15 dogs a year. They do hundreds a year. It just warms my heart. And that’s where my current rescue came from. My last one is in there. She came through the rescue because they saw her and they’re like, Cheryl, that’s your dog. I’m like, yes, it is. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, my goodness.
SPEAKER 06 :
I can help. You let me know and I’ll be happy to share the pointers. But that was a labor of love. And I had no idea what I was doing back then. The fact that anybody followed me anywhere and she was hysterical and it still exists. So there you go.
SPEAKER 07 :
I also love young people, and I don’t know if I can handle the pain of this, but I like giving love. And I’ve thought about some of these doctors without borders or these ships that travel and do cleft palate surgery and go to different countries. Oh, mercy ships, yeah. Yes, I really thought about, you know, obviously, I’m not someone that can, you know, help with the medical aspects of it. But, you know, the patient aspect of, you know, you know, aftercare or pre counseling, or, you know, working with the patients directly in their families, like that’s something that would really appeal to me if I could handle the pain of their situation.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I think, yeah, that’s the hard. Yes. I’ve got an interview with a group on the 30th, actually, to be able to do some kind of transitional thing through a church. With moms and moms and teens and crisis and things thinking that, you know, I don’t have kids of my own, as you know, but as a college prof, I sure spend an awful lot of time with them that maybe I can help both of them. But my interviews on the 30th to see it’s like, you know what, we don’t have to solve world hunger single handedly, Angie. But if you’re just willing to make a sandwich, can you imagine what this world would look like?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, I love that. Okay, number four, again, 18 things I wish I was told when I was 18. Oh, it’s the last one we can do. Talk with lots of people in college and early on in your career. Like really become, like I would say, a reporter.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, we actually have a name for that. We call it informational interviewing. I teach my kids this all the time. It’s the fact of go find somebody who has a job you think you might like, go take them to lunch, go talk with them, go shadow them for a day. Don’t ask for the job. That’s not the point. The point is just to go find out because how they got there, everybody gets to wherever it is they’re going to be. through a variety of different degrees, different degree paths, et cetera. But just open your mouth and ask, and you’ll be amazed what people will share with you.
SPEAKER 07 :
I love that. I love that. All right, DrCherylLenz.com. Let’s pick up where we left off next time. Sounds great. And the next one is good. It’s invest a little time, energy, and money in yourself every day, even after college. And I think that you and I know a lot of that has to do with educating yourself. And I love, I wrote it down, informational interviewing. Love it. DrCherylLenz.com. Thanks, Cheryl. You too.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 07 :
Littleton is listening to the mighty 670 KLT Denver. Hey there, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news. Well, joining us today is Jeff Kerr, PETA Foundation Chief Legal Officer. And PETA has filed a first-of-its-kind First Amendment lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health. So break it all down for us, Jeff. Welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
Thank you very much for having me, Angie. Pleasure to be with you today. Our lawsuit seeks to enforce PETA’s fundamental First Amendment right to receive communications from the monkeys that are imprisoned and tortured in the NIH laboratory of an experimenter named Elizabeth Murray. Let me back up and sort of pull out a couple of threads on the First Amendment. Everybody understands that the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, but what’s less well known is that it equally protects the right to listen or the right to receive communications from those who are trying to communicate with us. And for years, for a number of years now, we’ve been following four macaques, macaque monkeys, in the laboratory of experimenter Elizabeth Murray. And what she subjects these monkeys to is horrific. She uses crude and invasive methods to damage the monkeys’ brains. And what I mean by that is she will immobilize each of the monkeys’ heads in a device, in a vice-like device, carves out a section of the skull, and injects toxins into the brain to cause permanent and traumatic brain damage. And in some cases she will actually suction out or burn out portions of the brain. She