What If “Hardwired” Is Just History: Breaking the Rules and Finding Reinforcement with Mark Malady (Part I)

ABA on Tap is proud to present Mark Malady (Part 1 of 2):

A piece of duct tape on the floor becomes a turning point for how we think about safety, reinforcement, and basic human connection. Mike and Dan sit down with Mark Malady to trace the long arc from an IEP and constant school changes to building programs for adults with severe aggression and minimal communication. Along the way, Mark shares the moment he stopped accepting the “he doesn’t like people” assumption and started asking a better behavioral question: what history built this repertoire, and what would it take to build a new one?

ABA on Tap and Mark give a full pour of the ideas that shape real clinical work. Mark connects early experience in adult disability services to big-picture themes in applied behavior analysis: functional communication, humane reinforcement, and why our field too often mistakes procedural compliance for effective intervention. He breaks down process versus procedure orientation in plain language, ties it to ACT and relational frame theory, and explains why relationship quality often predicts outcomes better than which “manual” you follow.

Finally, we get honest about the hard parts of ABA in autism services and school settings: power dynamics, “firefighting” models that wait for crisis, and resource decisions that prioritize deceleration over skill acquisition. If you care about ethical ABA, assent and consent, better assessment practices, and building meaningful skills across the lifespan, this conversation will challenge you in the right ways. Subscribe for Part 2, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the biggest question you want our field to answer next.

Tune in, drink up and ALWAYS ANALYZE RESPONSIBLY.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:01

Welcome to ABA on tap. I'm Mike Ribio with Dan Lowry. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly. All right, all right. Welcome back to another installment of ABA on tap. I am your ever-grateful co-host, Mike Rubio. Always to my right, Mr. Dan Lowry. Mr. Dan, how are you doing, sir?

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Doing great, doing great. Ready for a good discussion today, a high-level discussion.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

Doubleheader.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Doubleheader, yes.

SPEAKER_03 0:52

As I mentioned uh during our first episode today, we get to go to school sometimes. And that's where we're going today. We're going straight to school. Our guest has an immense amount of knowledge to lend us from a research perspective, from his own experiences. I mean, it is it seems endless. So really excited to share, to learn of his content expertise. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Mark Mellady. All right, sir. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Did I did I do okay? You did. It was perfect. Okay. I'm glad. All of a sudden, I got a little nervous. I didn't verify that before we started. Did I get it wrong somehow?

SPEAKER_00 1:38

I know you're in the Southern California area. So if you meet anyone with the same last name in that area with in your area, say Malady instead of Malady. I prefer malady. Okay. Like the meaning of it.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

Well, well, that's what made me nervous after I pronounced it. I'm like, wait a minute. Maybe that doesn't sound right. What's going on here? I don't even know the guy. I'm calling him a malady. What's going on here? Well, Mark, we cannot thank you enough for uh spending some time with us on a Sunday afternoon. We promise this will be an invigorating discussion and conversation. We'll get you right back to your Sunday, whatever that looks like. Super excited to learn from you today. Again, I Dan and I always say this. We feel super blessed to be sitting in our seats and to share time with content experts like yourself and be learners ourselves. It's probably one of the most invigorating parts of doing this podcast. One of the ways that we really feel this works out well is to learn as much about you and your background as we can at the beginning. We find that there's always these ever exciting culminating stories to what people are doing now, and we love how those connections come together. It really speaks to the diversification of our skills. We like to say that ABA is a good thing to have, and then the more skills you have outside of ABA, the stronger ABA can become. And I get the feeling you're gonna you're gonna fall right into that category. So without further ado, tell us how it all started for you. Go as far back as you want, include what you like, and then we'll come to the culminating point in the present, and we'll take it from there.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Awesome. Well, thank you. I'm really excited to get the conversation flowing. The urgent sword question is always hard. I've kind of changed my entry point a few times over the years, and I think where I'm starting now is my third grade experience. And so in third grade, I had just moved from Southern California to Las Vegas. By that point in my life, I was changing schools in elementary school every two to three times per year. So lots, lots of change. And I had an IEP already, and every year at the end of the year, they asked my mom to hold me back. And my mom would say, Nope, we're gonna keep moving forward. Uh we don't really care if he's behind from your standards, he's fine, he's got this. So that was kind of the normal drill. And in third grade, my mom kind of convinced me to try. And so I was like, All right, I'll I'll try it hard. I started all of a sudden, I got F's on everything always up until third grade. In third grade, I start trying, I'm doing really good. My teacher tells me you're about to be the student of the week, and it's Friday. And at the end of the day on Friday, you get the student of the week. I've never had anything like that before in my life. I'm stoked. We go out to recess, and this guy, Kevin, says string of curse words, and I grew up with a lot of variety in my life, and I knew quite a lot of curse words, very, very intense ones at that point. So I showed him what I had. Well, I crossed the line that I didn't understand, and he went and told the teacher the line that I crossed. So the teacher said, Sorry, buddy, you're not gonna get student of the week. I gotta report that to your parents. So I at that point was very emotionally reactive, and I ended up tearing apart the classroom, and everybody had to evacuate the classroom, and I went into a very aggressive cycle. And that was my third grade. That was towards the end of third grade. So my mom decides she's gonna move me schools again for fourth grade, and we're gonna start over and try again. So we start over and try again, and I was supposed to have this teacher, and that teacher, her husband got called to Saudi Arabia as part of the military, so he got stationed in Saudi. So she left. And I got a new teacher, and I think that's probably the luckiest thing that ever could have happened in my life. That new teacher identified with me that I was not trying at all. She was the first person who said to me that was a teacher of mine that said, You're just not trying and you don't care to be here. Which I said, yes, I agree. But starting in that place was really different than starting in the place of you're so far behind, I can't do anything with you. And that was where all my other teachers started. So this teacher helped me make my first friend and helped me kind of commit. And then she wanted to test me for gifted and talented. And so she said, All I want you to do is try your best. That's it. Promise me you'll try your best, then I'll kind of ease off on the annoying stuff that I make you do. And I was like, All right, let's do that. So I ended up scoring very, very high, and I got identified what's called twice exceptional now. But at the time I didn't really know what to do with twice exceptional learners, so I got pulled out. I had speech pathology services and some OT and PT built into my IEP. So I had pullout services for speech, which I always hated the stigma of it, didn't really work very well for me. But the stigma of gate pullout was really different. Um, so I started doing that. And I started getting all A's. I never got anything below a B again in my academic career. Uh, and I got all A's, and I really kind of got on track. And part of the reason why that teacher kind of identified that with me is she had a daughter who was in kindergarten that had cerebral palsy. And she would take me, she was fully wheelchair bound, she had no functional communication, no language skills, and she pushed her daughter to like micro movements and moving her arm up so she could do something towards putting a shirt on. And she took me to pick her daughter up from kindergarten three days during like the first two weeks that we met each other. She's like, Look, if my daughter can try, you're gonna try. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

