Episode 92: Setting WIGS (Wildly Important Goals) With Jeffrey Krepps

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Transcript

0:03

Welcome back to building better businesses in ABA with me, Jonathan Mueller. It's a weekly podcast about the forces reshaping our autism services field. Learn from successful entrepreneurs, payers, investors, and leaders in applied behavior analysis. Thank you kind listener for letting me into your world today. Now onto the show.

Jonathan: 0:30

My guest today is Jeffrey Kreps. Jeffrey is a 20 plus year executive in healthcare. He has extensive experience working with seniors, adults with developmental disabilities, children with autism, and people with mental health needs. Jeff has worked across operations, strategy, outreach, and M& A functions and organizations. He's currently working as a healthcare management consultant, as founder of Akamai Synthesis Design, a consulting firm, and as a startup entrepreneur in the psychedelic mental healthcare space. Jeff, welcome to the pod, dude.

Jeffrey Krepps: 1:02

Awesome, dude. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this and I've been looking forward to it.

Jonathan: 1:06

Rock on. You know, we've known each other. I couldn't believe this as I was reflecting for, I think, almost

Jeffrey Krepps: 1:12

Freaking decade, dude.

Jonathan: 1:14

A decade, which means I'm not getting any younger, man, you look younger than I, so that's what counts. when we first met, it was in Hawaii. You live on the big island, so I'm super peanut butter jealous, but you live on the big island. It was in Hawaii. and we work closely together. one of my former organizations, was transitioning. It's a Hawaii operations. to your former organization. and so we went through an intense couple months working together on, on that transition process and everything came with it. And, uh, so yeah, let's start with there. Jeff, what did you learn about ABA as you took over leading those operations?

Jeffrey Krepps: 1:48

Yeah. I mean, you guys were all pros like coming into the situation. I was coming from primarily a home care based organization, but, you know, just the total passion for ABA, the, the dedication to clinical quality that personnel would have. I really learned a lot about the dedication of the practitioners themselves. In fact, we inherited a wonderful pool of talent from your organization. It allowed us to grow, to become the best. And biggest organization delivering ABA services in Hawaii. And ultimately that passion itself. And I think that that was the most tremendous impact that I had was the understanding of this passion and the passion of people would lead to, you know, many of those individuals led efforts in order to, unfold autism parity in the state of Hawaii. So I would say just the passion of the field, the dedication to the science and the ability to leverage clinical talent. IE from your prior organization and the operational talent from my prior organization in order to, you know, create that PBJ, peanut butter, jelly sandwich combination of, maximum effect and maximum organizational capacity for quality and scope.

Jonathan: 2:54

Yeah, you know, it's amazing because this is back in what, 2013, 2014, something like that. like ABA services were still generally pretty new, right? And certainly getting reimbursed for them. And there was a combination of both insurance, but also the, you know, school district work. I mean, it's extraordinary to think just in the last, you know, 9, 10 years, how far the fields come. But, and that's cool to hear that, from a policy perspective, right? just, the greater effect of what you all were doing helped to, move autism parity forward. But one of the things that I learned, and actually it was separate from this, from this instance, we went through, prior to that transition, a huge audit, of school district services that candidly were, like, super bogus. And I know they're super bogus because we got slapped with this audit. from Department of Education and we went through and said, we're going to fight this and we were able to source document and at the end of it, they had, there was this huge number owed and we were able to like, fight back on 98 percent of it. And not only that, the DOE, the person who came after ended up getting fired and they said, Oh, you don't owe anything. So anyway, that was like, Oh my gosh, that was an intense couple of months. But one of the things that I learned is that it's just hard to do business in Hawaii as outsider. You know, I'm, I don't know if this term outsiders is a bad word, but like, been your experience working in Hawaii and how do you become an insider?

Jeffrey Krepps: 4:10

Uh, there's generally going to be a little skepticism when people plant their flag and say, I am now living in Hawaii. I'm a resident of Hawaii. local folks many times, and I've been in Hawaii for over 20 years now. people generally, are some of the best people on earth. Love it. Love the people here. Love the culture. Don't think I'm ever going to move. But the local vibe is that, people that come many times with the best of intentions to stay will ultimately cycle through, cycle through the local community. So people aren't. Generally willing to invest in those efforts unless somebody is deeply embedded in that community. So to me, it's all about community and longevity. Longevity, if you're fortunate enough to be able to make a living in one of the most expensive places in the United States, then great. Longevity, just be here and be here for a while. But secondarily, Being part of the community, whether that's your professional community, whether that's your religious community, whether that is, you know, a not for profit board, whether that is public service and volunteering, government boards, et cetera, getting vested in your community, showing folks that you care about community. Show folks that you have love and aloha for the community, and that will reflect itself back on you, and you'll become an insider.