then, um, forces them into cramped darkened boxes and lifts a guillotine like door to, uh, expose them to frightening stimuli like rubber snakes and spiders that they’re naturally afraid of. And she filmed their reaction. Um, And they’re frequently deprived of food or water so that they’ll perform unnatural behaviors. And she’s tormented hundreds of monkeys over her 40 years of doing these types of experiments. And more than $50 million of taxpayer money has been wasted on these. And not a single treatment for humans has come out of them. And during our work of following her experiments, we’ve been able to obtain, we’ve had to fight for them, but we’ve obtained videos of some of these experiments. And what we’ve learned and what our primate experts and PETA scientists tell us is that the macaques are actually communicating during these experiments. They communicate like other primates. They use facial gestures. They use body posture. They use vocalizations. and other methods of trying to communicate the plight and the trauma that they’re enduring. And so what we did is we went to NIH and we said, look, we have a right to receive these communications, not just the little snippets that you’re videoing during your experiments, but during the entire time they’re confined in solitary confinement in barren metal cages before the experiments. During the time… that they’re having their heads cut into and their brains damaged. And after these experiments, we have a right to receive those communications. And what we already know that the experts involved in our case can tell us is just from the few video clips we have that they’re already showing recognizable characteristics, stress and fear responses, agitation, and understandably a desire to escape their confinement. We asked NIH to allow us to have this live video feed so that we could get those communications, and they refused. They refused outright and said, well, just keep submitting public records requests, which we presume would be for videos that don’t exist because they’re not making them in the first place. So it forced us to file this lawsuit in order to be able to receive these communications from the MCAC.
SPEAKER 07 :
You know, when I hear things like this, Jeff, you know, like when you told me this, I mean, I’ve been doing TV and radio news for 30 years and like I don’t cry during interviews. Like I started I mean, you’re making me cry explaining what is done to these monkeys. And when I hear stories like this. I can’t even believe that this exists in our world, that they’re taking these macaque monkeys that are named Beamish, Sam Smith, Knickknack, and Guinness, that they’ve spent years in cages, experimented on in such a horrific and painful manner. I mean, any animal… regardless of the level of intelligence. I mean, a macaque is way up above my dogs, right? My cats, but in terms of intelligence, but you know, when they’re fearful, you know, when they’re happy, you know, when they’re comfortable, I mean, fear is such an obvious communication technique for an animal and pain. And so I can’t imagine that we would be oblivious to the pain that they’re experiencing. If you, you know, had access to the videos of what they’re doing. I can’t believe we’re funding this for taxpayer money. I’m appalled. It’s,
SPEAKER 05 :
it’s i’m so glad you’re getting this story out because i can’t even believe this can be done but it’s legal oh yeah not only is it legal but every single year nih wastes tens of billions of dollars that’s with a b tens of billions of dollars from that from their budget on useless experiments on animals and we’ve been we’ve been fighting it for years now so the the guardedly good news is that our pressure is starting to pay off. Just last week, the NIH announced that it was launching a new initiative to reduce the use of animals in NIH-funded research and to prioritize human-based research technology. Now, this is the major paradigm shift that we’ve been calling for and pushing for, and importantly, the NIH new plan actually adopts several of the recommendations from PETA’s Research Modernization Now strategy, including things like expanding funding, training, and infrastructure for non-animal methods, and shifting funds away from experiments on animals and towards superior non-animal methods. Now, we’ve got a long way to go. There are way too many animals being tortured in these kinds of experiments, but they promised transparency, and we’re going to be watching carefully, and we’re going to hold their feet to the fire. But meanwhile, we’re going to continue to kick open the courthouse doors to file these lawsuits that will enforce our right to receive these communications so we can do exactly what you’re talking about, report and expose this information to the American public so that they know what’s being done in their name and with their money.
