MUN Impact would not be where it is today without the invaluable work of Cody Eckert, its Director of Global Operations. His worldliness, professionalism, and vision have streamlined processes and ensured the experience MUN Impact delivers is seamless and world-class. And so, in this episode, he details how he came to first be involved with MUN Impact, what he finds most impactful about the organization, and its immediate future plans, specifically October's Global Summit 2.0.
Join Erik Novak in interviewing the man behind the goatee and, to a large scale, behind MUN Impact as well.
Don't forget to like, share, follow, and show this to your friends and colleagues.
MUN Impact would not be where it is today without the invaluable work of Cody Eckert, its Director of Global Operations. His worldliness, professionalism, and vision have streamlined processes and ensured the experience MUN Impact delivers is seamless and world-class. And so, in this episode, he details how he came to first be involved with MUN Impact, what he finds most impactful about the organization, and its immediate future plans, specifically October's Global Summit 2.0.
Join Erik Novak in interviewing the man behind the goatee and, to a large scale, behind MUN Impact as well.
Don't forget to like, share, follow, and show this to your friends and colleagues.
Podcast Name: ComMUNiqué
Podcast Producer: MUN Impact
Episode Title: The MUN Impact Experience & Global Summit 2.0
Episode Number: 1
Host: Erik Novak
Guest: Cody Eckert
Date Published: August 2nd 2020
Episode Description: MUN Impact would not be where it is today without the invaluable work of Cody Eckert, its Director of Global Operations. His worldliness, professionalism, and vision have streamlined processes and ensured the experience MUN Impact delivers is seamless and world-class. And so, in this episode, he details how he came to first be involved with MUN Impact, what he finds most impactful about the organization, and its immediate future plans, specifically October's Global Summit 2.0.
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Erik Novak: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the world's premier podcast at the intersection of education, social engagement and the work of the United Nations proper . I am your host, Erik Novak and this is Communiqué. Today, I'm honored to interview one of the main motors behind MUN Impact, which is the umbrella organization this podcast exists under, and which has cultivated youth stewardship for the UN Sustainable Development Goals framework, the SDGs, for thousands of youths worldwide. So without further ado, our guest today is Cody Eckert, MUN Impact's Director of Global Operations. Cody received his BA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Public Policy from the National University of Singapore. In recent years, Cody has managed logistics, logistics for the Qatar Leadership Conference, the Global Public Policy Network Conference in Singapore, and an International Trade Exposition in Chang Chun, China. You oversaw the administration of a small group of employees for the Tufts Consulting Group in China, and was responsible for payroll, invoicing, and project coordination for a consulting group in Washington, DC. He was invited by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to participate in an expert group meeting in Vienna for his expertise and best practices in MUN methodologies. That said beside his fascinating curriculum and life experiences, which I'm sure can fill many of episodes of Communiqué in the future, Cody has also played an integral role in the establishing, expansion, and solid application of MUN Impact. This is what I'd like to focus on today, as well as what's next in store for him and for the organization as a whole. So thanks for being here today, Cody, and first off, tell us a little more about how you first got involved with MUN Impact as a whole.
Cody Eckert: [00:01:58] Hi, Erik, thank you so much for having me. so my involvement with MUN Impact. I think it's safe to say started in 2015, a mutual friend of Ms. Martin, our Executive Director and mine, reached out to me at around midnight one night. I just moved to Washington DC and I was job-seeking at that time. And he called me at midnight and he asked me, "Hey, do you want to go volunteer and help run a conference in Qatar for a couple months?" And I said, "What? What's that all about?" And by one o'clock in the morning, my time, I was on the phone with Ms. Martin, and she asked me to come help run the logistics for the Qatar leadership conference in 2015. By the end of the week, I was on a plane on my way to Doha and I was there for, in September and October, I believe in 2015, I helped run that conference and it really blew me away. It, prior to that, my experience, I had participated in Model United Nations as a delegate in high school, and, I thought that was it, going to conferences, representing countries, debating topics, and then you go home and that's it. But at the QLC, I realized that there were all of these super dynamic networks of young people around the world working on very important issues. It was at that QLC that I met, Sulaiman Sulaimankhil, one of the co-founders of Hope for Education and Leadership in Afghanistan, who since then they've done tremendous work in Afghanistan, developing MUN, women's empowerment, et cetera. And I became a member of their advisory board at that time. Then I was hooked and in 2016, I went back to QLC as a presenter. In 2017 and 2018, I was invited to, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna to some experts' group meetings on best practices in MUN methodologies. And then when MUN Impact started being discussed about two years ago, I was in the loop and my involvement just grew and grew and grew. And about a year ago, and I believe it was in August, 2019, Ms. Martin reached out to me, she said, "Hey, would you want to come work on this full time? And I said, "Absolutely." in many ways, it ticks all as a job, and as an organization, it ticks all the boxes of things that I want to do in my career. working on important issues that affect millions of people around the world, engaging with youth, et cetera. So I jumped at the chance and so I started working. You know, more and more on MUN Impact. And then right around the time of the pandemic, I think in March, 2020, I went from doing a few hours here and there, on, working on MUN Impact to it being a full time job, a 40, 50, 60 hour a week job. And it's just been a roller coaster, a fantastic roller coaster since then.
