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Joshua Miele: Connecting Dots
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Joe and Rolf talk to blind activist and friend of the show Josh Miele. Josh, a MacArthur Genuis Award winner and prodigious sushi eater, has just come out with a new autobiographical book called "Connecting Dots: A Blind Life". We talk about his life growing up in Park Slope, his freewheeling youth, the dog vs. cane debate, and his career as a blind accessibility scientist and inventor.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Joshua Mealy
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy. And on to- today's show, we have friend of the show, Dr. Joshua Mealy. Josh, who was a ah previous guest of the show where he talked about the Blind arino Arduino Project, is a blind scientist working on accessible technology.
00:00:29
Speaker
He received his undergraduate and his PhD at Berkeley, which is how Joe and I first come to know first came to know him. ah More recently, and he just can't get away from this, I suppose, he won a MacArthur Genius Award grant in 2021 and um has has, among many other things, been working at secret labs at Amazon on accessibility design.
00:00:53
Speaker
um The reason we're having him and this him on the show is he just came out with a really great new autobiographical book, which is called Connecting Dots, A Blind Life. And that's going to be about what we're going to talk about today. So, Josh, welcome. Great to have you on the show.
00:01:09
Speaker
Thanks, Rolf. Thanks, Joe. It's um thanks you know always a pleasure to be back on, to be a cog on Cog Nation. Yeah, so um congratulations on the book. We're thrilled about that. um The first thing we might ask is just to say something about the title of
The Metaphor Behind 'Connecting Dots'
00:01:27
Speaker
the book. So the title of the book is called Connecting Dots, A Blind Life. So what does that refer to?
00:01:33
Speaker
You know, um it's so interesting, Rolf, writing this book was, um I'm not a, I'm not, I'm not somebody who's done a lot of autobiographical writing. I'm not a memoirist. I'm a, you know, I'm a scientist, Jim.
00:01:46
Speaker
And, and, and d And so it was really an interesting process. And you know I thought it would be pretty hard, but it it turned out to be not that not that difficult. I had a nice um a collaborative partner, Wendell Jamieson, who I wrote the book with.
00:02:03
Speaker
And it turns out that coming up with the title was actually one of the hardest things to do. um Because the title is... um You know, it's this sort of pithy little encapsulation that's supposed to attract people and say something about what the book is and and sort of represent me and the book and my you know my my blind life in a way that I am comfortable with. And yet, which is a ah ah thing that turns out the publisher actually has...
00:02:39
Speaker
the final say over the title. And they were very nice and and, you know, weren't going to go with any titles that I didn't approve of. But at the same time, there was this tension that I better i better sort of start being more cooperative about the title because things were getting tense.
00:02:58
Speaker
And the problem really was that um there are all these blind cliches that are so easy to reach for. um You know, like how I see it or, you know, um you know, ah you know, my view of the world, you know, just these sort of Orwellian doublespeak approaches to blindness and disability that I'm not at all interested in.
00:03:25
Speaker
And so ah um I love the title that we came up with. And so do they. and I would say it also it it also works nicely in that it's actually got you it's got braille on the cover too. So it's got the nice tactile feel of that too on the cover.
00:03:42
Speaker
So it's a beautiful, like lots of sighted people have told me it's a beautiful cover and that the there's actual physical Braille that you can feel on the cover as well, which is really awesome that we got um we got actual good high quality Braille to be on the cover that it just says the title and and my name and and my co-author's name.
Innovation Driven by Disability
00:04:03
Speaker
And the So the dots obviously represents you know is is relates to my being blind and my being a braille reader, but it also relates to the fact that I'm essentially a serial inventor.
00:04:19
Speaker
And I like to say that disability is the mother of invention. you know we We create technologies because we actually need them or develop systems or...
00:04:30
Speaker
tools or techniques or whatever, because we need ways to do the things we want to do. And so invention and connecting dots is is a um is a nice metaphor for what the book is largely about, which is my...
00:04:47
Speaker
career and and development of my own blind thought and techniques for managing ah things and ah eventual eventual construction of a career on top of that penchant because that's what I do. I i basically make, you know, design and and build technologies that are useful for people with disabilities and in particular for blind and visually impaired people. I think there's another um connecting dots thing that I really like, which is that I strongly believe that
00:05:21
Speaker
you know, while it's, I love, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm as self-centered as, as anybody. And I love to, you know, i love that there's a book sort of talking about how great I am, but I also, also acknowledge pretty ah consistently and, and, and widely that, um that what I, anything that's worth doing is almost never done alone. You don't, you don't,
00:05:49
Speaker
There's nothing that I've done, none none of the inventions, none of the technologies, ah none of the research that I've ever done has been done by myself. I always had ah collaborators and so support staff.
00:06:03
Speaker
folks and and ah mentors and people who encourage me. And I've also tried to be very consistent throughout my career um in mentorship of my own, supporting younger ah scientists and and creative accessibility folks. And and so A huge part of that is connecting people together, building building relationships. and And that's another way in which connecting dots is really um really a powerful metaphor.
Mealy's Early Life and Blindness
00:06:36
Speaker
So one of the, I mean, you you have an incredible story. Yeah.
00:06:42
Speaker
What happened to you at a young age is now sort of well known, especially through a few years ago. Your co-author on the book, Wendell Jameson, wrote ah a widely read New York Times story about the incidents. I wonder if youd you would care to talk about I mean, this is at it is at an extremely young age and an age when most of us probably wouldn't remember all of the events. And I wonder if you could talk about what happened and what it was like reconstructing this and sort of putting it all together again.
00:07:15
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, you know, so the... I've spent most of my life trying to sort of sideline my origin story and how I became blind. Lots of people, when I want to you know, as ah as a blind scientist or inventor or whatever, you know, when you talk to media folks or when you're doing interviews, folks are always interested in knowing, look, oh, well, how did you become blind? And so for so many years, I really tried to divert and diffuse that and really,
00:07:50
Speaker
I realized ultimately, and I talk about this in the book, I realized ultimately that i had i had reached a point in my career where I was ready to...
00:08:03
Speaker
to start allowing that story to be told in the service of building a narrative around the what I see as the more important work that I do, which is raising awareness about the need for better design, better technology, better tools for people with disabilities and blind people. And so i very consciously decided that it was now okay to start in a controlled way, telling this origin story. And real quick, um and ah it's also really quick in the book.
00:08:36
Speaker
The book does start with, you know, it's a fairly chronological narrative throughout the book. And so it does start, you know, when I'm a little kid, when I got burned and blinded with sulfuric acid in Brooklyn, New York. And it was, it's a brutal story, um but it's, it, it comes and goes. And the vast majority of the book is actually,
00:08:56
Speaker
Not about becoming blind, but about being blind and about how one has to interact with the world as a blind person, whether it's as a ah kid in elementary school or in high school or college or building ah a career as a researcher.
