I had seen enough hospital shows that I could tell where to look for blood pressure and heart rate. Everything was dropping precipitously. And the doctor went over to the bed very, very quickly and he's like, I think this is it. So we all gathered around the bed and I watched my cousin, my best friend, take her last breaths in this life. And whether you've been in that situation for somebody that you don't know, or whether it was a situation like mine where it was someone who you cared more deeply for than anybody else that you've ever known in your life that is going to shape you to your core and it's going to shape you as far as the human being that you're going to be after that particular day and I remember saying to myself in that moment my cousin she was a brilliant brilliant person she would have been an amazing person going on in life but cancer took that away from her. So what I need to do is I need to do everything in my power to live my life in a way that honors her memory. It is yet another great day to get better. Welcome to episode 50, the big five zero of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mildly, and grow relentlessly. Join me, Toby Brooks, as I invite a new guest each week to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. I'm thrilled to be here with you for a milestone episode. When I first set out on this journey to launch not just a podcast, but a movement to help people be inspired by the stories of those who've battled through tough seasons in life to find their way to success. The goal was three episodes a week and at least a hundred and fifty episodes for the year, but life happened. I started a new degree. Stresses and demands and other parts of my life ate away at not just my time, but my motivation. And if I get really honest, somewhere in the middle I questioned if I had what it took to keep toiling down the sometimes lonely road of a person doing their best to build a show worth listening to. And so, in typical me fashion, even though episode 50 is cause for celebration, I find myself a little disappointed in not being where I said I'd initially be. Somehow I can easily find the ability to forgive others that fall short but give good effort, but I can't seem to be able to conjure the strength to do the same for me. At any rate, I am thrilled to bring you episode 50, which is significant for a number of reasons. First, this marks my second spouse duo, as I featured former elite gymnast Cara Frye in episode 2, followed by her husband and minor league baseball manager Mike Meyer in episode 5. Later, I featured Professor Julie Partridge in episode 34. And today I bring you her spouse, the tall one, Dr. Phil Anton in episode 50, who as luck would have it, wore number 50 back in the day. For renowned cancer rehabilitation researcher Dr. Phil Anton, it wasn't a well marked path from growing up the middle son of three in Hastings, Michigan. It took time and exploration to find his purpose. The trauma of losing his cousin Julie to cancer when he was just 18, simmered in the background as he went away to college and pursued career. Initially majoring in computer science before switching to business and ultimately landing on physical education. He eventually enrolled in grad school with a desire to teach in college and to prove a friend wrong. With his master's degree in exercise science nearing completion, a PhD seemed a logical next step. And it wasn't until considering the possibility of a doctoral program at the University of Northern Colorado over a decade after Julie's death, that it all finally clicked. And he realized that he could use his love for the benefits of exercise to serve and research ways to help others suffering from the disease. Since then, he's built one of the most recognized and respected cancer rehabilitation programs in the world. Here Dr. Phil tell his story of introvert turned extrovert, of WWF worthy basement cage matches between the three Anton brothers of a summer spent exploring the back trails of Colorado with a buddy in a Jeep and ultimately a first finding then living his purpose in episode 50 uninhibited. This week we are fortunate enough to have a good friend a longtime colleague and just all-around great guy Phil Anton is an associate professor and the program director for exercise science at SIU Carbondale. He is the director of the Strong Survivors Exercise and Nutrition Program for cancer survivors and caregivers, and he also directs the SIUC Cancer Rehabilitation Laboratory. Dr. Phil, great to have you on the show. Thanks, my brother. How are you doing? Doing great. So, you mark the second husband-wife duo that I've had, but I will say, milestone here, you are episode 50. So big deal. Seriously. Well, that's funny because I do a little radio show with my buddy Bob and we just did our 50th episode this past week. And guess what number I used to wear when I played basketball? Awesome. 55-0. Yep. Well, it's great to have you. It's been a long time coming. When I first conceived of this show, I thought of both you and Julie, because I love your stories, love you as humans, and you're just a couple of the funniest people I've ever known. So not to put any pressure on you, but I'm really counting on your comedic delivery and timing tonight. We always start at the beginning. Who did you want to be? What did you want to do growing up? All right. I had three possibilities that I wanted to achieve growing up. The first was I wanted to be an auto mechanic and that got dashed relatively quickly when it was determined that I was not exactly mechanically inclined. So you got to be mechanically inclined to be an auto mechanic so that one was what was dashed. The second was that I wanted to be a defensive end for the Detroit Lions and I got the hype for it. I am 6'5", but as far as the musculature and the athletic ability, that did not necessarily come into play for me. So my hero is Al Bubba Baker, old number 60 from the Silver Rush way back in the day in Lions history but I didn't achieve that one. And then the third potential goal was I loved game shows when I was growing up. One of the best parts about being sick and staying home from school is that I got to watch game shows during the day. And my favorite game show host was Gene Rayburn of the Mats game because he was a taller guy, he had real slick looking hair, I think it was a hairpiece but it was real slick looking and he was just a smooth smooth dude and I thought yeah I could definitely do that and never quite got there but I did eventually become a college professor which does allow me to sort of stand on stage periodically and achieve a little bit of that game show host role plus whenever we review for exams we always do our exam review challenge, and I play the host of the exam review, and they compete for extra credit points and have to answer questions relatable to the exercise science topics that we are covering. So I do get to play it there, and I actually have a set of microphones that have been made for me over the years that I actually hold. work but they helped me to roll out that that particular dream. If you haven't been lucky enough to have been a student in Phil's classroom take a sec to at least picture it. Here's Dr. Anton all six foot six or more of him, wiry frame, professional charm, but he's not just this tall former basketball player teaching you about the primary metabolic pathways or the chronic responses to exercise. He's managed to parlay childhood dreams of being a game show host into a career as a caring, effective, and award-winning educator, complete with pretend microphones so students can play right along as they prepare for an upcoming test or project. In a word, Phil is fun, and fun teachers oftentimes make for the most effective teachers. Absolutely. Well, that's great. You are wearing what I guess could be described as strong survivor yellow, but it looks kind of maize. So, you're a Michigan man through and through. Start at the beginning of your story, wherever that is for you. All right, so you mentioned Michigan. I did grow up in the great state of Michigan, and no self-respecting Michigander, when they're asked where they're from in the state of Michigan, the very first thing they do is they pop out their map of Michigan. So for those of you who are geographically challenged, Michigan is in the shape of a hand, or sometimes called the mitten of Michigan. And I grew up in a little town called Pastings, which is about a half hour south of