Dr. Matt Sherrer (Host 1): Welcome in to yet another edition of the Fresh Flow Podcast. Mitchell, I got a question for you, man, as always, per routine. You are officially a grumpy old man now. You could be with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in Grumpier Old Men, Grumpy Old Men series. They could add you to the next one. So, you've been around for a minute. You've seen different generations of learners. You come through residency training yourself. You now have residents that you train. You yourself have children, so you've seen the generations. is it harder to train and to educate the kids nowadays? Is it easier? Is it just different? Where do you find it?

Dr. Mitchell Tsai (Host 2): So, this is interesting. We just had a grand rounds on about education from one of our former colleagues who's now at the University of North Carolina. Several things here. One of the comments I made is that we're talking about residents and kids. But for the residents, I handed in an article a couple months ago to one of my graduating residents, about OR management, and the kid looked at me and said, "Is there a YouTube video on this?" And I looked at him and I said, "Are you kidding me?" He goes, "No." We'll leave that there.

But I do tell the residents that it's great that you do questions and you do question banks in and you can have AI test you and all that stuff. But what I remind them is that there will be one day where you will encounter a clinical scenario that you've never been tested on. And being able to develop the expertise so you can answer that question on the fly, I think, is a life skill.

And then, as for kids, my kids, and I think we've talked about this, my youngest kid reads an hour every day because what I've told him is that it doesn't matter what happens or where the world goes, as long as you can read, you can figure out what you need to do. So, there you go. My thoughts on education. That's about it.

Host 1: I like it. Well, what I've realized is that the kids these days will listen to podcasts, and that's a cool thing. So, that's why we're here. That's why we're doing this. How about you introduce our guest today?

Host 2: So, I get the pleasure of introducing Dr. Charles "Chuck" Whitten. I feel like I'm playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon because I've heard the name many times through my connections in the anesthesiology world. So, this is definitely a treat. Dr. Whitten graduated from Southern Methodist School of Engineering, graduated magna cum laude, because what else would we have expected?

He did all his medical school training and residency training at UT Southwestern, and then he did a transplant fellowship at UT Southwestern and Baylor Medical Center. In 1998, he was named the holder of the M.T. Pepper Jenkins Professorship in Anesthesiology. And if you look at his lists of administrative positions, Dr. Whitten, there is nothing left for you to do at the University of Texas Southwestern. He is currently at the national level a mentor for the new oral board examiners for the ABA. And then, he currently advises the SAAAPM on their annual survey benchmark productivity, which we've talked about multiple times on this podcast. So welcome, Dr. Whitten

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Thank you all for having me. I appreciate it very much. I'm humbled. Thanks.

Host 1: Thank you.

Host 2: As a longtime chair for a large urban academic medical center, did your role change over your tenure, and then how do you see it changing as we move forward in the specialty?

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Our market, unlike a lot in the country—so I'll have to kind of start off with this as a framing—was unique in that we had huge populat on growth. So, consolidation really wasn't part of our landscape.

Just to give you some idea, I had 75 faculty when I started in September of 2008. And when I stepped down to pass the baton onto the interim chair during the search for my successor, we had 250. We now have over 250 anesthetizing locations under our umbrella. We had 12 pain clinics, nine ICUs. We had massive increases in our CRNA numbers at all of our sites. Within our university hospital footprint alone, we went from 25 CRNAs to greater than 200. And then, obviously, we had to utilize—because of residency numbers fixed with rapid expansion, you know, we had to engage advanced practice people in pre-op pain in our ICU practice.

Having known the place like the back of my hand and been in Dallas, I knew all the other systems, but the other systems in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were running as fast as they could, just like we were, to keep up with the huge population growth. And so, I'd say the largest shift in my frame of reference on a daily basis was delegating, you know, a lot of the day-to-day amount of manner responsibilities and focusing on larger picture issues. I realize that in some parts of the country, consolidation was a big deal, had its own set of challenges. And we ultimately consolidated with another healthcare system basically to build our primary care base with Texas Health Resources. And so, we did have some consolidation expansion with them, however you want to refer to it. Learning how to delegate manage teams, I think, and develop teams really became my focus.

Host 1: Yeah. So to that end, I am super interested, just reading your bio, one of the things that you talked about in that was this impact program. And specifically, the sentence that got my attention was growing leaders to function in matrixed peri-op environments. I think that's what you were kind of alluding to. Do you want to expand upon that for our listeners?