Erik Novak: [00:05:12] All right, I was planning to move on, but I just have to emphasize this once more. so out of the blue, you've got a phone call the middle of the night in 2015, and then bam, one week later you were off to Qatar to help out with the Qatar Leadership Conference-
Cody Eckert: [00:05:29] Yeah-
Erik Novak: [00:05:29] Is that correct? -h. Wow. Just wow. Did not know this about you Cody, and we have worked together for a little, for a little while now. My God, I didn't know this at all. This is impressive. A call from beyond quite literally.
Cody Eckert: [00:05:43] It was, yeah, it was pretty wild. So my friend reached out to me around midnight, and I was on the phone with Ms. Martin, and we're both from California, and we both are graduates from UC Berkeley. And so when we got on the phone, she said, "Okay, tell me about yourself, Cody." And I said, "I'm , well, I'm from California. " She said, "Oh, I'm from California." And I said, "Oh, I did my undergraduate at UC Berkeley. "She said, "Oh, I went to UC Berkeley."
Erik Novak: [00:06:11] Go Bears.
Cody Eckert: [00:06:11] Yeah, go bears, and exactly. And she said, "Okay. A, a personal recommendation, UC Berkeley tie in, California tie-in, when can you come out?" And so I actually said, I, "Oh, I can hop on a plane tomorrow," but she said, "How about let's do it at the end of the week?" So yeah, it was at the end of the week I flew out to Qatar.
Erik Novak: [00:06:33] Wow. No, this is just, this is amazingly impressive. Really goes to show it that sometimes our, our life purpose comes to us in the, in the moment of unexpected and totally trivial, expectation basically. But anyways, basically your involvement has grown over the years and especially over the last eight months. And besides that, undeniably, MUN Impact has also really grown as a global movement this year. And I was curious about how you might contrast, generally speaking, besides what you said already, your involvement with the organization prior to this year, versus after March or so in particular with what you've been doing mostly, mostly recently.
Cody Eckert: [00:07:18] It's a totally, totally different organization. you know, it incorporates a lot of things that we were planning on, but it, it, it, it, the pandemic mobilized us in a way that. And, and put us down a path that I don't see, we would have been at the same place. You know, where we are now is not at the same place we were before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, we were focusing on, we had our online programming online, MUN and, and Junior Online MUN. And, but we were planning on having hosting in-person leadership summits. we were more focused on building our club partnership network and our conference partnership network, et cetera. But when the pandemic hit, I remember, Ms. Martin was in, we were in a group chat with, it was me, Ms. Martin, and I believe, Mr. Newman, and she said, "I feel like we got to do something. I feel like we have to, create a new program." And basically she outlined MUN@Home. And, you know, we're all pretty nervous because we knew that there was a significant likelihood that it was going to take off and take off a lot. And we didn't know if we had the bandwidth for it. And that's why we started a Slack workspace. And that's when we started bringing all of our student leaders from around the world, online, together in a workspace. And, that was like rocket fuel for the organization, because we have in, you know, before it was me, Ms. Martin, Mr. Newman, working on things here and there. But when we brought this army of young people together, like I said, it was like rocket fuel and it's been, it's been a blast since then.
Erik Novak: [00:09:07] Yeah. I mean, I joined the organization about the week before the pandemic really started to hit, so like got the tail end of what previously we were both focused on. I can definitely emphasize with that, and perhaps memory doesn't serve me right, but I'm pretty sure I was on that call as well because for example, I know that MUN@Home, the name was the one I suggested even and all of that. So I think I remember, I remember this pretty distinctly.