I was like, what do you say to that? Especially when you were like eight at the time.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Yeah, there wasn't really anything that I could say to that, you know. So I was like, All right, fine, lady, I guess I will have to try now because I see that your daughter is, and yes, I understand what you're trying to show me here.

unknown 7:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

So that connection really got me to think about what it meant to connect with other humans. And when I started working in behavior analysis, I always tried to bring the perspective that that teacher shared with me, and I wanted to kind of think about the skill sets of other humans that way. So I wanted to go in and I wanted to design essentially robots that could do all the things that humans drove me crazy about doing. And that was my goal in sixth grade. So I applied to a lot of magnet and gate schools in the area. Every single one denied me because of the things contained in my IEP. So I was like, screw this. Education is broken. This isn't sixth grade, by the way. Education is broken. They see that I'm good at this, but they're not letting me do it because of this other part of my identity. So my mom was really, really big into like, hey, we don't want you. And on that side of my family, I'm first generation college graduate, by the way. My mom actually ended up getting her associate's degree later. My stepdad got his associate's degree later. My stepdad raised me, and my brother got his associate's degree. But I was the first one in kind of the family that kind of went down that track. And so my mom, her big thing was like, you're gonna, you're going to be able to do whatever you want. I don't care what you do if you decide not to go to college, that's okay. But you've got to like make an active choice of I don't want to do this, not I can't do this. That's all my mom cared about. So she wanted me to get A's and B's because at the time we had the Millennium Scholarship in Nevada, which basically made going to college free. And I don't know, do you all know about the Millennium Scholarship? No. Okay. So it was uh the result of a lawsuit for smoking inside of casinos, I believe is the origin of the money. And so there was a huge lawsuit around the casino workers not being adequately informed of the risk because they were going to be around cigarette smoke at high, high densities for long periods of time. So the state of Nevada got a whole bunch of money out of that settlement and they put it aside to education. So basically, if you had a 3.0, you could go to any state college for it, it was like 10% of the tuition fees, is all you had to pay. So it made it really accessible and really affordable. So my mom was like, you just have to get a 3.0. Like, I don't care if you like anything in school, I don't care if you learn anything, just get a damn 3.0 and we're good. And I won't, I won't ride you for anything, I'll give you all the freedoms. You can do whatever you want, just 3.0. So I did. I quit doing the gift and talent stuff, and I got a 3.0. And then I went to a community college. And at the end of the community college, one of the kids in my stats class came up to me. I was working graveyard shift at a Starbucks. I worked at three Starbucks at the time, so I was working like 75 hours across three different Starbucks. Jesus. And I was working in the graveyard, and Sam was his name. He came up to me and he's like, Hey, where are you going? I know you're about done. And I was like, Oh, I haven't thought about it. And he's like, Well, I just got a three-bedroom house in Reno, and it's one click of a button. And then, like, you just sign up for your classes and you're good. Do you want to move to Reno with me in two weeks? And I was like, Fuck it, yeah, let's go. So I went home, I got blackout drunk because at the time that's what I did. And I signed up for classes. And one of the classes I signed up for was a work experience class that was a dahabilitation program for adults with severe aggression, self-injury, and all of those sorts of things. And they were the last people who were transitioning off of the institutional grounds of the state. So the day program was still on the state institutional grounds. Medicaid waiver was really mad about this because part of the Medicaid waiver was like, it can't be on state grounds. So there was this whole drama going on with that. But I signed up for that. And I had already transferred Starbucks and in the course catalog, I don't know if you guys remember this, but for like work experience classes, they had to list the time. So they had like a normal class time, but it wasn't actually the time that the program was open. So I show up and I go to like the first day that was like at that time, and they're like, actually, our hours are nine to three Monday through Friday. And I was like, Oh shit, that's my Starbucks work schedule. Like, what am I gonna do? So you'd think I'd be responsible and I dropped a class. Absolutely not. I did not do that. I pretended like it wasn't a problem until the last week of the semester because I was gonna lose my scholarship for failing a class. So again, blackout drunk, I sent an email to the graduate student who was responsible for like scheduling. And I was like, hey, I was gonna go home for winter semester, any way that I can just bang out these hours, just three consecutive weeks of like giving you all my time. And he was like, Absolutely, everybody goes home for Christmas. It means only graduate students working Christmas and like three other people that are on paid staff. So we would love for you to come do that. So I did. I showed up and within the training at the time was they sat down, they gave you a PowerPoint, it was one hour long. You shadowed somebody for an hour, and then you were in the chair working. Um you got shadowed for one hour, and then you were in the chair working by yourself. And theoretically, there was supposed to be a hierarchy of going from like the least severe D cell targets to the most severe D cell targets. But the problem was all the people in seniority didn't want to deal with the most severe diesel targets. Like, I don't want to do that, it's not a really good progression. So I do my like first shift, and by the end of the first shift, I'm I'm already working alone in a chair with a lady, and even her like not intense diesel was she did fecal smear, so and she liked to try to hook you in the mouth. So lovely, she would get poop on her fingers, and then she would try to reach into your mouth and get the poop in there. So it wasn't like a walk in the park, you know?

