When “check-the-box” courses crank out certificates, patients and frontline staff pay the price. In this Rad N Bad episode, Sean and Mike square up with guest Tara Zeller, BCBA—Chief Empowerment Officer at Apple Tree Connection and creator of the Empowered RBT program—to tear down the 40-hour myth and rebuild it around fluency, mentorship, and real accountability. We hit the quality gap between compliance and competence, how employers weaponize minimums, and why onboarding and BST—not glitchy videos—decide outcomes.

Tara brings solutions: synchronous + asynchronous design, prove-it performance checks, “train–mentor–empower” pipelines, and a 91.7% RBT exam pass rate that backs it up. We debate crisis training (exposure vs. in-job fluency), propose provisional licensing and payer incentives tied to retention and outcomes, and call out the revolving-door clinics starving supervision. If you’re still treating 40 hours like a finish line, this one’s your audit.