There is a particular kind of professional frustration that arrives without warning and has no obvious address to complain to. You sit down to do something you have done successfully five or six times before. You expect it to take an hour. Forty minutes in, a page asks you for something you do not have, cannot produce from memory, and were never told to keep.
That is where this conversation starts, and the reason it is worth your time is not that two clinicians had a bad afternoon with a website. It is that in working out exactly what went wrong, they land on a distinction that most professionals never make explicitly — between a requirement and the disclosure of a requirement — and then follow it somewhere genuinely useful.
The word that organises everything
Ric Long names the shift in the first two minutes.
For the first time, that renewal process begins to have the feeling of an audit.
Nothing about the underlying obligation changed. Clinicians took continuing education before this cycle and will take it after. Certificates of completion have existed as long as workshops have. What changed is the posture. You are no longer telling the state you did the thing. You are producing the material that would substantiate the claim if someone doubted it.
That is a small procedural change and a large psychological one. Attestation is a relationship of trust. Documentation review is a relationship of verification. A clinician who has renewed on the same terms for fifteen years reads the new posture, correctly, as a change in how they are being regarded — and the shock that follows is a response to that, not to the extra ten minutes.
Both hosts hold this carefully. Neither one argues the state should ask for less. Michael Baltimore is unambiguous about it at the close of the episode: the state has every right to document that you have been trained and that you continue your education in order to provide services. That concession is what makes the rest of the argument worth listening to.
The gap between the page and the platform
What the state's website described and what the platform actually required were not the same thing.
The published account named the requirement. The platform enforced a procedure — one that asks not only which course you took but where the certificate is, and expects you to upload it on the spot. So you are scrolling through what you took to be a form, and mid-page you hit a wall.
You didn't tell me up front that you needed the certificate. I'm going to have to put this thing on hold. Well, what else are you requiring?
That second question is the real cost. Once you have discovered one undisclosed requirement, you can no longer treat any part of the process as knowable. What Ric found underneath it was not one more step but five: this is a six step process.
His analogy is a medical office. You cannot get in without documentation — license, insurance, the rest of it. That is not the complaint. The complaint is that the medical office tells you in advance. You get a message before the appointment naming exactly what to bring. His ask to the state is precisely as modest:
Tell me in advance what these requirements are in terms of documentation. Don't assume that somehow or other I know what's going on.
Informed consent, pointed the other way
This is where Michael makes the move that gives the episode its spine.
The term informed consent may be applicable here. We're not on the client side coming to therapy — but we are therapists getting licensed.
He is careful about the limits of the analogy, and he should be. But the content of it transfers cleanly. Informed consent in clinical work is not a signature. It is advance notice of what will be asked, what it will involve, over what period, and what happens if the terms are not met. Every one of those elements maps onto a renewal cycle.
Applied here, informed consent would mean saying: things are going to change. Every course will need documentation. The window is two years, which means the certificate you receive this month has to survive until 2028, in a form you can retrieve and upload.
None of that is difficult to say. It just was not said.
What makes the frame worth borrowing is that it sharpens the complaint into something actionable. It is not "this was annoying." It is: a body that requires disclosure from its licensees in their clinical work has an obvious reason to model disclosure in its own.
What a certificate actually costs
If you did not capture the documentation at the time, here is what recovering it involves. The hosts walk it step by step, and laid out plainly it is longer than anyone expects.
Remember. Which workshop, run by whom, up to two years ago.
Request. Contact that provider. Supply enough identifying information to be let in. Prove you are who you say you are.
Retrieve. The record may be archived, gated, or gone. If it is released, it comes by email. Download it.
Upload. Correct format, through the platform's security, into the state's system.
Four parties: you, the provider, your own device, and the state's contractor. Any one of them can fail, and you carry the consequence of all four.
Now that you have it — maybe, after all that — that's just part one.
This deserves naming as a systems problem rather than a personal one, because it is almost always experienced as personal. A clinician who cannot produce a 2024 certificate is not disorganised. They are standing at the end of a chain that was never described to them as a chain.
The skills nobody mentioned
Then there is the technical layer, which is where the conversation gets funny and slightly bleak at once.
The platform accepts some file formats and not others — JPEG, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and a couple more in the mix. You have to know which is which, convert between them, and confirm compatibility before you submit. Michael's summary is exact:
You suddenly have to have skills that you didn't know that you needed.
What compounds it is that no instruction exists. Most platforms carry a short walkthrough video showing how the thing is done. Neither host could find one here. So you go searching, which is its own hazard — one click of curiosity and you are down a path that is hard to get out of, landing on pages that return 404s.
Ric offers the sharpest explanation for why this registers as jolting rather than merely tedious. Two decades of consumer software have trained everyone's expectations. Ordering a book or a bag of dog food does not take fifty steps; it happens quickly and it works. Whether or not that comparison is fair to a compliance system, it is the comparison every user is silently making. The reference point moved, and interface conventions that were adequate a decade ago now read as omissions.
Michael's workaround is worth stealing: he had an AI assistant build him a spreadsheet — courses completed, hours held, hours still needed, mapped out. Not because anyone suggested it. Because the alternative was chasing providers under deadline.
