Angelo Milazzo, Pediatric Cardiologist and Chief Medical Officer

 

123. Angelo Milazzo

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Angelo Milazzo,

 

Will Bachman  01:02

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m here today with Angelo Milazzo. Angelo, welcome to the show.

 

Angelo Milazzo  01:27

Thank you, Will. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I love this project, and I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you today. Well, that’s

 

Will Bachman  01:34

very kind of you to say. So then you probably know my first question. Tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Angelo Milazzo  01:42

Yeah, so happy to spec that out. So after graduation, I took a summer to prepare and get ready to start medical school. So the fall after graduation, I enrolled in medical school back in New York. So returned to my home state and started school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which was not too far from where I grew up. Had a great time in medical school. There met some amazing folks, folks I still have connections with today. And you know, it was just a fantastic four years during med school, developed an interest in cardiology, and knew that my long term aspiration would be to do something in the field of cardiovascular medicine, and decided to do my residency in pediatrics, because I had an interest in pediatric cardiology, which is very different from adult cardiology, and we can, we can certainly get into that in a little bit more detail, but decided to, you know, pursue post graduate training in pediatrics and wind up, wound Up, excuse me, coming to Duke University to do my residency. From 1996 to 1999 spent the last year of my residency as an assistant chief resident, and during the time of my residency, really developed that interest I had in cardiology, got to spend some additional time as a resident, looking at that specialty in more detail, found some great mentors and decided to stay at Duke to do my fellowship, which was an additional three years. So completed my post graduate training in 2002 I was offered the opportunity to stay at Duke as a faculty member. So I joined the Department of Pediatrics as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in 2002 and my first assignment, the job that I was offered was to start a practice which was not the typical type of first academic job out of post graduate training for a physician. It was, it was quite unlike most of the other jobs that I was looking at, which were mostly traditional, sort of first time academic jobs with some elements of clinical practice and some element of research. This was quite different. This was mostly clinical practice with an administrative overlay. So I was asked to to essentially build something new and manage it and administrate it. And that began my interest in administration, and that’s the tact that my career subsequently took. So within that first year of running this practice, I became its medical director, and what was the practice? So the practice was, it was, you could think of it as a satellite of our academic practice. So, as you may know, Duke University Medical Center is based in Durham, North Carolina, sort of smack dab in the middle of the state. What we call the Piedmont area of the state, about 30 miles from the capital city, which is Raleigh. And at that time, in the early 2000s our health system did not have a heavy penetration in the capital city of Raleigh. This was an attempt to take this very specific specialty practice, pediatric cardiology and bring it to this new context. So I was asked to build a pediatric cardiology practice in the city, again, about about 30 miles east of our main hub. This was a very new venture for us, something again, that we had not really experimented with or tried in any meaningful way before. So I grew that practice over the course of almost a decade and a half, from basically a one man operation to a practice which today has about 30 physicians in it, across a dozen medical and special and surgical, pardon me, specialty areas, all within pediatrics, but all within various areas of Pediatrics, everything from primary care to very esoteric, specialized care, seeing 1000s of patients a week. And you know, it’s a it’s a very busy endeavor. I gave up the medical directorship of that practice in 2017 when I was offered the opportunity to become the vice chair for practice for the Department of Pediatrics. So took a fairly large step up on the administrative end of my of my work, and became essentially the second in command for the Department of Pediatrics here at Duke Health, which is, you know, which at that time, was about 125 130 or so clinical faculty, about 20 or 30 PhD faculty, and in my tenure as vice chair, we, we grew it to what is today, About 250 clinical faculty, about 50 or so research faculty with a really broad portfolio of clinical work, academic work, scholarship, teaching activities, advocacy activities, etc. So that takes the chronology to about last year when I was offered the opportunity to become the Chief Medical Officer for what we call the Duke Health integrated practice. The Duke Health integrated practice is the practice plan, so to speak, for the Duke Health System. So now I am the administrative the clinical administrative leader for essentially all the physicians who practice at Duke Health so well beyond just the Department of Pediatrics, but across all 18 of our clinical departments, in addition to the physicians, my work also encapsulates, pardon me, and oversees All of our advanced practice providers, so the nurse practitioners, the physician assistants and the related clinicians. So I have taken these steps over my career with, you know, increasing administrative responsibilities, and now have the privilege to serve as the chief medical officer, which is, you know, in many ways, I think, the logical extension of what I’ve been working toward over the years, and it’s given me a much bigger sandbox to play in. It’s allowed me to take the best of what I’ve been able to do as an administrative leader within one clinical department for within the care of children, and now spread it across the entire enterprise, which has been just an incredibly exciting opportunity for me. I’ll also mention that along the way, my my hands on administrative experience, my hands on managerial experience, got me interested in getting the didactic piece of that too. So just before the pandemic, it turned out. So in mid 2019 I enrolled in business school and wound up, um, completing my my MBA in just under two years. And did one of these, you know, very popular Executive MBA programs. So working full time, getting my MBA in the evenings and on weekends, and that exposed me to sort of a whole other a whole other world, new set of contacts, new set of people. Got really interested in the economics of healthcare, the business of medicine, but really enjoyed the perspective of classmates from all these other industries and all these other walks of life, you know, like with so many other educational experience in my life, it’s it’s been about the people. Got to meet some really fascinating people. Being an adult learner was much different than my experiences either at Harvard or or in medical school. So that takes us a. To today. So today I function still as a as a practicing pediatric cardiologist. I spend about 40% of my time in clinical practice and about 60% of my time in my administrative work. I do research as well. I’m very interested in health equity research, and in part of a big project right now, funded by the CDC. I’m a small part of this project, but a small part of a big project where we are looking at health equity issues and the cardiovascular care of children in in our state of North Carolina. So again, that kind of takes us up to where I am today, professionally. And you know, happy to explore any of this in more detail as you like.

