- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

A New Jersey health foundation program.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

New Jersey’s Clean Energy program.

Lighting the way to a clean energy future.

PSE&G.

Powering progress.

Newark Board of Education.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Moving the region through air, land, rail, and sea.

PSEG Foundation.

The Fidelco Group.

And by Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

Promotional support provided by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

And by Insider NJ.

- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

_ It’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) (dramatic music) - [Speaker] Good morning, Mrs. Duprees.

- Have you spoken to Dani?

- Dani was blindsided by Bill and Haley's affair.

(Dani screams) (glass shatters) - Well, so much for stop by for a cup of coffee.

(dramatic music continues) - It warms my heart to see this beautiful family.

I am so proud of every one of you.

(dramatic music continues) - Does my legacy ever feel like a burden?

- It's a lot to live up to.

- You were just watching an excerpt from "Beyond the Gates" and we are honored to kick off the program with Sheila Ducksworth, executive producer of "Beyond the Gates."

Sheila, it's an honor to have you with us.

And let's make it clear, you're in California.

We're over on the East coast.

It is 7:24 in the morning.

You got up early to do this.

Thank you.

- It's my pleasure.

I'm always up early and actually hail to New Jersey.

I spent many years growing up in New Jersey and I was just there last week.

- Excellent.

Now, "Beyond the Gates" is a daytime soap opera.

It's the first soap opera on broadcast television in 25 years.

- Yeah.

- First of all, the premise of it.

Second of all, why is it so significant?

Because it is.

- Well, I'll actually say it's 26 years.

It was 1999 when "Passions" first...

I guess was the most recent one that was on.

And now before us, prior to us coming on board, which was just this past February 24th, "Bold and the Beautiful" is our next youngest sibling and they are 38 years old.

So as the first soap opera of the millennium, it's truly an auspicious place to be.

We're excited.

We've been on now for the last two and a half months and could not be more thrilled with where we are today.

It's a time for us to tell stories in a way that have never been told with people who have never, the exposure to tell the stories in the manner that we're doing.

So it's really, really exciting - With a predominantly black cast.

- It is.

- The only one on network television.

- Yes, it's very true.

And I have to say it's definitely time.

A lot of folks watch these soap operas and have, as I did as well, have longed for representation of stories that, you know, were particular to their lifestyles and their culture.

And so it's really incredible that we have that right now.

And it's, I know, a welcome thing for so many people.

- Sheila, lemme ask you this.

In my producer notes or the producer notes for this segment, talked about your love of soap operas.

- Yeah.

- When the heck did that start and why?

- So I started watching soaps when I was about 10 years old.

And I have to say it's...

I started watching "General Hospital," which then grew to "The Edge of Night."

I grew up in New York and in New Jersey.

And so those were the soap operas that were on when I was home from school.

At that time, there was no streaming and there wasn't even VCRs that we had access to.

So it was really about running home as quickly as possible.

And I was just really captivated by the stories and by the genre of watching something unfold every single day, Monday through Friday.

And it's something that stuck with me since, as I said, as I was 10.

- Sheila, let me ask you something.

I mean, you had to go to the folks at Paramount, pretty big company, and sell this with others who are part of "Beyond the Gates."

You had to sell it.

Did they buy it immediately?

Any resistance, what?

Tell us.

- So it's interesting how the whole thing came about.

I was actually having a conversation with the co-CEO, George Cheeks, who runs CBS as well as CBS Studios.

And we're talking about a new production company that had just come on board, which was a joint venture between CBS Studios and the NAACP.

They were looking for someone to run it.

So George and I were speaking about just the different aspects of the newly created production company.

And I said that I was very interested in working in daytime.

I've produced really every genre, most every genre, not every single one, but most every genre.

And I wanted to produce every day part and specifically daytime.

And I happen to say that when George said that daytime and every day part was definitely something that we could make happen, I just said, you know, "Specifically, I really wanna do a soap opera," which is again, something that I've thought about for decades, you know, at that point.

And that was back in 2020.

And so, truly, it was just one of those situations where I couldn't have asked for a better reaction.

It was kismet, and George Cheeks said, "Actually, we've been talking about doing a soap."

And so this was an idea that I had lived with for a long time and I pitched him the idea.

The reason it was important to me is because it really touched on real life circumstances in the DMV area, the Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia area, and especially in suburban Maryland.

These gated communities that are predominantly black really do exist where majority of residents are living in, you know, big 10,000 square foot mansions on park light grounds.

And I really wanted to capture that.

Now, I'm not a writer, I'm a producer.

And so I didn't have the names of the characters, I didn't have the Duprees, I didn't have what they all did.