Grand Rapids on the west side of the state. It's a town of about probably 7,000 to 8,000 people, depending on the year, very much a small town, very homogenized type of population, homogenized type of growing up. But yeah, I grew up in that small town and then spent all of my formative years there. Eventually ended up going to college after I graduated high school at Alma College, which is a Division III school in the middle of Michigan. In fact, it is exactly 20 minutes or 20 miles, one of the two, from the exact center of Michigan. And how you get the center of this, I have no idea, but there's some fancy math involved there. And it's just about in the middle of the state. And I did play one year of college basketball there, but you got to know that it's Division III school. I played on the JV team of the Division III school and I did not start. So I was about as low level of college basketball as you can get, but I did do that while I was there, made some great friends while I was there, and I found beginning of my calling there because I started out as a computer science major because when I was a senior in high school, that was about the time that personal computers were really becoming a thing. I think about out of the 200 that graduated from my high school class, maybe two families had a personal computer. Commodore 64s, I believe they were. And, but I took a computer programming class and the professor was one of the funniest, most affable individuals that I'd ever met. And I thought, yeah, yeah, computer science. This is the way of the future. Plus, I don't know if you remember this Toby, but there was a show on TV called whiz kids And it starred Matthew Labrador go I'm not sure how he's Albert from Little House on the Prairie And it was a group of high school kids who helped the local police solve crimes with computers And I was always into the mystery genre like the Hardy Boys and things of that nature So I thought yeah, you know I could maybe I can do that and then you know I mentioned math earlier I figured out pretty quickly that you have to take a lot of math to be a computer science major, and I barely survived Math in high school so that quickly was not necessarily what I wanted to wanted to do and I shifted to become a business major and Was in that for about a semester, and I came home for that first summer and my mom you know just from having conversations with her she knew that I was struggling to figure out what I was going to do as a career and you know we're just sitting around shooting the breeze and I was at the age where you know we all go through there for we think that our parents are probably the the biggest idiots that ever walked the face of the planet and she's like you know you've always really been into exercise. Like, can't you use that as like a career path? And I sat to myself there in the living room of my parents' house and I thought, oh my goodness, my mother is a stone-cold genius. Those of you heading to college, in college, or maybe even out of college, but still feeling like you haven't found your thing yet, take heart. Spoiler alert here, but Phil Anton is one of the world's most respected authorities on the positive benefits of exercise for cancer survivors. And in addition to being a great teacher, he's a recognized researcher and authority when it comes to the positive factors associated with an active lifestyle. But he hasn't always been laser-focused on that goal. It initially started as a goal to become a computer scientist, followed by a brief but similarly unfulfilling detour as a business major for a semester, before a convo with Mama Anton flipped the switch and opened Phil's eyes and heart to the possibility of a career studying exercise. And the rest, as they say, is history. So I looked around at different ways that I could use exercise science as a career path, and the one that seemed the most achievable in the time that I had left at Alma was to go into physical education. So I became a physical education and health major and that's what I graduated with from Alma way back in 1992. Yeah that's cool. So now you work with undergrads primarily also undergrad students but how would you say that process of kind of feeling your way through three tries until you really hit your sweet spot. How did that, I mean obviously you wouldn't have chosen that. That's hard on a young developing mind to think, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. But having gone through that, how do you think that's better prepared you to counsel and to speak into the students that gravitate to you there at Carbonet? Well, a couple of things. One is, I always tell students, don't be afraid to do a 180 degree switch because I went from computer science to physical education and health and those are pretty much on the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to different careers that you can get. A lot of students I think they get sort of locked into one area and they think, well, I got to do this or I got to do something similar to it. That's absolutely not the case. You should definitely explore different avenues and try to figure out where your passion lies. And then the second thing that I always express to them is listen to people. Don't try to solve things completely by yourself because the inspiration and the direction that you might need to be a great professional and to be a highly functioning and satisfied professional may come from sources that you wouldn't necessarily have expected because like I said at the time I did not have a super high opinion of my of my parents and their intelligence and my mom showed me that what an idiot I was in that in that circumstance and those would be the two the two main things that I have passed along and I've actually turned that into a recruiting tool because sometimes I'll have students that are interested in exercise science and then they have like a friend or a family member who might be interested in engineering or something along those lines. And I'm like, well, you know, I started out in computer science and I ended up in exercise science. So there's always pathways that you can take that gets you in a different direction. So I've tried to parlay that into trying to recruit more students into the exercise science area. Yeah, now growing up in Michigan, I know your background, but talk to me a little bit about home life for you and what mom and dad did and how that shaped who you were when you ended up on the doorstep at Alma. Well, I tell you what, I had the sort of a rare upbringing as far as upbringings go because I was the son of a Lutheran minister who he was a Lutheran minister for nearly 40 years. He's retired now. He still does, you know, some fill in work for different churches that need people to fill in for people who are sick or on vacation or when they're between pastors, that type of thing. But I spent a lot of time in the church growing up and my parents were always the type that my dad was never a, you know, fire and brimstone, pound the pulpit type of guy. He was the type that he led more by example and he was able to take the, you know, the stories of Scripture and the stories of Christianity and make them very personal for people. I've always said that he always did his best work when he was doing a funeral or he was doing a wedding. He was able to make things very personal for the people that were involved in those situations. But he also did a great job when he did his sermon or homily or whatever you want to call it. And as I grew up, I went through my rebellious phase. The last place I wanted to go on Sunday morning was to church because as I said to my mom as we were arguing, I listen to dad talk six other days out of the week, why do I have to go on a seventh day and hear him talk some more? Come on. And what I didn't realize part of my teenage idiocy was that my dad is easily one of the best that's ever done that job. But he did it in a way, particularly with the three of us, because I have an older brother and a younger brother, where he and my mother encouraged us to find our own path and to make our own decisions about spirituality and make our own decisions about where God or spirituality or whatever would play a role in our life. And what they said was, whatever you do, just try to be the best person that you can be. Try to be the best human that you can be. And he's very much more of a humanist than anything else. And so when I was moving through high school, of course I was