The Tables Have Turned: Alison and Chris Get Interviewed

In this, the first episode of Season 2 of Trauma InJustice, Chris and Alison are in the hot seats.  Who are Chris and Alison?  Why do we do this podcast? How is our engineer, Chris Higgins, okay after listening to all of these recordings about the dark stuff we talk about? Give a listen to find out about the behind-the-scenes business of Trauma InJustice.  And BOLO for new episodes every Tuesday starting now!

Transcript

DeBelder_Moser_Transcript.mp3

Speaker 1 [00:00:05] This is the Trauma and Justice podcast. I'm Chris Higgins, your guest host. Today, I'm interviewing the show's creators, Alison DeBelder and Chris Moser. If this is your first episode, you probably want to back up and listen to pretty much anything else from season one, because this week we're going inside how the show is made and why it was made. Next week, we'll start up with regular episodes and season two as a reminder, the show is not appropriate for children. These conversations can touch on seriously troubling topics. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse and incarceration. Now, with all that out of the way, let's get started. I'm Chris Higgins and normally I just engineer this show Alison. Can you introduce yourself and then pass it over to Chris? 

Speaker 2 [00:00:47] Hi, sure. I'm Alison DeBelder and I have been a lawyer for about 20 years. I've also done some other things like mitigation specialist and teacher. I started my legal career in the Jacksonville Public Defender's Office in Florida, which is where I met Chris Moser, who my co-host. 

Speaker 3 [00:01:11] My name is Chris Moser. I'm an attorney and a college professor. I work at Feiger College. I'm the director of the preLaw program. I met Alison 20 years ago at the public defender's office and prior to working at the public defender's office, I represented death row inmates for a short period of time and I still take cases in private practice. And I'm of counsel with the Henrikson Law Group up in Jacksonville, and we focus primarily on civil rights violations and employment law. 

Speaker 1 [00:01:50] Right on was the only nonlawyer in the show, I am suitably impressed, also not faculty, so I want to start at the beginning. Can you talk me through the beginning of the show? How did the idea come up? How did you think about making a podcast? I assume this is the first podcast that either of you has made, right? 

Speaker 3 [00:02:08] That's right. The idea for the podcast was Alison. What happened was I was awarded a sabbatical and Alison and I had worked in various projects and jobs together in the past. And we had an idea originally of going into the prisons and interviewing vulnerable people and perhaps writing some sort of a manual for clinical programs. And then covid happened and that all got waylaid. And when covid happened, we also began a happy hour hold public defender conversation group that lasted. I don't know how many months. And we kind of, I think, were inspired by the stories that we discussed there. 

Speaker 1 [00:02:54] Now, was that like a Zoome happy hour? 

Speaker 3 [00:02:57] Yes, it was every Friday, I guess around started in March, right. Alison. And it went for about nine months at least. 

Speaker 2 [00:03:05] Yeah, that sounds right. With a different cast of characters and attendee's. I've always been an avid podcast listener, I think since before most people knew what a podcast was when I was commuting to go to school, when I was getting my master's degree, after I left the public defender's office, I had to commute to school. I would listen to them when I was going to teach at Flagler. I have a lot that I listen to and especially after I left criminal defense work. I have thought a lot about these special conversations and relationships that we have with one another. We were lucky enough to work in a very special office and I think all of our friends recognize that. And we've stayed in touch with a lot of those folks. And the same sorts of conversations come up all the time. And it's such a weird area of work to have done and to be passionate about and to be really excited about and also sometimes to be really troubled by. And I listen to true crime podcasts. This isn't quite that, but it's kind of adjacent to that. And I was interested to see if other people might find it interesting 

Speaker 1 [00:04:21] going into making the show. I'm curious what you thought was going to happen. Like what did you think was going to be easy or straightforward? What was going to be hard? And then in actually doing the show, what turned out to be the challenge? You know, sometimes you you learn something quickly and then have to change. And I'm curious if anything like that came up for you. 