SPEAKER_03 13:17

That sounds fantastic. That sounds like a lot of fun for sure.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Well, that's uh I never really had a problem with that stuff, and like it in general, other people's physical aggression never really was a trigger for me. Like, I was always comfortable with like people that were hard to read, difficult to predict. Like that was never a problem in my life. I have a little cousin who has Angelman syndrome and is level three autistic. And very early on, like when he was first biting, my grandma taught me like who cares if he bites you, like just let him bite you, or then just move on and do something else with it. Don't make it a big deal. And so my grandma kind of taught me uh some really good basics very early on with that.

SPEAKER_03 13:56

Seriously. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yeah, I didn't actually wear this until a few years ago because sadly my grandma died when I was 11. But one of my uncles told me that once all of her kids left the house and they all hit 18, she just started volunteering at a learning center for kids with disabilities. And she always worked with the most severely aggressive learners. And this is like when she was like 45, is like when she just started doing that. Jeez, wow. Cool, yeah, super cool. And so I felt really comfortable with that. And there just so happened to be an undergraduate research assistant who quit a case management position to really be a supervisor and kind of train the other new people on the most aggressive. So I'm on I'm on the lowest step. It's now my second day, and there's an opening, and I say, Hey, can I do that? And they're like, Yeah, sure, why not? Nobody else wants to do it. And that graduate student already had his master's degree, and he really wanted to go to UNR to learn theory and philosophy. And he already had a full company doing early intensive behavioral intervention back home. And so he had left his company to come and he just said, Hey, the one thing I don't want to do is have a placement that's an applied placement. Like, let me have an EAB placement, let me have theoretical conceptual placement, but I don't want an applied placement. Well, back then there was only what 7,000 BCBAs. So of course, they wanted the person who could do supervision. So, you know where he got placed.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

Applied placement.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Yeah, he wasn't thrilled to be in the applied placement. But what he did like the idea of, hey, can I teach this new kid who knows nothing about behavior analysis how to program? He thought that was interesting. Nice. So he asked me, like, do you want to start writing programs for him? This is day three, by the way. So day two, I become a case manager. Day three, I get offered, hey, do you want to write programs? I said, Yeah. He said, Okay, cool. You got to come Saturday and Sunday. You gotta hang out in here with me for like 12 hours and basically do whatever I say, and then we'll start writing some programs. Like, okay, let's do it. The guy that I was working with, he engaged in bites up to 100 times per hour, and he he had head C. And so there was some legitimacy to the difficulty of what could happen if somebody is bit. And so his physical layout was kind of one of those old wooden tables pushed up against the wall. It was a longer one. I want to say it was probably an eight-foot table, and then halfway through about four feet away from him. So he's touching the wall, sitting in his chair. There's a an old piece of duct tape on the floor that's like kind of peeling apart. And then you're supposed to sit all the way on the other side of the table so you have optimum distance. So you can interact with them, but you're not allowed to cross the tape. Do not cross the tape. That was the number one rule that they taught everybody. So, what do you think I did on now my sixth day, the Monday that I come back the next week? Did you cross the cross the 49th parallel? I ripped that tape off the ground.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Oh well, well, you didn't just cross.

SPEAKER_03 17:00

Well, I had a feeling you you've got a very rebellious, a rebellious streak here building up, but I'm digging it. I'm digging it, man.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

So we ripped the tape off the ground, and part of that is because in those first five days, I was noticing that when he got close enough, you would people would engage in blocking with him and you'd do some response blocking. And because he grew up inside of the institution, the second that the blue floor mat came out, he went and laid down in position. So you didn't even have to do the floor restraint. The only physical contact that would happen would be of the blocking. And he he would do this thing where he would kind of like pull back right at the moment where you're about to call get the mat, right? So you're gonna call get the mat when it's like kind of so escalated. But he would walk the line of that escalation. So I asked the graduate student, like, hey, could physical contact be a reinforcer? And he's like, Yeah, theoretically, yes, it can. Like, do you think it could be for him? And he's like, Well, where does he get physical contact? I'm like, nowhere, nobody gets within four feet of him. And when we were looking back through his history, when the state got him when he was nine years old, he's like mid-30s at this point, by the way. When the state got him when he was nine years old, he was being raised in a barn chained up that that wasn't even attached to the house that the family lived in. Jesus. And that was the level of isolation that he grew up with in his early years. Oh my god. So he just didn't have a repertoire to interact with other people. And the assumption was he didn't like other people. And I kind of was questioning that assumption. I was like, I don't think that it's he doesn't like other people. Like I'm kind of a harsh person, I'm very direct, I don't really pull my punches. I've I've learned to soften over the years, but especially in those younger days, everybody thought I was an asshole. Um and they uh thought that because I was an asshole, I didn't care to connect with other people. And that's one of those things that my fourth grade teacher taught me is like, hey, just because you're using these things to feel safe and comfortable with other people, does that mean that you don't want to build relationships with other people? And that's how she helped me make my first friend. She didn't like strong arm force him to be my friend, she just kind of helped set up the situation where like I would allow myself to be friends with someone. And so I felt there might be something going on here with this. And sure enough, this dude loved to be touched. Like, once we got over that hurdle and we pulled the tape off, I was able to get really basic presentation contingencies of him just putting his arm out, and he loved like just a forearm three-finger stroke on his forearm. Loved it all day long. So we were using edibles with him, but he was pre-diabetic. So the edibles were not wise, and the team always wanted to get off of the edibles. So we actually switched out edibles for the rub, and then we used the edibles for very, very few targets that were like the critical targets, and so we kind of created like a tiered reinforcement system with him. Sure, that was one of the first programs that we came up with, and we were able to teach him a man to ask for people to rub his arm, and it was the first functional man that he ever had. Wow. And he was mid-30s, you know, and so if you you can teach a functional language response to somebody in their mid-30s, there was a lot there about the assumptions of, you know, the critical period of the brain and language development and all these things that, you know, in a liberal arts program, because at the time our psychology program was inside of the liberal arts college, I was taking like introduction to speech pathology classes, um, and I was kind of sampling everything. And this idea of critical periods and brain development was so essential. And that just made me feel even more like screw that, I think that's bullshit. Um that that early programming experience was very, very critical to me of what you can do with the science behavior. And I had never taken a behavior analysis class before that three-week journey. And even when we did our first little sit-down PowerPoint, the lady asked me, like, Oh, do you know B.F. Skinner? I was like, Yeah, he's a really shitty novelist who wrote Walden 2. Like, what? What do you mean? And I'm like, Yeah, I found his book in a used bookstore in Vegas and I bought it, and that guy is garbage.

