Hey, everybody. Welcome to ABA Inside Track, the podcast that's like reading in your car, but safer.

I'm your host, Robert Perry Cruz, and with me, as are my fabulous co-hosts. Well, hey there, Robert Perry Cruz.

It's me, your friend, Jackie McDonald.

My friend, you're here. And it's me, Diana Perry Cruz, also presumably your friend and your

wife. Well, we'll see. We'll see. Well, everyone,

welcome to our show where we talk about behavior analysis and behavior analytic research.

And every week we pick a topic and discuss it at length. And this week, we decided to take two

great topics. We thought we just taste great together. We wanted to talk about the scent.

We wanted to talk about pecs. And we said, you know what? Let's just put them together. Let's just see what happens. And magically, when we did that, we were joined by a special guest. It happens that way sometimes. You just, you throw it on the internet, and the internet gives you something special back. I don't know if it's AI related.

I don't know.

But we're very happy to be joined to talk about mostly the ascent part, but also, you know, Pecks as a component of assent as well as a number of other ways to be thinking about our assent practices. But we're very happy to be joined today by Armando Bernal. Armando, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It is such a wonderful experience, and I'm just

happy to be able to be. by Armando Bernal. Armando, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me.

It is such a wonderful experience, and I'm just happy to be here. Beautiful. So, Armando,

this episode sort of came in following kind of a talk you did at the Stone Soup Conference,

and you had a really excellent overview slash call-to-action article

that will say the name of it in a minute because we've been forgetting to do that on recent

episodes. Sorry, listeners. That's my bad. But on the idea of the neurodiversity kind of affirming

applied ABA. And then when we reached out about being on the show, you brought up another article related to Pex and how that can be part of the Ascent process. And it was very fun reading both articles because one was a very like heady, deep soul searching discussion, thinking about practice. And the other was kind of a nice standard. Here's a great way to use Pex in a way. Actually, I hadn't thought about doing it that way, but I love it and I'm going to do it. Let's just say I already have a little tiered conversation, social skill presentation, and I didn't directly cite it because it's for teachers and they don't always love my citations, but it's going to get mentioned in there. It already kind of got put into the stew of that presentation. So we're very excited, but love to

hear a little bit more about sort of like kind of your own journey as a behavior analyst and how

your interest in this topic enough to, you know, co-publish an article came to be. Yeah, yeah,

no, thank you again. So initially I started out, so I was diagnosed with autism at the age of three.

Doctors told my mother that

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