Podcasts about Digital Equipment Corporation

MAKE HISTORY WITH US THIS SUMMER:https://demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showPATREON: get episodes early + join our weekly Patron Chat https://bit.ly/3lcAasBMERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci.myspreadshop.com/allAMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@UCqV4_7i9h1_V7hY48eZZSLw@demystifysciJim Keller is on of the all-time great computer architects who has shaped the tech revolution during his tenure at Digital Equipment Corporation, AMD, Tesla, Intel, AMD and Apple. In addition to being a crack engineer, Keller is also deeply curious about the inner workings of nature on all scales, and is the patron for our upcoming Beyond the Big Bang meeting in Portugal. Keller is a big proponent of what philosopher Paul Feyerabend called “scientific anarchy,” where progress requires us to abandon a prescriptive approach to what counts as “science,” because many contradictory theories can be “true” at once. We build on our previous conversation about the nature of institutions to unpack why the Big Bang is about to fall apart, what it takes to build a new theory, and how to create a lasting impact without striving explicitly for immortality. (00:00) Go! (00:04:07) Skepticism in Scientific Models and the Role of Physical Intuition(00:11:26) The Evolution of Physics and Cognitive Sciences(00:18:07) Challenges in Conventional Cosmic and Solar Models(00:22:10 )Evolution of Computer Architecture(00:24:02) The Utilitarian Approach of Engineers(00:28:12) Debugging in Engineering(00:30:32) Reevaluating Scientific Paradigms(00:34:00) Collaborative Dynamics in Science and Engineering(00:37:13) The Influence of Paradigms on Scientific Discourse(00:44:42) Musician's Journey and Archetypes(00:45:37) Belief Systems and Shared Realities(00:49:59) The Bible and Mythology(01:00:17) Sci-Fi, Technology, and Societal Impact(01:02:31) Religious Beliefs and Cultural Diversity(01:07:53) Cultural Beliefs and Alignment(01:10:50) Alignment vs. Experimentation(01:13:23) Decentralization and Experimentation(01:15:00) Individual Experience in Religion(01:18:10) Mythology and Technology(01:21:14) Scarcity and Human Behavior(01:23:04) Complexity in Human Systems(01:33:47) Human Collaboration and Motivation(01:36:16) Public Speaking and Leadership Dynamics(01:39:51) Stability and Change in Systems(01:43:52) Paradigm Drifts (01:49:02) Geopolitical Structures and Exploration(01:53:37) Political Power Dynamics(01:57:05) Critique of Power Structures(02:08:45) Paradigm Shifts(02:14:44) Mission-Driven Success(02:18:04) Authenticity in Art#TechVisionary, #AIInnovation, #TechnologyLeader, #TechVisionary, #TechGuru, #astrophysics, #engineeringlife, #cosmos, #innovations, #technews, #codinglife , #programminglife , #techindustry , #engineeringlife, #philosophypodcast, #sciencepodcast, #longformpodcastCheck our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience AND our material science investigations of atomics, @MaterialAtomics https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomicsJoin our mailing list https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities. SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySciMUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

The show you are about to experience serves twofold. First and foremost, this conversation design elicits knowledge from an experienced individual or expert. It is modeled on conversational theory and utilizes a protagonist, me, to crack into deeper knowledge by a vigorous discussion.  Pioneer Knowledge Services has become adept in this practice and offers it as a service. Think of all those super smart people retiring.  It is the best way to secure and transfer knowledge. The other piece of what this show provides is a self-help guide leading a community group. It will aid anyone as an example to leading communities. Stan Garfield, a true leader in the field of knowledge management, has been a friend to Pioneer Knowledge Services® for many years. Find him on LinkedIn and learn more about the Systems Integration and Knowledge Management (SIKM) Leaders Community. Stan Garfield is a knowledge management author, speaker, and community leader based in Northville, Michigan. This is his 30th year in the field of knowledge management.. Stan spent 8 years at Deloitte leading communities and enterprise social networking. Prior to that, he spent 25 years at HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Stan launched Digital's first knowledge management program in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq, and led the Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management Program for HP. He also worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, St. Louis University School of Medicine, and Washington University School of Medicine. Stan holds a BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.  He leads the SIKM Leaders Community, February 2025, it has 1,264 members globally. The community's main activities are Online threaded discussions – discussions on the field of knowledge management, questions and answers, and links to job postings Monthly calls – presentations by members and invited speakers Stan is invited to present at numerous conferences, including KMWorld and the APQC KM Conference. He has published over 1,000 articles on leadership, innovation, knowledge management, communities of practice, enterprise social networks, and social media. He is the author of the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring knowledge management thought leaders. Books Implementing a Successful KM Program (2007) Successful Knowledge Leadership: Principles and Practice (2013), Chapter 5: The Modern Knowledge Leader: A Results-Oriented Approach Gaining Buy-in for KM (2014), Chapter 2: Obtaining support for KM: The ten commitments Measuring the ROI of Knowledge Management (2016), 2nd Edition, Chapter 7: The case against ROI for knowledge management Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program (2017) Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners (2018), Chapter 6: Communities Manifesto Handbook of Community Management: A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice (2020) The Five Cs of KM (2022) Knowledge Nuggets: 100 KM Infographics (2023) Profiles in Knowledge: 120 Thought Leaders in Knowledge Management (2024) Content Knowledge Management Site: http://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/ LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stangarfield/ Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/stangarfield