SPEAKER_03 21:26

That's so awesome.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

That's so it wasn't about his his approach to behavior, about his writing. Like, I don't know if you're like into literature, but Skinner was not a good novelist. There's a there's a reason why he failed being a novelist and ran away to Harvard, you know, and that's okay. Like everybody's got their place. Uh not a bad place to land.

SPEAKER_03 21:49

A little bit of pre uh pretense to try the Walden 2. I mean, that's that's that's a big uh those are big shoes. I mean I mean so yeah, I I agree with you. Shitty novelist, and then uh He aimed kind of high, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

He might have found a good niche though in the behaviorism side. Maybe.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

I mean, I love science and human behavior. It's still one of my favorite books. Like when he when he was flowing in writing from a scientific lens, I really liked his writing style, actually. I think he was really good at it. But so when I told them that, they all thought like I hated Skinner's theory and philosophy. And they're like, oh shit, we made a mistake. But because I had never taken a class, when I got that responsibility to start programming, I was like, I owe this guy to show that he can be more than what everybody thinks. Because I don't know what nobody wanted to spend time with him. You know, like even in his program, not a single staff, not a single graduate student, nobody in his life was happy to be with him. And just like, what kind of existence is that?

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Yeah. Especially because he can't communicate, he has no functional communication to get his needs met either.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Yeah. And so it it just it was it was sad to kind of watch that. So I felt like I had an obligation this dude, just like my teacher had an obligation to me. I felt that, hey, if I was if I was gonna honor the work that she did, I needed to honor this guy. And so I just I started reading, and I read an insane amount in those three weeks. I'm a very fast reader, a lot of my friends get mad at me about it. But I asked the graduate student, Josh, I asked him, like, hey, what should I read? He's like, okay, here's a stack of six books. He gave me the white book, tactics of scientific research, Hank Penny Packer's methods, uh, James and Pennypacker, third edition, Ciapani's functional assessment book, and let's see. Oh, the Sanders Acceleration Chart, the book that had Pennypacker, Lindsley, and White on it. So, like the main SEC book, and then what was the oh, Science and Human Behavior? Yeah. Okay. So those were my first six books, and I killed those like within the first week and a half, and then I just went to the library. Jeez. And I was like, okay, if this guy, this graduate student, this is his base. What if I read six times as much as this? Can I be better than him in a month? Like both. I was like, can I be better than him in one month? Which is a while ago, but that was my goal. Don't have to lie about it. And luckily at UNR, UNR's claim to fame, if you're not super familiar with them, is really multifold, but relational frame theory, acceptance, commitment, training and therapy came out of there, and interbehaviorism. So the the less known one, I think, is really UNR's a mecca and a hub for theory and philosophy, and interbehaviorism from J.R. Cantor was pretty much dead in the rest of the country, except for at UNR. And so Linda Hayes did a lot of work of trying to get interbehavior behaviorism to not only still have a home, but also to expand inside of mainstream behavior analysis. And so the book selection at the UNR library was all of context press books. So it was all relational frame theory, act, everything that came out of Context Press, because Steve created context press just right down the street. And I think it was a smart move. He made sure that the library he taught at bought all of his books. Reasonable, you know?

SPEAKER_03 25:25

Yeah, that works. That's a good marketing space.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Yeah, yeah, it's a good little move. So I read every single context press book that exists, and then I started reading Cantor, and then that got me into Israel Gold Diamond, and I got really into a constructional approach, and I got a PDF copy of the Blue Books, which was kind of the lost work of Israel Gold Diamond, the polindronis and TV Joe Lane kind of put together. So Joe Lang has since put out a book that is much easier to interact with than that. But back then, that's what we had. So I got really into constructional approach to programming with the interbehavioral spin on the philosophy inspired by Skinner. And then I found a guy named Zing Yao Gyeo. Do you guys know him? K-U-O? No. Man, I love Zing Yao Gyo. He so we gotta go back to the 1920s. Nature versus nurture. That's all the jam, right? What's going on here? Is this the environment happening or is this aspects of the organism? And Xing Yao Gyo is like, hey, you idiots, this is clearly environmental. And he was even more on the environmental side than Skinner was. So I would say like Skinner would be a soft environmentalist from where Gil's coming from. And so what Gio decides is okay, let's take a wide-held belief that people have about a species and let's test it. Let's see if we can come up with a condition where we actually negate that belief. So, how do cats feel about mice? They want to chase them and kill them, right? Play with them. Cats want to kill mice. Why do cats want to kill mice?

