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Heights of Victory with Dr. Tedd Mitchell · Heights of Victory

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: From the Mast Rider Capital worldwide headquarters in Lubbock, Texas, this is Heights of Victory, a program showcasing businesses and leaders from across the region.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can expect to hear stories of success with bounts of adsity and resilience, which, when paired with hard work and a little West Texas grit, culminate in the Heights of Victory.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Heights of Victory.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Jeff Horne, CEO of Mass Rider Capital, and today we are honored to welcome Dr.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Ted Mitchell.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Ted served as the eighth president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and then as the Fifth Chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Today he holds the titles of Chancellor Emeritus of the Texas Tech University System and President Emeritus of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Under his leadership, the Texas Tech University System opened the first new veterinary school in Texas in more than a century, just up the road in Amarillo, Texas, along with the new dental school in El Paso.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: He championed the Texas University Fund, approved by the Texas voters in 2023, which secured lasting research, helping fund Texas, helping Texas Tech to compete with the best universities in the nation.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Along the way, he welcomed Midwestern State University into the system, built a values-based culture across every campus, and grew the Health Sciences Center into the institution that graduates more healthcare professionals than any other in the state of Texas.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Mitchell, welcome to the Heights of Victory.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be here, Jeff.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of fun.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, we're so excited that you're here.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, for people that are first-time guests, we go into all the way back to childhood, and then as we go through your life experiences, we'll dig a little deeper, and then at the end we like to have a little fun with what we call around the horn.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds great.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get started.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we visited the other day, and you were born in uh Columbia, Louisiana, raised in Longview, Texas.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me what it was like being a young lad over in East Texas.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I will tell you, do you remember the show The Wonder Years?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was just like that.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was really great.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, when we were all growing up, I was born at the tail end of the baby boom.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And in our generation, we were the ones that grew up riding bicycles all over the neighborhood, no helmets, drinking out of anybody's water hose along the way, riding to the Dairy Queen, going to the five and dime, and just having to be back before dark.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was really looking back on a very, very kind of idyllic, carefree time.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Back when kids used to get out and ride their bicycles on the sidewalk.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Lay out in the backyard and stuff like that.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you're playing ball or on a trampoline, we didn't have safety nets around it.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm surprised we didn't get killed.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, in in spite of all that, you made it through.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're riding the cars with no seat belts, everybody wanted to be in the back end of the station wagon or the back end of a pickup.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a very different time.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Your parents both grew up in Louisiana and were LSU fans.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And your mom was a school teacher, your dad served in Korea and then came home and worked uh as a driller in the wool field, and then went back to school and became a doctor.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us the lessons that you took from your parents, you know, as you did grow up.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my mother was always about, well, for one thing, uh, she was about teaching.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: And her minor in college was in library sciences.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that that my mother always made sure, every house that we lived in, we always had a library, a real library, with books that were in there based on the Dewey Decimal system.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if you pulled a book out, by golly, you better put it back where it belongs and this and that.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: So every summer she'd make us read books.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was one of the things she wanted to make sure that along the way that you were uh focused on education as well as all the activities you were involved with.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And she was always about the family.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: My dad, on the other hand, was a very blue-collar guy.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: He grew up in a small community in Louisiana working blue-collar jobs all along.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: He went to Korea, he came back and he was a driller in the oil field for a decade before he ever went to college.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so, even though he was a head and neck surgeon when he finished schooling, he was a very blue-collar guy.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we were never, as kids growing up, we were never country club kids or anything like that.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you when we were visiting, you use words like perseverance, sure, grit that you've received from your father and your mom, you know, she was the glue to cook the meals for you know, all of you boys and your one sister and then all of your friends and teams that y'all, you know, and that she was everywhere all the time.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean and think of it.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: So there are five kids in my family, five kids with five different sets of activities.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know how she did it, but in all of my memory, not just at football games and baseball games and basketball games and the like, but even at practices.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: I remember practices with my mother sitting out there in the station wagon watching our practice.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this is all of us.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't I don't know if she cloned herself.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not exactly sure how she did it, but she was always present.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Dad would make sure that he was present for your games.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: But otherwise, he was working.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and my dad was always somebody that so mom was the glue of everything that we did.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad was the one that was teaching you lessons and perseverance.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he was always the guy that uh when I later on in high school and college, one of the odd jobs that I had was working as an orderly in the hospital.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad in the operating room was always first guy in the operating room, he was the last guy going out.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: He was the first guy in his office, his clinic, and the last guy coming out.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: He just always worked hard.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: And his whole thing was you put your nose to it and and you just keep going and keep going.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you want good things to happen, you've got to make it happen yourself.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Think you're a good mixture of both of them?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think if you'd asked some of my brothers, I might have the worst of both of them.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have to ask my siblings about that.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, speaking of your siblings, you know, you had your you know, you have your sister, she was the firstborn, and then four boys right in a row, and you're smack dab in the middle.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're a middle child.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So tell us what it was like growing up.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it had to be a pretty competitive household.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of crazy because my sister was significantly older.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: So the the sentiment in our house was my parents raised Beth and then the boys.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: We were never referred to by name.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: We were the boys.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And even on our clothing, every summer we'd have to, or every fall, we'd have to try on everybody's clothes.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so my brother Clay was Mitchell one, I was Mitchell two, Mitchell three, Mitchell four, and you just keep handing down the clothes to everybody every year.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so you didn't go shopping, you just got your hand-me-downs from the guy before you.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so we were all very competitive.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Our house was like a combination of the Waltons and the World Wrestling Federation.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it was fun.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was a lot of fun growing up.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: What all were you involved with in in high school that you did for activities?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So in in high school, I was very involved in student government.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Always enjoyed student government uh with uh the the student senate, student council, and the like.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was involved in athletics, and uh and then I was actually involved in musical comedy, so which was uh odd way of getting in there, but it was always a lot of fun.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: We had a big the high school had a big uh musical every spring.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so my brothers and I, we all did that, and my sister did that.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: My sister was actually a music major in college, but it made it a lot of fun because uh you started what called it play practice in January and it went straight through until the production.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a lot of fun.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, from our talks together, you know, you were playing football until you got to the point that you tell us that story.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So my dad uh was a head and neck surgeon, and he always wanted me to be a head, he actually wanted all of us to go to medical school, or everybody.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: My sister was a national merit finalist, and so you know, really brilliant, but she wanted to be a music major.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: My older brother, whom I love dearly, uh always tell everybody he only went to college for two terms: Jimmy Carter's and Ronald Reagan's.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Best 12 years of Clay's life.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: So so he came along, he wasn't gonna be pre-med.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time I came along, my dad was about to pull his hair out, so I was pre-med.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But dad had wanted me to think about medicine all the way when I was starting in high school.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, You are not going to play football in high school, so forget about it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because I play I was the center on offense and a linebacker on defense.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, I don't want you to bugger up your hands uh because I want you to be a head and neck surgeon.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I was verboting.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was forbidden to play football in high school.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then you end up swimming having success.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I understand you and Michael Phelps have well I didn't even realize I was always very, very comfortable in the water, and I never knew why.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't until I was into sports medicine and studying sports medicine that I realized that that my build is is built for swimming.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it sounds odd, but if you think about sports in general, uh Michael Jordan is built for what he did uh in the NBA.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you think about the gymnast Simone Biles, they're built for doing that.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there's certain physiques and there's certain types of genotypes that are made for different sports.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: And Michael Phelps is 6'4, but his reach is 6'8.