rebelling and not wanting to go to church. And then when I got to college, I actually tried out a couple of different churches in Alma and realized very quickly that the ministers there didn't do it the same way my dad did it, didn't do it with the same aplomb that my father did. He was always very supportive of what I was doing. And when I would come home, especially on Christmas break, he and I would, he and I both like a glass of bourbon now and then, and it would be late at night and he'd pour us a little bourbon and he'd say, where you at with God? And we would have a frank and freewheeling discussion about religion, about spirituality, about God. So it was kind of a, you know, it was a great upbringing. We lived in rural Michigan and, you know, we're able to run around the neighborhood on our bikes and it was just a great growing up place. And our backyard was the place where all the baseball and football games happened. Our driveway was the place where all the basketball games happened. And it was just a great place to be a kid. And I had a great set of parents that allowed me to determine who I was going to be when I was an adult. I think that's an important perspective. One of the themes that's emerged out of this show, if I really get nerdy about it, this is a podcast that's qualitative research and it's interviewing people and hearing their stories and looking for themes in what high achievers are able to do and how they're able to overcome. And in particular, you touched on it, that identity, like being an Anton meant you were a preacher's kid. And being from that part of Michigan, Rust Belt, salt of the earth, the automotive industry, the blue collar work ethic that comes along with that upbringing. And then you throw athletics into the mix where you're also a basketball player looking to pursue that as long and as best you can. How would you have defined your identity when you showed up at Alma College? Yeah, that's a great question because I have a hard time convincing people these days that when I was in elementary school, middle school, and most of high school that I was shy, that I was the the type that you know would occasionally go to high school dances Because you know I was on the basketball team But I didn't have you know a lot of girlfriends. You know I wasn't like a gregarious individual at home I was more of a cut up. I was more as my mom would call it would say I was a ham So to speak but in public I definitely didn't have that persona, so to speak. And the second half of my senior year, I started kind of coming out of my social shell a little bit, and then when I got to Alma, it was really, honestly, because it was a smaller school, basically about 2,000, 2,500 students, somewhere in there, it was like having a second high school. Because everybody knew each other, for the most part, and it was a smaller place, it was a smaller town, and it felt a lot like Hastings, my hometown, where I grew up, and I think that helped to really ease that transition and help me to, again, come out of more of that social shell where I was able to show off a little more personality, and I found that I was able to entertain people relatively easily. People appreciated my gawky, sort of awkward sense of humor and way of moving around. And I became a pretty famous dancer at Alma and not because I could complete steps. I could not ballroom dance or jazz dance or salsa, whatever. It was because I was uninhibited. I would go wherever my arms and legs wanted me to go and for the most part when I would start dancing there would be a circle that would form around me and The circle had two purposes one was because it was a spectator sport people wanted to see the spectacle That was me dancing and they wanted to stay the hell out of the way too because they did not want to get hit by the arms and legs and elbows and knees that were flying around the room at that time. That's actually one of the ironic parts about myself and my wife Dr. Julie Partridge is that when I first met her she was teaching at a summer camp at the University of Northern Colorado and she was teaching dance classes. So she can do swing, she can do salsa, she can ballroom, she can do all of that stuff and that was one of the first agreements that we had to come to as a couple was that we would slow dance together, but we would never fast dance together because she couldn't do what I did and I couldn't do what she did. So we just had that agreement. But I think that that helped me to gain more confidence as a person to be able to feel like I could be a presence in a room. And I think that, even though I didn't know it, I think that helped me to further myself down the road towards becoming the college professor that I am today. And obviously, I became a phys ed and health instructor first. Did that for a couple years, and I realized that I could probably do that for the entirety of my career and have a very happy career, but I also felt like I was limited a little bit as far as what I could do exercise science-wise because you're, you know, as a phys ed teacher, you've got a lot of extra responsibilities that are on you and you don't have those other pathways that you can take and really what you can teach to the students isn't as in-depth as what you can do at the college level either. So, but I think, you know, that started me down that road and then, and then Alma and beyond, I was able to kind of get down that, uh, that road of being able to, Hey, have a sense of being like, all right, I can, I can actually bring something more to the world than my height, you know, being able to block out the sun for people or be able to reach stuff off of high shelves and grocery stores. I had more, I had more to offer than that. Well, I think we need to acknowledge the fact that as dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xers, we can always be thankful for the fact that there weren't cell phones recording like dance-offs and those types of things. So if there's video evidence of this, I'd love to see it. Yeah, there's a couple that are out there that haven't necessarily surfaced as of yet, but I'm sure they'll make their way to the top at some point. Yeah, well if you're like me, when you change into physical education, there's almost like a trepidation to sharing that. There's a big difference between saying I'm a computer science major and I'm a phys ed major. And now we call it kinesiology, and people say, well what's kinesiology? And there was a time in my life where I'd be like, let's be, you know, but it's not, it's different. Exercise science is not whistles and rolling the ball out. It's a different deal. And so later in your journey at Alma, you start to maybe come to the realization that this teaching thing might have some legs to it. Grad school starts to enter the equation. So talk me through that transition from undergrad to grad school. Absolutely, and that actually was a part of my transition out of Michigan because of course I had, you know, was born and raised there, went to college there, and actually the second year that I taught phys ed, I taught in my hometown and I actually lived with my parents. And that would be another piece of advice I would give to students is after you've been away at college, think very carefully about whether or not you move back in with your parents after that. Maybe you have to, maybe it's a necessity. And for me, I was able to save a bunch of money that year, making a teacher salary and not having to pay rent. But if I hadn't moved to Colorado the year after I spent with my parents, I'm not sure that my mom and I would be on speaking terms at this point, because one of us probably would have said, or both of us would have said something that we would have not been able to take back. But I had a friend who I was a fraternity brother with at Alma, and I actually knew him in high school, I didn't really know him personally, but he went to a rival high school called Delton, actually played basketball against him a couple of times in high school, but we went to the same college, we're in the same fraternity, and he had moved out to Colorado that previous year, so the year that I was teaching in my hometown, he had moved to Colorado, and he moved out there with his cousin, and his cousin had gotten pretty homesick the first couple of months that he was there, and ended up moving back to Michigan. So my buddy Brett, he's got this two bedroom apartment that he can't really afford. And so he