00:09:13
Speaker
It's rough experience. It's a rough ride at the beginning. and And I think the the point of telling that story is really just because it would have it would have been too, um it would have been incomplete if I had left it out. Like it it just wouldn't, like people would be left wondering, okay, well, how did it happen? and so ah my co-author convinced me that we had to we had to tell it, we had to tell it in the beginning and we had to just kind of ah hit it and move on.
00:09:44
Speaker
And, um and that's what, that's what we, that's what we did. And that's largely what I did in my actual life, you know, you know, okay, I'm blind. and burned, so now what? right And the answer to now what is you you you've still got to engage with the business of being a little kid, of of learning to read and run and and be mean to other kids and and and defend yourself on the schoolyard be
00:10:17
Speaker
ah build an understanding of the world through science and math. and And that's that's what I did. Yeah. And then your early life ah growing up in Park Slope ah sounded very interesting just in terms of like and it must have been an interesting time to be in that neighborhood in that you know in the 70s. Can you talk a but bit about that, what that was like, just the neighborhood and you know growing up there?
00:10:46
Speaker
your family and and yeah know just, yeah, what that was all like. Yeah, so I mean, for for those who um have heard of Park Slope, you probably think of it as a ah and affluent ah neighborhood in Brooklyn with beautiful and extremely expensive real estate and lots of families and good public schools and lots of you know lovely walkability and good subway access.
00:11:10
Speaker
And that's all true. But it wasn't the, you know, when i grew up in the 70s, New York was overall a very different place and Park Slope in particular was also ah a very different place there. You know, we lived in on a block where um all the houses were occupied.
00:11:32
Speaker
um it was it it was a It was a very early, gentrifying neighborhood, and you could walk a block or two in any direction, and there would be abandoned and burned out buildings.
00:11:46
Speaker
There were bars everywhere up along 7th and 5th Avenues, which are now you know filled with very fancy stores and restaurants. And the neighborhood was...
00:12:00
Speaker
rough, but it was also, it was just the seventies. It was a different time. It was a, you know, being a child in New York city and Brooklyn in the seventies, you know, even though we were, met you know, middle-class and, and white, and my parents were artists. My father was an architect. My mother was, was an artist. And, you know, it's a particular,
00:12:25
Speaker
class but it's also a very particular time when the, the parents, the, the grownups were much more concerned with their own feelings and, and doings than they were with the safety and, and, uh, and wellbeing of the kids, you know, it was, a and it wasn't, nobody was, nobody was, um, my parents were wonderful, but, uh,
00:12:55
Speaker
But they i had way more freedom both you know before I was burned and after I was burned than we give our kids today. ah Much less supervision and much less attention than I think is is currently the norm And what what did you notice about accessibility services at the time? Or what was what what was it like getting around on your own? Did you, was it just, everything was just so normal you didn't think about all of that stuff? Or, I mean, it must have started entering your mind that there are some problems that you could probably think of solutions to.
Discovering Echolocation and Blind Community
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, there were problems I could think of solutions to. And I did, you know, So disability is the mother of invention. we We create technologies and techniques constantly as disabled people because we need to. We need to figure out how we're going to engage with the world and in ways that we want to.
00:13:55
Speaker
I tell one story in the book about sort of realizing, sort of discovering echolocation for myself as a ah fairly newly blinded kid because my ah somebody had given me a pair of roller skates, ah a metal, you know, these old school metal.
00:14:13
Speaker
roller skates that clamp onto your shoes. And so I was roller skating around in the kitchen and my mom was like, you're going to, you're going to break the tiles, you know, go play in the street kid. And so, um so I did. And I went, you know, as a little blind kid, I go out ah onto the street and I, I'm roller skating up and down the street And, you know, at first I'm just skating up and down on the very little patch of sidewalk in front of my house because that's what I felt comfortable with. But...
00:14:43
Speaker
um But I started realizing very quickly that I could hear all this stuff i could because they were loud, you know, and they they made noise and I could hear where the stoops were. I could hear where the planters were and I could hear where the parked cars were and I could sort of skate up and down the sidewalk with, ah you know, and stay fairly well-centered. And, you know, echolocation is something that it it's sort of little known But all blind people who are, you know, adept at getting around echolocation to some extent or another. some Was that something that you needed to independently discover? I mean because now it would be easier to connect with people online, of course, and and sort of learn everything about it. But is that something that you had to independently discover? Did you have other people that that could tell you something about it?
00:15:38
Speaker
It's something that I independently discovered. that The sighted people who were teaching me how to use a cane, how to get around, they knew nothing about it. And most sighted, it's called orientation mobility, O&M.
00:15:52
Speaker
Most sighted O&M instructors don't know anything about echolocation. It's not um part of the curriculum ah for teaching blind people how to get around. But blind people know how to do it. And If I had been open to learning from and ah you know being mentored by older blind folks, I probably would have been told about it, but I i wasn't open to that. i didn't want to be I didn't want to be blind. I didn't want to have anything to do with blindness or disability um because I had been as steeped in ableism and sort of...
00:16:29
Speaker
ah negative stereotypes about disability as everyone else had. And I didn't want to think of myself that way. I didn't i thought I was sort of the only cool blind person in the world.
00:16:40
Speaker
And so I didn't want to have anything to do with blind adults because they weren't they weren't cool. And i so so the short answer, Rolf, is that I probably...
00:16:51
Speaker
If I had been more open to connecting with blind adults, I could have been ah could have been taught a lot more. But because I wasn't, I discovered a lot of things. And echolocation is one of them.
00:17:03
Speaker
Well, this is a really interesting part of the book too, I think, is your yeah sort of, I don't know if I would say spirit of independence or stubbornness, or maybe they all could go together. But I think um part of your idea that you were just you and and you weren't as connected or you didn't feel as connected to the blind community. So where did that start to shift or start to change when you started to feel more connected?
00:17:33
Speaker
part of the community or or it it really started. um So I I went to I went to public school. There were so there were some other blind kids in the public school where I was, but I was um I was definitely like the most academically inclined of of any of the kids that i was ah that I was going to school with in Brooklyn. And then when I moved to Rockland County, which is suburbia about 20 miles north of New York City, ah in third grade, I was the only blind kid in my mainstream public school.
00:18:10
Speaker
And um i did go to a blind camp in Vermont. And again, i was sort of even though I was, you know, there were bigger kids, there were older kids, there were kids that, that were, you know, much, very intimidating, but they, they weren't, they weren't, they weren't cool. Like they, they were, they were sort of marginalized blind kids who had, who had ah internalized a lot of negative stuff about blind people. And they weren't people that I ah felt,
00:18:49
Speaker
could be my role models. And so again, i felt like i was the i was the only cool blind person around. And um so that was my my major exposure to blind people before I went to college. And not and and and not to Not to be you know disingenuous, i there were one or two blind people that I liked that I thought were cool.