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he's got an inseam of somebody with shorter legs, and he has a long torso, and it and he's got big hands and big feet.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: So he he's like a dolphin.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: And my physique is similar to that.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I again that's something I learned much later.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's why I was always comfortable in the water.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so you you finished up high school and decide to stay over in East Texas and go to Stephen F.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Austin?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was kind of decided for me.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, it was decided for you.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Another one of those.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was a very practical guy.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: And Stephen F.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Austin had a really good pre-professional program, pre-med, pre-dent, and the like.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so my dad, uh, because he was about to have to pay tuition for four boys right in a row, and Clay had just started college, and dad said to the rest of us, he goes, You guys can go to any school in the United States that you want to go to.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna pay for it if you go to Stephen F.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Austin.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of predestined.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then you start your your your medical journey and on all of those types of things, and then what did what what were you focused on in in med school?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so I finished college in three years and and started in a medical school at UTMB in Galveston.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so when I got to medical school, I was younger than most of my classmates because I'd finished college a year early.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And what I wanted to do in medicine was to learn as much as I could during medical school, but then what I really wanted to do was go to law school.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so my senior year of medical school, I actually took the LSAT in preparation to go to law school.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh I'm an internal medicine doctor, and what internal medicine is, they call it adult medicine, but internal medicine guys are called the doctor's doctor because they're the diagnosticians, they're the ones that are the Sherlock Holmes of medicine.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: So when a physician can't figure something out, they'll generally refer them to an internist to figure out what's going on with it.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I always enjoyed the uh the the again the the investigative part of trying to figure out what was going on with somebody, the diagnostics of it.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it was uh an area that was a cognitive field as opposed to a hands field with surgery.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so I figured if I did internal medicine training, that would be helpful for law school.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And when I'd go to law school, I wouldn't give up a surgical skill that I had just picked up.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I selected internal medicine.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, your dad, as you you get to medical school, he, you know, yeah, gave you a day one advice, but he but he also talked about a uh a a phrase that he used to call stick to it-ness.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what does that mean?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so on the day that I was leaving to go to medical school, my dad said goodbye to my mother.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm walking out of the car with my dad, and I'm ready for the son I'm proud of you talk.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Which is not what he my dad was not, my dad uh was very stoic about things.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I didn't get the stunt son, I'm proud of you talk.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: What he said was he said, Ted, let me just tell you something.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: This business about you being the smart guy in the class, you can forget about it.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're about to go to a school where everybody there is at least as smart as you, and chances are most of them are a lot smarter than you are.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: But that isn't gonna be what counts.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: What's gonna be what counts is what I call stick to it.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: You just need to stick to it.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be the guy willing to study on Friday nights instead of going to the movies.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be the guy willing to get up on Saturday mornings and go to the library.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be the guy that's willing to go into the library again on Saturday night when everybody else is going to a party.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you'll do that, you're gonna have a lot of smarter people than you that won't make it through.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be who's willing to do that that works, which is why, you know, and that that that was such that was so characteristic of the way he lived his life.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he was absolutely right.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of people in my class a lot smarter than I was that just couldn't hang in there.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm I'm sure, you know, as you've risen through the ranks and and done the various things that you've done, you're able to look back on that and probably have seen a lot of talented people that just don't make it because you know that they don't they don't stick to it or don't have that resolve.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, think about this, and this is the same in business, same thing in law, the same thing in any uh industry.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um generally speaking, the habits that you develop doing something are the things that are gonna get you through.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a lot of people that are uh really talented, but if they don't work that talent, uh they still aren't gonna be successful.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just curious, how'd you do on the LSAT?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: I did extremely well.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is crazy.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because the L Sat you can actually study for.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Which which which used to be.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: This was in 1987 or something like that.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but you can study for the L Sat on the reading comprehension section.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the MCAT is very different.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you either know your chemistry or you don't.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know your physics or you don't.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know your biology or you don't.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: But the LSAT's reading, comprehension, all these other things, so you can really prepare for it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: So did pretty well.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: I did well on the LSAT, but but what wound up happening was they asked me to stay at the end of my uh training for internal medicine, they asked me to stay an additional year as junior faculty as chief medical resident, which meant my LSAT expired.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't take it a second time.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: At that point, I liked what I was doing.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Have you been able to scratch the legal itch in your various roles from time to time?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's one of those things that everything in retrospect.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows what did you know what you wanted to be doing coming out of school?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: You do what life is telling you you need to do.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you just move forward like that.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, the the and I don't remember who said this, but sad thing is, you know, we have to live our life moving forward, but you learn from it looking back.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so looking back, uh, I know that had I gone to law school and had I finished internal medicine and gone to law school, my life would have been very, very different.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And my life has been blessed with everything that I've been able to do.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Turning personal side things, you know, you met your wife, Janet, in 1984.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: The only problem with that is she was dating your roommate at the time.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: So walk us through that story.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: That is correct.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So uh my roommate, one of my roommates, uh, Kevin, great guy.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: We were at UTMB, they have a very strong uh medical fraternity system.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Kevin and I were the social chairs for our fraternity at the end of our freshman year.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: So the social chairs are responsible for doing a lot of the recruiting of the students coming in the next year.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the various fraternities down there, some were co-ed and some were all male.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: We were in one that happened to be all male.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So as recruitment time was coming up, we had all the new students coming in for the next year, and I'm recruiting away, chit-chatting with all the new guys coming in, and I can't find Kevin anywhere.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And when I did find Kevin, he was recruiting Janet.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and and uh so I go over and said, Yeah, hey Kevin, I need some help over here.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: But he was already, from the time you saw her, he was already kind of focused on Janet.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so we were in it, all of us were in the same study group.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: We were one year ahead of Janet and her classmates, but there was a group of us that all studied together, and over time, uh Janet and I shared a lot of a lot of things in common.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: We like to exercise and all these other things, and it became pretty clear over time that Kevin wasn't the right guy for her.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So and that Dr.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Mitchell was.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but we're still friends, yeah.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we all remain great friends afterwards and the like.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it worked out.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's great.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna we're gonna dig a little deeper to get you all the formative years.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know that your family, it's been a real um, it's been a you know, some uh a tradition that's been followed to to try to serve in the armed forces in some way.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you served as a captain in the army reserve following after your dad and your grandfather.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh tell us about that time, and uh which I think included being uh stationed at Fort Sam Houston.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: So my grandfather uh was the executive officer at Fort McClellan, Alabama during the Second World War.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was an enlisted soldier in Korea, and so we grew up, as kids, we grew up around hearing about the military.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was always something that I had wanted to serve from a very young age.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So after medical school graduation, I joined the Army and got a direct commission as an officer.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this was right, this was in 1988, but this was in the run-up to what wound up being first Desert Shield and then Desert Storm.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so for uh for the Army reserves, which is what I was in, what wound up happening during Desert Storm, it was the first time that the military, that the Army relied heavily upon all the reserve units for taking care of the all the active duty people.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: So more than half of all the the care was being provided by the reserves.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was actually at Fort Sam Houston the day, and this would have been in January of 91, when Desert Shield became Desert Storm and the air attacks began.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was a lot of shuffling around.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And in January of 91, Janet was almost nine months pregnant with our daughter.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and it was a real it was a real issue because we you know uh if as our unit was getting called up, we'd get activated and then deactivated and activated and deactivated.