knew that I was not happy living at home and maybe not happy with physical education as a career choice, looking at grad schools. We had talked about all that stuff. And he's like, you know, you don't have a girlfriend right now, you should just move out here. Like, I had always had sort of this, I don't know if it was a secret desire or whatever to live in Colorado because we went out there when I was younger. I had memories of that. And then we drove through it on our way to the Philmont Stout Ranch down in Cimarron, New Mexico when I was a junior in high school. So I had this feel for the state of Colorado that yeah, I could go live in the mountains. That'd be awesome. So in July of 1994, I packed up everything that I owned into my Chevy Lumina and I drove out to Colorado and I moved in with Brett. And at the time, he was working for Golden Technologies, which was a subsidiary of Coors, and he was a chemist. And being that it was a subsidiary, if Coors had any financial issues, it was first on the chopping block and he was the lowest person on the totem pole there in that company. So they had some issues, they had to make some cutbacks, so he got laid off. So right before I moved out there, he gets laid off. He goes on unemployment with the state of Colorado and I move out there and I had spread my salary over 12 months. So I was still getting paychecks in July, in August, and then in September. So for the first three months, I didn't have to have a job. He was getting unemployment pay. He had a Jeep Wrangler and a tent. And he and I were on the road for about a month, just driving around the state of Colorado with our Colorado Gazetteer, which is basically a topographical map of the state. And he and I just said, okay, that looks cool. And we just went there. Because with a Jeep Wrangler, of course, you can take all of those forest roads and Jeep trails and go to places that people with normal cars can't go. And I really discovered the state of Colorado, and I looked further into the idea of grad school and applied a couple of places. And Brett was actually very key in getting me very serious about grad school because, and he was right when he said this, he was like, you know what, you know, you always did well in school but I don't necessarily see you as grad school material and that pissed me off that was like You said what now and so at that point I'm like, hey I'm gonna go get a master's degree just to show my friend Brett that I can do this The ends justify the means I guess maybe there are worse reasons to get a graduate education than to rub your buddy Brett's nose in his disrespect. But either way, the fuse was lit and the dancing phys ed teacher from Hastings was on his way to becoming the real Dr. Phil. But master's degree first. And so I applied at University of Colorado at Boulder, eventually got in there. And Boulder, of course, was an appealing town because it's right there in the foothills of the mountains and has a very athletic population and a very young population. And it fit me very, very well. And so I lived in Denver for a couple years and then moved up to Boulder as I was going to school there. And as I was getting close to being done, I was still thinking, OK, so physical education, that's not where I want to go I've got this master's degree that I'm earning but I still don't really know what I want to do with my life like I don't know what my career is it is gonna be and once again Rud Engel bless him he says you know you always talked about how you like the teaching part of teaching. About how, you know, being a phys ed teacher, a lot of students looked at it as a glorified recess period and you needed to do a lot of discipline, you type of thing. He said, you can, as a master's degree, you can teach at the college level. And I hadn't ever even considered at that point being a college professor. And I thought, you know, I kind of came out of my shell as a college student, maybe I would fit very well with that population. So I started looking into it and discovered that yeah, you can teach with a master's degree, but if you really want to move up the chain as far as academics goes, having a doctoral degree is the way to go. And so that was kind of the next step that I got to. So in completing that master's degree, probably the biggest thing that grad school taught me is just being consistent and it's not something you can do in a day. It is not an insurmountable academic task as much as it is an organizational task for many. And a PhD is kind of more of the same. It's depth, it's deep, deep, deep, but not necessarily breadth. And so in looking at doctoral programs, what were the things you were looking for in making that transition from your first grad experience to your second? Well, I looked at a number of different exercise science programs around the country and applied it in a few different places and even went on a visit to the University of Georgia because Athens was a cool town and they had a very good program there. But at that point, I had lived in Colorado for about five years, maybe between five and six, and I wasn't quite ready to leave the state. And then also, very importantly, if I was going to be a college professor, I wanted to be a college professor who could actually teach, because by that time, as an undergrad and a master's student, I had had way too many classes with professors who were brilliant, brilliant people, but who couldn't make what was in their brain come out of their mouth in anything resembling a coherent fashion or make sense to anybody besides themselves in a very small fraction of the population. So I did not want to be that type of that type of professor that students dreaded getting because they were just impossible. So, as I'm looking around, I started to hear inklings about University of Northern Colorado. And they were known as the normal school in Colorado, which the normal school in any state is the one that has the most educational basis to it. And I began to hear from various people that they had a reputation for turning out PhDs who could teach. And I thought, you know, I'm not quite ready to leave Colorado yet. And Greeley was actually a bigger town than Boulder population-wise, but it felt like a smaller town, which was more along the lines of where I wanted to go. And they had that reputation for turning out PhDs who could teach, and so I applied there. And as it turned out, their program would have suited me fine regardless of who I met when I was there. But I found my purpose for living at the University of Northern Colorado, and it was a total stroke of luck. That's a great perspective for sure. Up to this point, I mean, yeah, you've had to change majors and maybe the basketball career didn't go as planned, but the theme in this show that I really wanna zero in on is failure and setback and adversity. At this point in your life, what would you say was your biggest failure as you showed up to start on that PhD? And what do you think taught you that success wouldn't have? In my head, I was 28, 29 years old, and I hadn't figured out what I was gonna do. That was, to me, my biggest failure, that I hadn't figured out where I was going to go as a professional. I hadn't established myself. I had had a heck of a lot of fun along the way, but I hadn't really established myself as a professional person. And I looked at lots of my friends, I looked at family members who had decided what they were gonna be early on in their lives, and I thought, man, I was still kinda living paycheck to paycheck, living the student life, and I'm like, wow, I mean, I just, I need a way that I can go. And that conversation I had with Brett about teaching at the college level was kind of like, yeah, maybe that could be it. And at Northern Colorado, I did meet Dr. Julie Partridge. She was not Dr. Julie Partridge yet at that time, but she and I were both in the same, not in the same academic program, but in the same school there at Northern Colorado and we became you know a couple and eventually got married while living out there. That's the sweetest thing I've ever heard you say Phil. That's fantastic. But I also found my second purpose for living and that was the area of cancer rehabilitation and that one was you know I was not searching for it. It was a again another total stroke of luck that I was able to just luck into the fact that at Northern Colorado, when you have people who apply to their PhD program, they do what we do here at SIU when we have people