Jonathan: 5:26

I mean, I think that speaks volumes to Any community that you're in, right? Like that is that you get out of a community what you put into it. And those, if you're just looking to like plant that flag and just do business in Hawaii, you're gonna be seen as that outsider forever, but you're not gonna reap those rewards of being part of the community. I think it's well said. Well, you know, as a healthcare management consultant now I know one of the things you're super passionate about, you've described to me before is. the frameworks that you used for running really disciplined and efficient organization. and specifically references 40 X and four disciplines of execution. Dude. So Jeff, tell me more about that.

Jeffrey Krepps: 6:04

there are many kind of models, and they all have similar, similar parts and different parts. But with 40X, it's a book written by, uh, McChesney, Covey, and Euling, where they, Detail for specific disciplines that really facilitate, execution of your goals. But what you start with is what's known as a wig, which is your wildly important goal. So this is like one or two significant goals. It can be a moonshot, it can be like, something very practical and pragmatic, like in the a b, A space where it would be like, we want to double our RBT and our BCBA talent pool. So it can be any number of things, but you're not going anywhere without, without a goal. So you start with a wildly important goal. Secondly is the idea of measurement. And, uh, it's important to distinguish a lead measure from a lag measure. And the lead measures are what's really important for people in ABA. They're going to love the concept of lead measure because the lead measure is just active behavior. It is, what are you going to do to inflect the measure? A lag measure, like number of employees on staff, that, that's already happened. That's past tense. that is something that is ultimately, not necessarily in the now, in the present, and it can't affect anything. So don't focus on the lag. Focus on the lead. it's already happened. You can't change it. You can't affect it. also number three. So the third discipline relates to the idea of a scorecard, like a graphic representation of where you are at. against your goals. are you hitting your goals? Are you, or where are you at? So I'm a visual person myself and I like to see, whether it's a graph or, a scorecard that is like kind of colorfully laid out, something to get a quick glance of where you're at versus your goal. It's like the actuals versus your predetermined goals. Some people might know a version of this by, you know, if you've looked at, Uh, you know, a charity event. They used to have telethons on TV. There'd be like a thermometer, and the mercury would be rising. You'd be able to see that as a graphic representation of where somebody was at a goal. So you have this visual representation known as a scorecard telling you where you're at. Sometimes people use red, yellow, and green to determine where Uh, am I on track? Am I off track? Am I somewhere in between? Those types of things allow people without getting into the weeds of the data to have a big picture understanding of on track, off track or not. So scorecard is important. It's the third discipline of execution in 40X. lastly, is establishing a cadence of accountability. many organizations are already doing this. you have. Regular operational standup meetings. But occasionally you might have to have meetings that are designed to see where we're at with goals. So more of a tactical meeting, like it's a tactical meeting cadence, whereby you're meeting to discuss where you at with like maybe initiatives, strategies, or things that are outside the normal day to day of what's going on. Where are we at with scheduling, billing, collections, other functions that you frankly take up a lot of operational time, but setting out time to meet with others that are on your team to kind of pressure test each other and say, where are we at with our goals? Team members should be supportive in this case. They should be, helping each other. It should feel like team building, camaraderie, and we all leave the meeting coming back with goals for the next week and then ready to report out when we convene again in the following week. So typically you might want to do this weekly or monthly.