Dr. Chuck Whitten: It was the impact of the program is how I wrote that thing for that sketch.

Host 1: So, it wasn't called the Impact Program.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: No, it wasn't called the Impact Program.

Host 1: We can come up with a fancy mnemonic for it right now, I'm sure, on the fly, you know.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: It's actually a program I established in honor of my mom and dad. I'll tell you a little bit about the etiology of all this. So, it's probably one of the most serendipitous things that ever happened to me.

My wife and I don't have any children, and you get around 60 and you start thinking, you know, what's going to happen with all your stuff? I've had an interesting leadership journey. lots of peaks and valleys. I learn from the valleys and you try and stabilize at the peaks. I just knew we were having this rapid growth. We've got this lost generation. I was directing resident recruitment in the mid 90s when not one UT Southwestern student went into the specialty and I was like we can either keep people propped up on the old end, the Weekend at Bernie's scene where the guy, you know, and the guy's still over there by the jukebox, right? And we can keep the Baby Boomers propped up over there, or we can really grow the next generation.

And so, my wife and I decided to start the Charles E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothy D. Whitten Perioperative Leadership Development Fund within the department. We started this on my back porch with a guy named Jim Stoller, who's done a tremendous amount of work with physician leadership at the Cleveland Clinic. And so, we developed this rubric.

And, lo and behold, we kicked it off in June of 2019 and gave him a big reading list and had these grand plans. We were rocking along and going to graduate all these people in May of 2020. And the pandemic hit. And we had to pause, you know, because we were doing it all in person late afternoon, early evening. And then, we did the rest of it virtually because we wanted to get these people. The George Floyd incident happened. We added a whole section on, basically, diversity, equity, and inclusion, looking at bias. Blind Spot has now become one of my favorite books. We all have blind spots, right?

And we got some other leaders to come in and talk to our folks. I got Desireé Reed-Francois, who at the time was the athletic director at the University of Missouri, first Latin American woman to lead, at that time, a Power Five athletic department. I got Ron Kirk, the first African American mayor of Dallas, to come and talk. And we did all this virtually, and then we graduated these people. And serendipity would have it that all eight of those people got thrust into leadership positions during the pandemic. And two of them, who I'm really proud of, Megan Maxwell, led our perioperative COVID testing program, and Christina Goff was the co-director of our COVID ICU, got recognized with institutional service awards. I think the proof is in the pudding. We got 32 graduates as of right now. We've had three cohorts. The last cohort included a group of residents. It's a thing that's near and dear to my heart, and I hope that the department continues to utilize that and grow and develop it.

But there's all these leadership programs at academic medical centers, right? But it's not like leading a clinic where you might see your patient, the patient's family, the nurse that's helping you on a daily basis where we're going to encounter 50 to 100 people in our daily walks. And leading in that environment is completely different. And it's just a huge cultural shift for people that have sat in classrooms and not really managed life in real time, right? And that's what we try to give them the skill set and the toolbox to do that.

Host 2: I just learned that the American—was it the ABA, Matt, or the ASA? Somebody's looking for a perioperative leadership program, so I think we found it. We're doing work for the ASA.

Host 1: Yeah. Why create something new when one already exists?

Dr. Chuck Whitten: No, I'm proud of the rubric that we've gotten. I'm grateful to many of the people in the department. It's kind of the old see one, do one, teach one sort of thing. It's been a great experience for me. And my mom's 98, she's still alive. And when we graduated the second cohort, she got to congratulate all the people and was there. So, it was a neat thing.

Host 2: That's amazing in the sense that one of the things that we pointed out on this podcast is that, in medical school and in residency, all we teach is management skills, right? One, to manage your time, and then how to manage the workload when you get to work. But with the healthcare systems and the financial headwinds that some systems are facing, the curriculum that we teach doesn't teach individuals how to pivot, and like you said, especially in our specialty, how do you deal with things on the fly and think on your feet, right? And those are probably going to become more important as these future physicians move into their professional development.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: The beauty of the program, I think, was that we had a didactic session, and then we would have a real-life speaker come. It was kind of all programmed where they were giving you lessons learned from the school of hard knocks on that subject and how it impacted them.