that apply to our master's program, if they don't say specifically who they wanna work with or what type of research they wanna do for their master's degree, we basically give them to the person who has the least number of advisees, or who was at the end of the line as far as when the last advisee was being assigned. And that's what happened to me. I was assigned to Dr. Carolyn Dennehy and I didn't know anything about her. I just knew that she was going to be my advisor. And so we set up a time for me to come up to Greeley and meet with her. And we're sitting there in her office and we're kind of shooting the breeze and immediately she impresses me as someone who I want to emulate. Just a great personality, clearly was great in the classroom, also had a solid research base. She was into muscle physiology, which really wasn't necessarily what what what I wanted to do but she was just I could tell she was going to be a great person to work with and we're sitting there and the topic of okay well what do you want to do research wise comes up I said well you know I did some cardiovascular research at CU Boulder and you know that was I enjoyed working with an older population because that's who we worked with. I was kind of hemming and hawing. And I think she picked up on the fact that this kid doesn't know what he wants to do. So she just threw out this little nugget. She said, well, have you ever heard of cancer rehabilitation? And I said, well, I've heard of cardiac rehab, I've heard of rehab from drug addiction, rehab from injury, lots of different types of rehab, but I've never heard of cancer rehab and she said these magic words Well, we have a program called Rocky Mountain Cancer Rehab Institute that we just started a year and a half ago and what we do is we use exercise as a therapeutic tool to Help cancer survivors and caregivers get through the treatment and recovery period. OK, so buckle in, folks, because I need to go back in time. And on a TV show back in the day when they were going back in time, what would they do, Tubby? They would go doo, doo, doo, exactly, the whole Wayne's World thing. Wayne's World, funny time, and she and I were best friends. We liked the same music, we liked the same movies, same TV shows, we had the same stupid sense of humor, everything lined up. We were just best buddies. And when When she was 13, she was diagnosed with a sarcoma, which is a tumor, it's a rarer type of tumor that was in her right femur, right above her knee. And so they went to all sorts of specialists and they determined that the best thing for her in that situation, because of the situation of where the tumor was situated, was that she was going to need to have an amputation. Because they said, we could do surgery to remove the tumor from that spot in your femur, but you would basically lose the use of that leg. It would basically become a peg leg. So the better thing for you would be to do this amputation. It's gonna be a difficult process, but you would get a prosthetic limb, and you would be able to have a normal life, and we'd be able to remove the entirety of that tumor and hopefully get that cancer out of the body. So that's what they decided to do and she had that amputation. And for about a year and a half, everything looked pretty good. She kind of returned to her normal life, went back to school, got a prosthetic limb, learned how to use that. She couldn't do a lot of the things that she was doing before physically, but she was able to do most everything. And about a year and a half after that surgery, she of course had all sorts of scans that were done of different areas to make sure that there wasn't a metastasis that had occurred and they found a spot in one of her lungs. And that started a cancer odyssey for her that went from her lungs to her kidney and eventually to her brain. She had I believe nine different surgeries to remove tumors from her lungs. She lost one of her kidneys at one point and then eventually the last place that it showed up was in her brain. And it was a about a five-year period of time that she battled cancer. And she of course went through countless rounds of radiation, chemotherapy, all sorts of different treatments that have nasty side effects. And we didn't live in the same place because I was in Michigan and she was in Chicago in a suburb called Barrington outside the city. But we were in touch not every single day, but almost every single day, either by phone. We wrote each other letters and we kind of grew up together during her cancer battle. I still remember the day that we were visiting her. This was when I was 18, she was 17. She had been battling this thing for four years. We had been watching a movie at their house and the movie got over and we just started kind of talking. All of a sudden she said, you know, I've been battling this thing for four years and I want to keep on battling this but if if cancer is gonna take me I'm ready to die and I remember in that moment thinking I'm only 18 she's only 17 how is a 17 year old coming up with the bravery the the cojones to be able to say, I'm ready to die. It still to this day is the bravest thing I've ever heard anybody say. And so that launched us into this whole discussion about death and dying and so on and so forth. And it really kind of took our friendship and our cousinship to the next level, so to speak. And she passed away a year later. And I had obviously started school at Alma at that point. So I'm living in Alma, and my mom had made many, many trips to Chicago to help her sister, because her sister, my Aunt Judy, was Julie's primary caregiver during that time. And my mom would go down there to help her. And I knew she wasn't doing well. She had to go back into the hospital. And I found out from my mom that she had slipped into a coma. And they were hoping to bring her out of it, but it wasn't looking good. And I got a phone call from my mom that I had been dreading since the moment that cancer first came into our vocabulary as a family. And that was, it's looking like it's getting close to the end here, and she said I know you've said you want to be with her at The end so if you if you want to be here You better go right now So I got a hold of my buddy Scott Shussell who was a year behind me at Alma And I grew up in Hastings with with him. He drove me to my parents house in Hastings Which is about two hours away from Alma? I grabbed my dad's car and I start the trip to go from Hastings around the corner of Lake Michigan and over to Chicago. This was in April. Those of you who are familiar with that area of the country know that that southern tip of Lake Michigan is very famous for very weird weather, especially in the springtime. It happened to be that there was a huge temperature drop, a huge storm came across Lake Michigan that was a whiteout blizzard. This is in April, and I'm driving along, and I'm driving 94, and at times I'm going maybe like five, 10 miles an hour, white knuckling the whole way, there's cars, semis off the side of the road. I'm beginning to think, am I gonna have to stop? Am I gonna have to like, you know, pull over here, get a hotel, get there the next day? And in my head I'm like, no, what if she passes away and I'm not there so that just kept driving me and driving me and driving me and finally what was supposed to be usually about a three and a half to four hour trip depending on traffic for my parents house ended up being a nine to ten hour trip I finally got to downtown Chicago which is where the hospital was where where she was and this is of course was the days before GPS and I got there at like 1 in the morning. So it's like, you know, nothing is open. And it's like, I'm trying to find this place. My dad had kind of given me some directions. And I finally found the hospital, found the parking garage, and I go running in to the information desk. And Toby, you know that there are some people that should be serving the public. There are some people that are very good at with their people skills that are very good at engaging with the public and there are people that shouldn't be. And there was a receptionist who was working there who I think they made her work the graveyard shift because she couldn't work the day shift when there were more people in the hospital. Because I came up to the to the desk and of course I'm completely frazzled. I've been driving through a white knuckle snowstorm. I've been driving for 10 hours thinking the whole time that my cousin's going