Jonathan: 9:18

I, so full disclosure, I am a huge fan of 40 X and the 4 disciplines. In fact, at element, we've got our wig and the scoreboards like we measure just a couple of things. Got to reflect on like this idea of lead versus lag is so important. Right? And, and I've always thought of leading indicators are those that are number one, predictive of the outcome. And number two are actually influenceable, right? To your point, like you can change behavior now and affect them. And that's really important because looking in, like you mentioned a lag indicator, like number of staff, right? Or, or if you look at a PNL, right? A financial statement, that's a lagging indicator. That's what happened in the past, right? Is it important to know? Sure. Absolutely. But what are the things, what are the inputs? What are those predictive lead measures That are shaping those, but that cadence of accountability and like the weekly wig lag meeting, as we call it, dude, because we like to say 80 percent of the work that, that we do, at least I guess most organizations, it's just the whirlwind. It's the stuff that comes up. That's like, gotta be done, but it's like whack a mole. And are you really moving the organization forward? No. So we have to specifically carve out time to look at the scoreboard and look at that 20 percent of like, how we can use. our most valuable time that will most bend the needle and move the organization forward toward our goals. And without doing that, it's just so easy to get caught up in the whirlwind, isn't it?

Jeffrey Krepps: 10:36

It sure is. I'm glad you mentioned that too, because that's an important concept of 40x as well. This idea that we're caught up in a whirlwind and whether it's, work or day to day life, the whirlwind is all around us, right? And if we don't take time to step outside of that, we're just going through the motions of life with, without being conscious or meditative about what it is that we're doing. So that's 40X, stepping out of the whirlwind is you know, taking your deep breath and maybe hitting, um, a little bit of meditation, yoga or something to get your head straight, to think about what you need to do.

Jonathan: 11:05

I do that. You know, I'm a big fan of the app Headspace. Now you mentioned meditation. Um, I don't know, I've got like seven or 8, 000 minutes meditated over the last couple of few years, but I think that's another good example of discipline. Number three, the scorecard, right? Like we want to know how are we doing better for worse as human beings, but how are we doing? Are we winning or not? And, uh, I don't know, we see that everywhere, especially with all the gamification, right? Well, hey, I'm going to put you on the spot, Jeff. give me an example of how you've used this framework in your own career at your own organizations.

Jeffrey Krepps: 11:34

You know, I'll be honest with you, John. I tend to use a variant of a strategic execution model that is similar, but a little bit different. So I don't know what the name for this is. I picked it up many, many years ago, but there are definitely analogies. with the 40X model, but it really is more based upon, I guess for maybe some of the listeners coming from the clinical space, based more around a clinical treatment model of assess, plan, implement, and review. Like, there's always a continuous process of, looking at where are we at with our problem, what is our, plan for addressing the problem? How are we going to execute that? And how are we going to review that? So you have goals in assessment after an assessment, you're gonna have goals. So there's a wildly important goal when you're planning, you're ultimately saying what you're going to do. And when you're executing your, your, involved in, the creation of a lead measure. the review happens at a tactical meeting at the, at the weekly lag meeting. So it's similar, but a little bit difference. and I always think of it as like a clinical model that is, refabricated for organizational thinking.

Jonathan: 12:39

Yeah. And I think what's important about what you've described, this assess, plan, implement, review is like, that's an ongoing process. You you do it once, right? And come back in a year or five years or something. It's always going. Were there any. Big challenges that you face that you found that this, this, framework lent itself to and that you were able to solve because of it.

Jeffrey Krepps: 12:57

Yeah. almost every single activity as a. Strategic advisor as a strategic consultant. rests upon some sort of, idea where there's a goal, there's a challenge, there's a problem, you're attempting to solve it, and you execute interventions that are designed to affect change in the organization. So I could call out any number of things that I've worked on, but it's almost, I would say everything that I do is based on that model. Everything outside of, I have, I'll be honest, I haven't been in operations, pure operations, And maybe seven or eight years. So this is all I do. This is what I do all the time.

Jonathan: 13:35

It's, yeah, you're right. there's like a universal application of this to any challenge that, that you face. And I think back at Ascend, um, when we had this challenge of, you know, we were getting this low acceptance rate, on, uh, BCBA offer letters think we're getting a 50 percent acceptance rate. And we looked at this, we're like, what are we doing wrong in the process? And we had to first step back and like assess. And we figured out we weren't like, we were like speedily going through the process, but we weren't helping candidates contact our values, organizational values. So, you know, the plan we came up with was sort of modeled on a much harder interview process where they got to meet more people in the organization, where they contacted our values. We implemented it right. Like. Teed up the metrics we wanted to see and whether it's gonna be successful. And then it was like this constant review and we actually got it up to, and we've stayed above 80 percent acceptance rate ever since like four or five years ago. So, but I think this is, that's a really important idea is like you're constantly revisiting and working through those four stages. Well, You mentioned that you haven't been in, in operations for, for seven or eight years, but like at your heart, I know you love strategy. I love strategy too. Huge strategy I love like stepping up to the 10, 000 foot level and looking at, you know, where an organization fits within its competitive environment in the field. but tell me, how does strategy in your mind, Jeff differ from execution? Yeah.