00:19:12
Speaker
that but But they were, like myself, I thought that they were the exceptions. And then when I went to Berkeley, when i I got to Berkeley as an undergrad, which is a place I wanted to go because of the physics department,
00:19:25
Speaker
um And they had an element named after them, and that's pretty cool. So ah I didn't know anything about the disability rights movement. I didn't know anything about the free speech movement.
00:19:36
Speaker
I didn't really know anything about the social history of Berkeley. All I knew was that it had a ah great physics department. And so I was pretty stunned to discover that there were There was an enormous community of very cool blind people, students, and and ah and adult community at Berkeley.
00:20:01
Speaker
And that's when I sort of realized, oh, my God, I've um i've been i've been thinking of this all wrong. I'm not the only cool blind person. I just didn't meet any cool blind people before.
00:20:16
Speaker
And here was a whole bunch of folks that were my peers. They were funny. They were smart. They were cool. They were, ah you know, creative and interesting. And, you know, we, we, I became lifelong friends with many of them.
00:20:31
Speaker
And it was, I think, a very similar thing that happens to a lot of people who feel isolated and marginalized in high school. When they get to college, they, very A lot of us discover communities of people that we that we can ah that we can be part of. you know Identity, can find an identity and a community that that speaks to us. And for me, blindness was blindness and disability because, of course, the disability rights movement, which had peaked kind of in the seventy s in Berkeley,
00:21:07
Speaker
it was still reverberating loudly in the air ah in Berkeley when I got there in 1987. And it was ah it was just an amazing, it was a very,
00:21:18
Speaker
um enlightening and and ah empowering moment for me to to realize that I was not the only one and that blindness was cool and that my blind friends were cool and that I didn't have to minimize or make excuses for or pretend that, ah you know, oh, i you know I'm a physics student and I just happen to be blind. I i started realizing that I was a blind physics student and that blindness was part of what...
00:21:48
Speaker
part of what made me who I am and that it was something to be, to be proud of and to be centered, not to be, ah not to be hidden away and, and apologized for.
Choosing Between Guide Dog and Cane
00:22:00
Speaker
Tell us about the dog versus cane debate at Berkeley too, because I love this part of the book too. So you, am I correct? So you come to Berkeley after recently, yeah, after recently getting a seeing eye dog.
00:22:17
Speaker
and And finding out that this might even be frowned upon a little bit. I mean, and and this is ah ah an interesting, um you know,
00:22:31
Speaker
A dog is ah a dog or a cane or, you know, ah using Uber or the bus or whatever. These are all techniques that that people use to get around in the world. And blind people, um you know, it's it's not as simple as for a sighted person – um The way you get around in the world, I guess, you know, it's sort of like what car you drive or what bike you have or, you know, whether you ah ride a moped or ah or a scooter or a motorcycle. You know, these these all sort of say something about you and they have impacts on how – on what your capabilities are and what your comfort level is, right?
00:23:14
Speaker
And – For blind people, you know some of us use canes, some of us use guide dogs, some of us ah don't use either one and just are are guided by by other people. And some of us, I mean, I've i've even known um particularly like old school blind people who didn't use anything. They just walked around in the world, which is, by the way, what I did um basically from third grade through ah the end of high school because there were no sidewalks. There were no, like, there was no public transit in in Rockland County. There were no sidewalks.
00:23:54
Speaker
Anywhere I went, I either had to be driven or guided. And once I got there, you know, you're in a building or you're, you know, whatever, you're not going to fall into a, you know, into a hole in the middle of the gymnasium.
00:24:09
Speaker
so um So I didn't really even use a cane. And I got a dog before I went to Berkeley because knowing very little about blindness, I thought that's what blind people were supposed to do.
00:24:23
Speaker
Like I thought that's what everybody did. I thought, oh, well, like, you know, all these college kids, they must have guide dogs. That's the, that's the thing to do. So I went and got a guide dog and, And i love I do love dogs. I love dogs a lot.
00:24:38
Speaker
um But ah once I got to Berkeley, I realized that um none of these other amazing, cool, blind people had dogs or almost none of them. Like only one or two other people had dogs and the vast majority were cane users. And um and they were not...
00:24:56
Speaker
less capable. In fact, they had more flexibility in a lot of ways than the the dog users, because a dog is not, you know, It's not just a way of getting around in the world.
00:25:10
Speaker
It's a way of life. And, you know, when you have a guide dog, you have a dog with you all the time. And you need to sort of make accommodations for its welfare. And your social profile is not just you, but it's you and the dog. And so,
00:25:32
Speaker
um You know, a lot of people are like, oh, it must have been really good for getting chicks, you know, oh you know, forgive the language. That's I'm just trying to bring us back into the 80s there.
00:25:44
Speaker
ah But, you know, and of course, having a dog does give you something to talk about with the world, but I don't really always want to talk about things with the world. Like I don't need something to bring people to me to make them talk to me. Right. Like, and, and, and a lot of the time, like it's ah that's a very passive ah trap, right? Like I don't want, like most of the people that would come and talk to me about my dog,
00:26:12
Speaker
First of all, they were much more interested in the dog than they were in me. And second of all, it um they weren't always people I wanted to talk to. but But much more than that was the concern about just, you know, I wanted to go to parties. I wanted to go to concerts. I wanted to do things where the dog was would be, on you know, I didn't want people feeding my dog acid at parties.
00:26:37
Speaker
I didn't want my dog eating, you know, people's pizza. Um, And, you know, you've got to hold on to your dog the whole time at a at a social event or it will eat things.
00:26:51
Speaker
And, you know, um and of course, it has to, you know, be taken out and fed and all of these things. And I was having enough trouble taking care of myself. So I had the dog for about three years and kind of.
00:27:06
Speaker
ah Over that period of time, as as wonderful as it was as a guidance system, came to realize that I would be much freer, much more independent, much more flexible, and um have much less sort of overhead of work to do if I just used a cane.
00:27:27
Speaker
And I just want to sort of say that part of the part of the reason that people use a dog instead of a cane is that a dog is sort of an active guidance system, right? Like a dog will take you around things. It will take you to the crosswalk.
00:27:43
Speaker
And... that's great if you are strongly motivated by not wanting to look blind. Like if you don't want to look like, you know, because when you've got a ah cane, that's um more of a,
00:27:57
Speaker
ah well, I guess they're both active, right? But like the, I mean, um the the active part of having a cane is done by you, the cane user, opposed to the dog. And so you a cane is a tool for exploration and it's a contact sport. And so you do very often as a cane user need to interact physically with things that you that are obstacles, right? So garbage cans, parking meters, parked cars.