 

Will Bachman  10:46

Wow, what. What a exciting career. There’s a lot of ground to cover now I’m curious. One place to dive in is to, you know, continue to get promoted through the ranks at your level administrative you probably need to be a pretty decent, you know, hands on doctor. I would imagine it’s sort of a table stakes. And maybe you’re modest and don’t want to say it about yourself. But what would your peers or people who put you in this role say? Why did they pick Angelo, you know, for these kind of increasing levels of administrative responsibility, what is your kind of unique skill set that has allowed you to function well as an administrator as well as a clinician? Well,

 

Angelo Milazzo  11:31

fantastic. First question, I think that it speaks to something that I’ve talked to people I’ve mentored over the years about whether they’re medical students or residents, fellows, other trainees, even undergraduates that I’ve had the opportunity to mentor. I think it’s about allowing one aspect of the work to inform the other. So you’re right. It’s table stakes. In order to be a great physician leader, it starts with being a great physician, a great clinician. And when I say great, it’s not an attempt to pat myself on the back. It’s about being the kind of physician who loves to engage with patients, feels a feels that it’s a privilege to engage with families, gets energized by that privilege, by being in those spaces, really enjoys the opportunity to have conversations with patients and families, really enjoys the sort of medical anthropology aspects of being invited into these parts of people’s lives that as physicians, I Really feel we’re privileged to be invited into so that energy, that insight, translates into my managerial work, starting with the, you know, the premise that I’ve had the privilege of great mentors in medicine and to have been taught by some really amazing clinicians, applying those lessons in practice, think has informed the administrative side of my career. It’s allowed me, I think, to feel really comfortable with very fraught conversations, if you think about the idea that in managerial work, you’re often dealing with the crucial or the critical conversation. Well, we have those as physicians every day, so we’re used to high stakes back and forth. So I think that skill set fits in both domains. And then I think the managerial experiences, the administrative experiences, feedback to the clinical work and make me a better clinician. You know, in my managerial work, in my administrative work, I’m having to negotiate. I’m having to work with other professionals from from different backgrounds, different training perspectives, whether it’s nursing leaders or research leaders or leaders from federal, state, local government, leaders from the regulatory environment, from the world of insurance, from the pharmaceutical world, you know, having to be in rooms with those folks and and speak those languages and engage in that bartering and in that negotiation, that skill translates back into the clinical environment. It enriches, I think, my perspective. It broadens my perspective. So I think there is this sort of constant back and forth, this sort of constant bilateral communication that occurs within within me, and allows me, I think, to enhance both sides of of my career. Yeah, it