Host 1: Chuck, you've been around for a minute or two, right? You've seen the evolution of our specialty over time. One of the things we talk about on this show a good bit is the economics of anesthesia, the finances, and you've seen a lot of that and you've also spoken on a lot of that. Rick Dutton just put out an article about private equity in anesthesia that I thought was actually really well done. From all of the things that you've seen and the movement, what's the future of our specialty from a financial and economic standpoint?

Dr. Chuck Whitten: I have to mention my longstanding relationship with Amr Abouleish. And then, Mark Hudson we hooked up with. But probably one of the most serendipitous things that ever happened to me was getting involved in the economics of academic anesthesia practice. I mean, I had to basically build two very large financial operational models to convince our administrations. Because, in the course of less than one calendar year, we moved into two new freestanding hospitals, a new university hospital and then a new Parkland Hospital. And that involved a lot of what? Resources, and I had to recruit up.

I was standing around the SAAA meeting in the mid-'90s when John Ulatowski, who was at Hopkins at the time, and Kevin Tremper, who was at Michigan for many years, and then Mike Cahalan, who's been my primary mentor, role model, advisor, coach, guide, big brother that I never had. He said, "You know, you guys ought to think more about getting into the science of the economics of academic anesthesia practice." And I'd like to say that I hope when people look back at my career along with the work we did with Mark and Amr, we kind of defined a new science of looking at that.

The biggest question right now is what is a 1.0 FTE? I could pull my hair out, and have pulled my hair out. Because in our specialty, you know, as we ask for resources, I felt like I was giving the same lecture to a new mid-level administrator who didn't know anything about ASA units, work hours models, the supply-demand mismatch that happened in our specialty.

My grandfather always said everybody's ignorant, it's just about different things. And there's a real ignorance about anesthesiology, though, in the medical world because we're just different. The future is bright. And what I tell people is that we need to own hospitals. I think hospitals are going to be ERs, ORs, and ICUs. And I tell people right now, if I was doing it all over again, I mean, I did a transplant cardiac fellowship. I would go back and do cardiac, get echo certified, and I'd do critical care. And you can run the world. Those people will run the world.

The emergency medicine physicians are trying to figure this out, and they're getting more involved in the ICU, which makes sense in some ways. We also have to own ambulatory pain. I mean, it's the essence of our specialty, right? We're doing some incredible work in our department right now about what's going on with sodium channels. And there's a guy named Bruce Beutler who's got 60,000 knockout mice down here. And I think, you know, if somebody really wanted to invest themselves, they could figure out the genetic mechanism behind how anesthesia really works. And that'll move us into this interval, I believe, you know, of gene-directed anesthetics, which will make things easier. It's easy to see how AI is going to impact all this, and I'm an engineer. I hope in my next life to use vision models and artificial intelligence and machine learning to help the world. And that's sort of what I feel called to do next.

I think I'm still trying to figure all that out and how to do it. But I think there's big applications in medicine. I think there's big applications to our specialty. I was good friends with Michael Avidan at WashU. You know, and I went up a few years ago and visited him, and they've kind of owned remote monitoring of ICUs in my home state of Eastern Missouri and then Western Illinois and kind of that space there. And they also have modified that strategy to actually have people watching all their rooms regularly. We can expand concurrency if we have another set of eyes, and I think they were well ahead of that. And I really like to tip my hat to Michael. That's the future. We're going to have to practice differently. But we're still going to have to have the personal touch, right? That involves taking someone through one of the most critical events of their life. That human spirit, right?

Host 2: That was just amazing, Chuck.

Host 1: I wrote down about 16 things on a piece of paper right here.

Host 2: Chuck, I don't know if you remember Michael Richardson. He was at Rochester. And then, I think he went down to Vanderbilt. But he had Google Glass before there was Google Glass, where he could scroll through all the vital sign monitors of the patients that he was supposedly taking care of.

Vijay Govindarajan down at Dartmouth, when we're talking about supervision, that we're always looking past as quickly as we can to try to decide what we need to do. Vijay talks about how do we get to predictive analytics, right? So, if we could get to predictive analytics in the ICU or in the operating room, I still make fun of Warren Sandberg every time I see him. But when he became Chair of Vanderbilt, he had this 96-screen—so he could see every operating room in the system. But then everything's a little box, so you really can't see.