00:28:32
Speaker
um Whereas a dog, you know, you wouldn't You wouldn't interact with those with the dog because the dog would take you around them or find the clear path. With a cane, it's you that's finding the clear path. and um And people and I was not comfortable at first having people see me.
00:28:53
Speaker
being blind, finding finding my way in the world, interacting with these objects that people would look at me, interacting with them and saying, oh, ah it's too bad he's bumping into that. you know and And really um a huge part of my transition from a dog to a cane was my growing comfort with being blind in the world. i don't care if people see me ah interacting with A garbage can at the corner at the street corner because that garbage can is ah it's an obstacle, but it's also a landmark. And it's it's a um ah there's nothing wrong with finding things and interacting with things that are in your way. That's how you that's how you know where they are.
00:29:38
Speaker
You go around them once you find them. and And of course, it also gives you more experience to be able to just sort of continually explore and and sort of develop your own um ability to to navigate and explore yourself. Much more incidental information. Yeah, much more.
00:29:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you mentioned briefly there talking about going to parties and, and you know, interact interface with the dog and parties.
Perception Sciences and Early Drug Experiences
00:30:04
Speaker
I just want to call out for readers what potential readers of the book that there is a lot of science and accessibility research and things like that, it's also sex, drugs and rock and roll in the book. so So watch out.
00:30:19
Speaker
So no, that's good. That's a good thing. you what It's a trigger warning, right? No, no, it's going to draw. You got to draw your readers in with with the sex, drugs and rock and roll. I was i was actually quite impressed by how early you started doing drugs.
00:30:31
Speaker
that would That was what impressed you? lot of things, but that was notable. Yeah, well, I mean, it was the 70s, right?
00:30:43
Speaker
And there was, you know, ah I mean, i I think I smoked weed for the first time when I was like six or seven. Wow. And, yeah. ah and um And I took a lot of acid in high school. And that was sort of one of the things that I think was really formative for me. And I i ah don't do a lot of psychedelics anymore.
00:31:07
Speaker
um I really felt like I learned a great deal from it as a high school kid and then kind of – eventually realized that i was I was having the same experience over and over again and and wasn't learning new things anymore. And so it's not ah it's not part of my my normal ah my normal activities anymore, but it was hugely formative for my – think – formative for my my i think i I decided that I wanted to study physics while I was on acid in 10th grade.
00:31:42
Speaker
um And, you know, it it doesn't talk about this a lot in the book. There's a lot of stuff that is left out of the book just be just for narrative streamlining.
00:31:52
Speaker
But when I was burned... at four years old, i was in the you know I was put into pretty much the only burn center in the country at the time, which was an army medical center in San Antonio, Texas.
00:32:09
Speaker
And because I was a tiny little kid and because I was so badly burned and needed ah ongoing anesthetic and pain ah pain management,
00:32:22
Speaker
They couldn't use opiates because opiates, um they're they're addictive, they're central nervous system depressants, and they you know they so they slow down your your digestive system and and lead to all kinds of other problems. And um so they wound up giving me basically for a series you know for about two months, I was on heroic doses of ketamine and as a four-year-old.
00:32:48
Speaker
um and and that is um You know, it was very confusing at first ah for me, because for those who don't know, ketamine is is a powerful hallucinogen that is it it doesn't at the doses that I was getting.
00:33:10
Speaker
on, it's not a hallucinogen like, oh, wow, look at the pretty colors and the walls are breathing. It's like there are no walls. It's a completely disembodied experience more akin to to dreaming um than to hallucinating. Yeah, the dissociative quality, right? that's Yeah, exactly.
00:33:31
Speaker
and um And so it took a while. like Finally, they explained to me that all the... you know I was like, why don't you remember Like, you were there, we were talking about it, like we were, we were over in this, you know, we we had this whole set of experiences to my parents, and why don't you remember it? And and finally, they explained, like, you you're on drugs, you're dreaming about, about things. And It was my first interaction with, it was my first recognition as a conscious person, as a four-year-old, that um that perception was malleable, that perception was was completely subject to not only what kind of hardware you had hooked up, like whether you had eyes or not, or ears or not, but um but what kinds of ah what kinds of chemicals they were
00:34:25
Speaker
shooting you up with. And, um and I, I've always had a fascination with, ah with perception. And, and, ah you know, drugs are, are deeply connected to that. And of course, you know, I wound up getting a PhD in psychoacoustics, which is largely a, you know, the study of of auditory perception. And there's a lot of other perception in there, too. So it's a lifelong interest.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's you know that that struck me, especially when you're talking about your LSD experiences as something that connects a lot of people who study perception. you know People who have had those experiences of having their perception altered or torn apart in different ways through drugs, you know have more more often than otherwise but you know above base rate ah become interested in perceptual sciences.
00:35:21
Speaker
Another way to connect the dots. That's right. Exactly. So many meanings. Yeah. And and interestingly, um the way that, um you know, one of the things that I talk about in the book really is this um this sort of throughgoing misunderstanding that that mainstream society has about disability and blindness, like where, you know, ableism,
00:35:47
Speaker
ah not just, you know, discrimination, but sort of deep misunderstanding that people have. And one of the experiences that I had around drugs and blindness was this, you know, I...
Societal Misunderstandings of Blindness
00:36:00
Speaker
ah went to a drug counselor in high school to try to get, you know, i realized that sort of I was a little bit of a loose cannon and that I should probably try to chill out. And I went to the drug counselor and I told him, you know, about all the acid and and and opiates that I was taking at the time.
00:36:17
Speaker
And, um, And, you know, he he couldn't get past this idea. He was like, oh, well, but you're blind. Like, why would you take acid? Acid is so visual. And I was just like, you fucking idiot. Yeah, that's fine. You know? pretty um and And I never went back, right? I was just like, okay, like I can see, as it were, how this conversation is, you know, you're you're not going to help me.
00:36:41
Speaker
I'm going to help you. And I don't have time for that. um So a very interesting story. interesting dynamic that sort of is is part of the narrative throughout the book.
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that that that time period that you were discussing there, you were doing something that I i found really interesting.
Phone Phreaking and Musical Pursuits
00:36:59
Speaker
You talked about phone freaking. Can you talk about phone freaking what that was and and what you were doing with that?
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah. um Yeah, so phone freaking is a thing that a lot of people did, you know or many nerds did in the 70s and 80s, which is basically just ripping off the phone company to ah you know figuring out back doors and loopholes in the control mechanisms of phone switching systems and very early voicemail systems and using that to communicate for free with other people. And interestingly enough,
00:37:37
Speaker
um So it's it's sort of a
00:37:40
Speaker
um a hacker community specifically around ah phones and telecommunications. you know before Before everybody was you know hooked up to the internet, when everybody did have a phone, but not everybody had a computer.