Jeffrey Krepps: 14:50

Well, kind of put it in a way, like when you, when you think about it, or when I think about it, I think of it as they're, they're essentially almost poles of the same thing, or they're essentially maybe the yin and yang of business development. They are, one without the other is sort of like. It's nonsense. It's it doesn't make any sense to have half of a yin and miss the yang or half the yang and miss the ying. And so to execute without strategy is like going into a wilderness without a map. and that's back to the whirlwind. It's like, okay, you're just spinning around. What are you, what are you even doing with yourself day in and day out? Don't know. I'm just too busy executing. To strategize without execution is just. One of the biggest waste of times that you could ever do. It's the, you know, you put forth all of this money, you put forth all of the team gets together, you start drafting strategies and plans, maybe even pay a consultant and then you never do anything with it. Like, you know, why even go through the process? You might as well just enter the whirlwind and not think about it, but to have, to have both of them prevents you from wasting your energy. Creating a document that is perhaps, destined for the scrap heap of ideas and wasted effort. And ultimately, just being able to put them together as strategic execution, I think is a more helpful way to kind of look at the, the paradigm. Um, there is also the science, the nuance, the magic between the yin and the yang there. And that's tactical execution. Like it's helpful to have somebody on your team that's able to be able to say, let's take these ideas. We'll put them in the operator's hands and we'll be able to make this magic happen. Because sometimes with the best of intent, you can have the strategy there. You can have the execution, but there's this whole tactical middle ground that has to happen to convert one set of ideas into, into practice.

Jonathan: 16:34

I love that imagery that you did in the end. It's so true. One of those like is without the other is functionally useless. You know, I'll be honest. Like, I'll make a big confession when I started my career first couple of years, I was a management consultant and I didn't work in healthcare. I worked in a whole bunch of different fields, but, we would walk it. I, I worked with Canada post. Uh, so the, the Canadian equivalent of the U. S. Postal Service and I was in Ottawa for, for many, many weeks and we, um, we were tasked, I think, with looking at the replacement future forecast and the future replacement rate of emails, or I'm sorry, of physical mail getting replaced by fax, email, and other things. So anyway, there's this beautiful, like deck that resulted, this great strategy I recommend about how they like, afforded that. And then guess what? I'm sure it went on a shelf. And like, we left it up to someone else to execute. It's like, seriously, dude, like go, go execute on that thing. Don't just tell me what to do. Anyone has good right? And you can say what to do. So I think it's so true, man.

Jeffrey Krepps: 17:29

Yeah. I mean, wouldn't that be great? just, if you're not going to use the plan anyway, How about just paying me the money and I'll go to the beach and we'll just kind of scribble a few notes on a piece of paper and you can have that, but yeah, that's a good example. It's

Jonathan: 17:43

Um, I, as I understand it, like you are like looking out over the beach now, like in Kona on the big Island. I am super jealous. That's like pretty sweet, dude. I don't know how you get

Jeffrey Krepps: 17:54

hard to concentrate.

Jonathan: 17:57

Um, well, let me follow up on my question about strategy. Like what does it take for an organization? To be great at strategy.