Speaker 2 [00:04:42] Yeah. So many things. Right. The whole thing's been a huge learning process. I thought that it would be hard to get people to agree to do this thing with us. There was no sample for them to listen to. There was no reason that they would have any confidence that we would make something of value. And almost every single person that we reached out to immediately said yes. Chris and I actually discussed regularly as season one was going along how flattering that was because we asked some really incredibly important busy people doing hard work that takes up a lot of their time. And anything they agree to do takes them away from their family more than they are already. It was just a really good feeling to have people say yes to us because I think they trusted us. So that was something that I thought would be hard. That was easy. One of the things that I thought might be challenging, but maybe was a little bit harder was I don't think our conversations capture some aspects of the work, because I think what I found is that our guests in the first season are all criminal defense attorneys and they're all huge, sincere champions for their clients. And they are very reluctant to say things that might damage a client even if it's not a specific person. They're very reluctant to say anything that might cast the people they represent in a negative light. And also they're concerned, I think, about their professional relationships. And so I think there's a little bit of hesitancy to be quite as frank as we are when we're just sitting around talking with one another. 

Speaker 1 [00:06:19] Do you think season two will be different in that regard? Do you think you'll have what different sorts of folks, people, you know, less? 

Speaker 3 [00:06:25] Well, I think so. I think not knowing someone for 20 years, not having all of that history is going to make the podcast different and perhaps better in some ways, such as the ways that Alison just described, because we're going to branch out, we're going to talk to different kinds of professionals. They don't have the same duty of confidentiality. And they also our listeners, at least they checked us out before they agreed to say yes. So they really are coming with a passion to discuss trauma. I had no expectations going in. I thought if we preserve a social history of these great people that we can listen to, it was going to be a win. And now seeing the outcome and the response of the first season has us really excited about the work of the podcast. 

Speaker 2 [00:07:30] I also think that Season two is necessarily going to be different because we are listening to all of our guests with fresh ears, whereas in the first season, although we certainly didn't know everything that we talked about, these are people that we've known for a long time. We're comfortable with them. We have an idea about their perspectives on things generally and also had heard some of these stories specifically. We wanted to elicit them because we think that they're very important, whereas that's just not the case. I don't think with really almost any of our guests in the second season, 

Speaker 3 [00:08:01] we also have been able to get the vulnerability and the intimacy out in the second season, which surprises me because we don't know these people in that way. And I guess what that tells me is these are other professionals that are very passionate about their work and they really are there to help service people. They might be in different roles. They might be on the other side, but they really do want to make the system better and they want to shine the light on the places that it's profoundly broken. 

Speaker 1 [00:08:36] Chris, I want to touch on something you mentioned, which was the reaction to the show in season one. All the reaction that I've seen so far has been very positive. And in fact, I think you all were on television. Can you just talk briefly about how that came about and whether that was a surprise to you? I mean, did you expect it to be on TV for your podcast? 

Speaker 3 [00:08:53] No, I didn't expect to be on TV, but and Schendler and I have known each other for a very long time. Our children, who are now almost out of high school, we're in a two year old class together. And after the second episode, she texted me and said, this is amazing. I think that she is an amazing investigative reporter, but I also know that she has very good taste and so that really meant a lot to me as a nonlawyer friend going kind of out of the way to say, hey, this is good and this is a good idea. And so I had a sense that Regina's episode, which was Episode three, because Regina addresses some more timely things, such as recently losing emotion, the Black Lives Matter movement, that if and liked what she heard before Regina's, that she was really going to respond to Regina's because it is newsworthy, quote unquote, like in the moment. And that's, I think, what kind of prompted the invitation to sit for the interview. 

Speaker 2 [00:10:03] I've been really touched by the folks who have reached out to us that we don't have any relationship with specifically, for the most part it's been attorneys and it's been women attorneys who've heard things in our interviews that really resonated with them that have been lacking in their professional space. Right. So they're not having conversations about sexual harassment that they have to deal with. People aren't having conversations formally at work, at trainings about some of the topics that we cover. We've had people contact us and tell us that they have been attacked at work. They have never told anybody before. They've told us that they thought that part of their professional career was that they had to endure sexual assault and have never told anybody before they reached out to us. And so that's the sort of thing that gives me goose bumps and makes me feel like having these conversations, just having them, is a thing of value in and of itself. If it means that it gives somebody else permission to maybe start having this conversation or think about how their office is dealing with things like sexual harassment. 

Speaker 1 [00:11:22] Wow. Yeah, it gets to a thing that I think is very unusual, like I don't think I've ever heard this on another show. Your show is structured in a way that at the end you've gone to the trouble, certainly in season one to elicit these remembrances, appreciations of the people who you're speaking with. I've done a lot of interviews in my life, but I don't think I ever ended the interview by saying, well, I talk to your colleagues and here's what they said about you, and it's going to make you cry in a good way, like a happy cry making space for that. That's certainly an unusual approach. And I wonder if you modeled that on something or it just came up out of the air. 