00:37:57
Speaker
And we ah interestingly, there's a huge... there's a disproportionate number of blind people in the phone freak community. And it's not hard to understand why it's a very accessible hacking space.
00:38:15
Speaker
And met somebody who sort of introduced me to it and introduced me to some people in that community. And I became very interested in it. I loved, I loved,
00:38:29
Speaker
the phone and you know The phone was already interesting because you could use it to connect with anybody else in the world, but you, of course, had to pay for it, and long distance used to be quite expensive.
00:38:42
Speaker
Yeah. Then there was this, it it's like those dreams where you discover rooms in your house that you didn't even know about. It's, you've got, you know, you've got the house that's the phone, but then you discover that actually there are all these secret rooms that you can, that you can use and hang out in with your, with your crazy hacker, ah you know, hacker community.
00:39:10
Speaker
um, um We did. we Not only would we steal long-distance services, but the the most fun was these early voicemail systems that nobody was using because voicemail was...
00:39:25
Speaker
you know Answering machines and voicemail were very new in the 80s and we're even there was a ah lot of social stigma associated with them. It was quite rude at first for people to have answering machines. you know It's like, oh, well, you know I'm not even getting to talk to you and I have to spend money to just leave a message.
00:39:46
Speaker
And so... you know corporations would have these voicemail systems for them their employees, but but for cultural reasons, nobody was using them. So what we did because we just we just moved in. We just took over these voicemail systems and hacked into the voicemail boxes.
00:40:03
Speaker
And we would have hundreds of of phone freaks on these systems just sending voicemails to each other and, and you know, making funny recordings and, you know, sending each other audio messages and, and then like splicing up other people's audio messages, like a very, you know, it's very much like what people do now with sort of memes and, and, and, uh, and Vine or sorry, not Vines. What are they called now?
00:40:32
Speaker
Uh, uh, So, uh, TikTok. Reels. Reels. Reels, yeah. Reels, the really short ones. yeah Showing how old I am. But, um, you know, uh, uh, I mean, it's, it was the same kind of thing.
00:40:46
Speaker
And it was just this sort of, these pocket communities of, of telephone hackers. And it was, it was really amazing because we were talking to people all over the world. It was people, you know, in,
00:41:00
Speaker
ah you know, English speaking people from all over the world were doing this. And I'm sure that there were communities that were speaking other languages too, but we were, you know, we were all English speakers or people who knew how to speak English.
00:41:13
Speaker
And, um and it was just an amazing, an amazing experience as a high school kid. ah did almost, you know, once they discovered that we were doing this, uh, you know, they would shut us down. And there were some moments when, uh, when I did get some very uncomfortable calls in the middle of the night from, ah people who, you know, told me that if I didn't stop, they were going to go, going to call the FBI and all this stuff. And, and that was kind of, uh,
00:41:46
Speaker
You know, a little a little nerve wracking since I my stepfather was German and not a citizen. He certainly didn't like the idea of of me ah committing ah wire fraud, I guess, which is what it was.
00:41:58
Speaker
And and so they their solution, their solution was to get me my own phone line. Right. So that'll fix it. that seriously Yeah. Well, it's your responsibility at that point. Exactly.
00:42:12
Speaker
Exactly. Well, it seems like you had more fun in high school than most people between that and the psychedelics and the band, too. Yeah, also, that's what I'm thinking of, too, is you had friends that you played music with, too.
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a bass player. I'm still a bass player. I'm not, ah you know, i don't ah um I don't practice enough and I don't play enough, but I still love playing bass. And it's it's, you know, something I've been doing my whole life that I get a lot of joy out of.
From NASA to Accessibility Design
00:42:44
Speaker
Yeah, and the the next, one of the next things that I think we have to hear about is um your time at NASA too, because um you worked on some pretty interesting projects there. It was kind of a little unfortunate about how that time came to an end, but out of your hands.
00:43:00
Speaker
You know, some some some people, some listeners might think that, ah you know, i do I do something spectacularly stupid at the end, but no, it wasn't my fault. um i um As an undergraduate, I was still very much committed to having a career in physics, and it was only really after this period that I made the decision to move my my plans from physics into accessibility and design. And what would you what what sorts of things were you thinking of doing in physics? So NASA obviously won.
00:43:35
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to study. I wanted to be a planetary physicist. I wanted to build spacecraft and, and ah you know, study other planets and. you know, I, ideally I wanted to go into space. I knew that wasn't going to happen, but, but I, I, you know, to be the first blind astronaut would have been pretty cool, but I, I was, I was not, you know, on that track. I was a scientist and, uh, much more likely to build satellites in space and, uh, robotic spacecraft and to, ah to do science than to actually go into space myself.
00:44:10
Speaker
And i had a, ah you know, a co-op internship, a six-month ah internship at NASA as a um as an undergraduate senior, essentially, where, ah you know, it was designed to lead to a career at NASA if I had wanted to do that.
00:44:30
Speaker
I was working on with a great team on, this was in the early 90s, 91, 92, I guess. And i was working on this great team.
00:44:41
Speaker
For a spacecraft called the Mars Observer, we were our instrument on that spacecraft was a thermal emission spectrometer that was designed to measure the the atmospheric temperature and therefore, in a lot of ways, the atmospheric composition um of of Mars. It was a spacecraft. The Mars Observer was ah you know going to be ah a Mars orbiter.
00:45:06
Speaker
And i was there at NASA when it was arriving at Mars. And so it was really exciting. i was As an intern, I was writing some of the some of the software that would be used ah to interpret our data and from this from this spectrometer and was learning a great deal from amazing mentors and really cool people at NASA.
00:45:32
Speaker
And i i um I was also ah the only one who knew Linux. they They were all sort of old VMS people and they were trying to make the move to Linux and nobody knew Linux. And so they had these these awesome Sun computers and I basically became the system operator for these computers because I was the only one who knew Linux and I was teaching my whole team ah how to use how to use Linux and it was ah it was actually Unix, I guess.
00:46:05
Speaker
And so that was super fun ah until the time came for the Mars Observer to go into orbit around Mars. You've got to sort of, um you know, turn on the, it's in a solar orbit You know, on its way from Earth to Mars.
00:46:24
Speaker
And then you've got to sort of give it a little kick with the with the rockets to push it into Mars orbit. And ah we turned on those rockets and we never heard from it again. so what a it was super depressing.
00:46:39
Speaker
For me as an intern, but also for... Yeah, all these people who had been working on it for how long had it even been since the start the project? Like a decade. Some of them had been working on it for a decade. Pouring their lives into it and sort of gone in an instant. That must have been a pretty crushing blow.