The rule that has outlived its evidence
Everything above is about a rollout. This next part is about a rule, and it is the part that will still matter in five years.
Georgia treats asynchronous continuing education differently from synchronous — capping the asynchronous hours a licensee can count. Ric has written to the board asking them to reconsider it, and his argument is the strongest thing in the episode.
Consider what a conference session can consist of. You listen to a presenter. You never interact with that presenter. You never enter a small group. You may never be tested on anything. Now consider what an on-demand course can consist of. You engage the presenter. You engage peers. You are tested on the material and required to pass at a threshold.
There is no evidence that in person is superior to on demand or online. There's no evidence that supports that.
Where a board plays favourites with in-person delivery, the question is on what basis. There are poor conference speakers and there are excellent on-demand courses. Quality varies within each format at least as much as it varies between them — which means the modality is not measuring what the rule assumes it measures.
Michael puts the assessment point beside it. Where a course ends in an exam passed at eighty percent, you have documentation that the material was engaged and some evidence of comprehension. A conference plenary where people welcome the attendees may generate the same credit with nothing behind it. What is really being attempted, he says, is a grading system for educational materials — arrived at by divination rather than by measurement.
Ric traces the intuition behind the rule to the COVID years, when a lot of parents encountered their children's learning directly for the first time, concluded it was not happening, and had that impression reinforced by reading and math scores. The doubt was real and it was earned. It has also outlived its cause, and it has been carried into professional continuing education where it never fitted the evidence.
Who the rule actually costs
And here is why it is not merely an intellectual disagreement.
A cap on asynchronous hours falls hardest on the practitioners least able to absorb it. Clinicians in rural areas, for whom reaching a major conference centre is a substantial expense. Clinicians with disabilities, for whom travelling to a conference centre is not straightforward. The rule quietly converts a professional requirement into a financial and logistical one, distributed unevenly, without a demonstrated benefit on the other side of the ledger.
Ric is precise about the scope of his objection. Core hours, related hours, ethics requirements — well thought out, they make good sense, leave them alone. It is the modality distinction, and only that, which creates a hardship that is unnecessary.
The alternative he points to already exists. Quality control is a front-end decision: the board reviews a provider's submitted workshop and decides whether it meets the standard. Michael, who knows that process, describes it as rigorous and thorough and says it should be maintained exactly as it is. The modality cap is a second gate doing badly what the first gate already does well.
Core and related, in one usable sentence
The last stretch of the conversation answers a question most licensees fudge annually.
How do you decide whether something is core or related? Ric's method is an anchor rather than a list. Start with the license — marriage and family therapy, clinical social work, licensed mental health professional — and ask what the granting degree was that got the whole practice rolling. Core is the content that supports that foundational training. Clinical material lives there: anxiety, depression, couples work.
Related is the surrounding professional competence. Technology, administrative support, finances, grant writing, the business of running a practice. Real professional content, adjacent to the clinical core rather than inside it.
Two wrinkles worth knowing before your next cycle. First, breadth varies by license — Michael found that listings on the MFT side label workshops core or related directly, which lets you choose against the gap you actually have, while the LPC side in his experience does not, and its core reads as a considerably wider basket. The same dementia and Alzheimer's workshop can be core under one license and related under another.
Second, the classification is delegated to you. The platform is, in Ric's words, asking you to use your own judgement — and neither host knows what happens if that judgement is off, or how an error would ever surface.
What this leaves open
Some questions the episode raises and does not answer, because they are not the hosts' to answer.
How the platform was selected — what the bidding process was, at what level of government the decision was made. What security assurances exist for practitioner data now routed through a private contractor, and where a licensee could go to read them. Whether the board will respond to Ric's letter. Whether the second cycle is genuinely easier than the first, which Michael asks directly and does not get a clean answer to.
These are fair questions asked in an ordinary register. Michael calls his own version of it yelling at the clouds, which is exactly the self-awareness the moment calls for. The narrower point stands on its own: the rollout did not serve the licensed people well, and reassurance is something a state could readily provide and has not.
The through-line
The state has every right to ask. Both hosts say so plainly, and the episode is stronger for the concession.
But a requirement and the disclosure of a requirement are two different things, and only one of them was actually delivered this cycle. The gap between them is where the shock lived, where the scrambling happened, and where a two-year documentation obligation quietly landed on people who were never told it existed.
And underneath the rollout sits a rule about asynchronous learning that nobody has evidence for, that costs rural and disabled practitioners more than anyone else, and that duplicates a quality check the board already performs properly at the front end. That one is fixable with a letter. Ric wrote his.
Systems in Session is a conversation between Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Richard Long Ph.D. about the systems clinicians work inside — licensure, training, institutions, and the structures that shape what happens in the room. Family therapy is bigger than the family in the room.
If you renewed this cycle and recognised any of the above, you are not the only one. That was Michael's point in recording it, and it is the reason this subject is coming back — the hosts close by saying they will explore more of it, because it affects practice.
Subscribe to get the follow-up, including whatever the board says about that letter.
This is a conversation between two licensed clinicians about their own professional experience. It is not legal advice and it is not any board's stated position. Requirements differ by state and by license category — verify current rules with your own board.