SPEAKER_01 27:15

That seems more of like a nurture piece. I'm sorry, a nature piece, right? Like they're just genetically like I feel like my dog is like genetically like things that move, he just wants to chase. So maybe similarly with cats.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Yep. So it's in their genes, right? Yep. And so he says, okay, cool, we got like that perfect foundation. If I can get a cat to love mice and I can show that the ontogenesis of behavior, how behavior develops in an individual organism is about early environmental conditions. Now we're moving and we're we're challenging core beliefs of people. So he comes up with multiple conditions that he's gonna raise these cats. He's like, okay, let's raise a cat kind of typically, like this cat knows humans and it knows other cats. That's all the cat knows. Now, what happens if we raise this cat so it never ever sees another cat and only has minimal interactions with humans? Because you know, it's an experiment, so it's gonna have to interact with humans in some way. But really, it just knows mice. So, like mice are raised as the siblings, as parents, and together, cat plus mice, basically cat becomes mouse. So, what happens when a cat that's raised with a mice as their family sees another cat?

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Oh, does it get aggressive or does it run away?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

It gets aggressive or it flees. That's what you get. The fire flight or flight, yep. It goes straight into fire flight. That's what's gonna happen there. Now you can control that, especially if you when the cat's being raised with another mouse, if you kind of wait a while and then you bring in a cat and all the other mice run away, you can actually get the cat to reliably just run away, to only engage in that because of the social learning that's happening through the interactions of the mice. So Joe's like, hey, you idiots, this is clearly about our lack of ability to understand the ontogenesis of behavior from the individual organism. And he publishes these beautiful papers. Well, he's from China and he's studying here as a Chinese student, and things with China are getting a little complicated in the world at this time. Much different these days. Wow, back then, too. That was a hundred years ago, man. I know, man. I know. So around this time, he's gotta go back to China and he kind of checks out uh the mainstream psychology world. But in China's where I think he does his coolest work. He never like he doesn't publish on it at that time period. He's just living his life, and he had these animal farms, and dog fighting was really big in China, so it was culturally appropriate, it's different than it is now. But dog fighting was huge, and people would bet on dogs, and it was this really big culture. So he had these research laboratories, he called them, but really they were just giant farms where he just played with every single variable you can ever imagine. And he tried to see like what were the factors that made aggressive dogs non-aggressive and non-aggressive dogs aggressive, and he just played with those over and over. So he published a book eventually, and that book was kind of his last hurrah when he came back to America for a quick little tour with a couple of students in developmental systems theory. That's what those students ended up going on to. So those students talked him into publishing that book, and he published one book. And so I found that book and I fell in love with it. And the way that he understood and identified variables were really, really cool. And the notion of the things that we're quick to say are because of genetic endowment, oftentimes are a lack of understanding of history. And if we can actually zoom in and understand history, we have more clarity on how to alter the things that we might think are the bad parts of our genetic endowment. And that really got me to start thinking about myself, my own experiences, my own journey, how I would label things as like I'm just not good at that. And it really got me to start challenging my own language about things. At the same time, I was reading a lot of act, and I was also into Eastern mindfulness. So I was reading a lot of Eastern mindfulness at the same time, which basically has a similar story, but from a language and cognition perspective. And relational frame theory really breaks down the basics of how those language structures will alter your future actions. And so I kind of started getting into hey, how can we start playing around with this? How can we start moving this? And where are kind of the boundaries of what we can do with the science of behavior? And because I started working with adults and not with children, the adult world has a lot less uh procedural rules, I would say. And it is you have to become process-oriented to do behavior analysis with adults. You cannot get stuck in procedures. You will go nowhere and it will not work well. Now we'll use procedures to guide staff, and we use procedures to be able to get consent and assent, but really the function of a procedure is not effective intervention. The function of a procedure is agreed upon documentation as points in contact and time. So that early process orientation kind of I think helped me not fall into the trap that a lot of behavior analysts fall into, where the adherence to procedures prevents meeting your learner where they're at when you're with them.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

So, and can you kind of differentiate? Uh so when you say process versus procedure orientation, can you just break that down a little bit, exactly what you mean? Because I think that's really important for people to understand. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

So procedures are those step-by-step, how are you going to get there? And there's a lot of good metaphors that exist. Stu, one of the co-creators of Generate, our learning system and assessment that we might talk about a little bit later.

unknown 33:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Stu uses a metaphor. He has two that he really likes. And I like his of a dressmaker. And so the idea of getting a wedding dress versus getting a dress to wear to work, are two very different ideas, right? And the dress that you need to wear to work, you probably are fine if you want to teach a new person how to make it to go through a step process of here's a list of things you need to do, and you're going to build it. But when you get a dress made for a special occasion that's a one-time use, you have this consultation process that is happening that's back and forth that you're trying things on, you're adjusting, you're looking at it, you're trying it on. And the custom creation of that wedding dress, that is really what I think captures the idea of the process of we know what the terminal outcome is for both processes and procedures. The procedure dictates the steps to get there. And a process-oriented approach dictates the way that we can get there and the changes that can happen along the way to produce the meaningful outcome.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

That makes sense. So if you're working on communication or colors or whatever, you might work on that. There's various different ways you could do it. We could do it with 2D, 3D, we could do it playing, we could do it at the table, we could do it on a field trip. It's kind of what you're saying. Where the process is going to change. It's not just like we're going to do it this one way. This is our procedure to teach communication.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, absolutely. And in our assessment generate, we ended up really taking a process-oriented approach to what's the functional outcome that you're trying to assess on this item. And then allowing the clinician to make clinical judgments and actually designing it inside of the system to force them to make clinical judgments. And that was a really tricky thing that we kind of had to come up with. How do you do that in a way that ensures that the outcome is consistent? And that is a very hard question to answer. Now, mainstream clinical psychology has been kind of playing with this idea for a while. And process-based psychotherapy is really the idea that we need to stop using manuals for individual treatments, like Act 4 clinical depression versus CBT for clinical depression versus DBT for clinical depression versus what happened in really between the 1970s and 2010 inside of that field was there were all of these procedures that were documented that came out, and then they'd create a manual. You'd go to a training and you'd you learn how to use that manual. But the number one variable that is consistently important in outcomes for psychotherapy isn't did you use ACT or did you use DBT? It is what is did you have a therapeutic relationship? And so the therapeutic relationship is actually the predictor, not the procedures that you've used.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

Okay. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

So process-oriented approaches are how do you react to, interact with, and respond to the developing of the therapeutic relationship over time. And then utilizing those procedures for presenting clinical problems are options or tools that you can kind of tag in and out of and adjust as you need them.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Okay. Thank you for explaining. That makes a whole lot of sense. Continue.