But being able to get to predictive analytics, I think, will definitely help our specialty. The comment on the hospital administrators and having the same thing again and again, I don't think that's unique at UT Southwestern. I think anesthesiology and anesthesiology chairs are doing the same thing all over the country.

A shout-out to Cahalan, one of my favorite people in our specialty as well. I still remember my interview with him because he had just left UCSF to go to Utah to be chair there. And he was telling me that you needed to live east of where you worked. And I couldn't answer the question, and I was like, "Why?" And he's like, "Well, because when you drive into the work, the sun's behind you. And then, when you leave work, the sun's also behind you because it's setting." And I looked at Dr. Cahalan, you know, just a tiny little fourth-year medical student. I said, "Well, that's true, Dr. Cahalan. What happens if you're post-call, and you're driving into the sunrise?" Dr. Cahalan looked at me, and he said, "Good point, Mitchell." And I was like, "I was for sure I was not going to Utah."

Dr. Chuck Whitten: He followed those rules, both his home in San Francisco and his home in Utah were eastward.

Host 1: So, I got to touch on some of the stuff you said. You mentioned sodium channels, you mentioned remote monitoring, all this stuff. And one of the things I find, you're talking about new care delivery models in our world, and that's something that I love to talk about and love to kind of just come up with ideas about what we could do, remote monitoring, et cetera.

The technology's pushing us there. BD will now at least tell you that they are putting together a closed loop hemodynamic management system. I mean, they bought the Alaris pump, they bought Edwards' HemoSphere, ACUMEN, whatever you want to call it, hypertension prediction index, all that stuff's moving that way.

And on the one hand, I love talking about it. It sounds like you like talking about it and want to do it in the future. On the other hand, there's people in our specialty who push back on it just vehemently, because what we're essentially saying is, "Hey, you're messing up my business model." I guess a question I have is how can we drive that forward when there is resistance on the back end of what we're trying to advance, move the ball down the field, as it were?

Dr. Chuck Whitten: You didn't know this, I don't suspect, or you probably didn't look at my CV that close, but I put together a new lecture called Leadership Disruption and Generational Forces: An Interesting Intersection in 2026. And I've given it to business people, but I've also given it to a couple of anesthesia departments. And I tell them, I said, "This is my life story." It's not necessarily about anesthesia. But if you read between the lines, you can see where this is all headed. We're in a very disruptive time in the world. I'm a student of the generations. I could go on and on about that.

You know, Howe and Strauss and their famous well-quoted book, The Fourth Turning, say we're in the fourth turning of the millennial cycle. Neil Howe has written a great new book called The Fourth Turning is Here. It's a time of disruption. Old ways go away, new ways come in. The generational forces will drive us where we need to be. They're going to be accepting of this, but we need to lead the change. We can't let others lead it for us. And that's what I tell people. Embrace this moment, carpe diem. Because if we don't, then other people will lead us someplace where we may not want to go.

And I think, first and foremost, we need to keep in mind what's in the best interest ultimately of the patients. Pepper Jenkins was my mentor, my role model, MD-only anesthesia. The world has changed, right? Baby Boomers are aging, the provider pool. I talk about the lost generation. It's the people we never trained. They should be 50—I've I've forgotten the math now. I think they should be between, what, 52 and 60 or something like that. It's basically those people that should've been trained in the late '90s and early 2000s. Those are the people that should also be providing leadership for us right now on these fronts. And again, you know, having to keep some of us guys propped up in the corner to help do that, right? And there's a bright future, but we have to own it, and it's going to require great leadership. That's going to involve listening, using your ears equivalent to your mouth. You know, we got two ears and one mouth, use them equivalently. I think we have to do a lot of listening.

Host 1: Yep, slow to speak, quick to listen.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Yep, I think we have to do a lot of listening. The other thing that's near and dear to my heart is that I've talked to sociologists about my theory in organizational behavior people, and I think the leaders are going to have to be coaching leaders. They're going to have to be coaching leaders. They're going to have to coach the teams to get us to where we need to go in the next 10 years. And it's a subject that's also near and dear to my heart since I'm the child of two coaches.

Host 2: I read a quote recently about Rockefeller, and it's a nursing rhyme, and I don't know it by heart, but it's about the wise owl and how Rockefeller understood that his job was to listen. Not to talk, but to listen. And I just finished Epstein's Inside the Box, and it talks about Pixar and Steve Jobs and Catmull at the time.