 

Will Bachman  14:43

as someone who earned an MBA, but maybe a little bit earlier in my career than you did. I’m so curious, by the time you started your program, you had already been a pretty experienced administrator, a lot more experienced than I was when I got my degree. And most of my classmates were, what do you feel you actually learned in your Executive MBA Program that was kind of additive to what you already had in your experience? Was it like, oh, I learned accounting, and they never taught me that? Or what was the what was the value add of that program for you?

 

Angelo Milazzo  15:23

Yeah, I think, from a very pragmatic perspective, you you’ve hit one of the nails on the head will there was sort of that, that nuts and bolts piece, you know, I had, I’d worked with budgets in the past, but had no formal training and accounting, no formal education and finance. You know, I missed act 10 at Harvard, so I didn’t, I’d even have the basic economics other than what I would have read on my own or educated myself on my own right, and I’ve been sort of a self Didact most of my life and been able to teach myself things that I needed to know. But it was really nice to get it from a professional, you know, in a lecture, or, you know, in a video and in his zoom call, or a teams meeting, you know, we did a lot of that virtually because of what happened during the course of my MBA career. The pandemic landed right in the middle of it. At any rate, you know, really from that nuts and bolts pragmatic perspective, yes, a lot of it was that pure didactic. I love the idea of taking coursework in these in these areas. But the real goal that I was able to mine during business school was in those, those exchanges. So the, you know, here’s a problem, build the team and tackle the problem. That was something that I was so used to in my in my medical administrative career, and it was so nice to be involved in that kind of teamwork, leveraging the skills of people from other from other industries, right? So in my capstone project, which was supposed to be, we were supposed to travel to Europe to do it. We had to do it remotely because of the the reality of the public health emergency. But we worked with a firm in Eastern Europe, a delivery firm, a package delivery firm, you know, again, about as far from what I do on a day to day basis as you can get. And I had a team. And the team was made up of people from the military, from the micro brewing industry, from the airline industry. There was one other healthcare professional, but most everybody else was from some other sector. And, you know, again, it’s a cliche, but I learned so much from these people. I learned that there were things that I was there were challenges that I was facing in my work which were unique, but those were actually the exceptions. Most challenges had universal DNA, and so I learned things in that setting that I could immediately bring back to my work. I can’t imagine I have so much respect for you doing that early in your career. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have gone to business school without having had real work, real life work experience, because it was, it made it sort of easy in that respect. You know, I had so many examples I could draw when it came time to, you know, here’s a problem, give us some feedback on that problem. Or here’s a scenario. How would you deal with that scenario? I could draw from a pretty deep well. So I feel like I had the cheat code for business school. I believe that you and you know my other colleagues, who I knew as undergraduates, who went to business school much earlier in their career. I think you guys had the hard road, and I have tons of respect for that.

 

Will Bachman  18:36

So share an example of something that you know has had, you know, something in your work, you know at the medical center since Business School, where you feel you’ve like applied those lessons. Can you share any you know anecdotes that come to mind of where you did it differently because of that, that business training?

 