Jeffrey Krepps: 18:05

Um, a couple of things, and I think like there's so many, I think of so many analogies between what does it take to be, a great individual and what does it take to be a great organization? And there, there, there are a lot of parallels. So one is being honest, being honest with yourself about the organization, being honest about where you're at in time and being able to have difficult conversations about areas of improvement. So that honesty really goes a long way in Knowing yourself and knowing your company and knowing what you do. there has to be this, existential acknowledgment of who we are and being honest about who we are. it's a prerequisite to anything, like, you're not going to go anywhere if you're deluding yourself. Or if you're, you're senseless. have some misrepresentation of who you are, what you can do. So number one, it's the realism of having on honesty with yourself in order to, have the best knowledge set about your company. Um, so otherwise you're lost. but. Then I would say, okay, so those prerequisites being said, then you got to work it backwards. Like, I'm a fan of like vision boards, visualizations, etc. So the team having a real concrete idea in mind in terms of what is it that, that happens when we hit these wildly important goals or What does it look like when we're at the tail end of that? and it helps sometimes if you mentioned gamification earlier, but if you gamify something, or if you have a big party at the end of it, but what is, what's this end point going to look like, you know, close your eyes, feel it, taste it, touch it, smell it. Like make sure you know where it is that you're going. And start thinking about how if I were to take steps backwards, how could I get to the starting point? So you can work it from the front end. You can work it from the back end, but it's a whole lot of tactical objectives to get from point A to point B. So you kind of subsect the subheadings, work through the subheadings. If there are sub objectives through there, work through those, but you then line up the tasks, have a task analysis and just line it up. It's kind of like project management principles. Um, but then, The other thing I would say is becoming an expert is also know your expertise. But also your teams, the people that you work with have so much knowledge. They have got so much to say, they've got so much to give so that, this being great at strategy, it's not a one person operation or it shouldn't be. It should be a collective enterprise where people are distilling all of the inputs that they can into a. Particular puzzle or a particular goal that people are working on and then ultimately, working to distill that down into a functional plan to get to that end point, that wildly important goal, that destination. So those are some things I think that, you know, off the top of my head, I would think are really important for great strategy. be humble, work with others, know your destination.

Jonathan: 20:48

Well, you're now a consultant with your own practice. tell me more about the different kinds of consulting services you provide.

Jeffrey Krepps: 20:54

there's several buckets. there's vision and strategy work, of course. So, with strategic planning, I work on annual and three year goals. Typically, um, I do vision and values work, framing and reframing those for teams, go to market strategies and de novo planning for people that are entering new markets or delivering new services. a second bucket of work that I do is in business and corporate development. So a whole litany of. Market analysis, competitive analysis, market research projects, outreach, growth, growth initiatives, cross functional facilitation and project management, M& A support. So that's sourcing and advising buy and sell side, of the equation, due diligence and integrations there. I've recently started doing some, not for profit corporate structuring. So starting up not for profits for people, doing some grant proposals there. and also, lastly, with business development and corporate development, partnerships, alliances, and joint ventures, and working with people in ways to collaborate, in order to, uh, more effectively serve communities. Ideally, that's like a good community, a good way for individuals to more effectively serve communities cooperatively rather than competing. and then I guess the last bucket is along organization building. So doing organizational assessments. If people don't know who they are. As an organization, I can help pull that mirror up and show organizations who they are, do some executive coaching and team building. and then, lastly, um, some interim work. So I can do interim fractional executive, temp CEO, temp COO, or temp chief, chief growth officer. I've done a few of those before as well.

Jonathan: 22:26

Wow, dude, that is a, an extraordinarily broad range of what's really fun work, at least in my mind. That's like some super fun work that you get to do. I want you to harness like all of your expertise in autism services, broader behavioral health, and take out your crystal ball, Jeff. what's the next five years going to bring to the ABA field?

Jeffrey Krepps: 22:47

Okay. And I can't say with the first thing on my list, it's, it doesn't take a crystal ball to, to realize this. if you have been alive in ABA in the last. I'd say three to five years. You've heard about value based care and you know that it's coming down the pike So ultimately, as more, insurance providers, funders, et cetera, are looking at the total volume spend of these services. They're going to be looking at, payment methodologies that resemble other fields that I've been previously, such as, Medicare based services that have capitated care. They have moved to value based care. And, essentially, companies. will need to show value in terms of the services that they're offering. And primarily, at a minimum, that should be related to clinical outcomes and access to care. if that's that no crystal ball necessary, like you're asleep if you don't know that one. Some others, they're a little bit, deeper back. Another one that's emergent is the increase in an engraved care model so that, you would have not just ABA, but ABA partnered with neurology. I mean, OTPT speech has been there for a while, but you may see some pediatric mental health partnerships with ABA companies, pediatric, pediatric home care, pediatric, Maybe even pediatric primary care at some point, but you can see, the integration of the overarching healthcare system to acknowledge ABA as a subsector of the healthcare system. And, no, as no person is an island, no intervention is an island in the American healthcare system. Eventually, everything folds and comes together. another one would be, a regionalization, which would be, say, a market density approach for, companies looking to expand versus a national approach, you would see that as market breadth. So I think we're going to see less of the days where the highly funded invested companies are going for a pin in every state of the map. And they're going to look at where are the markets that we can most concentrate in and be able to most effectively serve the most individuals in that particular market. So it may be looking at more regional versus national markets. seeing some effects of it. God knows how long this will last, but the effects of, higher interest rates. So there's all kinds of finance related challenges and issues related to tighter lending. So you can see lower valuations in terms of, offerings in the M& A space. More difficult access to loans. So if you need a bridge loan or something, there may be more of a risk at, failure or, involuntary exits, that are out there, which in itself then, I guess lowers valuations, but, that expensive debt is going to limit growth and improvement initiatives. So, you know, the money eventually. Um, and then lastly, this one I mentioned joint ventures and partnerships before, but I feel that there's a lot of opportunity for mom and pop and smaller providers to be able to, Be competitive in markets where there are more well heeled, more heavily funded organizations out there. I think it only makes sense for those providers to start partnering up and looking at ways they can help each other in certain markets. So that's what I got in terms of my crystal ball.