Speaker 2 [00:12:03] It was this half thought that I had right before we started recording that Chris and I would have these long, long meetings where we had to talk about a hundred different things and we changed our mind about everything a hundred different times. And just as kind of a throwaway, I said, what about if we do this? Because it just felt like it was going to be such a huge bummer of a topic. And I felt like everybody was being so kind and generous to give us their time and do it. And Chris said, OK, let's try it. So we did it for a few episodes and we didn't start publishing our episodes until we had a number of them already recorded. So we had zero feedback. And even when we were several deep having recorded them, we still went back and forth and thought about axing them. We were not convinced that it made sense or fit the tone. And it turns out, I think the response to those pieces has been really good. Again, I've had feedback from people who've told me that they cried listening to that part. And I think it fits really well into the model that Chris was explaining, how we envisioned Season one episodes as really being a historical record. Even if only a half dozen people listened to it. We thought it would be an important thing for the two of us to have when we're old. So I think that piece fits into that and has ended up being something that people like. 

Speaker 3 [00:13:30] Everyone we talk to is a lifelong friend. These are the best people I've ever met. Thank you cards. You know, you keep those for a reason. And it was worth it to kind of do it for that, even if maybe down the line when we got feedback, people said, oh, well, that's too long or people clicked out. It really was the only thing we could do to show our appreciation because we couldn't pay them. And just saying thank you for us, I think wouldn't have been as powerful because we all have really learned from each other. And I think that was another common theme. People do it their own way and then we borrow and share ideas for the betterment of the work. I don't know if it's logistically feasible to ever replicate that with people we don't know, but I think that a few of the people that people will listen to next season came on because of the people that gave thankyous or gas. And so there's still a connection to that part of the why someone would spend two hours and talk to us if they don't know who we are. 

Speaker 1 [00:14:48] It occurred to me in listening to Season one that the two of you and your community had recently lost someone. This comes up in many of those discussions. And the idea of thanking a person, you know, via messages from other people that they knew reminds me a little bit of telling someone you love them before they're gone, just making sure they know you care. Does that ring a bell? 

Speaker 2 [00:15:11] Yeah, that's the that's certainly the spirit that it's intended with. We did lose Pat McGuinness and he was slated to record with us. Actually, he was 100 percent game to do this with us, which is very like him. And I think that that was a reminder of how important these people and relationships are. And also, frankly, the pandemic, Chris talked about the fact that we had these Zoome happy hour things. And I don't live in Jacksonville anymore. I live in Tallahassee. And what's funny is that I made time once a year to go back around the holidays and meet up with as many folks as I could. But that was really it. And so the pandemic actually brought me closer with my family, frankly, because I was talking to people once a week who I love, who are the people I need advice from. It was funny in this period of separation and isolation to have this feeling of connectedness, which I think probably bleeds over into the podcast. And also I think the pandemic makes me want to tell people I love that I love them. 

Speaker 1 [00:16:23] So here's a detail thing that stuck out at me. One of the specific questions you often ask of people, of your guests has to do with talk therapy, professional psychotherapy. And if I remember correctly, almost everyone or maybe literally everyone you asked, do you do talk therapy? Have you tried talk therapy? The answer mostly is that's not for me. And that really surprised me as an answer, just because I think if you surveyed the people in my sort of professional world, the majority of them maybe or maybe 50, 50 or something would say, oh, yeah, I've been in therapy or I am in therapy or something. I wonder if you have any insight on that, because to me, I would think that population of people working in a trauma field environment would be more likely to seek psychotherapy at the same time. I wonder if these are people from a different generation where the stigma is different or if the profession itself has a stigma against that tool. What do you think about that? 

Speaker 2 [00:17:15] I think there's a couple of things that spring to mind. Off the top of my head, there is a huge professional stigma and barriers to accessing mental health care because our bars, the bodies that govern attorneys, can be punitive when it comes to mental health diagnoses. And I'm not suggesting that that's necessarily intentional. And I know that there's a lot of really good, clever people in the profession working to make headway, to make sure that that's not the case. But the truth is, is that I know people who have struggled with being able to practice law because they have disclosed a diagnosis for which they are actively seeking treatment and is well controlled. But when you see that, it sets up some weird incentives and disincentives as people from seeking care and there's is still a lot of work to be done. The other thing that has occurred to me is that the profession of psychology has been weaponized in the work that we do, so people who are involved in criminal defense. So that's all the people we talked to in the first season regularly deal with psychologists in terms of folks liberty. And there are people who are perceived as reliably going to side with the prosecution. And are regularly perceived as siding with the defense, just as other medical professionals are perceived that way. And so I think that that saps confidence in the profession, generally speaking. Also, you spend a lot of time reading people's records, and that saps confidence in the confidentiality that people are supposed to rely upon to speak freely and get somewhere in their treatment. 