to pass away. My head has just completely turned the wrong direction. I'm like, I need to find the intensive care unit. My cousin is Julie Hohnerkamp. Of course, I'm probably talking about 100 miles a minute. She goes, wait, wait, wait, What what do you need I? Can't understand a word you're saying just you have to slow down I I don't understand you and of course immediately. I'm back on my heels going I Don't I couldn't even get any words up luckily there was a nurse that was walking behind the desk at that time She recognized what was going on and she steps over she goes Gladys what's the what's happening here? She's good. I don't know this guy needs to find something, I can't understand him, I don't know what's happening. And this nurse, whose name I never got, she leans across the dish and she goes, honey, what do you need? And I said, and immediately, like I was, I calmed down, I'm like, okay, Julie Hohnerkamp, she's my cousin, she's in intensive care, I need to get there as quickly as possible. She's dying. And she goes, honey, follow me. And she took me, I don't even remember what hospital this was, but she took me on this route through the hospital. I swear, we went through the cafeteria, we went through the morgue, we went through up and down staircases, up and down elevators, but we made it to my cousin's room in like five minutes. And the whole time, when we weren't in the elevators, we were running. And this woman, she was not small, but somehow she is out sprinting me. Like, I mean, my legs were five times taller than what she was, and she's out sprinting me. We get to the door of my cousin's room, she's like, honey, here it is. I am sucking wind. Like, I'm a college athlete at that time. Sucking wind. She's not even breathing heavy. And that's one of those moments where I kind of thought, looking back, was she real? Or was she like an angel sent to Earth? Like, what was happening here? She's like, she gives me a big hug. She goes, honey, good luck. And so I open the door, and the first person I see is my mom. And she can tell that I'm completely frazzled. She goes, it's OK. She's still here. So I come in the room, give my mom a hug. And my aunt and uncle were over in the corner talking to one of the doctors. My cousin John's there, her brother, he gives me a hug and then I go over to her bed and she of course is hooked up to all sorts of machines that are helping her breathe and helping her stay alive and I basically said my goodbyes to her. What I didn't know was that my aunt and uncle were in the corner talking to the doctor about whether or not they should just take her off life support because there was no brain activity. There was, you know, she was just being kept alive by the machines at that at that point. And so I stepped away from the bed and I went over and I hugged my mom, started crying my eyes out and all of a sudden all the machines that she was hooked up to started making noise. And I turned around and of course I had seen enough hospital shows that I could tell where to look for blood pressure and heart rate. Everything was dropping precipitously and the doctor went over to the bed very quickly and he's like, I think this is it. And so we all gathered around the bed and I watched my cousin, my best friend, take her last breaths in this life. And whether you've been in that situation for somebody that you don't know, or whether it was a situation like mine where it was someone who you cared more deeply for than anybody else that you've ever known in your life, that is going to shake you to your core and it's going to shape you as far as the human being that you're going to be after that particular day. And I remember saying to myself in that moment, my cousin, she was a brilliant, brilliant person. She would have been an amazing person going on in life, but cancer took that away from her. So what I need to do is I need to do everything in my power to live my life in a way that honors her memory and helps people that are in the same situation that she was in. So in the time since then I had you know I had participated in like Race for the Cure and Relay for Life, you know programs like that that helped to fund cancer research but I never really felt like I was doing enough. So if we go I guess you go in the other direction coming back in time, right? So we come back to me sitting in dr. Dennehy's office and she says, you know We use exercise as a therapeutic tool to help cancer survivors and caregivers get through the treatment and recovery period and She still laughs at me about this to this day because she said as soon as she said that I went like this I was just staring at her mouth breathing and I was sit, I sat that way for about 20 seconds. And she thought, something wrong with this guy? Is he like having a stroke? Like what is going on? And she was just about to say, are you okay? And all she got out was, are you, and I said, that's it! That's what I want to do! Because in that moment, I remember all of these things about my upbringing and about my cousin, our friendship, her battle, and I think here is a way that I can use exercise, something that I truly love, to help people that are going through a lot of the same crap that she went through in the five-year struggle that she had with cancer. It was the one of those light bulb moments where all the light bulbs in the world are on or the you know the universe is functioning perfectly, all the planets are aligned, you know, it's that aha moment of oh my goodness, this is what I was put on this earth to do. And after that, I, of course, I told, because Dr. Dennehy had no idea what I was thinking. And so I went through that whole story that I just told you guys. And by the end of it, I was just a mess, a pool of tears, just bawling my eyes out. And she, of course, reached across the table with some Kleenex and I'm dabbing my eyes. Dr. Dennehy is one of the funniest people I've ever met. She had the ability to be able to say things that were the perfect thing to say in that situation. She sort of settles back in her chair and she steeples her hands underneath her chin, kind of in the classic professorial manner. She goes, well, Phil, you know what? I think cancer rehab is going to be a good fit for me. And immediately through my tears, through my emotion, I recognized Gain. Like she's clowning me here. And I'm like, I had so much appreciation for the fact that she knew what I needed to hear was, you know, sort of like, you know, a bit of sarcasm. And like I immediately started laughing, she starts laughing, and we started talking about cancer rehab. I got to go through one of the first classes of trainees for Rocky Mountain Cancer Rehab, learned all about cancer, cancer treatment, how to use exercise as a therapeutic tool. And then when it came time to move here to Carbondale, I was at the point where I was getting ready to collect data for my dissertation, which was activities of daily living in cancer survivors who were going through treatment and how exercise might be used to help them maintain that performance. And when I got here to SIU, got here to Carbondale, no one else was doing anything cancer rehab wise. So I was able to help start the Strong Survivors Program. It wasn't called that initially, but it was basically what I was doing at SIU plus Southern Illinois Health Care, which is the biggest health care provider here in the region. They had written for a grant to the Livestrong Foundation to fund a cancer exercise program and then John A. Logan College, the local community college, they were looking for a program to run out there for cancer survivors because two of the guys out there, Jerry Bechtel and Chris Georgantis, had actually been out to northern Colorado to visit Rocky Mountain Cancer Rehab to learn all about what they did because they wanted to bring that to Southern Illinois. So I got in with the right people at the right time and through that three-way collaboration, we were able to start the Strong Survivors Program in 2005. And we've been doing it here at SIU and out at the community college ever since. it's become, besides the marriage to my wife Julie, is my reason for living, is my special purpose as Navin R. Johnson said in a totally different context in the movie The Jerk. But yeah, it really was one of those moments of, wow, I saw my future in front of me sitting there in Dr. Dennehy's office and then it's just become what it is and it's done a lot of good for cancer survivors and caregivers