Jonathan: 25:54

Wow, if you had asked me that question about next 5 years in a priori, what I've said, I I think I would have said exactly all things just described. And I think it's so true. in fact, to that last point, I was at a conference. Actually, both of us were recently at, I was talking to some sharp folks in the field who said, look, if In these times, in these harder times in a field like ABA, there will be non traditional mergers that happens. Call it a couple different, regional providers maybe that come together who are values aligned and meet certain criteria. And there's a way to accrete value that way. that's different from traditional MNA. So I think it's so true. I want to talk about integrated care, cause I am so passionate about this is one of the things we built into ascends DNA from, the get six years ago when we started, that it's having ABA company by family mental health support, LCSWs and diagnostics psychologists and a really smart dude in Silicon Valley recently, I was at a dinner and he said, Jonathan, there's value in. Bundling and unbundling. And he was describing, not, just ABA, he was describing like generally any type of organization as you're thinking about how you create value for your consumers. And just give a, for instance on this, think about, Microsoft and how it bundles, right? you buy a Microsoft, like the suite, and then they introduce like You know, MS Teams, Microsoft Teams, and that automatically, is competing a potential consumer out of a Zoom or somewhere they sneak it in. So there's this value in bundling, right? There's also a value in unbundling and just look at 20 years ago. Cable companies existed and you had to spend a couple hundred, 300 bucks a month and you had to get literally like thousands of channels. Like you couldn't decide. And now you've got Netflix or HBO max, whatever the subscriptions are, there's value in unbundling. And I think that's part of what we're going to see to your point, there is value in bundling these different and integrating different autism related evidence based services. Guess why? Because the consumer. Ultimately, that's autism benefits because they're going to be getting speech or OT, or they need a diagnosis. they need maybe access to a pediatrician. So I think you're spot on with that, that's part of the future of our field.

Jeffrey Krepps: 28:00

to that point, like when you talk about that, it reminds me of like the idea that, we should be client centered and individual focused. And that's very true coming from the service side. But that In the kind of like product development, maybe in tech space, we might consider that consumer experience and in some regards, they're the same thing, right? So we're carving out this piece that this one person wants as a micro data point and creating that experience for them.

Jonathan: 28:26

Yeah, well said. Jeffrey, what's one thing every ABA business owner should start doing and one thing to stop doing?

Jeffrey Krepps: 28:32

Okay. Assuming they're not doing it. It's like, um, I guess. Just empower your teams. you hire your teams for a reason. no exec, no founder can do everything. So empower your teams to actualize on your wildly important goals that you've set out and incentivize, and even vest if you can your teams when possible so that they're part of it. They know they're entrenched. They are part of the DNA. So I think that's, that, that is. The most essential thing. You need a team. Nobody can do it themselves. Empower the team.

Jonathan: 29:01

stop?

Jeffrey Krepps: 29:04

This may be a personal bias. People may disagree, but I'd say listen more than you speak, just generally, you know, always be a magnet for information. Always have your antenna up, listen more. you know, the expertise is closer than you think. And it may be from that quiet person in the corner of the room. So just always be prepared to listen more than speak.

Jonathan: 29:26

Such words of wisdom. And before we wrap up, I got to ask you, cause how did you get interested in, in the psychedelic mental healthcare space? I think there's some really interesting research going on right now about that.