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and because people weren't exactly sure what was gonna happen.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I finally spoke to our commanding officer and said, I'd rather just be activated and just go and and do this now rather than not knowing with what was going on.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was all very much up in the air.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And if you'll remember, the air campaign went on for uh several weeks.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: When the ground campaign started, and this was it now in February, actually the ground campaign started on my birthday, February 24th, 1991, is when the the troops moved in.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And and Storm and Norman, General Schwarzkopf, did such a great job with that that the ground campaign only lasted a few days.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so when when everything fell in place for us and the coalition, uh they stopped all movement.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: So my unit, uh, which had been pulled to the Gulf, some were pulled to Germany to backfill, uh, everything that we did was focused on what they called NBC training, nuclear biological chemical training.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: So people in my unit were the ones that would be putting on what was called mop gear, uh, which is mission-oriented, uh mission-oriented protective protocol, something like that.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: But it was the it was the uh the the gear that you wore.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: So all of your training was how to gear up for chemical warfare.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: That was the big concern at the time, was chemical warfare.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so you had to do things like get your mask on in nine seconds, you had eight minutes to put on your mop gear and do all this kind of stuff.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: But it every everybody was gearing up for that, and we were ready for this great big conflagration, and then it just it just went out with a whimper.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because our guys just overwhelmed them.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: So everything got stopped.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I was always very proud of having been in at that time.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and then our our youngest son actually uh joined the army as well after he got his master's uh in in in education.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's fantastic.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so after you know, doing that and you four years of medical school and four more in internal medicine at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston, a rotation at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, changed the trajectory of your life.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about that.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: It really did.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I had always had an interest in exercise science.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the more I got into internal medicine, the more I liked that.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And for exercise science and internal medicine, the field that most people would pick would be cardiology, which makes sense.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so I was gonna do cardiology initially.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I was sitting in a nursing station one day, and a friend of mine who was a cardiology fellow came walking in and he had his radiation tag on.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Kevin, why are you wearing that radiation tag?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Oh, I've been in the cath lab too much, I've had too much radiation, I have to stay out of the lab for a while.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And right there I had a light bulb, so well, I ain't doing that.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna radiate myself the rest of my life, so I'm not doing cardiology.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: There was a pulmonary guy, one of the lung doctors, that did a lot of what's called VO2 max testing in athletes.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started working in his lab, really liked it, so I changed my mind to do pulmonary medicine.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's and I'd have fellowship lined up in it and the like.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then we were at a dinner, and one of our faculty members who was an infectious disease doc was saying to me, Why are you why do you want to do pulmonary?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I told him, I really like exercise science.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, My gosh, if you like exercise science, there was a guy, this old nut that I was in the Air Force with, this guy named Kenneth Cooper, and you've got to go up and spend time with him.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: So he actually set up a rotation for me at the aerobics center, the Cooper Clinic in Dallas.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um and it was very fortunate because Dr.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper didn't allow residence.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And but for his friendship with this guy, I wouldn't have been able to go up there.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I get up there.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: There and just fell in love with that type of practice where it's heavily focused on exercise science, nutrition, lifestyle medicine.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so, uh, and at the time for internal medicine, there were only a handful of places in the country where you could get uh uh subspecialty certification in sports medicine, and that was one of them.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: So when I finished my chief year and when Janet finished her training, then we moved up to Dallas, and I wound up getting my subspecialty certification in sports medicine, and we stayed there for 20 years.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Kenneth Cooper is known as the father of the modern fitness movement and coined the term aerobics.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about him and the influence he had on you, and and I think still has today.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Dr.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Cooper is one of those guys who's kind of singular.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of those folks that uh so dedicated to what he did.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: He was always a track runner, he was always interested in exercise science.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: He knew, he knew that you if you used physical fitness, if you used exercise as a tool, you could do great things for people for their health.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because when he was growing up, you know, the the joke was always when he was a kid growing up, he said, if you saw somebody running on the side of the road, your instinct was to look behind them to see who was chasing them.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't have runners.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's a phenomenon we all grew up with, and much of that is thanks to the work Ken Cooper did.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: So Ken Cooper, from the time he started that clinic in 1970, took the data on every single patient he saw, every patient, every day, all the time.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: All their data got collected to the point that there are now 150,000 people in that database.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's the world's largest database on health and fitness that exists.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's now part of the Texas Tech system, it's part of the Health Sciences Center, because he was looking for a home for it just a few years ago, and they went through and looked at a lot of different universities and they selected us to house this.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a huge, a huge coup for the Health Sciences Center to have that database because it is so rich.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: But it's Ken Cooper doing that work over the course of 50 years that that really made it so that exercise today is something that we all know that it's helpful for your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your blood sugar, your weight, et cetera, et cetera.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm telling you, when he was in, people didn't know that.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Exercise was one of those things that you did, and you know this as a as an old athlete.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was something you did in high school, but once you got out of high school or college, you put that aside and you went to work.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, No, exercise is medicine.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: If I could give you a prescription for a pill that would reduce your blood pressure, reduce your cholesterol, reduce your blood sugar, reduce your body fat, improve your sex life, improve your sleep, improve your joints, improve your mental state, would you want that pill?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Of course you would.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the pill exists.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: It just takes 30 minutes to take it, and it's called exercise.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And all of that has been, all of that has been documented in these large-scale studies done at the Cooper Center.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: So he has a huge influence on me.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Mentorship is big to us here at the heights of victory.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you just what do you think of mentorship, you know, when people, you know, transfer, you know, a vast amount of knowledge to people that they bring on and you know the the impact that that can have on young people's lives.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's the pebble in this in the pond.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: The moment you do that and drop that, the the ripple effect that you wind up having uh in many ways is uh is infinite.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're gonna wind up hopefully influencing somebody else, and in turn they will influence others and they will influence others.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's the only thing, it's the only thing that ensures that the good work that you try to do, the way you try to serve people, whatever it might be, that you can ensure that it continues is by mentoring other people.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact of the matter is you're mentoring them, whether you know it or not, one way or the other.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: One way or the other, you're going to mentor everybody that comes in your sphere of influence.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: One way or the other.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is so true.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great, that's a great one right there.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: You spent 20 years at the Cooper Clinic, you published 40 to 50 papers, you moved from you know, an entry-level employee there, a physician, all the way to president.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a large one of the largest multi-special practices in in Dallas and the state.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: How did that season prepare you for the leadership roles you would you would go on to take?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, quite well.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Again, looking at it in retrospect, uh, because one thing, you know, one thing about doctors, doctors are not always right, but man, we're never uncertain.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's a that and that's a great trait in the operating room, that's a great trait in the ER, that's a great trait in the ICU.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's a terrible trait when you're trying to run a large group of physicians because everybody's got their idea, and everybody's idea is correct.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: So just that uh that experience of having a large group of physicians and working through to get everybody playing on a team was tremendously helpful and formative for me.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: What I wound up doing at Cooper when I became the president and CEO is I took all the jobs of the president and I divided them amongst all the other physicians.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: So my wife became the director of the nutrition department.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: I had somebody that became the director of the exercise physiology department, somebody became the director of the lab.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: For one thing, it helped to clean off my plate.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: For another thing, it brought them inside the tent.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so our meetings then would shift over to reports.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on here, what's going on there, what's going on here, what's going on in GI, what's going on in dermatology, et cetera, et cetera.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then it freed me up to do the things that only the president could be doing.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: All the stuff related to some of the research, all the stuff related to the public speaking, things like that.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I learned that.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I learned I learned how to start trying to build teams of people that may have their own opinions about things, but you really don't know if you have a team until somebody on that team has to give up something for the benefit of somebody else.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then you know you've got a team.