SPEAKER_03 36:49

So I think we got to get you back on the uh the origin story. You were almost there. Almost. Dan derailed you.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

I derailed you.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

I just wanted up. That's a good derailment.

SPEAKER_03 37:00

We're going to come back to process and product because that's I I love I from a developmental perspective. I I love process over product, but we'll get back to that. I'll let you, I'll let you run. Go ahead, sir.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

Rog and roll. So basically at that point, I was learning everything I possibly could. And I wanted to continue using behavior analysis in as many places as I could. And I pretty much forced anybody who knew me to try different approaches from a behavioral perspective to solve any problem they wanted to. And when I was done with my undergraduate degree, I had to decide like where am I going to go to graduate school? And I was going to go to one program, and I'd already met the advisors, like we were all on board, and I forgot to send my transcripts. I'm really bad at paperwork. This is like a thing. I've gotten a lot better, put some good systems in place, but early on, that was my number one barrier. And so I missed the deadline. And I was like, screw it. I'm just going to walk the Pacific Crest Trail and walk to Mexico.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

It's my good friend's dream. She's a she's a big hiker. Yeah. Did she do it? She's on part of like the John Muir trail and stuff, but not the full.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Yeah. So I was going to, and I was like, I guess I'm not going to graduate school. I'm going to walk that. I'll figure it out on my walk and then I'll see what's next. Who knows? So I set up my whole trip. Like I had like where all my drop stations were going to be. I kind of had like who was going to mail me things. I had all my stuff that I was about to buy. And then the graduate student I was working with, he was ABD, and he got a position down at FIT in Florida. And he texted me. He's like, Do you want in? Like, there's a couple spots left. I can get you in. We can figure this out. We can get your transcripts. So I said, okay, screw it. I guess I'll go to FIT.

SPEAKER_03 38:48

Not a bad spot to be in for behavior analysis. Not a bad spot at all. I'm guessing you didn't walk to FIT though. You didn't walk in.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

No, I didn't have to kind of walk to FIT. It was a very short turnaround. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:01

I guess you could have walked through Mexico and then back up in Iraq. We digress.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Didn't get to go on my walk. All of that. I did not get to go on the walk, sadly. But it did go to FIT. And what was interesting about that to me was you know, there's a lot of regional differences in applied behavior analysis. There was a lot of stuff going on the East Coast that wasn't really happening on the West Coast, especially at this time. There was like the VB approach was not very big on the West Coast yet. And it was quite big. So we were still very Lovosian in our approach to language development. We were still working on receptive skill sets versus identifying tax versus man's and kind of how to do that. So I was interested in like, oh, I wonder what East Coast behavior analysis is like. And you know, Florida being the home of the credentialing body, like there's a lot of really good practitioners down there. So I was like, yeah, I'll go down there. Let's try that out. So I went down there and Jose Martinez Diaz, he told me that.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

Shout out to Jose. I uh I got my uh VC ABA through FIT. Many uh margarita stories in Hawaiian shirts with Jose.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

Oh, hell yeah. And he said he told me if I got 80% on the intake exam, I didn't have to take a single class. I don't know if he would have actually honored that or not. So they always had you do a mock exam like before you took your first class, and then you did a mock exam before you left. And it was like their full mock exam, like the one that they sold to people to like get ready for the exam. And so, you know, most people would get like 15, 20, 30 percent. And the idea was like, Oh, you're gonna see how much you're gonna grow. So he told me because I was like, what happens if I like actually score high enough that I could be a BCBA? He's like, if you pass it, you don't have to take a single class, I'll just give you all the credits. And then he did his little Jose laugh. I was like two percent off. Oh no. He laughed and he was like, Whoo! I didn't know what I was gonna do.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

Oh man, that could have been a story in one of the classes.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

I know, you know, I was so close. But so down at FIT, I actually went to a satellite campus in Orlando because that's where Josh was teaching, and I didn't go to the main mailboard campus, and they never had anybody actually apply from outside the state to go to that campus because there was this whole like class thing going on, I guess you could call it. But that program was really cool. It was designed for working class professionals who had their BC ABA or had a bachelor's degree and were ready to go into behavior analysis, but they already were working full-time in the field. So it wasn't the same grouping of graduate students who like had no applied experience. These were people who had like five to 10 years of applied experience already. So that felt really good. I really enjoyed like being around a bunch of people who were already very into the field, but we had a whole different pool of instructors, which also was very cool because one of them was Pat McGreevy. And so Pat McGreevy was actually working on the essentials for living at the time. It wasn't out yet, and he was actively in development of it. And so we spent a lot of time kind of going back and forth, talking through like why you would select something. And what Pat was trying to do was he was trying to really raise or he was really trying to lower the floor of entry into the skills that we assess. And so if you think about current assessments, criterion reference, or standardized, it doesn't really matter at this level. If you think about those assessments, there is a floor of entry, so the lowest skill it assesses, and there's a ceiling, the highest skill it assesses. And one thing that drove me crazy about skill-based assessments was that our floors were too high and our ceilings were way too low. Okay. Yeah. So in working with adults, I would work with, you know, one person who went to college, took like 30 credits and didn't complete, and they were like working and they were getting fired from entry-level jobs every like six to ten months. To people like that first guy I talked about. That first guy, we we did enable czar. I told I didn't think that we should just because it wasn't quite appropriate, but we did enable ZAR on him and he scored on like two items, and that was it. Like when I first started working with him. So the floor didn't really let you differentiate his skill sets from other people like him. And the ceiling with those other people I was talking about, they were way beyond it. It would do nothing for you. It wouldn't, it wouldn't let you understand them in any way whatsoever. So I was already oriented to this idea of the floor and the ceiling because I did a little bit of research assistant work for a project with the Ables R where we were watching video recordings and then I was coding kind of what the parents were doing. So it was parents implementing the ables R with their kids who weren't diagnosed. So it was kids who were, you know, first administration and three months later, and then three months after that, and three months after that, and three months after that for a two year cycle. And we were kind of coding data on how that was going. So I was very familiar with what the assessment options were. I was also already using the VB map and it had its own problems that I wasn't really happy about. But what I didn't like was that there was no assessment that could even register somebody like me. Like I'm a level one autistic, and neither of those assessments would be useful for me whatsoever. So, you know, I didn't really like that. And so I spent a lot of time with McReavy talking about that. And then when I graduated, I moved back to Florida or I moved back to Reno. I wanted to drop out, so I actually became a craps player for a six-month period. And I did not practice behavior analysis because I worked in I worked in the autistic sector in Florida, and I did not like a lot of the things that I saw. And so I was just like burnt out. I was done. And I just wanted to live life and enjoy what I had and use behavior analysis in the ways I wanted to. So I had this whole system for my craps thing where I had a suit jacket for each day of the week, and each jacket had $100 in it, and that's what I would take to the craps table. And if I won, I put $100 back in the jacket, and the rest of it was my earnings, and then I filled out my jackets. I made more money than I've ever made in any job I've ever done doing that, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 45:16

