The Emergency Mind Podcast

Diane Malaspina, psychologist, performance coach, and yoga teacher focused on stress, burnout recovery, sleep, and nervous system regulation. She discusses a strengths-based shift away from deficit models. She outlines foundational pillars like sleep, transitions, nutrition, and regulation. She debunks the idea that suffering at work is necessary and shares practical tools for tuning performance.

Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a RAND social scientist and former wildland firefighter, brings a practitioner-informed lens to disaster risk. He discusses bridging individual, team, and system perspectives. Topics include socio-technical thinking, full-spectrum risk management, cascading crises, and designing expertise for emerging technologies. The conversation pushes interdisciplinary thinking and spotting professional blind spots.

Joshua Feblowitz, a board-certified emergency physician and medical educator with Harvard and MIT training, explores experiential learning and simulation in clinical training. He discusses teaching metacognition through interactive cases. Conversations cover operating under uncertainty, speed versus accuracy tradeoffs, realistic decision thresholds, and practical limits of traditional assessments.

Patrick Pollock, veterinary surgeon and One Health academic who builds remote and rural veterinary programs, discusses the collision of people, animals, and complex systems. He talks about why animals complicate rescues, horse senses and hidden risks, training trade-offs between calling experts and cross-training, and practical system fixes for safer, coordinated responses.

Christine Stead, CEO of ELSO and leader in global ECMO coordination, shares how networks of people, data, and organizations drive innovation. She recounts rapid data-sharing during COVID, the shift from centralized labs to collaborative systems, challenges of crisis decision-making, and bold ideas for expanding ECMO access through coordinated EMS, transport, and engineering advances.

Adam Milano, a practitioner-scholar blending social work, crisis response, theater, and higher ed, shares how teamwork under pressure mirrors ensemble art. He discusses using storytelling and improv to rehearse emotions, building nonverbal cues, and simple rituals like breath checks and pre-briefs. Expect practical scenes about loyalty, making teammates shine, and syncing fast in high-stakes moments.

Marius Aleksa, a performance advisor who coaches elite athletes, military, and medical professionals, explains why curiosity fuels growth under pressure. He discusses using questions to reveal hidden strengths, integrate mental and physical support, and build reliable foundations. Short, practical approaches help performers notice choices and create systems that extend their limits.

Annie, a neonatal resuscitation clinician, Patrick Hetrick Schauenberg, a surgeon-intensivist training mission-critical teams, and Preston Klein, CEO of the Mission Critical Team Institute, discuss what team performance means in crises. They explore measuring performance beyond outcomes, simple signals like willingness to rejoin, process and behavioral markers, trust and adaptability, measurement fatigue, and how team identity and environment shape sustained performance.

In this discussion, trauma surgeon Eric Benoit, visual neuroscientist Zab Johnson, risk management researcher Jay Bologna, and critical care expert Ayan Sen share insights into the nuances of measuring team performance. They explore how teams often fixate on outcomes instead of processes, the perils of subjective self-assessment, and the importance of after-action reviews. Ayan highlights efforts to develop cardiac arrest team scores, while Zab opens up on neuroscience metrics of teamwork. The panel emphasizes trust, leadership, and the integration of creative friction as keys to enhancing performance.

What happens when life-and-death decisions must be made by a team rather than an individual? In this episode, Dr. Mark Ramzy — cardiothoracic intensivist, emergency physician, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of REBEL EM — joins us to explore how teams think, decide, and act under pressure inside the ICU