Visit Mike at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-paciello-1231741/ Be A Better YOU with AI: Join The Community: https://10xyou.us Get AIDAILY every weekday. Subscribe at https://aidaily.us Read more here: https://thinkfuture.com --- In this episode of thinkfuture, host Chris Kalaboukis dives into the future of accessibility with Mike Paciello, a tech accessibility pioneer with over 40 years in the industry. From his early days at Digital Equipment Corporation to his role in launching the Web Accessibility Initiative at the W3C, Mike shares how he's helped shape the accessibility landscape. Now the Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye, Mike reveals how the company is transforming web accessibility by combining AI-powered automated remediation with human expertise, addressing the massive gap in accessible websites. They discuss the current challenges with voice interfaces, the limitations of overlay solutions, and their vision for a future where tech adapts seamlessly to individual needs. This episode is packed with insights on creating an inclusive digital world for people of all abilities. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thinkfuture/support

Episode 353 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Giuseppe Stuto, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of 186 Ventures. Did you know that the venture capital industry originated in Boston back in 1946 with the founding of American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) which backed Digital Equipment Corporation and saw a 1200X return when the company went public. Since then, Boston has been very fortunate to have a steady stream of VC investors at all stages to foster the local startup ecosystem and one of the newest firms is 186 Ventures. Co-Founded by Giuseppe and Julian Fialkow, 186 Ventures is a pre-seed & seed stage VC firm investing broadly across technology. I kept hearing about the firm, so I was excited to interview Giuseppe for the podcast as they have been out there hustling and have been earning the respect from entrepreneurs and their peers in the VC industry. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A discussion around the importance of investor & founder alignment. * How a conference at Stanford changed the trajectory of his career into entrepreneurship. * The full background story of SmakHigh and how they evolved to Fam, the first live group video application for iMessage, including how Jeff Bussgang's book - Mastering the VC Game - helped them raise venture funding from Jeff. * The full story of how the acquisition by DraftKings came to fruition. * The details about 186 Ventures and what they are targeting for investments. * The 4 fundamental parts of a business that matter. * The importance of building a repeatable sales model for not only your go-to-market strategy but also how it factors into raising capital. * Why Boston is the best place to build an AI startup. * And so much more.

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy Seidl is joined by his longtime friend and esteemed guest, Frank Hauck, a retired executive with an impressive career spanning DEC, EMC, and NCR. The conversation touches on commemorating 9/11, the importance of sales training, and Frank's journey from a finance manager at Digital Equipment Corporation to becoming a key figure at EMC. Frank discusses his methodologies for maintaining high standards in sales, the significance of leadership working for the sales team, and the relentless commitment required to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Personal anecdotes about learning from mentors like Mike Ruettgers, Jack Egan, and Joe Tucci highlight the importance of humility, accountability, and continuous learning. The episode also explores the evolving role of technology in sales, with a specific focus on the impact of AI and prospecting in a post-COVID world. With contributions from industry peers such as Eric Mann and insights into the cultural ethos at EMC, this episode provides a comprehensive look at what it takes to succeed in sales and customer service.KEY TAKEAWAYSHonoring 9/11 Sacrifices: Acknowledgement of 9/11 and the sacrifices made by many.Sales Training Importance: Emphasis on the critical role of sales training in organizational success.Career Highlights: Frank's extensive career, spanning roles at DEC, EMC, NCR and more.Customer Focus: Stories illustrating the importance of maintaining strong customer relationships, especially through challenges.Sales Best Practices: Insights on what makes top sales performers, including preparation, continual learning, and teamwork.Leadership and Mentorship: The influence of mentors like Mike Rutgers, Jack Egan, and Joe Tucci on Frank's career.Adapting to Post-COVID Work: Strategies for maintaining client relationships in a remote/hybrid work environment.Embracing Technology: The role of AI and technology in enhancing sales and customer interactions.Cultural Lessons: Anecdotes highlighting the value of showing up, humility, and constant improvement.QUOTES"It's part and parcel to a successful organization. You got to keep them fed and you got to give them the insight and the knowledge of what it takes to be successful.""When things went bad, we sold the product that when it didn't work, planes didn't fly. Banks didn't process checks. GM didn't make cars.""It's about being accountable. Being able to do the things other people aren't willing to do to be successful. And really it's the extra effort.""He goes, but you didn't come here to be good. You came here to be great."Find out more about Frank Hauck through the link below.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankhauck/This episode is sponsored by Sandler. Sandler is a world leader in innovative sales, leadership, and management training. For more than 50 years, Sandler has taught its distinctive, non-traditional selling system and highly effective sales training methodology, which has helped salespeople and sales managers take charge of the process.