None of that was mine, just really the premise.

And I knew exactly who I wanted to write it, which is Michele Val Jean.

And Michele Val Jean is...

I mean, talk about a veteran, a venerable writer of soaps, award-winning, Writers Guild Awards, Emmy Awards.

She's incredible.

And actually, she and I had talked about doing a soap more than 20 years ago.

- Really?

- So once that... We sure did.

Yeah, we talked about it.

We both just love soap.

Obviously, she built her career in it.

She's been writing soaps for more than 30 years and more than 2,000 episodes under her belt.

And I've been producing all different kinds of television.

- You sure have.

- So when we linked up... And this was, gosh, as I said, more than 20 years ago.

And an interesting way that we linked up, I have to say, is because we were talking about the soap operas, which I used to watch and loved.

In the beginning, it was "General Hospital" and "The Edge of Night."

And as I grew, in 1989, a really groundbreaking soap opera, "Generations," broke through.

And that actually was a half-hour soap that had a black family, a black family, and a white family, but a black family at its core.

And I just loved it.

And Michele was one of the writers for "Generations," in fact, the only black writer on "Generations."

And of course, that starred... One of the stars was Vivica Fox.

And Vivica Fox became a friend of mine.

And roughly at the top of the...

I guess about 2000-ish, I was telling Vivica that I really wanted to make a soap.

And she introduced me to Michele from their work on "Generations."

And so from that time on, Michele and I have said that we were gonna do a soap together at some point in our careers.

And so it's really incredible that the some point in our careers is pretty much right now, Which actually, backing up, was really 2020.

Because once I pitched the idea to the folks over at Paramount, then they said, "Sure, let's explore it."

And I immediately called Michele and I pitched her the idea.

She loved it and she created what all know is "Beyond the Gates" now.

- Sheila Ducksworth has made a big difference with her colleagues with this series, "Beyond the Gates."

She's the executive producer.

And, Sheila, you honor us by joining us, particularly this early on the West coast out in California.

Wish you all success and good things with "Beyond the Gates."

All the best, thanks so much.

- Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- We're now joined by Marie Mathews, managing member of CSG Law.

Marie, good to see you.

- Good morning, Steve.

Good to see you as well.

- You got this.

Let me share with folks that in my other life, doing a leadership and communication coaching, I lead and facilitate the CSG Leadership Academy with some top attorneys looking to become even better leaders, and Marie has been a key to that effort.

So thank you for that, Marie.

- No, thank you.

It was a great program and our people really enjoyed it.

- Yeah, let's talk about this.

Why is, someone gets trained in law, they go to law school, they understand case law, et cetera, et cetera, right?

But that's not the same, and you and I have talked about this, Marie's come in and done a whole range of conversations with the students in the academy.

That's not learning to be a leader.

Where does that happen, Marie?

Or is it osmosis, it's supposed to happen?

- Well, of course there's people who are naturally inclined to have that in them, but it's really developed through mentorship at the firm and watching how other people do it.

At least that's my view.

When we try to develop that in our young associates that we see who are interested, who have the spark, and get them involved in programs just like yours to help them along.

- Yeah, along those lines, and we've also had a look at previous editions of our sister series Lessons and Leadership.

We've had Giantomasi and Jeff Chiesa, two leaders of the firm that work with Marie on.

They talk about mentorship and leadership a lot.

To what degree do you see yourself, Marie, as a mentor to other attorneys just coming into the firm?

- I see it more and more as I progress, you know, within the leadership of the firm.

As a senior associate, I started focusing on mentoring, became more important to me at that point.

But as a member of the firm and now managing member, I really focus on it even more.

I tend to work most with litigators because that's my training.

And so I have been focused on quite a few in our litigation group who I can see really have the potential and the interest to do it.

Of course, interest is really important.

You have to wanna do it.

You have to wanna be involved and learn from those around you.

And we have quite a few really great young attorneys who have that.

- You know, along those lines, one of the things that struck me, and I said this to you and our colleagues in one of our last leadership seminars, that a disproportionate number of the folks in the leadership academy are women.

Okay, are you finding that, where are we in terms of the legal profession in 2025 and moving forward in terms of gender, women in law?

- So I think what we see is the same as what we see at the law school level.

At the introductory levels, we have parity.

We generally are 50-50 women and men, but as careers progress, those numbers drop for women, and we're closer to 30 or 40% of women in leadership.

And so I think it's incumbent on all of us to try to rectify that and to bring those numbers back to parity at the more senior levels.

And I think that's reflected in the composition of our leadership academy class, you know, that we had more women than men.

I think that's a good thing.