Wow, legit. I've known my way around a craps table and poker table casino before, so I love it.

SPEAKER_03 45:21

Poker guy. Poker guy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Yeah. We were we were doing good. And so I was feeling good about life. And one of my other advisors, Melissa Nosick, she was when I was an undergraduate, she was also one of my graduate advisors. And Melissa knew that I just loved being around adults with disabilities. So she was working for a local nonprofit. And she's like, dude, just come hang out. Like, you don't got to do any work. I'm not going to force you to do behavior analysis. But I really think it would be good for you to be around other people more and just come chill with me. And I was like, okay, cool. I can do that. Well, she abandoned me to go work at the BACB. And I took her job. I started three programs underneath her, and I'm still here.

SPEAKER_03 46:02

Wow. Nice. That's fantastic. Okay. Man, from the casino to the analysis table. You got roped back in. I love it. I think I mean I'm sure you still find time to play craps, though. You you should.

SPEAKER_00 46:16

Occasionally. Not not anywhere near that. It's a it when I do it, I have to be all in. You know, like that's part of who how I approach things in general. It's like you gotta make time for it. Now that I have two kids and I work a lot, uh, and I have a couple part-time jobs and side things, there's just not time to be all in. Not enough time. I mean, that's that's the type of person that they want in the casinos, people who don't have time to kind of work the system and game it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 46:43

Are you a pas or a don't pass guy?

SPEAKER_00 46:47

I play all the wrong things. I do hardways and I do the uh field primarily, which statistically I should lose all of my money. I don't know why. I've been able to figure out timing to do those things. You got to run good. It makes no logical sense. Like don't give me the wrong, I'm not delusional here. Statistically, it makes no logical sense.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Hey, whatever works, man. Good for you.

SPEAKER_03 47:12

Another example of process toward product at some point, but you got you have to give it time, is what you're saying. Yeah, you have to give it time. And I mean that's that's a really good, it's a really good analogy here, a really good parallel in terms of what we mean by that. We often get discouraged by the quick product or lack thereof, we abandon the process, and that leads you a whole different way. So I do want to go back to a lot of things you mentioned, but starting with your work within the autistic sector and things you didn't like. This podcast, in fact, started right around COVID time. We came across a tech TED talk from a young woman, Chloe Everett, and it was the first time that I had I had been hearing about the Reddit rabbit holes and ABA is evil, and I was like, well, let me go check. Let me go check out how evil I am. And I saw this TED Talk from this woman, and she was very earnestly describing her intervention experience. And I was like, Yeah, I do that. I do that too. Oh, that's what she didn't like about that. And it was, I mean, it was so I almost felt sheepish. It was like, man, this should have been very easy for me as a developmental guy who likes open-ended child-directed approaches, play-based, for example. Like, how was I missing a lot of this despite my better efforts? So, this podcast, and then our current endeavor, Ascend Behavioral Solutions, really stemmed out of working for so many other people and having these grievances. And why are we doing stuff like this? We should try this, you know, and I can get into more details if it's appropriate later. But I'd love to get your insight, your perspective, both from your personal and professional experiences, as to those things that you saw that you were like, nah, this can't be right. This just can't be what we're supposed to be doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:06

Absolutely. And I love that you have that reaction. I think a lot of people prevent themselves from allowing themselves to have that reaction because it's scary, you know, like it's a scary place to be.

SPEAKER_03 49:17

Well, I mean, I thought I was doing cool too. Like I thought I was right in there with my you know, developmental open-ended approaches. You know, we're doing process here. And I I think I certainly was distinguishing myself from my colleagues, and they they were attracted to that. But then I saw that TED talk, and I'm like, nah, I'm I'm only about halfway there. There's so many things that um I guess the best way to put it for me was there's there's this authoritarianism that comes from you've got a disability, I'm here to help you, and I'm going to cross these lines because it's in your best interest that I, in essence, force you to do this. And I think that once I was able to phrase that for myself, I even I'm getting tingles right now. It was like, oh, dude, what the hell are you doing, man? Like, you gotta rethink this. So, anyway, let me pass it over to you and you can share more uh about your experience with that.