00:46:54
Speaker
A very harsh toque, yes. A very harsh toque, as they say in the science community, yeah. Yes. And you you mentioned that also that you thought that NASA was a little sleepy.
00:47:07
Speaker
It was. i mean, you know, I was a student at Berkeley. And so I thought I understood about ah bureaucracy and and large institutions.
00:47:17
Speaker
And I didn't know nothing. I was like, I was stunned by the the sort of um inertia and hysteresis of a federal agency like NASA.
00:47:32
Speaker
i I don't want to sort of play into the tropes of of ah federal You're not a doge bro. Waste. I'm not a doge bro. but um But I will say ah there was There was a lot of slow-moving stuff going on at NASA.
00:47:52
Speaker
And i um i was not – like part of the reason why I realized I couldn't work at NASA was um i i realized it wouldn't be good for me. I realized that ah if I were in that environment, I would – I would be too lazy because i I wouldn't be pushed. I wouldn't have to get a lot done. Like the the expectations, not just of a blind person. I mean, blind people always suffer from ah low expectations from the world, but the expectations in general at NASA, um at least my experience,
00:48:28
Speaker
in my observation there were pretty low. Like you, you didn't have to get a lot done in order to be, ah you know, productive.
00:48:38
Speaker
And i knew that I would just, I would, I would be bored to tears. Um, and I, I also know that I'm, uh, sufficiently not self-motivated that I, I, I would take advantage of it if I could. And so I, I was like, no, I don't think I can do this.
00:48:56
Speaker
And at the time you had also been working for some accessibility teams too, or you'd been working on some accessibility projects too. So it wasn't like you you you hadn't been introduced to that stuff, but um right this maybe um turned the tide a little bit and felt like a chance to really dedicate or push towards another career.
00:49:19
Speaker
Yeah, it really was a turning point when I realized that um I was working at a ah small software company in Berkeley that had made the first screen reader for a graphical user interface. It was it was the the early Macintosh, and we had made a screen reader for it. And before that, all screen readers had been for ah for you know for DOS, for PC, for ah command line interfaces, which is a very different kind of system. you know, very different set of functionality and a very different way of, of getting the information from the computer into the hands of the, the blind user. And so we had figured out like, this was a very innovative, very exciting company. And I was just working there as an undergrad, i you know, doing like tech support and stuff, but it was, it was, it was fun. It was a fun place to work.
00:50:14
Speaker
And, I realized also that a lot of the people that were sort of calling the shots, that were doing the design work, that were doing the research around how to design technologies like this were sighted people, very smart, very well-meaning sighted people, but they were sighted people who weren't using the tools. They weren't eating the dog food.
00:50:38
Speaker
And as a blind person, there was a lot that I realized immediately that I had to contribute to designing this stuff that they didn't have. And i didn't you know I had resisted as a ah you know i had been resistant to the idea of going into accessibility as a career.
00:51:02
Speaker
It felt like a cop-out. It felt like something that, um you know oh oh, you're blind, so you have to work in blindness. right you can't you can't be a scientist You can't be a real physicist. this epiphany that after working at nasa i sort of had this epiphany that um that it wasn't a cop-out, that in fact I had a lot to contribute, and that while i love physics and i thought I had what it took to be a scientist, to be a physicist, to be a space scientist.
00:51:36
Speaker
There were a lot of other people that could do that. And there were far fewer people who were blind, who were qualified to start contributing to the design of the tools that blind scientists and other blind people needed in order to participate as equals in science, in math, in ah other disciplines.
00:51:58
Speaker
in other fields. and so i and And not only that, but it's actually very challenging. The the the designing stuff for accessibility for people with disabilities is um is one of the most interesting and exciting design challenges I think a lot of people ever get to face. And and i realized I could contribute a lot more by working in accessibility than by being another physicist. And so that's, I really pivoted after that NASA experience to um doubling down on working at Berkeley Systems. And that's that's really where my career got started was was at that at that company.
00:52:42
Speaker
So you kind of half dropped out of college at that point, working at Berkeley Systems, Berkeley Access. Is that right? And then use it then how did that and how did you transition from there to thinking about graduate school?
Academic Pursuits and Culinary Adventures
00:52:54
Speaker
Yeah. um So I've always hated school, actually. you know Even though you're pretty good at it. From the very beginning, I've always hated school. And I i was definitely not like i I always felt like, oh, you know, writing papers, doing problem sets like that's so unproductive. Like that's like that's so...
00:53:15
Speaker
self-centered. I always liked doing things more than I liked learning about things. the the My favorite kind of learning is when it was doing something that would also be something useful. and so i um ah did you know I was basically a semester away from finishing my undergraduate degree, and I went and worked at Berkeley Systems full-time for a number of years. and By the time I realized that, you know, i mentioned all of these, you know, sighted people that were doing design work in accessibility and research, and they all had PhDs. And i um I realized that I wouldn't.
00:53:58
Speaker
be an equal if I didn't have the credentials to sort of stand up in the same room and say, yeah, you know, the way, the way one of my mentors put it is that Dr. Mealy could get a lot more stuff done than Mr. Mealy could.
00:54:15
Speaker
And I, once Berkeley systems went through a transition, they were, being acquired by a different company, the technology was changing, the field was changing, and it was an opportunity to either kind of find a different place to work and do more stuff in in the, um you know, inac accessibility in the dot-com world, or I could go back to school and get my get a PhD to be more of a ah player on on an equal footing with the sighted folks.
00:54:54
Speaker
Okay, and here's a question. After after going through and getting that PhD, was there anything that you learned or was it just a title? do you think No, I learned a huge amount. um Yeah, no, I mean, I learned how to design experiments. That's what i that's the most valuable thing I learned because ah You know, in in doing the work that I have done subsequently in designing ah technologies, if you don't evaluate the technologies, then you don't really have any any data or any basis for saying anything about what you've done. And the same thing is true of the work I do ah at Amazon or in any in any other area of of technology development. You have to do usability studies. You have to ah design technology.
00:55:39
Speaker
experiments that that ah either give you information about how to improve your technology or give you information about how well your technology is is performing. And so experimental design was ah um was the most powerful thing I learned in graduate school.
00:55:57
Speaker
I also learned a lot about hearing and auditory perception, which is... um has sometimes come in handy, ah but um you know it's it's the rare happy day when I'm able to ah to use my psychoacoustics knowledge in the service of accessibility.
00:56:17
Speaker
Well, one other dot that got connected in that period of time between college and and a graduate school in Berkeley is Mr. Sushi. yeah So you you actually introduced Rolf and I both to Mr. Sushi, and thank you for that. That was that was ah that was a wonderful introduction.