- It's a great thing.

The other part of it that we didn't get into in our work, but I'm curious as to your thoughts on this, because there is no industry where artificial intelligence, AI, is not impacting our world.

For those who say, well, lemme just put it this way, how are you and your colleagues at the firm integrating artificial intelligence into your work so it's not simply replacing people?

- So, we're doing that slowly and responsibly.

You know, in the law, we've been using AI for quite some time, particularly on the litigation front.

AI has been part of document review and research, you know, for years, more than a decade at least.

And of course, as the tools have gotten better and capable of more things, it gets a little bit scarier.

What is this capable of?

Is this a good thing for us?

So we are proceeding slowly.

We have a committee that analyzes the different tools that are available to us so that we can know what we're doing before we jump in with two feet.

And we're just starting to pilot a program that will be available to all of our attorneys.

That's kind of a toe in the water as far as the more sophisticated AI tools.

- You know, I'm gonna shift gears on this.

I was thinking about this recently.

So, in order to be successful in law or any profession, but in your profession in particular right now, the idea of, quote, "business development," bringing in business, someone that's trained to be a litigator, they're trained to understand the law, and they're really good academically, they understand case law, they're just good lawyers in that way.

But you and I have talked about this, that being good at business development, building relationships, that's not natural for most folks.

How the heck did you learn that?

- Well, it's an ongoing process.

I won't say I'm an expert yet.

- Same here.

I'm a lot older than you and I'm still at it.

- Right.

So how did I go about it?

I think one of the key ways is watching how others do it and figuring out what model makes sense for you.

And not everyone can be the person who's out, you know, center stage at every event and meeting people.

You have to find what model and what type of business development works for you.

And it might be a one-on-one situation that you're more comfortable in, and you start there and you build from there.

But it is a learning curve.

It's not so simple.

- But again, whether you're in law or any industry, being good at, quote, "the business" of your industry, whether it's in the art, people are like, "Well, I'm into the arts."

Okay, you need money to pay the bill.

I'll get off my soapbox.

So Marie, try this last question.

- Yeah.

- One of the themes we talked about in our leadership work was about giving constructive, honest feedback, which is part of mentoring that you talked about before, but also being open and receptive to receiving it.

Why the heck is it so hard for so many of us to receive?

Including what my wife gave me some feedback.

I call it criticism, she calls it feedback in that case.

For most of us, why the heck is it so hard to be receptive to feedback that we need to hear but hurts our ears?

- Well, that's exactly the reason.

It hurts a little bit.

It feels like a little bit of a rejection.

And so you have to change your mindset a bit and remember that this is for your benefit, this is for your growth.

And when you put it in that perspective, that the person who is giving you what feels like rejection and criticism is giving you that to help you to grow, it's a little bit easier to accept.

- Yeah, it's never easy.

But if we have what I like to call on my leadership work a growth mindset, you bite your tongue and you say, as Marie just said it, "Even if I disagree with it, it can only help me."

Easier said than done.

Marie Mathews is managing member at CSG Law where we have been doing a leadership academy for the last year or so.

Marie, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

Well done.

- Thank you, Steve.

- You got it.

Stay with us, We'll be right back.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- We're now joined by Dr. David Alland, who is Director of the Public Health Research Institute at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

Doctor, good to see you.

- Good to see you too.

- You got it, we met each other at the EJI Excellence in Medicine Awards.

You were in fact awarded the Outstanding Scientist Award for your research and your work in the area of tuberculosis research.

First of all, congratulations.

- Thank you.

- Second of all, tell us about the research and why it's so significant.

- So we've done research in several important areas.

We're perhaps best known in tuberculosis diagnostics.

TB is a pretty terrible disease that will ultimately kill half the people infected And up until we developed this new rapid test for tuberculosis, it could take months to make a diagnosis, and just as long, even longer, to find out if the TB was drug resistant.

And so we developed a test that happened in a little cartridge that could be done pretty much anywhere in the world where there's electricity.

It could give you a diagnosis in under an hour.

- How did you become and why did you become so interested in research around tuberculosis?

- Well, tuberculosis is a disease that we don't see a lot in the United States.

But back in the 1980s when I did my training, we had an outbreak in New York City, there were about 700.

- I'm sorry I for interrupting, doctor, your training in infectious disease.

- Infectious disease, yeah.

- I apologize, go ahead.

- No, of course.

And there were about 750 cases of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis during that time.

It cost about $3 billion in 1980s dollars to stop that outbreak.

And a lot of people suffered, a lot of people died from that.

And the cost to the healthcare system were immense.