Angelo Milazzo  18:57

Well you may know, and you may know this better than I do that all these principles, all these management principles that people are so fond of today, whether it’s lean, whether it’s six sigma, whether it’s the Toyota Production System, you know, all these things have become pervasive in healthcare administration. So, you know, I got that. I got those lessons in business school, the idea that, you know, we want to do things just in time. We want to do things in a continuous improvement cycle. We want to, you know, iterate and allow the best ideas to bubble up from the production floor, rather than to be rained down from the executive level. So those were things that some of which had developed organically in medicine over the course of my career, but just as I was entering Business School, a lot of those things were becoming common parlance. Some of it was from people who didn’t have the formal training. They were just. Kind of using the lingua franca of the time. They were just sort of picking up on these, on these popular ideas. But I think those of us who went ahead and got the training could appreciate in a much more tangible way what that could bring to us. And you know, fortuitously, this all landed in my lap in the middle of the public health emergency. So there was no better laboratory experiment. There was no better, you know, real world pressure test than taking what I had just learned in terms of Lean management, for example, or even more importantly, the continuous improvement cycle, which is something we are now incorporating in everything we do. So one of my responsibilities today is to we have a we have a huddle in every one of our clinical areas every day across our enterprise. And you know, we call this the due quality system, which, you know, is not too far from the Toyota Production System in its, in its, you know, sort of intrinsic sub anatomic structure, art. We’ve borrowed a lot of that. Okay, one of my roles today is to facilitate that and to help spread it across the enterprise and to make sure it works, and to visit these huddles as they’re occurring and and hear about what people are doing, and what’s really energizing about those huddles is the people doing the work are driving them. You know what happens?

 

Will Bachman  21:29

Give us an example of what happens in a daily huddle. Yeah. So, you

 

Angelo Milazzo  21:33

know, we will have somebody read out our mantra. We have a we have a quote that we use, and I don’t have it in front of me, and I don’t have it memorized, but it’s basically a quote saying that we believe in the principles of continuous improvement, and that we have built a culture, a learning culture, a learning environment, and we want to become what’s known as a reliable organization with a commitment to quality and to safety and to continuous improvement. Somebody reads that out, quite literally, reads it, and then somebody leads the huddle. And every day, it’s a different leader, and it is not necessarily somebody with an MD after their name. And usually it’s actually not, usually it’s one of our nurses or one of our medical technicians. It could be one of our front desk staff. Could be somebody who works on the back end. And payroll could be somebody who works in the lab, and they talk about an improvement project, and we use the A three structure, which is a common structure for improvement, be familiar to a lot of people who do this work, and it’s focused, and it’s data driven, and there are tangible end points and and they could be small things. It could be like, you know, we are having a problem with patient satisfaction around check in time. Or it could be a bigger ticket item, as in, we are not getting laboratory results fast enough in this particular practice, or we are often delaying cases because anesthesia is not ready when our surgeon is ready. And we use the continuous improvement process to study those problems. And then we have a tiered system. So this lowest tier, these local huddles, we call that tier one. And the best learnings from tier one go up through a series of subsequent tiers till they get to the top executive level, where we take the best of what’s done and we share it across the enterprise. So it’s really exciting, because we’re letting the people doing the work drive these continuous improvement projects around things that they think are valuable. You know, getting direct feedback from our patients, getting direct feedback from our colleagues, hearing what our staff have to say, so it’s really satisfactory, and it’s been a great journey of improvement for us. And you know, none of this is proprietary. What do they say? Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. We have stolen a lot of the fabric of this from other organizations that have have walked this journey before us, and we have been willing to share back the best of what we’ve been able to accomplish too. So that’s been another nice benefit is bringing us closer to our like minded organizations, because we’re sharing these best practices when we go out, when we send our people out to national meetings or international meetings, and it’s just, it’s just nice to be part of that, that academic learning environment in healthcare.

 

Will Bachman  24:32

So that is a major undertaking to initiate a process like this and to get it evolved and waterfall all the way through an organization, to get everyone doing it, massive kind of change management effort. Tell us a little bit about how this came about and what was it like to implement it. How’d you do it? Was it you start with some pilot groups and then roll it out to two and. Then three, and then 17, and then 100 or, you know, tell us about this program rollout. Well,

 