in the region and it's done a lot of good for SIU students who've had the ability to go through my staff training class to learn how to use exercise as a therapeutic tool in that population. So it's been a fantastic thing and I hope to continue that and help to proliferate that across the country, across the world, across the universe as far as we can go. Yeah, even the vernacular, it's changed over the years. Hearing someone talk about cancer survivors was very different, cancer patients. The outlook was never good, it was always grim. My grandfather passed away from cancer and it wasn't a question of whether or not he was gonna survive, it was a question of when's he gonna die. And usually alone, usually in home care, isolated, but your work has shined a spotlight on the social impact, not just of the physical benefits of exercise, but how people with this shared trauma can bind together. They can also be bound to caregivers, and the result far outweighs any individual efforts. If they were exercising in their garage alone, they don't have the same outcomes as they have when they bond together. So talk to us a little bit about the social aspect, not just the physical aspect of the work that you do. Well, I tell you what, I'll start with sort of an example of the type of relationship that develops between the students who are the staff members and the participants who are community people. I like to say that we have a lot of adopted nieces, nephews, and grandkids, and conversely, a lot of adopted aunts, uncles, and grandparents that come out of this program because that's the type of relationship that develops there. And I've had lots of students who have told me how having strong survivors on their resume helped them professionally, the training that they got helped them professionally, but when I talk to them years down the road, that's not really what they're focused on. They're always asking, well, how's so-and-so doing? I haven't talked to her in a while, because that's the crux of their experience. And Dr. Partridge and I go to every graduation ceremony, both in the winter and in the spring. And invariably, there's always going to be some strong survivor staff members that will be going through the line. And I'm not like you, I'm not supposed to have favorites amongst my students, but I will confess here on your show that my Strong Survivors staff members are among my favorite students. But they come through the line, and their name is announced, and you hear their family going crazy, and it's a very proud moment for me, but in many cases, I'll look up in the second deck of the Banterra Center where the SIU basketball teams play and I'll see one person standing up there applauding graduation gift underneath their arm and I'll kind of look up like who is oh that's Jim Emily who just graduated she was his strong survivor staff member while she was in school and in many cases people like Jim have even though they're a member of the Southern Illinois community, they often don't have any connection to SIU. They're not an employee, they're not a former employee, they didn't go to school here, they don't have kids or grandkids that fit any of those descriptions. They don't go to sporting events, they don't go to plays or orchestra or movies or whatever, anything that the university puts on. The only connection that they have is to this program. And Toby, you've been to enough graduation ceremonies to be able to say that, you know, it's not the most exciting two hours that you could, or more, that you could be there for. Now, when the person that you're there for, they get up and they get in line and then their name is called, that's all fun, but there's a lot of, you know, sitting around and like, okay, how long are we gonna be here type of stuff. Plus, you got to fight through car traffic, people traffic, to find a place to get in, to sit, to get out, all of those things, it's a giant pain in the butt for a lot of people, and for a person like Jim, he represents someone who doesn't have a connection to SIU except for strong survivors, for him to say, I'm going to that kid's graduation is a pretty amazing thing, and then after the ceremony, periodically, I'll be walking around in the concourse or outside where the students are meeting with their families and I'll see strong survivors participants getting pulled into family photos. When that happens, this guy has got to find some of Dr. Denny's Kleenex and find himself a nice quiet corner to have a healthy happy cry because that is, that's you know, kind of a great capstone on the whole experience. And that really says everything that you can say about the relationship and about the positive impact that we've been able to have as a program at SIU. Yeah, that's a pinnacle moment for sure. So you graduate with a PhD, spend your career working with cancer survivors and also college students. What do you think being immersed in that environment, being surrounded by people who are overcoming, like every day is an overcoming moment for a patient in the Strong Survivors Program. What has that experience taught you that just being a college professor wouldn't have taught you? Well, I think that one of the main things is that you get to see life from a different perspective. And I obviously had some of that perspective because of going through my cousin's situation, but continuing to have those experiences where you are working with people who are struggling through one of the toughest things that a human being can struggle through, I think that that for me is a great thing, but it also helps me to translate that to the student staff members who are in that same age range that I was in when I was trying to decide what I was going to do as a career and it really helps them to gain a perspective on what other people are going through and be able to look outside themselves, outside their own selfish needs to be able to say, you know what, let's do what we can do to help these people to maintain or improve their quality of life while they're going through this often nasty experience. And I think that that is one of the things that is truly unique about what students who go through the Strong Survivor staff training and then eventually work with participants are able to gain. And maybe there would be other experiences out there that would allow them that type of thing. But they really become a part of that cancer survivor or caregiver's medical team and really become a part of their family. And it just gives them that perspective that they probably wouldn't have if they hadn't had that experience. For sure. Our used to be president, now TTU system chancellor came from the Cooper Institute. So he's an exercises medicine guy. And I've heard him talk several times to university as well as outside as well. And he would say something along the lines of if I could give you a pill that could cure insomnia enhance your productivity Boost your sex life improve your self-esteem like he rattles off this list Would you take it and inevitably, you know, raise your hand if you'd take that drug and everybody does and he says exercise is that drug? Yeah, and I think Recognizing that exercise is medicine and it's not just a physical medicine. It's not a pharmacological agent, it's a psychological agent as well. Yeah, if you look at what we do with our participants from a physical standpoint, they're not able to do a lot of things that an apparently healthy population can do physically, but from a psychological perspective, their perceived fatigue, their perceived quality of life, all of that just goes through the roof as a participant in our program, and that influences the way that they feel physically. And it's just this whole mind-body connection that we are able to enhance, I think is a big, big thing. And really, I think we're helping to break down barriers because, like you alluded to earlier, there's not a whole lot that a lot of oncologists know about exercise or about quality of life. They're there to treat the cancer. They're not always able to have enough time to be able to treat the person. And that's where our program tries to step in to the gap and try to make that difference for folks. And it's not all a bowl of cherries, because with cancer, you're gonna lose some people. And just this past year, we said goodbye to three of the stalwarts of strong survivors. That's one of the things I tell the students about during the staff training is you have to be able to, number