Erik Novak: [00:09:32] And it really goes to show how the organization has changed for the better. And I'd say, and also expanded drastically over the last year.
Cody Eckert: [00:09:40] Oh yeah.
Erik Novak: [00:09:40] And to that end, what would you highlight as a particularly noteworthy trend that you have observed with MUN Impact's growth, especially with its demographics as a of late?
Cody Eckert: [00:09:51] Our demographics, well I mean, it, something that really attracted me to MUN Impact in particular from the very beginning was the, us expanding into underserved communities around the world. And MUN, historically has been an activity in primarily in Western, developed countries. in, in developing countries, it was localized around various international schools, et cetera. And, you know, because MUN is a costly activity for, in person events, for in-person conferences, there's conference fees, there's transportation, there's accommodation, food, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And if you're you're from a family or a community or a country, that you don't have a lot of money to spend you can't participate in this program. And, something that has just been exhilarating to be a part of is, you know, especially with the explosion of our online programming, it's, you know, having events online, it reduces this drastically reduces this barrier to entry. And so we've been able to get students in Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Maldives, Nauru, all over the world and we've been able to bring all these, all these young people together that would not have been able to travel in person to a conference somewhere to meet in person. But now they're, they're working together on important projects and becoming friends.
Erik Novak: [00:11:31] Any specific example that might come to mind of these small pockets forming around the world?
Cody Eckert: [00:11:37] Well, so something, so, with our first summit, in, yeah it was in July. as it was getting close to the registration, a deadline, Erik, you and I were going through the, the, the backend data. And we were seeing where everybody was coming from. And we noticed that we're really close to about a hundred countries. We're at about 95, 96 countries, represented by, by students. And so we really wanted to get it over that a hundred, hundred country mark. And so we all reached into our different networks and started digging to see who we could find to, you know, from these remaining countries or one of these unrepresented countries. And I reached out to a, former classmate of mine when I was doing my master's program in Singapore, and she works for previously, well, she works for the Maldivian Foreign Ministry previously. She was at the station at the UN Mission, Maldivian UN Mission in New York. And I reached out to her because we didn't have anybody for Maldives. And I said, "Hi, hey. Do you know anybody who might be interested in attending this event?" And she, dropped it into some Facebook, Facebook groups. And I think we had, I forget exactly, a number, maybe a dozen or 20 students from the Maldives sign up. And a handful of them were very active in the summit. They participated in a lot of the sessions and I said, "Oh, how cool." You know, Maldives, it's a beautiful place, it's underrepresented, it's , a place that I personally want to go. And I was looking and they have a developed, robust MUN community in, in Maldives. And after the summit we've reached out to the, the students that participated and we said, "Hey, we want to get more involved." and now we have, I believe at least one, maybe two of our diplomats, that are responsible for reaching out to potential partner clubs and other students in their, their region or their country. And so now we have a couple of diplomats from Maldives and we also have a burgeoning network in Nauru and Nauru...
Erik Novak: [00:13:55] It’s a micromanager, right?
Cody Eckert: [00:13:56] Teeny, teeny, tiny Island country.
Unless you're from the region, it's very hard for you to get prior exposure to it. So that's pretty impressive.
Hmm. It's about, it's about 12 square kilometers. and it was under the UN trusteeship. It was a UN trusteeship until I, I don't know exactly when.
Erik Novak: [00:14:16] Oh yeah. I think I remember hearing about that. It was one of the last trusteeships. I think the last one was Palau in 1994, but I think Nauru was among the last ones too. That's pretty impressive.
Cody Eckert: [00:14:27] Hmm. And it has a, it has a population of just around, I think, 12,000, I think. My hometown, I come from a small town, smaller, smallish town in California. We have about 60,000 people in my hometown. So I'm thinking a whole country that is, is, is like that. And, so we've connected with, well, we had a speaker at one of our MUN@Home sessions and her name was Margo Dacia. And she was from Nauru and she put us in touch with, she reached out to, I believe the Nauru, Ministry of Education. And we're in talks now of getting, getting students from Nauru to, you know, get on board with MUN Impact, join, sign up for MUN@Home, or other programs, attend our virtual events, our upcoming summit in October. And it just blows my mind, like I think of Nauru, if you look up the images of it, it's like a, a grain of sand in an immense ocean. And there are going to be kids that are going to be logging on and connecting with, with students in the US, in Ecuador, in Afghanistan, in the UK, in South Africa and yeah, you name it. And I think that's awesome. I think it's so cool. and I'm just so proud to be a part of that.