00:56:34
Speaker
Want to talk a little bit about that time? and Yeah, I mean, i i'm I'm obsessed with raw fish in a lot of, you know, I love oysters. love fish. i i love um Sushi and sashimi and ah Japanese cuisine in general, um I actually love food of all kinds. but um But sushi is one of my obsessions. And we you know we had we found this little...
00:57:01
Speaker
Neighborhood sushi bar over in Oakland near Lake Merritt on Grand Avenue. And it was it was just this and it was like the cheers of sushi. It was like this incredible place where um it had a fabulous cross section of of Oakland neighborhood people.
00:57:19
Speaker
Um, sitting at the bar, hanging out together, talking about, you know, all kinds of stuff and eating sushi together from this, you know, the sushi chef named Kenny, who was, you know, became one of my, one of my good friends. And, uh, we would just, you know, we would hang out at Mr. Sushi, which was the name of the restaurant, uh,
00:57:40
Speaker
you know, we would go there like, like several times a week at, at, you know, and this is one of the reasons why it was so nice to be, you know, to be a, a, have a full-time job because i you know I had to support my habit, it really. That's right. larry One of my favorite things, I think, is when you won ah small money award for a couple hundred bucks, the first thing you did is just sign the check over to Kenny and just keep it coming. Keep me in sushi for as long as this lasts.
00:58:10
Speaker
Tell me when it's over. Yeah, yeah yeah you really, i mean, I remember going to Mr. Sushi with you and you really ate. copious amounts of sushi it was it was impressive the omakase that he you and him had going was is a thing and and you know and ah like so many obsessions and and habits like you know my my my friends just egged me on flip but it was it was amazing and I miss that place a lot but ah you know luckily there's still one or two good sushi places in Berkeley yeah yeah definitely what's your favorite sushi place now
00:58:47
Speaker
ah there's ah There's a really nice place up. Actually, it's in the same building where Berkeley Systems used to be. It's it's up there on North Shattuck and it's called Kamado Sushi.
00:58:59
Speaker
Really good place. I like that place too. Yeah, so another thing that I want to talk about too is um how you got started in making tactile maps.
Creating Tactile Maps and Audio Descriptions
00:59:11
Speaker
I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about sort of what got you, I mean, obviously ah an incredibly useful thing for the blind community. And i think you noticed the lack of availability of that sort of thing and presents an interesting technical challenge. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
00:59:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm a very... tactile learner. you know A lot of people talk about maps, they talk about ah graphics, and they they say, oh, maps are so visual, like blind people, like I didn't even know blind people could use maps because they're so visual.
00:59:45
Speaker
They're not visual, they're spatial, right? it's a um And so a tactile representation of a map is a really good way of showing spatial relationships and ah and sort of abstracting that to the physical world.
01:00:00
Speaker
And They were very difficult. you know There were no tactile maps of of streets because every tactile map had to be made by hand. um So one of the first things I did as a postdoc, actually, was to... said earlier that...
01:00:22
Speaker
you know i said earlier that you know we Disability is the mother of invention. One of the things I had to do in grad school was develop a set of software tools for displaying my data.
01:00:37
Speaker
And ah so I created a MATLAB toolbox that let me... take my data and print it out in Braille to so that it would be you know nice tactile graphs and charts.
01:00:52
Speaker
And as a postdoc, I took that software and basically adapted it to making tactile maps. So I took um ah built on that and learned a whole bunch about GIS and and ah how ah digital maps work and use that as a as a springboard to making tactile street maps because um it was a thing that we didn't have. And i really wanted better information about
01:01:24
Speaker
the street networks that I was going to interact with. It's, it's um when your only way of finding your way in the world is to go out there and, you know, go out there three hours early so that you have time to get lost.
01:01:38
Speaker
That's, that's, that's a, that's a tax on my time. I don't have that kind of time. And so maps, ah maps make things a lot easier to plan how you're going to get from one place to another and having, ah you know,
01:01:53
Speaker
Having access to that kind of information is just one of the many, many ways in which blind people have had to struggle to get the information we need to do the things we want to do.
01:02:06
Speaker
Right. And you have to be reliant on ah expensive Braille printers in order to construct these maps, right? That's true, but there are a lot of these printers out there in the world. So a lot of you know libraries and agencies, blindness agencies, they have the printers.
01:02:24
Speaker
So you know they could produce maps for their their patrons and their students and their their clients. um it's just you know and It was a matter of developing the software that would allow allow us to do that. and you know I developed that software in 2004, 2005,
01:02:41
Speaker
you know two thousand four two thousand five It went through a number of iterations, but it's still available. It's still it's still out there. um People people are still using it to make street maps for themselves. And it's, you know, one of the things I'm the most proud of.
01:02:57
Speaker
so you were you were at Smithkettle at that time when you did that work? Yes. Yeah, I did my postdoc at Smith Kettlewell, and then I was at Smith Kettlewell for, ah you know, which is a ah a vision research institute. And it was, interestingly, it had a whole, you know, a group devoted to accessibility and disability, ah designing for people with who are blind or low vision, designing technologies. And so that's, that's where I,
01:03:24
Speaker
spent my ah my early career at first as a postdoc and then as ah a scientist and um ultimately sort of directing a center there on video description and other other accessibility tools. And, um you know, ultimately got ah a little exhausted by the grant game and wound up ah shifting ah to working in working in tech ultimately at at Amazon right now.
01:03:54
Speaker
Do you want to talk a little bit about the describing and description, that that whole line of work? Yeah, sure. You know, and this is all in the book, right? Like there's a lot of stuff in the book that, you know, I try to talk about my, ah you know, use my life as a narrative to talk about some of the design issues, some of the ableism issues, the social and technical issues.
01:04:20
Speaker
ah you know, nuts and bolts of being blind in in this in this world. um And audio description is one of the technologies that I've done a lot of a lot of work in.
01:04:33
Speaker
Working, you know, it's it's like captions, right? Everybody's familiar with captions, which are a way to allow deaf people to have access to the audio part of the program. So audio description is the converse,
01:04:49
Speaker
It's an audio representation of the visual parts of the program. So it's basically a ah a description, a narration track that is fit in between the dialogue that succinctly And very, you know, parsimoniously describes what's happening in the scene so that a blind person can independently enjoy whatever the program might be.
01:05:19
Speaker
And... um when I got started working in that, you know, when I started developing technologies for and researching practices in that, that area in audio description, ah very little of it was available. And now we're in a world where a lot of audio description is available, um available on streaming platforms like, ah like Amazon and Netflix and Apple TV.
01:05:48
Speaker
And the, you know, so the, The things that I contributed to the field of audio description were um a bunch of technologies that made it possible for people to add their own audio description to and specifically to YouTube videos, ah where it wasn't possible to do that before. And it was basically done as a demonstration for how we could use the internet to...