Jeffrey Krepps: 29:37

Uh, yeah, certainly, There, I mean, I'm a lifelong aficionado of, um, psychedelics as transformative, substances for people, in the, I guess, You know, long term, when you look at it from an ethnological perspective, these substances have been used in shamanic experiences. They have been used as, natural healing remedies for thousands of years. You know, it's, it's undeniable. There's a history of this being a medicine that's out there. Personally, I had the most traumatic experience in my life many, many years ago, well, 10 or 11 years ago. And, I had undergone, MDMA, self treatment for that trauma. And I would say that that's fundamentally, it altered my neurons in order to, it, you know, it stopped my brain from battling with itself, feelings of guilt, feelings of. The inability to, have done the right thing at the right situation. So it's going to sound nebulous to the audience, but trust me, this is, this was a painful experience and still is, but the medicine allowed me to walk forth in a nonjudgmental way, assume the best of the situation and allow my, Cognitive rational side of my mind to communicate with my feeling and emotive side of the mind in ways that talk therapy alone will never do. It will never, ever do that. So I have a passion for it. It's personal. And I look forward to Expanding access to this type of medicine.

Jonathan: 31:03

Uh, Jeffrey, you give me goosebumps, dude, that emotion and your voice as you describe that. Promise me when you were ready to come back on the pod to talk more about psychedelics. I cannot wait, to do more of that, sir. Well, hey, Jeffrey, where can people find you online?

Jeffrey Krepps: 31:17

Um, you can find me, um, www. asd. earth. That's for Akamai Synthesis Design, www. asd. earth. I'm also, LinkedIn. you can find me there. And personally, I'm always open for networking calls. You can reach out to me at jkreps. That's jkrepps@asd.earth.

Jonathan: 31:38

And I know from firsthand experience how much you are a knowledge sharer, and you're trying to help to put good knowledge and wisdom out in the world. So I appreciate that about you, Jeffrey. All right. You ready for the hot take questions, dude?

Jeffrey Krepps: 31:49

Let's hit it.

Jonathan: 31:51

All right, you're on your deathbed. What's the one thing you want to be remembered for?

Jeffrey Krepps: 31:54

I want to be remembered as somebody that gave more than they take, they've taken. I want to be known as a kind person. I want people to know that I had a good heart and I gave more than I took.

Jonathan: 32:05

What's your most important self care practice?

Jeffrey Krepps: 32:07

Uh, digging in the dirt, gardening, planning things, being in nature.

Jonathan: 32:12

Well, hey, that's the jcreps at asd. earth. I did not even know that extension existed. So you've learned me something new today,

Jeffrey Krepps: 32:19

You got it.

Jonathan: 32:20

Um, Hey, do you have a favorite song and or music genre?

Jeffrey Krepps: 32:23

Um, millions, more than maybe not millions. I'm exaggerating. There's hundreds of favorite songs. I cannot, and it's not fair to ask a music lover that question. But, in terms of genre, like, I guess, summertime I listen to a lot of reggae. Like, I like reggae in the summertime. I have a little seasonal affect, so in the wintertime it becomes darker. Sometimes I listen to stoner metal or like dark EDM, but, you know, it varies depend, depending on my mood.

Jonathan: 32:48

I love it. What's the one thing you'd tell your 18 year old self? Oh,

Jeffrey Krepps: 32:52

Um, chill out, dude. don't rush to the destination. The experience is right there in front of you. know that your ego, although part of the team, your ego is really not the driver. It's an illusion and it's trying to take control. Very important, valuable member of the team, but not the captain. let the ego step aside and let the true self shine through.

Jonathan: 33:10

that is deep AF. Wow. Um, You could only wear one style of footwear. What would it be?

Jeffrey Krepps: 33:17

Okay. This is kind of, it's an easy one. after the last few, I live in Hawaii and we wear slippahs bra'. That's flip flops to you people on the mainland.

Jonathan: 33:27

Slippers, bro. Well, bra, it has been sick fun. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. I've loved our conversation, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Krepps: 33:34

I appreciate it too, man. You have, you have a good one.

33:40

Hey, kind listener, thanks for tuning in. If you like this episode, can you do me a favor? Give me a rating on your favorite podcast channel. It helps more values aligned people like you find the pod. Till next time, peace.