Speaker 3 [00:19:14] I think the hired gun point is really good because there are stats and you can ask them in depositions, you know, if you're testifying for the state 90 percent of the time, yes, you might be in that mental health field, but you're not objective. I also think a big theme through the season. There was one guest that did discuss therapy. I don't think it was an accident that she was, I believe, the youngest guest of the season. So I think part of it is generational to a degree. But it also seems very apparent to me that you have to compartmentalize and repress some things to serve your client, to do that job and to stay in that job for as long as some of those people have stayed. So that is their coping mechanism. So it sort of runs contrary to making time once a week to speak about how you're impacted by that. They seem at odds with each other and maybe that's part of it, too. 

Speaker 2 [00:20:23] I think that's a really good point, Chris, the time, because whether you're working in a public defender's office or you're in private practice for different reasons, you never have enough time. When I was a public defender, I worked seven days a week regularly. Now, that wasn't every week. Sometimes it was six. It was rarely five people doing this work. And I'm sure this applies to other people in the profession as well, have outrageously stressful hours. So the idea of adding on something more that isn't just pure recreation that might be a chore I think is difficult. And I think Katherine Hinchey talked about not being confident that somebody would understand the work that she does because counselors, therapists are human beings, too. And we know from talking to a lot of human beings that they don't care for people who do the type of work that we do. And so that seems like a hurdle that you wouldn't want to inflict on yourself at the end of the day. 

Speaker 3 [00:21:35] Yeah, you don't need any more judgment for how you defend those people, Al Chipperfield was our last guest and I remember listening to a clip that he did at one point and on the work in the workload and the dedication the Alison just mentioned, it was in the context of trial preparation. And he said something like, you can never start early enough and you're never done. So it's never like, OK, I've finished perfecting this cross-examination or this. And so because it is never complete, you just can get it the best you can get it under the situation, I think a lot of people would feel guilty for taking the time to actually talk about their problems because they're seeing people with such profound problems. I think that's also part of it, too, in talking to people privately about why they don't seek out therapy. 

Speaker 1 [00:22:33] That's the kind of insight that I think is useful from this show and sort of OK, all of that, hence this show is a space for discussion of that set of problems, because that is pretty grim. I got to say, like, if the strategy to succeed in this field is to master repression, essentially sort of to repress these things effectively for long enough that you're not going to burn out so bad. Well, you know, I hope that works. I guess so. Moving on a little bit, the show is not for everybody. And you spend the first minute of the show basically telling people to turn the show off, you know, in case they have any issue with a litany of potential problems. I'm curious whether doing a show where that is the topic, trauma is the topic and response to trauma is the topic. And you're getting into stories of, oh, I don't know, torture boxes and sticky shoes and all kind of stuff like that, whether having these conversations in itself is in any way traumatic for the two of you. 

Speaker 3 [00:23:31] I think so. I think it's been very difficult because it brings up a lot of past cases and dynamics and then there's also the pandemic and just our own personal trauma of things happening in our life, whether it's the loss of a friend. My mom was in the hospital. It just kind of almost helps trigger struggling in a way that I did not expect at all. And I kind of had to work through that. And it took a couple of weeks and it was towards the end that I think it all kind of culminated. I don't think it's necessarily the podcast fault, but I think that making space to make people comfortable and vulnerable to talk about some of these awful things has to have some sort of an impact. I know I haven't been sleeping well. I don't know if it's the fault of one particular event because there's so many events going on. But I think I had to kind of really recenter and let some things go, like, for instance, outside of the clinical class that I'm teaching, which is a big deal. I'm not taking any criminal cases for the foreseeable future because I just only have so much place for that sadness to go. And this is helping people. And it's so evident. People we don't know, like Alison said, students in law school. I think Alison has a colleague who's going to be sharing it with her law school class. So it's like, what's the biggest impact and way to help people in that kind of whittling down how we're going to spend our time? Because we both, I think, for better or worse, are attracted to very hard, difficult problems. And we do like to spend our energy in these places. Basically, for me, I realized I had to stop doing some things and then also kind of maybe apply some of that advice that we heard on compartmentalization or on therapy or exercise in my own life, because it did have an unforeseeable reaction. But it could have just been all the acutely sad things that happened that would have waylaid me anyway. It's hard to say. 