And they both decided when they were doing brainstorming sessions, trying to figure out what to do and how move a project forward. They both agreed that Steve Jobs needs not to be in these meetings, right? Just because of his presence would intimidate people, but that they really wanted individuals on the front line to bring it forward.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Who told him not to be there? A guy named Bill Campbell. This is my favorite book, "The Trillion Dollar Coach." My dad could have been the trillion-dollar coach. In my next life, I'd like to be a trillion-dollar coach. Because Bill Campbell was a washed-out Ivy League football coach, and he went to the West Coast and became a fixer, and he worked with Steve Jobs.

You should read the book if you like that. It'll talk a little bit about what he did and told him he had to step back. He had such a big personality. He sucked the oxygen out of the room, right? He just couldn't be there for that. And I think we, as a specialty, need to do that. We need to have some of the big voices not there so that the people that are actually still making the sausage every day can see what to do.

Host 2: Reminds me of Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops, right? When he started coaching a young Michael Jordan, he said, "Look, you're going to be the greatest basketball player this world has ever known, but you're not going to win a championship till you start to trust your teammates."

Dr. Chuck Whitten: I got a basketball back there to remind me of my weight.

Host 1: This episode is going to cost me about $100 on Amazon later when I go order all these books. So, Chuck, you mentioned the different generations, and you said something about the generations kind of being more accepting of the new models and technology, et cetera. Talk about that, just the generational differences. We alluded to it at the beginning of the show, the generational differences we see in anesthesiology education.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Right before I stepped down as chair, you know, we had an 80-year-old faculty member. I believe in the definition of the generations a little bit differently. Because, again, I apply this book, "The Fourth Turning."

Host 1: Goodness gracious, $200 now. Holy cow

Dr. Chuck Whitten: The greatest generation were my parents, and they're basically not in the workforce anymore. And then, the Baby Boomers, by some reports, should be primarily retired by 2030, 2032, but I'm not sure that's going to happen for economic reasons and a lot of other reasons. You know, the Xers are the leaders right now in many ways, right? I'm not sure how old you all are, but I suspect you fall in that bucket.

Host 1: Yeah, that's me.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: It's been interesting for me to watch them progress because they were so interested in life balance. I developed our compensation model so people could have time or money. They wanted time when their kids were young. And now, they're morphing into wanting money because they're trying to figure out how they're going to pay having three kids in college and all that sort of stuff. Our model allowed them to progress through that. And then, I've seen the millennials.

What I do know, and one of the things that was probably the most serendipitous for me in studying the generations, I knew they didn't like work environments that were full of sarcasm, cynicism, or condescension. And as embarrassed as this makes me feel, the department that I inherited had a lot in that, a lot of those things in it. And I knew I was going to have to fix that. And, you know, the day I stepped down, over 50% of our department was millennial. And on top of that, over 50% of our department faculty were women, which makes me really proud. Because I was able to allow them, I think, to balance all those elements in their life.

And then, the most intriguing group to me are the people that are our rising medical students. They're going to be homelanders. Some sociologists talk about Gen Z, which is basically young millennials and old homelanders. But the homelanders are going to lead us through. And the homelanders and the millennials need to be mentored, advised, coached, proctored, have good role models, all those things.

Host 1: So, keep that going. I did read about kind of the idea that moving from authority to coaching, and you kind of alluded to that a little bit. Talk about that coaching mindset and why it's so important.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: I guess it's in the core of my DNA. I'm a child of two coaches. And I think academic medicine oftentimes, and the world in general, right, is too punitive, too judgmental, too harsh. I was probably accused, I know I was accused of being too empathetic. And I saw this in my parents.

Empathy is feeling with someone, experiencing their emotions as if they were your own. While compassion is feeling for someone's suffering and being moved to act to help, making it an action-oriented response rather than just an emotional resonance, right? And to me, the world needs more empathy, and we need more grace right now too. And I think that resonates across the generations from my perspective. And I learned grace from my parents, and I learned grit from them.

But, you know, I think grace is defined by the five letters that make it up. We need more gratitude, we need more resilience, we need more aspiration, we need more courage, and we need more empathy. But empathy can't hold you back from making a compassionate decision about what to do, right? And I think those things are so cross-pollinated. I see great coaches do that. I saw our University of Missouri head men's basketball coach, Dennis Gates, bench his starting point guard right after Christmas. Tough decision for him. It was the right thing for his team, right? And he did it the right way.