And that brought home very much the threat that we have in the United States from tuberculosis if we don't find faster ways to diagnose it and to treat it.

But the other problem is that TB is still the biggest single killer from a single infectious disease in the world.

There is about 10 million cases a year and about 1.4 million deaths.

And the worst part about TB is that it kills people in their prime working years where they leave children and orphans.

And it also interacts with HIV so that people who are HIV infected who living or who are living with AIDS, are at much higher risk.

So it's really a global problem and we thought it was something that would be really exciting to address.

- Switch gears for a second, I'm curious about this.

To what degree do you believe, lemme try it this way, funding for research, government funding of the kind of research you just described, doctor, A, why is it so significant, B, what do you say to those who say, "I'm just cutting waste, fraud, and abuse at NIH, the National Institutes of Health?"

- Well, I think I'll speak to the first question about why it's worth funding tuberculosis.

And we can talk about waste, fraud and abuse afterwards, because they're not completely related.

But there are a lot of diseases in the world of poverty where people don't have 80 or $100,000 a year to pay for advanced cancer therapies, for example, where simple drugs can save their lives.

And there's not a lot of money to be made.

And so tuberculosis is not a high priority.

And for most companies, it is not a priority at all, for developing drugs and diagnostics.

And so the government really has to step in at that point.

Otherwise, these therapies and these diagnostics won't be made, but it can still come around and bite us.

Just because a disease can't make money for a drug company doesn't mean it isn't very severe.

I should point out that this problem is not just in tuberculosis, but really the entire field of infectious diseases.

People are talking about the post antibiotic era for infectious diseases.

You know, just a hundred years ago, people lost significant number of their children to infectious diseases.

People died in their 40s, 50s to 60s of pneumonia.

And then with the advent of penicillin around the 1940s and then new antibiotics after that, we've been able to save millions and millions of lives, including the United States.

We've been able to do things like transplants where people are immunocompromised and can't survive without getting lots of infections and treated with the drugs, and there's very little investment in that type of thing in the United States now because people take antibiotics for two weeks and they get better.

People take Lipitor, for example, for the rest of their life.

So there's so much more money to be made, and you really need the government to support that.

- I wanna ask you about something else.

We're doing a series and the graphic will come up right now.

Tomorrow's Physicians, what role have you played?

'Cause I know from the folks we're working with at EJI, your role, tell the folks watching right now your role in working with mentoring students in medical school right now.

Talk about that please, doctor.

- So I've had two roles.

One is to walk around with them on rounds and seeing patients with an infectious disease.

My role there is both to teach about infectious disease, to teach about why it's such a wonderful field to get into, because to be a good infectious disease doctor, you have to know all the medicine.

The other role is to teach compassion, to teach communication, very important aspects that young doctors don't always learn.

So that's in the clinical side.

In the research side, my role really is just to share my passion for research, to share my excitement for discovering something new, to stop people and say, "Listen, you actually have something today that only you and I know of in the world.

Think about how exciting that is," and to share that excitement.

- I'm gonna follow up on this.

In the post-COVID world that we're living in, you understand this in a way that most of us cannot, the question of preparedness.

To what degree, Dr. Alland, do you believe that we as a country with our public health infrastructure, what it is, to what degree do you believe we are prepared if and when we face another pandemic?

- I think we're probably worse prepared now than we were even before the COVID pandemic.

- How could that possibly be true?

- I think that there have been a lot of myths about this, how will vaccines work, especially RNA vaccines.

I think there's been a lot of pushback, and perhaps somewhat very rightly, for the degree of lockdowns and the amount of people, children, they were excluded from school.

And I think there are a lot of misunderstandings really, of scientists.

When we were asked questions about the pandemic at first, we got a lot of things wrong, as you might expect to happen with an entirely new disease.

And we were self-correcting, we were coming out with new recommendations as we learned more.

But I think that we didn't message well enough to show that that's how science works, and that's not the failure of the system, but it's actually how the system works best is to be self-correcting.

So a lot of confidence was lost, a lot of support was lost.

So we have less funding for public health, the CDC has been decimated by recent firings.

Entire laboratories that monitor disease have been closed, websites have gone blank that let us know what's going on.

- That's Dr. David Alland, Director of the Public Health Research Institute at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

Check out the follow-up interview we do with him.

Doctor, thank you so much for watching.

I'm Steve Adubato.

Trust me, the doctor will be in the house in another program.

See you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

A New Jersey health foundation program.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

New Jersey’s Clean Energy program.

PSE&G.

Newark Board of Education.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

PSEG Foundation.

The Fidelco Group.

And by Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

Promotional support provided by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

And by Insider NJ.