SPEAKER_00 50:06

I think that authoritative component, the relationship between instructor and learner is definitely one of the components that I had a really hard time with. I worked at a school for autistic students that were from three, so it was a pre-K program up to 21. It was uh elementary to high school. And I had never done early intensive behavioral intervention in home-based services. This was before clinics were really in the rage. And there were some clinics around the country, but for the most part, it was home-based services. That was still the primary model that was happening. And I had never done that for a couple of reasons. One, I just personally never really felt comfortable in other people's houses unless I know them really well. So just like the idea of going into other people's houses, like, I didn't like that idea. Two, the idea, you know, and people would throw it around like, hey, kids are doing this for 30, 40 hours a week, and that's like a full-time job. And then the response from behavior analysts were like, Yeah, but they're so far behind, they need to work now so they can work later. And that idea was a little hard for me. Um, this idea of like, what does that mean for the family? Like, when do they get to like lay with their dad? And when do they get to learn to cook with their mom? Or when do they get to barbecue with dad? Or, you know, whatever. Like, when do you get to just be family? You know, like what does that feel like? So I had a hard time with the idea and the model. Like, I read the meat book pretty early on, I want to say, in that first month, and I kind of went down the rabbit hole of kind of trying to understand like what or where everybody was coming from on what early intense behavioral intervention was trying to accomplish. A lot of my friends, a couple of my girlfriends worked in the IBI at that time period. So it wasn't like I it was foreign to me, but it was a model that I was like, I don't think it's for me, and I don't want to do that. I wasn't anti-it, but it wasn't a model that I wanted to work in. So when I went to Florida, there was an opportunity right away to work at a school, and I was like, okay, that sounds pretty cool. So I started working in the school as a paraprofessional. They had a first-year teacher who was having a very, very hard start of the year. So it was like week two in the school year, and kids were running out of a classroom, jumping a fence, and running across the highway. Um that was like one of the things that was going on. It wasn't like hypothetical he might run across the highway. It was like he ran across the highway four times last week. Oof. So it was, you know, and everybody was like, we don't want to be playing Frogger with kids. Like, we gotta stop that. And so, and that was one of the kids in the classroom. So she had six, and all six of them had significant things that were feeding off of each other. And she was a first-year teacher, and they had one paraprofessional who was a guy who worked graveyard shifts, and then he would come in and he would actually fall asleep in the class. Sleep through like the whole day. And they were supposed to have another TA, but they couldn't fill it. So, because of the program model at the Orlando campus, because it was for people who already work in the field, one of my co-workers, Mark, his name was also Mark, was telling me about this the first day because he's like, Where are you working? I'm like, Oh, I'm looking right now. And he's like, I got a job for you. Do you want to come be a TA like next week? And he told me about it. I was like, Yeah, I want to do that. That sounds cool. So I went in there and as a TA, because this teacher, she was a first-year teacher and she already like was seeing all the bad stuff. She was like, Yeah, I will try literally anything you want to try. And we got that class under control within the first two months, and then all the kids ended up learning an insane amount. We took some kids from you know, like five to ten mans, we took them to like second grade reading levels like that throughout that year. Like it was wild. Like we got we got wild progress. And part of that was like, Oh my god, I see the kind of addictive nature of working with early learners, which is really different than working with adult learners. Like when I said, like, we got that dude one manned, and it was like life-changing, like you can just think about the scale of how many targets are acquired per unit time. They're very different, and there is like this really powerful thing that happens when like you are able to facilitate skill acquisition at like such a wild pace, and nobody else is doing it. But so I thought, like, hey, look, we just showed what this could do. We did a demonstration. Everybody in the school knew that this was the crazy classroom, right? They were like, that's the wild classroom, it's the worst one. The behavior techs, because they weren't behavior analysts, but one of them was a BC ABA, the guy Mark, my friend, who told me to come be a TA. They had him and then basically another RBT. This was pre-RBT, no RBT credential, but functionally he was an RBT. So they were the behavior team, and the behavior team was basically firefighters who were called out to do restraints and de-escalate kids.

SPEAKER_03 55:04

Yeah, that's how it was used. The good old days. I remember those. Yep, yeah. No pro act, there was nothing prevents it if you were gonna go straight into the hold.

SPEAKER_00 55:13

Yeah, that's that's kind of the game. And so that's where we were at, and they were spending like you know, five hours a day in this class before I was a TA, and then we ended up doing this really complicated procedure. We got it all together, and so at the end of the semester, they were like, Hey, that classroom is good now. Like, we have another TA that can swing in there since we stabilized it. Do you want to be the behavior team with us? And I was like, Yeah, let's do that. So we started doing that, and I did not like the firefighting. Um, I I did not like that we had to get kids to such intense levels before we allocated resources to them. So, like the general idea of resource allocation was drove me crazy. And like, why am I spending five hours over here? Or if we spent five hours over here, we can prevent 15 kids from ever going this way. And that was that was really, really frustrating to me is that D cell targets were the primary emphasis of what behavior analysis had to offer. So I really did not like the emphasis on deceleration versus acquisition. So we made a bunch of programs and we we actually created a pull out model that was kind of similar to how speech and OT and PT do pull-out models, where we were basically going through and doing skill acquisition for 30 minutes for you know, three days per week with kids, and we actually got some really cool stuff from that. We created some staff training that was really cool and actually became a base for a paraprofessional training that I brought back to Reno and that we still actually do with all uh special education in Reno. So there was some really good stuff that came out of that, but this notion of D sales plus resource allocation and the financial side of it was just too much for me. And those are those are my two main things. And the lack of really learner focused and learner aligned values growth, like there it was so hard with such limited resources to allow yourself to be able to do that. That every time that we were trying to get people to do it, there was always barrier after barrier after barrier after barrier that kind of came up. Yeah. So that was my main reason. Again, the early intensive behavioral intervention from the home base perspective was just never on the cards for me. So like I just didn't even consider that an option. So it's like working in schools or working in adult services, those were the two options kind of left. And I kind of checked those off and was like, yeah, I don't think we're gonna do that.

SPEAKER_03 57:54

Wow, Mark is giving us a whole lot to think about, but I'm gonna have to stop us there as this concludes part one of our fascinating, enthralling interview with Mark Malady. Please do return for part two and always analyze responsibly. ABA on tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for today. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.