• 28:18
  unknown: Yeah.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so that forging, getting forged in an environment like that was very helpful then coming to the Health Sciences Center.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: And even more importantly, right at the end of my time at Cooper was when the recession hit.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the recession was a real nightmare for everybody.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we had just gone through a huge uh the tsunami of change that we had to do financially there at Cooper, uh, that prepared me.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the good Lord protects children and fools, and I'm not a child.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: So he protected me there.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: So coming into the Health Sciences Center during the middle of that recession was that that was a huge prep for the Health Sciences Center.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here at Mass Rider Capital, you know, when we're looking at businesses, you can often look at a business and and and judge the leader by how well the organization performs.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because is, you know, what you were talking about working through all of your physicians at the Cooper's at the Cooper Clinic to involve many more people to get more things done and be able to focus on a bigger mission.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, when we're looking at companies, you know, if everything is running through the CEO versus everything running through all of the employees and they're working together as a team, it's really a trait for leaders to be able to work through others.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Jeff is so anathetical to the way that that we think.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at successful people, forget physicians, I don't care if they're business, law, whatever, men and women that are that are successful.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: Most to a point, to a point in your life and career, all of your success is predicated on the work you're doing.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: That was the same thing with you coming through all the businesses you were coming through to get where you are now.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And at some point in time, then when you step more into a leadership role to have a team, you've got to give up some of the micromanaging.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it becomes very counterintuitive to you because up until that point, everything you've done is through the sweat of your own brow.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And to let go of that can be very difficult.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't let go of it, you limit how much your team and your company can grow.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: You become the bottleneck.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: You become the issue.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so the whole idea is to be, uh, in terms that we use for one of our law school classes, to be a gardener.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Your job is to get the environment right for growing great things, not the mechanic, where you've got to go in and fix everything yourself.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: So if you can focus on being the gardener, not the mechanic, then it will help to set the environment for growth in your company.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good way to think about that.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: I know one of the it wasn't original.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: Eric Bentley uses that a lot, too.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great one.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: I know one of the things that you're most proud of at the Cooper Clinic is your wife, you know, joined the Cooper Clinic, Janet, and the patient population used to be heavy, you know, 80, 90% male, and she helped move that to more of a 50-50, which is what the world is.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Tell tell the tell the viewers here what it was like to have her alongside that journey with you.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Janet and I, from the time that we met in medical school, had had done everything together.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: We'd gone through medical school together, residency together, and when we got to Dallas and started having our kids, uh, she was working at Presbyterian Hospital, now Texas Health Resources, DHR, and I was working at the Cooper Clinic.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: And from the time I got to the Cooper Clinic, the fellow that was the president at the time, Larry Gibbons, from day one, they started saying, Hey, do you think we can get Janet over here?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: To the point that I started feeling bad about myself.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wait, I think you guys hired me just so you can get Janet.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but uh so over over after a few years, uh then Janet, they did recruit her over there.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: And part of it was, exactly to your point, our patients were by and large male.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're trying to, and we knew that uh that that the same approach to life was just as important for women.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: But only about 20% of our population at the clinic was women.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so once we were, and there was a concern actually with some of the older physicians that, oh my gosh, though, but will the men want to see a female patient, uh, a female a female doctor.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, well, you get her in here and just see.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it was so successful, we'd have patients, men, male patients, said, No, I'd rather have that woman than than these guys.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: So not only did it expand the patient load in general, but more and more than the patients we would have, their wives would then come in and say, I want to see the female doctor.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And very shortly thereafter, and Janet was the one instrumental in doing this, we hired several other female physicians.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: So very quickly the practice was growing again with a number of female hires that just really changed the flavor of the clinic.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know that the clinic, you know, had about a from talking with you, had about a$35 million budget.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, Ray Hunt was another mentor of yours, and he actually gave you a business class crash course.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: So tell all of our viewers about that.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: I got an MBA in one afternoon when when I became the president of the clinic, I got a call.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: My secretary came in and said, Hey, Ray Hunt called and said, Congratulations, and he'd like to take you to lunch.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Great.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a lot of people were congratulating you and stuff like that.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't take that seriously because he's a busy guy.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: And a few weeks later, uh my assistant came back in and said, Ray Hunt called again, said, You haven't made an appointment with him, and he really Oh, so he was serious.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we set up a time and he he he wanted me to clear an afternoon.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I went down to his office in downtown Dallas and I walked in, and he had, we were in his conference room, and he had whiteboards on all the walls, no windows, big table in the middle, and he had a stack of typing paper and a bundle of number two pencils.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that was it.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he stood up there and said, Ted, let me tell you something.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: In the next three, four, five hours, I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know about business.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: So start writing.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: And let me tell you, he got up there on the board, and I still had that stack of papers.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's awesome.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it was really incredible because at the end of the day with Mr.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hunt, it boiled down to this what's the mission of your entity?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Your medical practice, your business.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: What is the mission?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you always got to keep that focused.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: What is your mission?
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: What is your margin?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And who are your people?
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you take care, if you focus on your product and not your and focus on your product and your people, the profit will follow.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: The moment you start focusing on your profit, you will destroy your own product.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he was absolutely right.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that I found the same when we got when I got to the Health Sciences Center.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: People are always worried so much about, oh gosh, well, what's our budget for this?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, worry about doing the right thing.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you're doing the right thing with your product, and our product in higher education are the our graduates.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's your product.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if they're doing the things they need to be doing and they get out there, they become your best salespeople for getting the profit coming in.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: So focus on your your product, not your profit.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Focus on the product and your people, and the profit will follow.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: But the moment you start putting your focus on your profit, you will destroy your own product.