Angelo Milazzo  25:06

I think it just stated from two directions, from from the bottom up and from the top down. We heard from staff that they wanted a bigger role in determining, you know, operational and strategic imperatives, you know they were, I think, in some cases, and depending on whether you were talking to physicians or whether you were talking to nurses or whether you were talking to other staff, think many folks felt as though they were punching a clock, a cog in a wheel, if you’re not careful, medical practice can become like that, and increasingly, with the pressures of the regulatory environment, academic practice has had to adjust itself to meet external demands. And for many years, we did a lot of things simply by telling people that they were necessary, without necessarily giving them a stake in the why or even explaining what the why was. So some of it was again bubbling up from the people on the front lines doing the work, saying, hey, we want a bigger role in determining the future course of our of our of our operational work and our strategic work at the same time, I think, thinking from the executive and managerial level, and looking down toward the operational and the frontline level, there was a desire among leadership to have A much more standardized approach to process improvement, you know, we saw that there were pockets, you know, and we have a relatively large health system, from, you know, primary care all the way up to ordinary care, local care, regional care, some some national care programs. We recognize that there were pockets where good work was happening, but there was no direction for the work, and no way to take the best of that work and scale it or even make it visible to other people across the enterprise. We were really way, way behind, and many of our sister organizations, many of our like minded organizations were far ahead of us, and it wasn’t because we didn’t have talented people. Think it was because we didn’t necessarily have the correct wraparound structure to be able to do to do that. So with some changes in the organization, with some new leaders, including leaders who came from from other health systems and other academic centers. We started this, I’ll call it the performance improvement journey. We started this a few years before the pandemic, and it really started, I would say, in earnest, with the introduction of a standardized electronic health record in 2013 so like many other organizations, we adopted epic, which now is somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of all major health systems in the country are using it. But the introduction of it allowed us to have a common set of data mining tools. And you have that’s table stakes. You know you have to have that. You have to have a way to, you know, pull clinical information to, I’m going to say slice and dice I hope that’s not a proprietary epic term, because there is a module within it called slice or dicer. But at any rate, we had to have a common set of electronic tools to be able to collect data and understand, you know, whether we were succeeding or failing. Failing. Pardon me, around quality initiatives. So that’s that 2013 2014 timeframe, when we brought epic on, standardized, our data warehousing, standardized, our electronic tools. That was the necessary, but not sufficient condition for the work. This the necessary condition that the data piece was there. We had to have the mindset, and so we had leaders come in from other organizations. There were some change over, some changing of the guard, some new perspectives, some people really committed to this continuous improvement environment. So by the time I became a vice chair in the 2016 2015 2016 timeframe, I was ready to hit the ground running and begin to bring some of these principles into my department. And now, you know, almost a decade later, as CMO, I’m operating in like, the second or third generation of thinking beyond where we started. And now we have built this culture where we want everybody to be a quality improvement science. We’ve we’ve actually developed an academy. You. Okay to train physicians and other healthcare professionals to become quality improvement scientists and some very dear colleagues of mine started this a few years ago. They put people through a boot camp where they give them all the principles and very rapid fashion over a very concentrated period of time. It’s like, it’s like a mini Six Sigma, or mini black, or whatever you want to call it. And then they have them develop a project, and they give them, they give them an end date six months later, and they have to have something to show. Many of those projects have now been presented at the regional, national and international level, at various different meetings, and in all sorts of medical specialties, from complicated heart surgery to solid organ transplant to medical genetics to obstetrics and gynecology. You know, we have covered the gamut with these quality improvement projects. So this is a long winded answer to your question, but that’s sort of the the history of how and why we got started and how we’ve evolved to where we are today.

 

Will Bachman  31:10

Wow. You mentioned earlier that you’re a bit of an auto Didact, and love learning new things. Tell us about some of the things that you have worked on learning over the years sort of outside of a formal program.

 

Angelo Milazzo  31:27

Yeah. So I have continued over the years my and this is going to get outside of my professional learning. Perfect. Love it, but I’ve continued my my interest in music over the years. Okay, I was, I was scarred by piano lessons early in life as a child, starting at around eight, he was either age four or five, depending on which relative tells the story and how proud they feel, took lessons for many years, and then I think, sort of actively rebelled against the idea of music lessons, put it away for some time, and then got back to it, and today, described myself as a self taught piano player and a self taught guitar player. And you know, of course, now we live in a world where there’s an unlimited amount of lessons out there that you can you can access anytime you like, yeah. But even before that was the kind of person who would, you know, sit down at my piano with the book of scales and arpeggios and just just kind of ingest it myself. So

 

Will Bachman  32:34

awesome. I was also scarred by some music lessons early in life. When did you kind of pick it up. Was this before college, after college,

 

Angelo Milazzo  32:44

so it was a little bit during college, but it was, it was really an earnest during med school, and then during my post graduate medical training.