Speaker 2 [00:25:52] I think I am certainly affected by the trauma in these cases, especially the stuff that my clients lived through in their backgrounds, and it took me not practicing criminal defense for a long time before I realized I was not dealing with that well when I was doing that work, not that I didn't do a good job because of it, but I didn't sleep well. I had nightmares. I had all the stuff that happens to people who are exposed to this kind of stuff. As I got away from it, all of those things have improved. I also have a lot of friends who do this work and we talk about this stuff all the time. And so I don't think that it really fazes me. And there's actually a lot more kind of dark humor with my friends that doesn't come up on the show. Again, I think, because people are a little guarded. So I don't think that it really bothers me having these conversations, but it does interest me how other people take it. Like I had a friend from my high school who isn't a lawyer. She was giving me a compliment, but she said she accidentally listened to three episodes in a row and she really had to give it a rest. And I think that's true. I don't think I would be surprised if somebody out there bingeing our podcast. But I've actually been really curious after I heard from her and some other people that it's heavy, which we know we told you, Chris Higgins, the conceit of the show, obviously, before we got started. But you have to listen to these dark conversations and you have to listen to them closely. You can't gloss over things since you're in charge of the sound. What has it been like for you? 

Speaker 1 [00:27:48] Well, thank you for letting me talk about myself in my work. So what I do just for listeners is I edit the show so the hosts record their ends, the guest records their end. I got a bunch of files back. I put them all together and Chris Tang Alison review that and essentially give me a list of edit points are like chop out this whole part in the beginning where it's chit chat and this whole part of the Edwards chitchat and then cut out, you know, from here to here and here to here and in the middle, there are some decision points like, you know, maybe we'll lose this part or, you know, for whatever reason, a topic has to be cut out for me in listening to it. I do feel like I'm in an unusually privileged position. Right, because I'm listening to the raw thing with the whole thing is there, you know, on my computer and I listen to it and then I chop it up. And a typical episode has something like three thousand cut points. So just like, you know, you chopped a little piece, chopped a little piece and then trimmed something out. What I do and I do this kind of regardless of the content, is I tend to detach the part of my brain that is judging the facts of the situation and focus on really mechanical things. So how's the breathing? Is there a noise in the background? Has the buzz saw out the back window started up again? However, in the show, there have been many times where I've gotten taken up in the stories. I mean, the ones the most recent for me is is Chipperfield. He's telling these stories in a cadence that is reminiscent of people in my family, including people in my family who are lawyers who recently died. You know, so to hear a man with that accent and that experience telling a story about a case, I'm like, well, that brings back some memories. And so I find myself sort of paying attention to that, you know, and listening to his breath and, you know, hearing those very quiet noises that people make when they're struggling to say something or to breathe their way through something. I don't feel that it's been particularly traumatic for me, if anything, it's been very interesting for sure. I lean on the two of you to tell me the broad things to cut out. And I lean on the two of you to tell me, you know, we're going to lose this or lose that. It's not. And it's not my problem to point out, hey, this thing right here, is that potentially a problem from. Because I don't I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the details of what you're allowed to say and not say. I've worked on true crime shows before a little bit. The crime has been very far back in history. I'm not a big true crime fan, but I'm a I'm a person who watches a lot of documentaries about true crime for the process of how do we tell a story about the crime and the person who committed the crime or allegedly committed the crime. And how did that all turn out? Like Errol Morris's documentary, The Thin Blue Line was one of my sort of formative things is about a crime inviter Texas that, you know, a lot of stuff comes out of that. There are echoes of all the things in that, you know, how the prosecution functioned and didn't and how the death penalty plays into the whole thing and all the stuff. I try to back up and focus on how people are talking and just really just focus on that. How do the words sound as noises and just pay attention to that if I'm getting too emotionally attached to it? 

Speaker 2 [00:30:51] I think that's really interesting because it's very similar to what we do as attorneys. Right. You take a clinical approach to what am I here to accomplish and how do I do that? Let's contemplate this evidentiary issue or whatever the task is at hand. I think that's that's kind of similar. 