• 35:25
  unknown: Yeah.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: MBA in an afternoon.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: That is awesome.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: So another connection you made at the Cooper Clinic was with former Chancellor Ken Hance of Texas Tech, and he ended up asking you to serve as on the search committee for the upcoming new president for the Health Sciences Center.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Talk us through that time and how you ended up applying for that position.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Kent called and said, Hey Ted, we're looking for a new president at the Health Sciences Center at Texas Tech, and I'd like for you to serve, uh, help me with the search.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, Kent, I didn't I didn't go to Texas Tech for undergrad, for medical school, for internship, residency, fellowship, anything.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, No, no, I want somebody from the outside.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was actually on uh the search committee, and there were several other people on there that I got to know from out here, and it was a lot of fun, and we wound up hiring Dr.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: John Baldwin.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Great guy, uh highly respected cardiothoracic surgeon from the Northeast, originally from Texas.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the long and the short of it was with it seemed like just a few weeks, but probably a year later, I got a call from one of the people that'd been on the search with me saying, Hey, look, it's not working out with uh Dr.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: Baldwin.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: And there were a lot of a number of family issues and things that he was suffering through, uh, but it wasn't gonna work out.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, and we're putting a search committee together again.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'm happy to be on it.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes, Oh, no, no, we want you to apply this time.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Janet and I had been at Cooper for a long time.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: Our kids were getting older, and we were starting to think about what might be next.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so we thought about it, we prayed about it, and and uh, and I said, sure.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I put my name in that.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the great thing was when I was doing the interview, I was telling, because I knew most of them.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: I knew a lot of the regents and everything else, and I said, Look, uh, I'm in the cat bird seat here.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: I love what I'm doing.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: And if you need to find somebody else, no harm, no foul, you'll still all be my friends, and I'm still gonna be doing that.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I'd love this challenge.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to do to do this.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so anyway, so it just worked out like that.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's unbelievable how fate sometimes intervenes.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're real big on Texas Tech, West Texas, Lubbock, the fabric of the society out here.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: What excited you about coming out here?
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what's crazy that you noticed uh immediately about Lubbock, about Texas Tech, and about West Texas in general.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: The people out here are no braggadocia.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: They don't tell you what good people are, they just go about the business of being good people.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: They don't tell you how hard they work, they just go about the business of working hard.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: That is an absolutely phenomenal personal trait that it's a Texas trait in general, but it's it's like that on steroids in West Texas.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is it's a double-edged sword because part of the job of the president of the university or the chancellor of the system is to make sure that when you go to Austin, they know the good works you're doing.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when your attitude has always been no braggadocia, this and that, guess what?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: There are other systems in the state that have absolutely no problem bragging about all the stuff they do.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: So they wind up getting the lion's share of the attention in Austin.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that that was immediately appealing was the culture of West Texas.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a shortcoming when you go to Austin.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I saw my job in many ways as being the cheerleader-in-chief for everything that we did out here and making sure that the people in Austin, making sure the people in the communities, making sure the people in D.C.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: knew exactly what a gem we had out here with with Texas Tech.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: You arrive at the Health Sciences Center during and as the country was recovering from the great financial crisis of 2008 when several large financial firms just flat out failed, which really had not happened before in the country.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2011, the state asked for 7.5% of their budget back.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: You had been managing a$35 million budget at the Cooper Clinic.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Health Sciences Center budget at the time was$800 million.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: What what led you through that?
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of luck.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, it it's interesting because we had just gone through this in at a at a big private system, but the the size of the budget paled in comparison to the budget out here.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: But nonetheless, the principles of economics are exactly the same.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you have no margin, you can have no mission, period.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: So when the state said we need 7.5% of our budget back, we sat down and I had done the same thing at Cooper.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'd put together uh an approach with five questions that every department we had, every school that we had, had to go through and look at every program they had.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: And there were five questions about every single thing they did.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: The first question was, is that particular program profitable for us?
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: If question number two, is it budget neutral?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Question number three, is it a loss leader for something that's profitable?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: Question number four, is it a cost of doing business like IT?
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: And question number five, is it mission critical?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you couldn't answer yes to one of those questions, then we really had to ask ourselves, can we justify continuing that program?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and that's a hard thing to go through.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: And by doing it like that, though, it's not just about cutting the budget.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just about saying everything has to make money.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of things we do in higher education that don't make money, but they're extremely important.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But basically, it's a way for everybody to turn the lens back on their area and justify the existence of the various things they do.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact of the matter is, when you do it like that, we were able to prune things back that while times were good, we had kind of grown into areas we probably shouldn't have.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: We prune all those things back.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, we closed 583 positions in a two-year period of time.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: The majority of that we were able to do by closing open positions and by working attrition.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in any business, there's about a 10 to 12% annual attrition rate.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we just close off those positions and take what the work was and divide it up amongst other people.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: And by doing it like that, we got lean and mean.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I'll give you a great example of something that it's not just about cutting.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I sat down with each one of the deans going through things.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Our dean of nursing came in.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the state of Texas, of all the professions, nursing is the one that we're always critically short in.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: And she sat down and said, I've cut this, this, and this.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: But we actually cannot, we should not cut our nursing program, the number of students.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, we need to grow it and we need to hire more faculty.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: And she gave a really powerful argument for that.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I told her, I said, look, we don't have the funds to do that.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: The only way that we can get those funds if we go to the school of medicine, and not through their state budget, but through the medical practice plan.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: But understand what we're gonna do.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be asking them to put on hold buying equipment and other things to support your school.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I spoke to the dean of the school of medicine and had him sit with her, and the three of us discussed this, and to his credit, he goes, you know, you're exactly right.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: So he made the decision that he would absorb some of their budgetary loss through the medical practice plan so that we could actually grow the school of nursing during that period of time.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it wound up being one of the best decisions we've ever made because as the recession, as we came out of the recession, we were already positioned our school of nursing to expand rapidly.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: And but but again, you don't know if you have a team until somebody on the team has to give up something for somebody else.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so we went through a very tough time, but we came out of it on the other end, I think, much stronger than we had been going into it.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: The health the Health Science Center, under your uh guidance and leadership, you know, developed strengths in telemedicine, primary care, rural health care, and all of those became very critical when COVID hit.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: How did the institution build those strengths and how did it how is it paying off today for the for the Health Sciences Center?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at the because the vast uh geography that we cover, our health sciences center covers an area of the state of Texas larger than 46 states.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: Our Health Sciences Center is responsible for an area larger than 46 states in the United States.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: A massive area.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Not many have that.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Not many have that at all.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: So if you've seen one health sciences center, you've seen one health science center.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're not all the same.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: We have a very different mission than UT Southwestern or UTMB.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have a very different mission.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so telehealth has been Something we've always done because of the geography.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so as COVID came on, we became a critical part of the community support for caring for people with COVID.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, all these tiny hospitals all over West Texas that would have that were just getting inundated with COVID patients, they did not know how to take care of COVID patients in their ICUs, the family doctors that were out there.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: But what we did was through our critical care department here at the School of Medicine, they would make rounds with family doctors in all these little communities every day with patients that were intubated at these little hospitals out there that normally would have been transferred in.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: But we were able to keep them in their communities.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: So again, that's something where your university becomes a community asset, far beyond just training healthcare professionals, far beyond just doing research, a true community asset for this side of the state.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: We actually had one of our faculty members in pharmacy called and said, Do you remember so the biggest issue?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: Remember early on in COVID, you couldn't even get a COVID test done because we didn't have enough tests, testing kits.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the rate limiting step was the gel, the vile transport media, the VTM that was the gel that you take that swab and stick it in.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I had one of our faculty members at our School of Pharmacy call and say, hey, Ted, that VTM, he goes, I've been looking on the website, we can make that stuff.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Really?