 

Will Bachman  32:54

Oh, when people, when people have so much free time,

 

Angelo Milazzo  32:57

yeah, you know, it was one of those things that became a really important way to to break away from, you know, the pressures, the the deadlines and all the other things that come along with with medical training. So music and and whether it’s, you know, playing it or performing it for myself, or even listening to it has always been a nice way for me to to get away from from all the rest and reset.

 

Will Bachman  33:26

What role does it play in your life now? Are you kind of playing for yourself? Do you have a group? Do you go play out in bars and clubs, or get together with friends? Or

 

Angelo Milazzo  33:36

yeah, it is. It is almost exclusively me playing for myself. And, you know, torturing my wife or my kids when they were around to listen. But I’m very proud that both of my kids, who are now young adults, both got interested in music during their school years. Both became really proficient in instruments, much, much better than their dad. Both see music is a really important part of their lives, and to the extent to which I modeled that for them. You know, I’m really

 

Will Bachman  34:07

proud of that. What kind of music do you play? So,

 

Angelo Milazzo  34:11

you know, everything from little bit of jazz, a little bit of blue, and it will depend on the instrument, too. So if we’re talking about the guitar, where I’m kind of barely getting by these days, I love to put on a backing track and and do my best at torturing some pentatonic scales and some blue scales. So that may sound like kind of the stereotypical middle aged guy guitar hobbyist endeavor, but I have to own it, because that’s what I enjoy doing. If it’s the piano, then it could be anything from some some jazz to some very uncomplicated classical music all the way through to rock and pop and folk and all that good stuff I love. I love me some Tom Waits and love. His piano style, and I even love his singing voice. So you might even catch me croaking out a Tom Waits tomb from time to time,

 

Will Bachman  35:10

and tell us anything else you want to share about your kind of life outside of being a chief medical officer there in North Carolina.

 

Angelo Milazzo  35:19

Yeah, North Carolina is a fantastic place. I’ve actually bumped into more than a few Harvard classmates over the years. Actually have a couple within a few blocks of where I am, which is kind of interesting. You know, the weather is wonderful here, except for this week, where we got our unseasonable four inches of snow. My son goes to school in the mountains, so we actually spent a fair amount of our time in the western part of the state. He is, you know, sadly, not far from where the state was devastated this past fall. And my son loves that community, and loves living in that community, loves living in that community, loves going to school in that community, may choose to stay in that community, and it’s another thing I’m proud of, is that he has sort of found his people there. The other the other nice thing about North Carolina is the contrast. So we also have wonderful beaches here, and we get to spend a lot of time on the water and a lot of time in the eastern part of the state. So we like to say that the force of gravity here is very strong, because there is so much to do, so much natural beauty. The people are wonderful. The climate is agreeable. And I think in terms of a work, life balance and a locale this this one meets a lot of my needs and checks off a lot of my boxes.

 