01:06:18
Speaker
leverage crowdsourcing of audio description for user-generated ah you know social videos and and and other videos. Basically, YouTube was a great a great way to demonstrate that if we let people add audio description to ah to any video they wanted, we would get a lot more accessibility and we would get a lot more interesting voices and techniques for audio description that we weren't necessarily getting from the professionals.
01:06:47
Speaker
So just opening it up, make it more available to more people to to make those descriptions. Yeah. And that was called YouDescribe. the The YouTube audio description thing was called YouDescribe. And that too is still available at YouDescribe.org.
01:07:02
Speaker
Okay. So very cool of all of these cool things that you've worked on, what do you think is the most impactful or something that you're maybe most proud of? um I think, you know, you describe and T-map or are are sort of at the top of my list.
01:07:17
Speaker
Those two, you know, the what I've contributed to tactile mapping and what I've contributed to audio description. Those are both, I'm pretty excited about both of those. Have you gotten and lots of feedback from people about um their use and and helpfulness?
01:07:33
Speaker
Absolutely. And the the great thing is that it makes people think, right? It's not just about using these things. It's about sort of thinking It's about hosting the conversation about how how we can make audio description better, how we can make tactile maps better, how we can be um be a world in which the accessibility of maps and video is ah not only... not only more available, but ah but designed in a way that makes sense for the people who need it most.
01:08:09
Speaker
and um And that's what I like to do. I like ah not just to create the tools, but to be part of the larger conversation about how these tools get used and why they're necessary and how to make them better.
01:08:23
Speaker
and So now you're you're at Amazon now. do you want to talk a bit about how that came about and what you're doing there now?
Scaling Accessibility at Amazon
01:08:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, basically, I wanted to have more of an impact.
01:08:37
Speaker
I wanted to get into a space where I could design and contribute technologies for accessibility that weren't just... used by a few hundred people, but would be used by you know tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of blind people. and um And I wanted a new challenge. I wanted to learn about what accessibility looked like at scale, at at a large corporation like Amazon. And I was also, as I said, pretty exhausted by the the grant game, um sort of struggling for diminishing ah funding with increasing reporting requirements was ah was um was really killing my my pleasure in doing
01:09:23
Speaker
what I was doing. And ah so so i I went to, you know, I decided to find a job in tech. And that's also a very interesting, you know, I mean, ableism is everywhere.
01:09:36
Speaker
And finding the right job at the right company that, you know, in a way that I could contribute meaningfully, like I wasn't interested in And being low-level accessibility tester, I wanted to help call the shots.
01:09:53
Speaker
I wanted to be in a position where I could guide ah meaningful experiences for people with disabilities. and ah And I got that at Amazon. And I've been there for about six years now, a little more than – a little more than ah six years and it's it's been just an amazing ah and amazing move. I'm so glad that I did it and I have learned so incredibly much about what accessibility means in the context of
01:10:26
Speaker
ah a really big company that has ah that has so many different experiences that they're designing, all of which they want to be delightful for all of their customers.
01:10:37
Speaker
And um and how to how to make those experiences, not only how to make them good for people who can't see, but how to build systems that ah that make it so that by default, those experiences are designed accessibly.
01:10:56
Speaker
It is a very exciting environment to be to be working in. Well, that's fantastic. um So a minute ago, you said that stuff is in the book. So, and, ah you know, a lot of what we've been talking about is in the book. So as a podcast, we want to sort of distinguish ourselves with some bonus content. So are there some important things that didn't make it into the book that are still worth relaying here?
01:11:22
Speaker
Well, i I think you really got you got some bonus stuff with the ketamine there. that was great bonus material for sure. That's good bonus material. um You know, ah i um I'll just I'll give you a little um a little a little a tidbit here, you know.
01:11:40
Speaker
One of the things that I love to do is woodworking. um I love to build things that are physical. i like to um I'm a stone carver. I'm a wire sculptor. I'm ah i'm a wood a woodworker.
01:11:52
Speaker
And part of why I love to do that is is there those are tactile, very tactile arts. And um it's really fun to just work with materials to make physical objects. And I think I love doing it For one thing, um because, you know, when you make something that's digital, when you create like an app or a or a device, that thing's going to be around for like 18 months. And then...
01:12:18
Speaker
And then you either you either update it or it goes away. And when you build something out of wood, it's there it's there until until somebody breaks it, right? Which could be a long time if you make it the right way.
01:12:32
Speaker
And so I just love the semi-permanence, at least permanence compared to my digital offerings of of working with with wood and wire and stone.
01:12:45
Speaker
All right, well, last question. um We i like to ask everyone this question. What are you excited about? like What's the next thing coming up? what's What's the next direction in your work that you're really excited about?
Mentoring the Next Generation of Designers
01:12:57
Speaker
It could be your work specifically or something in the field around you that you're you're just think is really exciting and the next the next big thing. well um I'm particularly, i think that the next phase of what I'm doing is going to be a lot more mentorship, a lot more writing, a lot more, um,
01:13:16
Speaker
Speaking about disability, accessibility, and design and sort of helping shape ah the next generation, I'm really excited about some opportunities for university-level teaching um in design programs, which is, I think, one of the things that's really missing from our undergraduate and and, you know, sort of master's level offerings for people that are coming into the design world as as young ah ah young professionals, they have almost no exposure to disability and accessibility ah coming out of out of college.
01:13:55
Speaker
And um I think what I'm really interested in doing is – ah building course, you know, curricula and and and courses that expose people ah not just to, like, not just to the basics, but to really fundamental, important stuff about disability and design that will shape the way they move forward. And, you know, this is part of my interest in scaling my impact, right?
01:14:28
Speaker
um it's It's one thing to build cool stuff, but if you teach cool stuff and if people pick it up, then then you're really sort of, that's a real force multiplier, as they say.
01:14:40
Speaker
And so that's that's what I think I'm really leaning towards at this point. I hope hope to be doing some teaching at Berkeley, at Stanford, and maybe some other places.
01:14:51
Speaker
well that's great yeah that sounds like a great and great next step teaching the next generation coming up and i think the book is a great force multiplier as well everyone should go out and get the book connecting dots a blind life a blind life yes josh thank you so much absolute pleasure to have you on the show and you're welcome back anytime thanks so much thank you both it's such a pleasure to talk to you and um and i you know if people want to reach out to me um ah My website is melelab.com, M-I-E-L-E-L-A-B.com. There's a there's a you know a page about my book and there's a page about you know how to get in touch with me. There's a couple other pages too. So ah thanks, you guys. Great to talk to you. Always an amazing conversation on Cognition.