Speaker 3 [00:31:09] That's my favorite documentary, too, by the way. 

Speaker 1 [00:31:12] Excellent. 

Speaker 3 [00:31:13] Yeah. And think show that in film class. And so to know your method in putting it together and your taste and what you're doing I think is a testament to how good it sounds. Because one thing that we hear all the time is it's so polished, it's so professional. And it's funny because you've seen our houses and our lives. And I think people were pleasantly surprised when I was driving the mic over and give him the gist. And it's like, OK, I'm going to be at my house and Alison is going to be at her house and then they're going to be wherever they are. How good it came out. I think it was surprising to everybody because I think that all of the people in season one just did it because Alison and I asked them to do it. They had no expectations at all that it was going to be released or what was going to come of it. And so that's, I guess just going back to that expectation part, I think from the I guess I don't know what expectations they had other than just their friends and colleagues and supporters of us. And we would do the same thing for them if they asked us to sit or help in any way. 

Speaker 1 [00:32:26] So the idealism question, I got to assume you're doing this now, first off, can you clarify for the listeners, do you get paid specifically to do this podcast? It's kind of a yes or no, I think. But also, I got to assume that you're doing this for a reason, right? It's a whole lot easier to not do this show and perhaps even to redirect some of this energy into some other thing, for example. So I'm happy hours and one on one interactions, but you are making and hiring other people such as me to create a show, put it into the world with some kind of expectation that something could happen for individuals or the criminal justice system at large. What is that? Where does that come from? What do you hope is going to happen? And don't forget the part about do people pay you money to do this? 

Speaker 3 [00:33:12] No, we are not making any money at this point. I've been fortunate enough to get the support of Flagler College as the director of the law program in paying for your services. We were hoping that would happen, but we didn't really know. So Alison and I kind of created a shoestring budget of a set amount that we agreed to split to get this done because it was important to us. I mean, we're both very busy in our personal and professional lives. We both have other things that are important to us. For me, it was seeing our boss, Bill White, at an event and he came up and said, hey, listen to Regina's episode. And I cried, keep up the good work. He's like my eternal boss. I just think the world of him. And it also shocked me that he had that reaction. And that's made me reflect, well, how can we try to make this work? Because it has been hard with the pandemic and a variety of other things. But that really for me was OK. Well, let's see if we can keep going. We're educating people and we're helping people. And I think we're giving listeners access to people who are the best people in their professions. Every person that comes on our show does the best that they can for their respective fields. 

Speaker 2 [00:34:47] We don't get any income from the podcast. To go back to your question about what we expected to happen versus what we might have been surprised by now that the first season is done. Having listened back to all of the episodes, the one thing that really shines through to me that I did not anticipate and I did not hear as we were having the conversations is how kind and sensitive criminal defense attorneys are, which I know that's why I've surrounded myself with a lot of them. But I think that laypeople and other players in the criminal justice system itself assumes that in order to do this kind of work, you must be callous or indifferent or somehow in league with a criminal element when the truth is the very opposite of that, in order to be very good at your job, you have to be very sensitive because you're not going to get very far with a judge at a sentencing hearing with a jury and a trial. If you aren't sensitive to what has happened to victims or survivors of crime, you necessarily have to be in order to make these presentations and in listening back those things that I love about the people in season one who I know, there's only I think one person who I did not know. Well, the reason that I feel the way I do about them, I hope comes across to the listener. And that's the kind and generous nature of people who do criminal defense work. 

Speaker 3 [00:36:24] Well, just to clarify, it's only because we have a particular endowment. It's the Upchurch preLaw Endowment that is slated for the benefit of the prelaw program that this could ever have happened. I'm just very grateful to have the institutional support for something that is our show. It's a place where people talk about torture but also costs and also come with their own political beliefs and religious beliefs and personalities. And it is educational in a very practical way, as evidenced in getting continuing education credit, for example. We have something special here and it's unique. And I think we in season two are broadening it in a way that is going to make it very evident. I'm so happy that people who enjoy podcasts like it. Because I really just approached it as intimate conversations with interesting people. 

Speaker 1 [00:37:34] I think that's what people want, right? I mean, broadly, that does lead into this thing about Kelly, which I believe stands for continuing legal education. I'm curious if you can talk about, like if there's anyone today in the legal profession or maybe associated professions who can use this for Kelly? How does it work? Is it limited to certain states, all that kind of stuff? 