Another thing that I did to honor my mom and dad was to name the men's head basketball position at the University of Missouri in honor of them. And so, Dennis Gates is the Charles E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothy D. Whitten head Men's basketball coach. When I see him, I see him living out the 33 things that I learned from my parents about coaching, that I try to apply.

And again, you know, I could go on and on about coaching. I don't know where you want this to go, but there's some real rules and regulations to me about being a great coach. And I think that's what we're going to need as a specialty, and the world's going to need. We're going to be coaching leaders.

Host 2: Because in 2022, you were inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, so I'm just letting all our listeners know that for the 1974 state championship football team.

Host 1: At where? Which school, Mitchell? Where was it?

Host 2: It was in Boonville.

Host 1: That's right.

Host 2: I just wanted to say Boonville. Over the years in my career, I've studied leadership, you study education, you study innovation, design thinking, even jazz music, right? And, like you said, they all share the same platform, and that is empathy. I actually teach my medical students that the only reason you're a leader is because somebody decides to listen to you.

And so to circle back to that coaching philosophy, what do we need to do for the chairs in our specialty today? What do we need to do for our young faculty, our residents, our medical students? But I would assume that your philosophy is fractal, and it doesn't matter which level you apply it at, it's the same principles again and again and again.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: I don't know if we've got enough time to say what we should be doing for the chairs. You got to continuously work on your leadership skills, I tried to do that. Read as much as I can, learn from people that I admire. What I know that leaders do, this is what I learned. You spend much of your time empowering and inspiring others, especially in a large department. And instead of telling people what to do, you need to tell them what to think about. And then, that usually leads to the creation of teams, which you then have to manage and monitor.

I tell people, when I became chair, you know, there were so many things I had to tackle, and my wife would ask me every morning when I was walking out the door, you know, "What are you going to do today?" And I said, "I don't know. I'll tell you when I get home." Because it became clear to me that leadership is doing what needs to be done on the day it needs to be done, whether or not that's what you had planned on doing.

And I think one of the beauties of my journey is kind of eloquently expressed by this guy named Parker Palmer, who's written a lot about leadership. And I don't know if you all have read his stuff or not, but he says good leadership—let me make sure I get this right. "Good leadership comes from people who have penetrated their own inner darkness and arrived at the place where we are at one with one another. People who can lead the rest of us to a place of hidden wholeness because they have been there and they know the way."

And I think great coaches and great leaders have done that. The coaching thing to me is just part of the essence of the core of my soul. I'm in the process of writing a book, which I need to try and see if I can get someone to publish called, The Chaos Playbook: How to Lead in a World Gone Mad. I don't know if anybody will publish that or not, but I've got a whole chapter on coaching and the lessons that I learned in watching my parents, because I think we need to talk about this more.

Dennis Gates says players make plays. And you got to have good athletes, right? And as I was growing that department, I didn't try and recruit people for positions. I just tried to go find really good athletes. And then, once I got them here, I tried to send them to places where we needed stuff done, and it worked out pretty well.

Here's one of my favorite, though. Eli Drinkwitz is the head football coach at University of Missouri, and he says this: "Coaching is art without an audience." And to me, that's those real guttural discussions that you've got to have one-on-one with somebody when there's not 80,000 people in the stands, but something is really on the line.

And I'll give you an example of this that happened with my dad. I didn't know this. There's a guy named Kent Meyer who's an organizational specialist. And after my dad died, I hadn't seen Kent in 30 years, and he came and found me. He was doing some work here. We went and had dinner, and he said, "Chuck, I need to tell you something." He goes, "Your dad, as you know, was my seventh-grade basketball coach." He said, "I could take you back to the gymnasium at Laura Speed Elliott Middle School in Boonville, Missouri." He goes, "I was the point guard, and we were in a tough game, and it got so bad that I couldn't make a shot. And I was afraid to shoot, and the other team were leaving me open." And he said, "Shortly after the second half started, your dad called timeout, and he walked to half court and met me away from the rest of the team. And he said, 'Kent, when you are open, you must shoot the ball. I have faith in you. You must have faith in yourself.'" And he told me those words and that conversation has driven me for over 40 years.