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, yeah, if I have the right help, we can make this stuff.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: So working with Texas Tech University, working with our School of Health professions, our laboratory science folks, we actually created a lab where we were creating VTM.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I then get a call from the UT system and saying, hey, Ted, I hear you guys are making VTM.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Can you help us with that?
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, sure.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: We can have our guys talk to your school of pharmacy so you can make it.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: And there was this pause, and he goes, No, well, that's actually, can you make it for us?
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, we can make it for you.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: We could charge you for it, but yeah, we can make it.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we started making it for them in their clinics.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Then we get a call from the governor's office saying, we hear you guys are making VTM.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: Can you help us make it for clinics around the state?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: So the Texas Tech wound up creating 500,000 vials of VTM within the first six months of COVID.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: We were sending VTM to clinics in Beaumont, Texas, Canada, all over the place.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: That is, it gets right back to that no-braggadocia.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: They don't tell you how good they are, they just show you how good they are.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's that kind of thing that makes you very proud to be part of something like that.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: So our position as a community asset during COVID really, in my estimation, solidified us as a critical part of the fabric of this entire region, this entire half of the state of Texas and eastern New Mexico.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: It goes all the way over into New Mexico, what we're doing.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, great stuff.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's awesome.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was the answer was too long.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're good.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: That is great.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to, you know, before we move on to, you know, when you became chancellor, what was your biggest accomplishment in your mind at the Health Sciences Center?
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: The values-based culture.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you can get the culture of the university, if you can get the culture of your business, if you can get the culture of the area that you're working in, if you can get the culture right, where people are free to do the things where you've set up a garden and people are free to grow their own vegetables and things, and you're making sure the environment's good for them, you would be shocked at how well people do.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they they do, we had an incredible group.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: As we would have uh departmental chairs retire, as we would have folks retire and deans retire.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: I would bring in people that were really expensive and pay them a lot of money.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure if you looked at our budget back then, we had some of the most expensive deans around, but by golly, they were good.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and they're their their schools all flourished underneath them.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so creating a culture that brings in, that attracts in the right kind of folks was by far the thing that makes me the more most warm and fuzzy about my time at the Hill Sciences Center.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: I know from visiting with you, you held almost 90 town hall meetings, even had a policy that if any any you know policies that we're going to create that were counter to our culture were immediately null and void.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you lived that with uh on an everyday basis.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: The preemptive policy.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Any policy we had that went against our culture and went against our values, that policy was null and void until we could talk about it.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because you can't have somebody saying, Oh, we can't do that, we can't do that, we can't do that.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, Well, wow, are we breaking the state law?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's against our policy.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, good Lord, we write the policy.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so that policy ain't gonna get rid of that.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: So after serving the Health Sciences Center, Chancellor Bob Duncan retires, regents turned to you for continuity.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: What was that transition like?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh it was eventful because that happened in the summer of eighteen, just as we were getting into just as we were really getting into a fight in Austin, specifically for the vet school, but as a corollary, the dental school as well.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it uh the a storm was was brewing and we were getting ready to roll into a session that was going to be uh either monumental for us.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's gonna be monumental one way or the other, because we were asking for something that had never been asked for, and uh and so it was a a very interesting time.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: Under your leadership, the system did establish the vet school and the dental school and secured the Texas University Fund.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just say other institutions in the state weren't necessarily for that.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: How did you make the case?
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: You make the case by talking about what the needs are of the people you serve.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: And if you looked at that, and I'll just say Texas AM is a phenomenal vet school, a phenomenal vet school.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Over the years, like most vet schools in the United States, what had happened was more and more of their of their student population were young women from urban areas.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you have a meta a vet school where the majority of your students are young women from urban areas, they're not going to move to Demet, Texas to pull calves.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you looked at the average age of veterinarians in urban areas versus rural areas, it was getting to be really problematic.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so the first time that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board had recommended that Texas Tech get a vet school was in 1971.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: When back then they were saying this trend is starting to happen.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: And forces that be had successfully blocked that since 1971.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem got worse and worse and worse.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: So what we did was we just went to the facts.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is what we have.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: We will enhance the the school and college station by having this other vet school.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we were willing to work with them in all kinds of ways.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I had actually told the folks down there, your system will benefit as much from this vet school as ours.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're FFA kids that aren't getting into your vet school that we need, we'll get them in out here.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll tell you, it again, it's it's a phenomenal uh vet school.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then the the one of the arguments was always, well, it's going to be a second-rate vet school.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: It won't be like ours, et cetera, et cetera.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: Our first graduating classes in 2025, we had the second highest Navily pass rate in the United States.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: The highest was uh Washington State with a 98% pass rate.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: We had the second highest at a 97% pass rate.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: Texas AM Phenomenal School had a 96% pass rate.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't rub that in with anybody.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's keeping score.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody's keeping score.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're all doing well.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: We've got two phenomenal vet schools in the state of Texas now.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I think you were the glue that helped bring all that together, but there was a lot of people involved in that process.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I know from speaking with you, you're really proud of the unanimous and strong support that the team all held together and fought the good fight.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: This was all the communities.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: This was uh the all all of the the uh the the different um academic entities, all of the schools within our system understood how important this was.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: So this became a focus of everybody.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: The entirety of the West Texas delegation was all over this.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is something that the people that work on this, the number of people that work on this, the people in Amarillo, the city of Amarillo, the mayor up there, the city council, everybody got in line.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: We had 15 different um uh uh chambers of commerce from all over West Texas signing on saying we need a vet school in Amarillo.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you had the presidents of chambers of commerce in Odessa, in Abilene, saying we need a vet school in Amarillo.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we the people pulled together on this in a way that I've never seen before with other initiatives.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you also uh said that you know Texas Tech became Rocky Balboa down in Austin.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm telling you, man, we don't have the money, a lot of the other systems, we don't have the attitude, but nobody wants to fight Rocky.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so we came down there and we just gave them the facts.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: These are the facts.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we stayed with it and stayed with it and stayed with it.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: We actually, during that particular session, we got an apartment down there, and one of us was down there all the time.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that if something came up where any elected official had a question, we could have somebody one myself, one of the other presidents, they'd go talk to them about it.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't have to be Lawrence Scubenac.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: You could have the president of the Health Science Center in El Paso, they'd go talk to him about the vet school if need be.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we had somebody down there all the time just to make sure that they heard the story of what the need was.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And let me tell you, it it paid off for us.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: A little stick toitiveness?