Erik Novak: [00:15:55] It is pretty humbling, you can't lie. And additionally, perhaps because of the speaker's connection with the Ministry of Education, that's also, I think gives a lot of credibility and weight to MUN Impact as a program, as a whole, especially within the Nauruan environment. Because even though it only has 12,000 people in this small island in the Pacific, it is a sovereign state with all the bones that come with that. And so positively, and once a sovereign state like that, I think that's also a very impactful thing.
Cody Eckert: [00:16:25] And you know, something that I'm really interested in in engaging these, these students and these young people in these, you know, small island nations is that these small island nations are on the, you know, forefront of climate change. And, you know, this is one of the greatest issues, you know, ongoing and, and in the future. And, to bring these young people's voices to this global discussion, this global youth discussion. it's not just cute, it's just, it's not just fun, it's important. And I think it's critical to get their voices and, and to connect, connect the student in St. Louis, Missouri, who, yeah, maybe doesn't know where Nauru is, but they can start chatting and they can start working on projects together. And, and then they have buy in these, these, these students around the world will think about Nauru, will think about the challenges that these, you know, their, their peers are facing in these countries, and they're going to want to do something about it. They're going to want to, going to want to stand up and take action and...
Erik Novak: [00:17:37] For sure, and it also gives an extra platform to the Nauruans we're the ones as well as to other, populations in the region that are being afflicted by the very real issue that climate change presents to them with a, sea rising and such. It gives them an extra platform to relay the important message. I, I know that I think the prototypical example of this is Tuvalu. I'm not mistaken and it's a country that's I think, it's the country...
Cody Eckert: [00:18:04] Yes...
Erik Novak: [00:18:05] That is the most endangered in terms of its land area because of climate change, and so it has had to do some publicity stunts. Like for example, its Cabinet Ministers met under water and that sort of stuff in order to bring attention to the rest of the world of the very real dangers that they're facing over the next few decades.
Cody Eckert: [00:18:23] I was reading something earlier. I believe the, the highest point in Maldives, is, is about three meters or two and a half meters above sea level, like two and a half meters, three, three meters. Sometimes I go to the beach in Southern California and the, and the surf is up higher than that. And, you know, and, and that's, that's now. And considering, you know, the ice caps melting, permafrost, et cetera, it's stark and it's scary, but that's why we, that's why, it makes our efforts and the work that we're doing even more important because, it's, it's the young people in this world that are going to be really in the thick of it, of encountering these difficulties. And, having to deal with repercussions....
Erik Novak: [00:19:19] Right, I think the real publicity issues with climate change is that it's generally an abstract concept for a lot of people who haven't felt the problems that it brings.
Cody Eckert: [00:19:29] Hmm.
Erik Novak: [00:19:30] I feel like having felt them in their own skin and the people in these countries have. And I think this also adds valuable insights to the conversation as a result. And I guess this is all very fascinating stuff. and it also points to MUN Impact establishing itself as a global movement this year, which is again, a humbling thing to know and to be a part of. And to that end, I wanted to briefly shift gears into what's immediately in store for the organization in the near future and to your involvement with it specifically. We had the very successful summit, a few weeks back, and we're already planning for the next one. Can you tell us a little more about what that previous summit was, how it will differ from the next one, as well as generally what, what your involvement was in the first one and what it will be in the next one?
Cody Eckert: [00:20:20] Sure. so our last summit, which we, hosted in, in July, it was named MUN Impact Global Summit, Uniting the World Through the SDGs, I believe. And, it was, we had, it was three days. we had, I believe 17 sessions, 17 workshop sessions, plus three plenary sessions.
Erik Novak: [00:20:51] That's seems about right. And also, three social sessions that had an extra speaker for the Spanish cohort.
Cody Eckert: [00:20:58] Yeah, and I believe we had, for the workshop sessions, I believe we had 80, around 80 individual workshop presentations all going on at the same time. I mean, not all 80 at the same time, but for each session we would have four, three, four, five different workshop presentations running. And, the themes were, the SDGs, MUN, impact and action, and then a, a Hope Strand and yeah. And so we had all these sessions and we just, we had over 1800 students from, over a hundred countries. we were, I didn't mean to leave everybody in alerts, but we were able to get over that, that a hundred country mark. We had 101 countries represented and it was great. And we had, fantastic keynote speakers. We had Will Kennedy from the UN Partnership's Office. other UN officials, . We had Sam Altman, a giant in tech speak at our second, second day plenary session. And it was great by all accounts was a great success. And my role in that, summit was handling the backend affairs. A lot of things, organizing the, you know, helping to organize a lot of the different teams that ran the event that promoted it, that administered the event, um. Organizing our, we're helping to organize our speakers and presenters, dealing with some of the backend tech, nitty gritty, organizing our, our, the different tech platforms that we used. And, probably the most frustrating, arduous part of it was handling our registrations at that time. And Erik, you were...