SPEAKER 07 :
You know, Jeff, I have to say some of the interviews I’ve done with your people at PETA recently have been pretty – eye-opening for me one of the people that I interviewed I’d say in the last month she actually was involved with experiments with animals while she was in school because it’s kind of required you know that you fulfill some of the obligations of the experiments that they want you to conduct while you’re in medical school or veterinary school etc and so to speak to someone who had been involved in it seen it firsthand and then is turned against it and is now speaking out against it and then you in the legal profession really like standing up for the rights of the, in this case, macaque monkeys. It’s pretty eye-opening to us. What is PETA seeking ultimately from the lawsuit, and is there anything we can do?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, absolutely. To answer your first question, what we’re seeking in the lawsuit is what we asked NIH early on, which is we would just like a live audiovisual feed from the laboratories so that we can see the macaques and receive their communications in real time. So that we can actually report without any government sponsorship, without any government interference, we can report everything that they’re telling us, that they’re communicating to us, to the American people. That’s first and foremost. The second question is, The most important thing for people to do is become aware and become involved, and that’s really easy. Just go to PETA.org. That’s P-E-T-A.org. You can see the lawsuit that we filed. You can also see and learn about PETA’s Research Modernization Now strategy that NIH has started to implement. And get involved. Write or call to your congresspeople, your senators, and demand that they move away from funding animal experiments and that they fund non-animal alternatives that are actually going to be better for the animals and better for human health. And contact NIH directly as well, either by phone or email, and demand that they stop these horrific experiments. Every card, every email, every letter, it matters.
SPEAKER 07 :
Jeff, I only have like a minute left, but I have to ask you, I know that you’re kind of one of the world’s leading animal liberation legal experts. How did you get into this work, if you can tell me in a minute?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, this is the answer to why people should never think that they’re not having an impact. I attended a lecture one night in 1993, and purely by happenstance, the lecture got changed to be about animal rights. And it changed my life that night. I’ve been vegan since that evening. So you never know when you’re going to have an impact on somebody when you’re spreading the animal’s message. Every animal is someone, and everything you do to help the animals makes a big difference.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, Jeff, thank you for all you’re doing for animals. I’m a big fan of them myself, and I appreciate you joining us on The Good News.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me. You bet.
SPEAKER 07 :
know i enjoy those interviews as tough as they are because i feel like i can’t believe that i don’t know this is happening like i i read the news every day i watch a lot of news but seriously all day long on you know perusing different news articles looking for good news or just catching up on the news and to not know what’s going on in terms of animal testing i’ve done two recent interviews where i’ve been shocked at the cruelty involved in some of this animal testing In the case of these macaque monkeys, I guess the good news is this lawsuit will hopefully help them. I also wanted to share with you a good news animal story, and this one has to do with a zookeeper. This guy, Alan Toyne, he did a regular nine to five job. And then he became a volunteer zookeeper at the Bristol Zoo in the UK. And it ended up that two gorillas were born premature and rejected by their mothers, Afia and Hassani. And he basically took them in. We’ll start with Afia. Like four weeks early, she was born four weeks early. The mom wanted nothing to do with her. So They wanted the babies to interact with the gorillas because that way they’ll be included more readily included by the gorillas as they grow up. But he also had to, you know, take care of the gorillas. So he got like a furry vest and the gorilla would ride around on his back. Athea would like holding onto his neck and he’d be on all fours with this furry vest on it went onto his back. He took the baby home in a car seat and introduced the baby to his wife, Sharon, and she fell in love with Afia, the baby gorilla, right away. And then gorillas eat at the same time together, and so they would have their tea in England, and the gorilla would sit down at the table and eat with them. And he said the gorilla won’t remember being in the car seat like babies don’t or being at the table in a high chair anymore. But they also allowed them to interact with the older gorillas as well so that they would be included and they wouldn’t be ostracized as they got older. And then this happened with a second gorilla, Hassani, who was also rejected by his mother after she stopped feeding him at like around four weeks in. And so the zookeepers actually had to keep bottle-feeding these babies well beyond a year to help nourish them, et cetera. And he said that if Afia, the girl, wanted to wake him up to play, she’d slap him on the head like a bongo drum. But if she wanted to wake his wife Sharon up, she’d gently stroke her face. He’s really loving, noticing the difference in the two. And he wrote a book about this recently, Gorillas in Our Midst. And his name is, again, Alan Toyne, T-O-Y-N-E. There’s an audio book, too. I think that might be pretty interesting. Just a cute little story of how he helped these gorillas, raise them and integrate them into their group at the Bristol Zoo. I’m Angie Austin. Thanks for listening to The Good News.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
SPEAKER 02 :
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