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: A little stick to this.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: Endeavor to persevere.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us the story that you like to share about leadership of the styrofoam cup versus the ceramic cup.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the things that I think is probably as important as anything uh for people in leadership positions of any type.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a story that Simon Sinek uh told.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's a story about uh a former Under-Secretary of Defense.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: He's at this huge conference and he's speaking to the group, and he's got his cup of coffee, and he said to the group, because you know, last year I was here speaking at the same conference, but last year I was the Under Secretary of Defense.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: And when I flew in, they flew me in first class, they had a limo waiting for me, they took care of my luggage, they had me checked into this hotel.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was in a great suite.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: The next morning the limo brought me over to the venue and they took me back to the green room, and there's this beautiful ceramic set, coffee set with my coffee waiting for me.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: This year, I'm the former Under Secretary of Defense, and I flew out coach.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody met me.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: I took the taxi to get to the hotel.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: I had to take care of my own luggage, took a taxi over here this morning, didn't go into the green room, but I came through the front and I asked a guy out there that was setting things up, said, Hey, do you have any coffee?
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he pointed over the corner to the Mr.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: Coffee Pot and said, Yeah, there's some right there.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went and poured myself this here cup of coffee in this styrofoam cup.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the matter is, I only deserve a styrofoam cup.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: All of us.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: We only deserve a styrofoam cup.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: The ceramic cup wasn't for me, it was for the position that I held.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: If people remember that, becoming the president at Cooper Clinic, becoming the president of the Health Sciences Center, becoming the Chancellor of the System, those weren't things for me.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those were positions that I was fortunate enough to hold for a period of time.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: And being in the position put me in a place where I could do really good things for folks around me.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: And not just me, I could I could bring to bear troops of people to do really good things.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: And if you keep that as your focus, then life's good.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't get caught up in all the the traps, the trappings of of the position.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Some people that get into positions, they love the trappings, they love all the stuff that goes with it.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying that's bad that's bad.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's fun.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's great fun to have somebody filling up your cup of coffee before you turn around and stuff like that.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: But but it's not important.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: What's important is the mission.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and with that, always understanding why it is that you do the things you do.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: And if you get a team of people around you and a real team where people are willing to sacrifice things on their side for the betterment of the mission, then there is absolutely nothing that your team can't accomplish.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's such a good story.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about life on the ranch right now and the your hobbies and and what you enjoy doing when you're not working.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we have uh we got a little ranch over in East Texas, and uh, we've got we have horses and we've got dogs, we've got a barn cat, we've got a lot of things that keep you busy day to day.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're a lot of fun.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: We've got grandkids in in Dallas that uh that Jan and I both run in and out of town all the time to take care of.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when I left here, uh there was a book uh manuscript that I had in mind that I wanted to put together and on on leadership and communication.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was working very hard and still working very hard.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: I completed the manuscript and worked with the publisher on that.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's in the works right now with things, but it's it's been very, very busy.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Janet and I have been extremely busy taking care of each other, taking care of the kids and taking care of the the ranch that we have.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and I've still stayed connected with things over at the system.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: So retirement so far has not been uh not been just sleeping in every day.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: And in the meantime, with all that, I wound up getting a knee replacement.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's all been good.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: You've got three very successful children.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about them, Catherine, Charlie, and Chris, and yeah, you know, your kids and and what you know what they've accomplished so far, and and and you know, I know you're really proud of them.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Very proud.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're both very, very proud of the kids.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: Catherine uh actually she started college the year before we came to tech.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so she actually went to undergrad at Alabama and came back to Dallas to go to SME for law school, and she's an assistant DA.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: She's a prosecutor in Dallas County.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: And she's in murder cases, she's one of the lead homicide prosecutors.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: And for the longest time, she was the the one of the lead prosecutors in the felony crimes against children.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: And Catherine has a big heart, wonderful heart, and yet she deals with some of the the darkest underbelly of crime that there is, but she does an ex exceptionally good job at it.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Charlie, so when I came out to Texas Tech, Charlie and Chris were both in high school, and so they started coming out coming out here for different things until they graduated.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: Charlie wound up at tech as a petroleum engineering major and did very, very well.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: And Charlie and Chris are only one year apart and they're best friends.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: So wherever Charlie was gonna go, Chris was gonna go.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: So Chris wound up at tech as well.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: So Charlie was a petroleum engineering major, finished here, started working for uh an oil and gas company, then moved to another one in Dallas.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bunch of Texas Tech grads, worked there for several years, and then he actually went to Harvard and got his MBA.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he's back in Dallas uh doing some really good things with several different companies that he works with.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then Chris went to Texas Tech and he got his degree in chemical engineering, but he also double-majored, he got a degree in natural resource management from Kasner, from the Davis College.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: And afterwards he got his master's at Villanova, and while he was getting his master's, is when he called his mother and I and said, Look, dad was in the army, granddad was in the army, my great-grandfather was in the army.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: If I don't join the army, I'm gonna regret it.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: So Chris joined the army after getting his master's, and my only thing was, Chris, you could have saved us a lot of money if you'd have done that several years ago.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, so he joined the army, and uh he actually he was at Fort Hood, he was the with the first cavalry division, and uh then he was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and uh Chris just came out of the Army, literally uh after six years, came out about oh, two months ago.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know you're gonna be able to do that.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: Very proud of all of them.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: Very proud.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's four generations in a row that has done that.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: Did your did your boys get the all you can go anywhere in the country to school and all but I'll pay for Texas Tech?
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the thing.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, I didn't do that, but I was I was really hoping, and I gotta tell you, when Charlie came out here and started singing, he got in the middle of this environment in high school, yeah, it became a real easy choice for him.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: And Charlie could have gone anywhere he wanted to go.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: He was interviewing at Stanford, at Duke, all over the place, but he wound up choosing tech on his own, and it's the best decision he ever made.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: Socially, academically, everything.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: You you talked about the book that you're that you're developing.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's around the concept prism.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, position, rationale, intensity, society, middle ground.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us a little bit about it and what you hope readers will take away from it.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: We are living in a society today, and I'll use politics as the example, of having such a polarized society that we spend our time screaming at each other, either on social media, on television, in person, whatever it may be.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: We are no longer living, in my estimation, in communities of people.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: Communities are defined by mutual admiration and respect for each other.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: We're living in tribes.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: And a tribe is defined not by how much you love other people in your tribe, it's defined by how much you hate the people outside the tribe.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how we're living.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to be getting worse over time.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the whole idea behind this thing with a prism approach is so, okay, what is your position on a topic?