Will Bachman  36:50

Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Angelo Milazzo  36:55

Well, how much time do we have? Will keep going? I knew this was coming because I’ve listened to the show and been actually really inspired by some of the answers I’ve heard recently, including the answer that my roommate John Knepper gave recently on your show. I loved that episode. So the one that comes to mind first, it probably connects most directly to my career, is the course that I took with Professor Kleiman, Arthur Kleiman the illness narratives. And Dr Kleiman was a psychiatrist as well as a medical anthropologist. And you could argue that he’s the father of medical anthropology in the US. I actually interestingly sat in on that class when I was a high school student who had been accepted to Harvard visiting during that day. That right still have it, but I remembered really well, and I got to sit there and listen to that class. And I don’t know what happened that day, but some kind of seed was planted, and I wound up taking that class not too many years later. Loved it. It was amazing. I used the principles that he espoused in that class today, in my work, he basically talked about this idea that, you know, hearing your patients, hearing your patients talk about their illness, is a kind of narrative. It is a kind of storytelling which seems so obvious to me now. It was, it was seismic, a seismic revelation at the time, but it was brilliant, and I continue to reflect on it. And there’s a book we read in that class called forgive and remember, which I still give out as gifts to people. And it’s a book about medical errors, and it’s a fascinating book. It’s, I think, in its God knows how many printing it was revised a few years ago, and it’s as true. The lessons learned in that book are as true today as they were when it was first published many, many years ago. So thank you, Professor Kleiman, for that. My second example is class I took with Professor Dante tela te who, unfortunately, we lost. Think he died last year or the year before. It was a course on the Divine Comedy, and Professor dilitera, for any of those who took his class, remember, he had this amazing voice, hearing him talk about Dante’s work and the historical and social and you name it, philosophical, literary context of the work. He had this very interesting, very heavily accented but very interesting sing song, almost operatic voice. And, you know, I still, I can still hear it in my head. I still have my copy of the Divine Comedy with with my scratch work inside, my notes inside, and very proudly sits on my shelf. And that was an amazing class, which still resonates today. And then the third one I’ll give, and this is probably going to be like boiler plate answer for you. You’ve probably heard this from other guests before, is Greg najes class, which we all called Heroes for zeros, but which I think was officially called the concept of the hero. And. A Hellenic civilization, and I knew I was in the right college for me when one day, talking about one of the Greek heroes, Achilles or Hector or somebody, he showed a clip from my favorite movie of all time, which is Blade Runner. And it’s the famous clip of Roy Batty, played by Rutger Howard, giving this amazing soliloquy about his life right before he dies, and he’s on a rooftop and it’s raining, and the film is a sure, you know, is a sort of sci fi noir, and a much younger Harrison Ford is sitting there watching Rutger Howard giving sort of this master performance, this master soliloquy, and Professor, naj used that clip in that class. And I thought, okay, and I was a, you know, young, impressionable college during the time, and I thought, Okay, this seals the deal. I am definitely in the right place for me. This guy is, this guy is speaking my language. And so that’s my three answer, you know, my it’s like, it’s like, they do an Ezra Klein’s podcast when he talks about, give me three books you recommend. I want to give four. Number four is a little bit of an exception. I actually missed taking MICHAEL SANDEL justice course when I was at Harvard. Okay, I took it through the Harvard X program many years later as an adult, and would listen to it in my car on the way to work. And again, you know, when you come to these things as an adult learner, it’s much different than when you’re a college student. But I love the opportunity, and I loved that I was able to eventually take that course because I was not able to take it as an undergraduate. So I’m sorry I cheated there a little bit, but I wanted to pack a lot into that answer for you.

 

Will Bachman  41:40

It’s a well packed answer. Angelo for classmates who would like to just sort of keep track of what you’re doing or follow up with you. Where would you point them? Online?

 

Angelo Milazzo  41:50

Yeah, I’m gonna point them to my only social media, which is LinkedIn, which I know is sort of the, maybe the lowest form or the most embarrassing form of social media, but my friends know that I’m not on the other platforms. But you know, feel free to reach out to me at LinkedIn. It’s probably the easiest way to find me.

 

Will Bachman  42:07

All right, great. We’ll include your link in the show notes, and I’d say there is nothing wrong with LinkedIn, even though my kids make fun of me for spending so much time there.

 

Angelo Milazzo  42:17

You know, my kids do the same, and they’re both on it. So what does that say?

 

Will Bachman  42:22

All right, Angelo, thank you so much for joining today. It was really fascinating hearing about your your journey.

 

Angelo Milazzo  42:29

Will it was a tremendous pleasure. Good luck with this project. It’s, it’s a wonderful thing that you’re doing, and I hope this becomes like the Seven Up project. I hope maybe once you get through this first pass, you come back to it at some point and catch people later on in their lives. That would be really fascinating. Well, it’s

 

Will Bachman  42:43

only gonna take 30 years if I do one per month. So I will start for your request when I’m 82 going around the second round second

 

Angelo Milazzo  42:51

and God willing, I’ll be one of your guests. Yes, okay, well,

 

Will Bachman  42:55

you’re scheduled for in 27 years, when I get through the first round of.