one, while you're in sessions with these folks, sometimes you have to put on your amateur psychiatrist or psychologist hat because they're going to ask you or talk to you about things that might be uncomfortable. And you may have to do your best to try to assist them through that. And then you might end up losing some of those people. And it's just what you sign on for. Luckily, I've been fortunate enough to have the students that have volunteered for the program, be the students that are pretty well suited for that type of thing, with a few obvious exceptions here and there. But for the most part, I've been very lucky as far as the students that have become a part of the Strong Survivor staff. Yeah. Well, it's been fantastic to watch you grow and to watch the program literally start from nothing into what it is today. It's definitely impactful for the university, the community, beyond the community all the way out to John A. Carterville. It's spread to the entire region. What advice would you give younger you now that you've been down this path, you've taken this route and it's shaped you as a professor, as a man, as a husband, as an expert in your field. Well, I'll tell you what, number one, I said this a while back, is listen to people. Listen to your friends, listen to your parents, listen to mentors that you might have. Seek out guidance. Don't try to do everything by yourself. So I've covered that ground, but also, even if you haven't figured out what you're meant to do, even if you never have the light bulb moment like I had at Dr. Dennehy's office, don't despair. Because I was 29 going on 30 when I had that experience. And for a lot of people, that's a third of your life that's already been lived, and you haven't figured out what you're going to do with your life yet. Don't despair because a lot of amazing things can happen, especially when you're not necessarily looking for it. We've been re-watching the show Lost and one of the things that John Locke says is one of the best ways to find something you're looking for is to stop looking for it. And there's a lot of truth to that and I am living proof of that type of thing. You can't be apathetic. You have to still be trying to make your way as best you can, but try not to despair because the answers are out there, the avenues are out there, and you'll get there eventually. Yeah. Well, I can honestly say I've asked this question of most of my guests. I've never had as much trepidation in asking it as I do right now, because your knowledge of pop culture is second to none, but I love music and the emotion that it can represent. What song would you pick as the soundtrack to the montage of your life and why? There is, I mean, obviously, there is a gamut of musical selections that I could go with, but the song that's always meant the most to me, or at least since I think 1986 was the first time that I heard it, it's a song by my favorite band of all time, U2, and it's a song from their album, The Unforgettable Fire, called Bad. And it's the live version of that, because the version that's on the studio album is great, but they take it to the next level live. And that song is just, it's got everything. It's got subtlety, it's got bombastic emotion, it goes from being very, very quiet to being just a freight train yowl at the end. It's just, as Larry Mullen Judron once said in Rattle and Hum, it's a musical journey. And that really, I think, would be the the soundtrack that I want to hear. That's awesome. So I put these together into a Spotify playlist for all my guests so that we've got kind of a musical compilation of what they picked. Last one. It's been a great career. There's certainly a lot left ahead but what for Dr. Phil Anton Remains Undone? Well I think we've done a lot of great things with this program, but I think we can do more from the perspective of outreach as far as connecting what we do with more and more areas around the region, allowing or having more places where people can access the program that are easier to get to. Because for a lot of people, you know, getting to Carbondale, getting to campus, or getting over to Johnny Logan is not an easy thing. So, trying to ease the access of it as much as possible. And a part of that too is gaining the support of big name players in the area of oncology who could have the juice necessary to help this become, like cardiac rehab, a part of the standard of care. Because I always kind of make that analogy that cancer rehab is sort of where cardiac rehab was when it was first getting started, where people were telling cardiologists, yeah, the best thing to do with these people who just had a heart attack or major cardiac event is to have them exercise. Like, are you crazy? No, they need to rest. And the same thing is said about cancer patients that yeah, they need rest, but they also need to be physically active too at the same time to help maintain their quality of life. And that's what we're hoping for is that eventually a cancer diagnosis will mean that you are funneled into immediately into a cancer rehab program. And that's where from a big-picture point of view I want to get there. But from more of a local point of view I want to you know be able to proliferate what we do across the region and then also have my students take it forward into areas that they end up in around the country. Yeah, I just want to thank you for the work that you do. I mean, this is community-engaged scholarship unlike anything I've really seen, certainly in Southern Illinois. I think it's unprecedented. It's changing lives and to me it is a beautiful marriage between what a university was founded to do. It's to enhance scholarship and to forward science and prove the human condition. But universities don't live in vacuums, they live in communities. And so if you can tie that mission to actually serving and helping the people in the community in which you are planted, that is beautiful. It's so powerful that a professor from Michigan by way of Colorado can put down roots in Carbondale and impact somebody's grandma, what could be better? It's like it kind of makes the world shrink a little bit, which is always a nice thing. And you know from being in academia that as a professor you've got to be a teacher, you've got to be a researcher, and you've got to do service. Strong Survivors allows all three of those things to happen very easily, and they all are tied together. Like Lou Gehrig said, I consider myself to be one of the luckiest men on the face of the planet. And I definitely feel that way without a doubt. Yeah. Well, Phil, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for your time. And congratulations on Episode 50. Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity, buddy. It was great talking to you. For Dr. Phil Anton, it's been a rewarding and impactful journey from young Michigander struggling to find his place in the world, but through hard work, soul searching, and divine timing of the perfect people, the perfect programs, and the perfect opportunities, he's turned the tragedy of a cherished lost loved one into an incredibly impactful place as a premier expert in cancer rehabilitation. And he's not done yet. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash ep50 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, Phil Anton. If you enjoyed the show, I've got just one simple request. Would you please be so kind as to share it with someone else? I'd really appreciate it. It would go a long way in helping me spread the word about becoming undone. I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout. So if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, tell me about it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com, click that connect tab in the top menu and drop me a note. Coming up, I've got Dr. Garfield Bright, one of the original members of the iconic and award winning 90's R&B quartet, Shy. Fitness business legend, Pat Rigsby, drops in. And then I've got the incredible story of Shelby Perry, CEO and founder of iHesive, a non-profit created to help those who have suffered from the loss of an eye. So stay tuned. this and more coming up on Becoming Undone. Becoming Undone is a NitroHype creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn at becoming undone pod and follow me at Toby J. Brooks on Twitter or X Instagram and TikTok. Listen, subscribe and leave us a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Till next time everybody, keep getting better. you