Host 1: I got to know, tell us a bit more about your mom and dad in the time that we have left. You said you were raised by coaches, and it's obviously a huge part of who you are. We're going to run out of time here pretty soon, but I got to know more about your mom and your dad, what they coached and what they meant to you.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Well, tough to do here. My mom will be 99, and she's still coaching us. She's feisty.. She taught me grace she also was very gritty. My dad was gritty, but also had a lot of grace. He actually gave up coaching, because he couldn't see how he could be a good father and do that because he knew it would probably lead, if he pursued it, to a nomadic life. So, he stopped before I was ever born, but he did come back for one year and coach this team that Kent Meyer was on in 1980, '81. And so, they mentored, proctored, role modeled. You know, I can't tell you, I still run into people that I didn't know that say they knew my parents or they impacted them in some way.

You know, when you spend almost 80 years in a small community, you know a lot of people and you know generations of families, right? Going back and reconnecting with that, I guess, with my relationship that I developed with the University of Missouri and their athletic programs, really allowed me to reengage with some of those people, and it's been very rewarding.

But my dad coached seven, eight-man football. He didn't like it, didn't know much about it. He coached baseball, he coached track, he coached basketball, and then he officiated for almost 50 years. And then, my mom coached softball, basketball, and she taught hundreds of people in Central Missouri how to swim in the summer. Incredible human beings. I was really lucky.

Host 1: Grace and grit. That's it, Mitchell

Dr. Chuck Whitten: That's what I look for in faculty candidates and in resident applicants. People ask me what I was looking for and I said grace and grit, that'll get you a long way.

Host 2: We've talked about your home state, Missouri, and the University of Missouri, but I just want to add that you've also done the same thing for our specialty, Chuck. So, you've scaled as much as your parents have scaled too.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Well, you're kind to say that. I feel like I've kind of gotten to one summit, but I'm looking forward to climbing the next mountain and want to continue to provide leadership. I'd like to provide leadership advice to this group of people that are going to get pulled into the vortex of the vacuum that we've got in our specialty. I'd like to do that, but I'd also like to do it outside of medicine. I want to keep on keeping on. I'm glad I'm not working 80 hours a week anymore, but 40 feels like a part-time job. I feel in good health and enjoy doing this, and I'm happy to come back and do part two if you need me to.

There's lots of stuff I think we didn't get to that you wanted to talk about. You know, I'd like to talk more about teams. I'd like to talk more about how I think you coach teams in the clinical arena to get where it is you need to get them to. I really like leadership development, and I really think a larger focus on the specialty about managing intergenerational teams will keep people engaged in the workforce. I don't know what else you all got for me

Host 1: Well, the 30, 40 minutes goes pretty quick, doesn't it? Yeah, I would love to continue this discussion. You can go ahead and sign me up for the Chuck Whitten coaching, mentorship program. I'll put my name at the top of the list, and then I'll volunteer my chairman to pay for it. But I'll also tell you that I get the opportunity here at this institution at UAB to teach leadership.

And as far as bringing people back to speak to the students, you just kicked yourself to the very top of the list. So, man, thank you for doing this. It's pretty rare that I get emotional on the show, but seeing you get that choked up about your parents was a pretty special moment on the Fresh Flow podcast.

So Chuck, thanks for doing this with us, man. We appreciate you, and thank you for all that you have done for our specialty

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Appreciate you guys very much. You all are a great pair. I was sitting here thinking about who I would give the sports analogy of you all, and I haven't quite come up with it.

Host 2: Around the horn?

Dr. Chuck Whitten: I know Cowlishaw. Cowlishaw's a golfing buddy of mine. He was on there, and I think he stepped out of it, but he was on there for many years. His brother is a closer friend of mine. I'm trying to think who you all remind me.

Host 1: I think what you're thinking of is Dumb and Dumber. And I'm not sure which one of us is which.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: No, it's not Dumb and Dumber. You know, did you all ever watch the golfing movie, The Legend of Bagger Vance?

Host 2: Yep. Matt Damon.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Yeah, Matt Damon was the golden child, but, you know...

Host 1: I think I might be more Happy Gilmore.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Maybe Happy Gilmore. Maybe.

Host 1: Chuck, thanks, man. This has been fantastic. thanks to everyone for tuning in to this edition of the Fresh Flow Podcast. We'll see you next time.

Dr. Chuck Whitten: Take care.