Speaker 2 [00:37:55] There are two different ways that you can get continuing legal education credits, which all attorneys need in order to maintain their license to practice law similar to CME credits that doctors need to prove that they're keeping up with things in order to practice medicine. One way is to contact the bar, submit information about the subject matter in advance, get a number, and then people submit that to get their credit. That's usually what happens when you go to a conference or a webinar training. In this case, it's a little bit awkward because we have so many small chunks compared to a conference, for example. And so what we do is we provide a certificate of attendance that includes the length and an overview of the content, and then individuals can send that information into their bar and request credit. And in Florida, people have certainly submitted these certificates of attendance and received continuing legal education credits. People can do that, to my understanding, in all 50 states, but each state will have their own requirements surrounding their licensure. And I certainly couldn't speak to those one. 

Speaker 1 [00:39:10] So determine process perspective again, let someone email you to get that certificate. 

Speaker 2 [00:39:15] What we've done is I create a certificate and I post that certificate on social media. They're all available on our Facebook page. If somebody has listened, then they can email it in Florida to the Florida bar. I believe the address is S.L email at Florida Bar dot org. And they have to provide their Florida bar number and they're certifying that they have indeed listened to it. And then the Barbar is very responsive. In a couple of days, from what I've heard, people are contacted back about their credit. And then I also have a group of contacts who I will email about the podcast intermittently and I will send by email links to the certificate's, because I know that those folks aren't participating on social media and people are welcome to contact us directly. And I will provide them with copies of that certificate if they wish to have it. 

Speaker 1 [00:40:15] OK, getting close to wrapping up first, something y'all taught me the catch all question. Is there anything in, you know, thinking about the fact that you're going to talk about the process of making a show that you've been making now for the better part of this year anyway, that you wanted to make sure we talked about today? Maybe it has to do with season two different from season one or other process stuff that you wanted to make sure we talked about. 

Speaker 3 [00:40:38] I'm very proud of what we've done. I just think it's just so rare that people make things and kind of push themselves and push each other. I know that Alison for me and I'm so grateful and I'm just really proud of what we've done. 

Speaker 2 [00:40:58] I agree with all of that. The only other thing that I think is really important that we include is a very special thank you to three individuals, in particular Amy Grace Gilmore, Jenna Love and Bill White. Yes, all three of these people were kind enough to agree to do the show and then spend a lot of time talking to us about some really difficult things. And I flubbed it all. And their audio for different reasons every time were destroyed. 

Speaker 3 [00:41:33] We flubbed it all. It was situational. It wasn't you. It was factors beyond our control. 

Speaker 2 [00:41:40] Well, the point is, is that they don't have an episode that you can listen to. And it's really frustrating and infuriating because they were very special conversations. And Jenna was actually the very first person who was willing to do the show. I just think it's important to say thank you to them because, boy, they really don't get any of the acclaim and the contact and the kudos that all the people who have published episodes have gotten. So we have apologized to them. But beyond feeling bad about it, I also feel very, very grateful for how generous those three people especially were and have been and continue to be in my life. 

Speaker 3 [00:42:22] I couldn't say it better than that. 

Speaker 1 [00:42:25] All right. At this point in a normal episode of the show, I would have talked to all of your colleagues and have a bunch of stuff. I didn't do that. Good news. Bad news. Right. But I appreciate you spending the time to talk about the stuff today. Most podcasts that I listen to have ads on them, or somehow there's some sort of funding mechanism or some clear way to support the show. Yours does not have that. Yours is just we're going to get into this when we get into it and then we leave. And I'm curious if people are listening to this, if they've gotten this far in this episode, what can people do to support the show? 

Speaker 2 [00:42:57] I think that the main thing they can do is share it with other people. We want people to hear it. And so if they could share it with like minded people, people that they think might be interested in the content, we would appreciate that. The other way is to go to the Apple podcasts, and there's a way to give us a rating by a number of stars or by actually writing a written comment. And we have some of those that are incredibly touching and descriptive. And I think that that would be very helpful. You can also follow us on all the social media and interact with us that way. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We can be found on all of those at trauma injustice. 

Speaker 1 [00:43:42] Well, thank you both for your time today. I appreciate these detailed, thoughtful responses. And next week, we will be back with regular programing season two starting up. 

Speaker 3 [00:43:51] Thanks, Neal. Thanks. Thank you.