Erik Novak: [00:22:59] I was very much, very viscerally involved with that for sure.
Cody Eckert: [00:23:03] Oh God, and so we had a, you know, hundreds and hundreds of different registrations and everybody registered for, you know, different workshops depending on their, their interest. And so we crafted individualized, personalized schedules for everybody with, with zoom links, for their appropriate workshop. And it was a monumental feat to organize all of that. But, you and our, the President of our board, Crystal Amo did some incredible work with some Mail Merge Monster and some, it was sequel programming, ...
Erik Novak: [00:23:43] Python Sequel Programming to get those emails out.
Cody Eckert: [00:23:47] And so, yeah, that was, that was quite an undertaking. For our next summit in October, the theme is driving action and impact for the SDGs. It's more focused on, yeah, action and impact, while the first one was more about, more theoretical or academic where different presenters would present on what they do and what they've found works. and the, the participants would listen and they're, you know, each session, we would have a question, a Q&A session. For this next session, we're going to have a component of it that will be similar. we're calling it our Inspiration strand where we will have different, workshop presenters, but again, it'll have, it'll have more of a focus on how to take action, how to create impact. So it'll be more like how to launch a campaign, how to, fundraise, how to market your, your idea. How to, you know, get sponsorship for your, your idea. And then two more, two of the more innovative strands or components of this next summit is we're creating something called an SDG Sandbox. So the idea is that, students will be able to join sessions together and, depending on specific SDGs that they're really, really focused on. So let's say they're interested in, you know, reducing gender inequality they'll join the SDG five, you know, cohort, et cetera. And we're creating a system where the students will be able to come together and brainstorm and formulate ideas for projects that they can take on together as a, as a global, global unit. and that will lead into. Another component of our, of our programming called the Dolphin Pool. We're taking our cue from Shark Tank, that is a popular TV show where budding entrepreneurs, they, they pitched their, their inventions or their ideas to investors.
Erik Novak: [00:25:58] To the Sharks.
Cody Eckert: [00:26:00] Yeah to the Sharks. And so the Dolphin, you know, we call it, we're calling it the Dolphin Pool because dolphins are friendly and collaborative. And so these different teams, that have, have created their projects or their ideas in their in the SDG Sandbox, they'll be invited to pitch their, their idea to, you know, globally recognized social entrepreneurs, UN officials, experts in their, in their field. And I think it's really exciting because the, and then we'll after the summit, we'll have a space on our education platform, taking it global for education where these, these projects will continue to be worked on. That will we'll have a space for these students to, you know, keep going with it, and, actually create impact and take action.
Erik Novak: [00:26:55] That's very interesting.
Cody Eckert: [00:26:56] It's interesting.
Erik Novak: [00:26:57] Now, well, this is obviously the overall theme and the overall idea, I assumed that your pacific work-related theme is improved registration system.
Cody Eckert: [00:27:06] Oh, absolutely.
Erik Novak: [00:27:08] How do you foresee your work looking and what do you foresee doing for the summit from a logistic point of view? Well, that’s the glorious work that people tend to forget about.
Cody Eckert: [00:27:19] Yeah, well, we've been, we've been connected with an online events, company called Kollective with two Ks. And, they do that, they, they run online events. They hosted a, an event sometime in the last few months, it was this global fashion event I believe, and they had over 140,000 unique, users who joined this online, event, and it was a huge success. And how, it's very different before the old summit, we used zoom links and this, the system where everybody had their own personalized schedule. With Kollective, how it'll work is, students will, or participants will be able to log in to the, a purpose-built website and the Global Summit 2.0 website. And think of it like a lounge where, like at a real conference, you go to a real, real conference and you look at the, the program and you say, "Oh, this sounds interesting to me,"or "Oh, this doesn't sound interesting to me. I really want to do that." And then in-person conference you can just walk over to, to one room, peek your head in, and if you like it, you can join. If you don't, you can go to go to another room, it'll be similar with this online portal. participants will be able to access the portal. And then from there, they'll be able to move into the different components of the, of the event, of the summit, and from an administrative, you know, view of this, they take out a lot of that, that work. So, hopefully, we won't have to be doing this, this kind of, mail merge of death and, programming, programming....