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then what is your rationale for that position?
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: Not a social media snippet, but truly, what is your rationale for that position?
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: How strongly do you feel about that position?
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: On a scale of one to ten, what's the intensity of it for you?
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what does society think of your position, especially people that disagree with you?
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, is there not some mutual understanding or middle ground that you can find with those individuals?
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: So if the the term for this is metacognition, thinking about your thinking.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you think about all that before you go into a meeting, before you go into a conversation, then at least there's some room for finding middle ground.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if there's not, at least you can hear people out and not scream past one another, which we're doing.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just telling you, take any political race you want right now, local, state, national, and just look at look at what it is.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we're we're just living in such a polarized time that the idea behind this is we all need to take a deep breath and step back and really, you know, think about what you're doing there, a little bit young man.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we've lost compromisation in our society today, and you know, it is uh it's sad.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we've had a breakdown of families.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean family, families not, you know, being as strong as they were 80, 100 years ago.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: Even 30 years ago, 40 years ago.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's just all of that leads to, you know, which I know is a topic of yours public discourse, you know, and and what the effect that is having on youth today, and and uh you know, we're very hopeful for the future.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: We are so Jeff, if you look at suicide rates, starting in 2012, suicide rates in the United States really started picking up.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_01: Increased by 30 percent just since 2012.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: And with 10 to 14 year olds, there's been a threefold increase in suicides.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: They'd been flat for decades.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: And a large part of that, I believe, is the the smartphone came out in 2007.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: And now we have children, children who are not emotionally mature and intellectually mature.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're living on this thing where for the first time in human history, they can immediately gauge their popularity just by posting something.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: And think about when you were in junior high.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: Think about those wonder years.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you had a zit on your face, it was freaking you out.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: If your genes didn't fit right, this and that.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you knew that you like girls, but you didn't really know why, this and that.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: And what we've done is we've stripped away from those kids that that age of innocence.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: We've stripped it away from them, and instead we've given them this little box that uh that that really can mess with their emotions.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we've gotta we've gotta have leadership rise up in this country to you know to combat, and it's gonna take the whole country.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna take all of us.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna take all of us to do it.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we really appreciate all of that.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_00: We want to our last segment is what we called around the horn.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: These are these are you know quick questions, five, 10 second answers back, and you haven't seen any of these.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so we like to have a little fun here on the heights of victory.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: This could be good or bad.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this could be good or bad.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're gonna put you on the spot a little bit.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if you weren't a doctor, what would you have been?
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh probably a lawyer, sad to say.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: Probably a lawyer.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: Or a teacher.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: I love teaching.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_01: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_01: The best book that I've read in the past year.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Is Prisoners of Geography by a guy named Tim Marshall.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I read it for the second time this past year.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's about how the world has developed along geographical lines, along the lines of where mountains are, where rivers are.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it explains, and we don't have time for that, but but it explains even things like the Ukrainian-Russian War.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great book.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: What was the name of the book again?
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: Prisoners of Geography.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: Prisoners of Geographic.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: Tim Marshall.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: Tim Marshall.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_00: Great book.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: Would you ever consider running for political office someday?
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right now I'm more worried about our grandbabies, but I don't know what I'm going to do next in my life.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's your go-to meal in Lubbock, Texas?
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: Go-to meal in Lubbock, Texas.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_01: Lord have mercy.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: I do not have a very discriminating palate.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: I will tell you, I love Las Brisas.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_01: I love Las Brisas.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_01: I love Latiosa.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: I love the tapas at La Diosa.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: I love La Serena.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: Lord, have I could go down a million places I love.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: I would say either Las Brisas or Latiosa.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: Latiosa is a place.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: If there's a go-to place, I'd say it's probably Latiosa.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is West Texas Tex-Mex your favorite Mexican film?
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: Tex-Mex, good Tex-Mex is great anywhere all the time.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: Who's one person living or dead you'd love to have dinner with?
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: Abraham Lincoln.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: There are tons of people, you know, family members and the like that are gone that I'd love to have dinner with for sure.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: But Abraham Lincoln, just the guy that was probably exhibited uh grace under pressure more than anybody in our in our country's history.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: I just watched that movie the other day, Lincoln Again.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's such it's such a great movie.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he had the entire world against him, including his own, you know, the legislature and his own cabinet.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: What's something about you that would surprise most people?
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: Besides you and Michael Phelps being dolphins in the water.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: That I'm actually very much an introvert.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I mean I I I I enjoy reading, I enjoy quiet time.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think mo I think most people would not describe me as I'm an introvert in extrovert clothing.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: What's one thing on your bucket list you haven't done yet?
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_01: That I haven't done yet.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I just I I just swam Escape from Alcatraz last year, so that was on my bucket list of things to do.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_01: I would say um I love to travel, and one of the things that I had talked about doing for a long time was trying to swim the English Channel.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I probably won't do that because of uh what's called a Polaris Breach.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: A Polaris Breach is how a shark attacks a seal coming from below it and hitting it like that.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_01: And once I saw that on Shark Week, as much as swimming the English Channel is on my bucket list, I don't think I'll ever do it because I don't want to be a seal.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see the movie that came out with the lady about a sister around the 1920s that that swam the English channel?
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I don't know.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it is an incredible movie.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's fantastic.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to swim the channel.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well that's But I'm not gonna get attacked by a shark.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think about AI?
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_01: AI is going to be, I mean, it is here whether we like it or not.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: It is here.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: As a tool, it's phenomenal.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh as a but but like anything else, people that are nefarious with it can do really problematic things.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what we need to do is proceed with caution.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to proceed, whether it's in medicine, whether it's in business, whether it's in pick your industry, but we need to proceed with with eyes wide open.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that that um if you look at what the the Chinese Communist Party is doing, uh if we it's not as though we can choose not to do this.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's being done.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to be involved.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_01: We just have to do it in a way that we can control the narrative moving forward with it.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your favorite Texas Tech moment doesn't it can be sports, it doesn't have to be sports.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: That happened at the same time.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we were getting op-eds written against the dental school too, all in one fell swoop.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_01: So the most impactful would have been that.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_01: I will tell you that from a personal standpoint, and I think Janet would say the same thing, is watching our boys graduate.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_01: That, from a personal standpoint, was the most uh memorable thing about all that.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Mitchell, thank you for being here today on the Heights of Victory and for your incredible leadership at Texas Tech.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_00: The impact you've made on West Texas healthcare and higher education across our state is truly remarkable.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: You've you've embodied a life of perseverance, service, and discipline, and we're honored to call you a friend and grateful for your time here today.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for the kind words, and it's great fun being here.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: That does it for this episode of the Heights of Victory.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: To our audience, if you want to ask a question or or you can leave us a comment.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to email us, you can email us at heights at victory at mass rider.com.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for catching this episode, and we'll see you again soon on another episode of the Heights of Victory.