That's the pressure on unis to actually produce graduates and schools to produce school leaders that have really demonstrated these skills, these human skills.

Yeah, I wonder whether we'll see more interest in interdisciplinary degrees and interdisciplinary courses.

We've got an institution, prime institution in the UK called London Interdisciplinary School.

And they do their BA and MA courses are essentially like a BASC or MASC.

So it's arts and sciences courses.

And a lot of the stuff that they do is very much kind of capstone projects.

It's, you know, essentially using a mixture of those skill sets across those disciplines to solve real world problems, usually connected into the UN Sustainable Development Goals and things like that.

But I think when schools obviously are grappling with, what do we do? What's the role of AI in education generally? What's the damage to learning and the development of critical thinking? that is happening and i think looking at those entry-level jobs and the the actions that companies are already taking to address that gap and that pipeline give us hope actually about about what education can take out of that as well

So what are some of the complexities and the myths and the realities behind the numbers that we're seeing? What are the numbers that we're seeing? What are those headlines first?

Yeah, I think that's the really important kind of part of all of this is taking a bit more of a big picture view, because I think there is too much of a focus on kind of headline numbers.

So if we think about a few things that have kind of come up recently over the last couple of years, there was that big headline, certainly made a lot of the UK press, that was taken from some Adzuna data, so some job board data.

that supposedly showed that entry-level jobs were down by about a third since 2022.

And this was attributed in loads of papers to the creation of ChatGPT.

Now, the reality of that was utter nonsense.

There was absolutely zero causation attached in the sense of Chat GPT gets created and suddenly these entry level jobs disappear.

Are there any reasons for our students to be optimistic? And what would you say to that kid who's just sort of questioning everything?

On the way to 100, dog.

Let's go.

Yeah, man.

It's crack black.

And so I'm not going to lie, man.

It's busy.

I'm busy.

Just on,

Yeah

...

it, yeah, it's a cluster for me.

So, but, um, that's cool.

It's, uh, uh, just, just a timing thing.

I just gotta measure that a bit better, bro.

And then, um, just honing in on that avatar.

You work with women too?

[laughs]

Or you know... [laughs] Or I would touch it and come to him and be like, "Whoops." But I think that between the three of us, myself, Chris, and Ian Murray, because, you know, I think one thing, the way that all of this got started was that, you know, we're three rust belt kids.

Chris is from Buffalo, Ian's from Cleveland, and I'm from Pittsburgh, and we, we knew that one thing that was going to happen was that we were going to rise and grind, and we were going to, we were going to go to the well with hard work, and that was the gonna be the easy part.

And the hard part was gonna be where do we get information, and, uh, we're just so lucky that our brothers and sisters in arms in coaching were so willing to share the information freely with us be- and they were just so happy to share it with us.

We went and visited a coach locally, Mark Hesse, who was tremendously successful at Washington Township, which was the team right next to us at Carmel.

We went down there and visited with him, and he said, "You're the only people who've ever come and asked me about what I did." And we said, "Oh, well you- like you're like the best seem- like you're like the best guy here." So you know, we took that idea and we just kept running with it locally, regionally, nationally, internationally.

Where can we find the best minds in the sport and how do we, you know, how do we mine them for our information? And then frankly it was Chris's job and Ian- uh, Chris's job at the total program level and then Ian's job at the age group level to take that information and say, "Well, how do I put this through the Carmel filter and make sure that this becomes us if it's, if it's valuable?" And, and I think that was, that's probably the brilliance of how we got to be aligned with Gain because, you know, Vern Gambetta is such a thinker a- he's a lifetime thinker, and he forced us and reinforced us to continue that process.

How long is it gonna be before I can implement this for my club and really see real results?

Talk about some of the challenges that you've seen and how you've addressed them.

So a lot of the challenges, I think this goes for, for probably most folks these days, electricity and access to power ha- has been one of the big hurdles.

Uh, thankfully, we have really good partners in Oncor, and we've been able to work with them to really not only try to address the needs of, of existing companies wanting to expand, but also be proactive in our approach, uh, as companies are wanting to move to the region, to Plano.

Uh, be able to kind of think ahead and generate and bring in more power, um, to help support these kind of high, high, uh, power users, whether it's life science, biotech, um, what you're seeing with data centers.

Uh, what we're seeing with, um, even on the industrial side, uh, you know, high, high power users really try to get some of that power.

There's still struggles there, you know.

Everybody's trying to fight for the same thing, so, but that's, that proactive approach has been very helpful.

[laughs]

Right.

And for a long time, it's been the word on the street that, you know, Carmel does this Gain dryland, and Mason Manarees do this Gain dryland, and oh, Dynamo does this Gain dryland, and the University of Tennessee does this Gain dryland.

And now, as of just a few weeks ago, we, we let the cat out of the bag, the University of Virginia is doing the Gain dryland.

And, you know, the, the list of our teams, uh, isn't vast, but their weight is mighty.

And I would tell you that, yes, we've done amazing dryland work with these programs, but these are led by very hungry, very curious people.

And I would say the, the distinguishing difference between the programs that we've worked with and maybe the programs that someone else has worked with, Mal, is that when we...

When people approach us about whether or not they should start getting involved with us, we just ask them, "Are you prepared to work more, or are you looking to work less and just have someone else write you practices?" 'Cause if you're trying to work less, we are not the group of people to work for.

Uh, what do those different swim ecosystems need from dryland?

This is, I mean, we're talking about agency, right? Trying to put agency into a situation where we feel like we have none, which is something we're always talking about in this podcast.

Agency and autonomy.

Absolutely.

For me, as someone who's 48 years old, like I understand that.

That took a long time for me to, for me to understand, and I struggle with it still, but that's a piece that I can start, that I actively choose to use in my life as a way to navigate things.

Now, I think that if you're talking about my students, my students who are 18 to 21, 22, all undergrads, like they struggle with things like that because they don't necessarily feel that they have agency because of where they are in their development, not just like the fact that they are at school, but you know, even their cerebral cortex like isn't fully formed until, we've just now learned, you're 32.

Like 32 is when you e- exit adolescence, right? So things are still forming in your brain and your nervous system, so they need more help.

Why do you think that is?