Erik Novak: [00:29:09] Let me see if I got this right, you've outsourced me and Chris...
Cody Eckert: [00:29:13] Haha. We found, , suitable, stand-ins while you work on even more important work for the organization. I should, I should note that this isn't set in stone a hundred percent. We are still, this kind of service service doesn't come cheap. It's not free. And so we are in the process of attracting sponsors for the summit. And, while we're con, we're confident that we're going to reach our goal and we'll be able to, to reach out to Kollective, but it's not a hundred percent set in stone.
Erik Novak: [00:29:52] Fair enough. Fair enough. I guess the way I see it as we ran a successful summit, albeit with relatively ragtag technology and now we're bringing it past the prototype stage and into more enterprise level software to improve the quality of people's experiences. That's not to say that the quality was bad the first summit
Cody Eckert: [00:30:13] No-
Erik Novak: [00:30:13] It was just that there are marginal gains to be had with enterprise software. And it's certainly very worth it to pursue them, especially because it allows people, working in the tech department as was the case, with you and I in the last summit to consider more, spend more time with the more meaningful and less repetitive work that requires more creativity and then in brain massage as well...
Cody Eckert: [00:30:41] Exactly.
Erik Novak: [00:30:42] So I really look forward, yeah, I really look forward to seeing what the summit brings because it's not just, it's not just the second summit. It's also version 2.0, as you pointed out a bunch of different things and a, and an added value experience overall for everyone involved.
Cody Eckert: [00:30:58] Absolutely. I just wanted to add, so, I mean, our first summit was world-class. we had no, there was somebody from, I believe the Ministry, the Foreign Ministry of Ecuador, who in her, in her comments afterwards said that she attends diplomatic events and diplomatic, you know, online diplomatic events that our event was equal to in, in, in many ways. And, so we, we did a great, great job, but, there's always room for improvement. And from the very beginning, our idea about MUN Impact is that we're not setting out to make a rinky dink organization. We're not, we're not thinking small time. We're building a global movement, a global youth organization. We're becoming, you know, one of the global youth leaders. And, you know, taking these steps to improve, improve things for our second summit is, you know, it's, it's adding the polish, it's adding the glitz and glam and it's taking us to the stratosphere and in some respects, and as we reach out, as our engagement with the UN and with different government agencies around the world, et cetera, we want to make sure that, and we know it will, you know, that their, their, their jaws drop when they see our events and their jaws will drop just by interacting or seeing our students and seeing what they're working on. But if we can add a little glitz and glam and a little pizazz-
Erik Novak: [00:32:33] Oh yeah-
Cody Eckert: [00:32:34] It'll take it over the top.
Erik Novak: [00:32:35] The first summit was, I was extremely impressed with the quality of everything and the training and how well prepared people were. And I certainly didn't mean to insinuate that, experience was bad in any way, shape or form. Much to the contrary, it's about marginal...
Cody Eckert: [00:32:51] No, I know-
Erik Novak: [00:32:52] -communities really and these marginal gains, they make a difference in the end of the game, especially when you're up with the top end players. But, they're not the, they're not the magic, but just the cherry on top. And I think we're at a point where we can actually have the luxury of considering that and like, and very legitimately showing that we're, we're at the table and ready to talk with, with the highest, the highest stratosphere of decision making in this community. I'm excited to see what the future holds.
Cody Eckert: [00:33:23] Well stay tuned, man. You know, you've, you've been an integral part of MUN Impact, you know, over the last six months or so. And, and I know you're going to be an integral part going forward.
Erik Novak: [00:33:34] Give or take, give or take one kitchen accident...
Cody Eckert: [00:33:37] Yeah, haha.
Erik Novak: [00:33:39] And unfortunately, Cody I've loved the conversation, but, time has run out. So, to all listeners out there stay tuned because this is definitely not the last you've heard of Cody Eckert, and he will make several comebacks as his curriculum and his way with words, have hopefully over the last 35 minutes shown you already. And so ultimately it seems that with the power of his goatee, Cody's bounds continue raising the threshold for excellence. And with that. We yield the floor until next time.