Send us a textVid Desai is Chief Information Officer, Office of Digital Transformation (ODT), at the U.S. Food And Drug Administration (FDA), where he sets and leads the agency's Information Technology (IT) strategy, as well as the agency's enterprise IT, data management, and cybersecurity. (https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-organization/vid-desai)The ODT oversees the overall FDA IT spend of close to $1Bn and a staff of around 2,500 employees and contractors. In this capacity, Mr. Desai was recently named to the Forbes CIO Next List 2023 and was the only federal CIO to receive this honor. He was also selected as a WashingtonExec Top Government IT Leaders to watch in 2023, in additional to multiple agency and industry awards. Prior to being named CIO, Mr. Desai served as the FDA's Chief Technology Officer, overseeing day-to-day technology operations as the leader of the Office of Information Management and Information Technology.Mr. Desai is a seasoned, nationally recognized technology leader with over 35 years of experience in the IT field, and healthcare and life sciences industries. He has previous experience working for large pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and clinical research organizations.Prior to joining the FDA in 2019, Mr. Desai held the CIO role at Vyaire Medical, a respiratory medical device company formed from a divestiture from Becton Dickinson. He was CIO at Endochoice, a GI device and services provider, and Lake Region Medical, which was acquired by Greatbach to form Integer, a medical device, outsource manufacturer. His previous experience includes IT leadership roles with large CRO and pharmaceuticals, including Quintiles Transnational, where he served as executive director, Global IT Infrastructure. Prior to Quintiles, Mr. Desai held several leadership positions of increasing responsibility with GlaxoSmithKline. He started his career in IT as a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in Reading, U.K.Mr. Desai holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (first class with honors) from Royal Holloway College, University of London.Important Episode Links FDA's Technology Modernization Action Plan (TMAP) - https://www.fda.gov/media/130883/downloadFDA's Data Modernization Action Plan (DMAP) -https://www.fda.gov/media/143627/download?attachmentFDA's Cybersecurity Modernization Action Planhttps://www.fda.gov/media/163086/download?attachment#VidDesai #ChiefInformationOfficer #OfficeOfDigitalTransformation #FoodAndDrugAdministration #FDA #InformationTechnology #ZeroTrust #ArtificialIntelligence #QuantumComputing #IT #Cybersecurity #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #IraPastor #Podcast #Podcaster #ViralPodcast #STEM #Innovation #Technology #Science #ResearchSupport the Show.

Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life in search of mindfulness tools that can be used by everyone (young and old) to transform their ability to speak at a professional level, as well as, to reduce the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and in between the words we speak. To learn more about Alan, check out the following links: Alan's Website & Speaking Workshops: https://acamindfulyou.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlanCarrolltrains Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulnesseminar/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aca-mindful-you/

I find that people do not necessarily view themselves as “unstoppable”. It just happens with them although later they may truly adopt an unstoppable mindset. Such a person is our guest this time, Wendy Cole. Wendy and I are roughly the same age and, I suspect, for different reasons have many similar life values and observations.   At the age of ten Wendy announced that she was a girl although physically she was a boy. As she puts it, her brain was a girl and the rest of her was a boy. Even so, she moved forward with life. She spent 20 years working for Digital Equipment Corporation. After being laid off as DEC was failing, she decided not to work directly for one company but rather to accept contract work. She enjoyed doing this kind of work and living that existence for twenty years more.   In 2012 she retired, sort of. Wendy began looking more at her life and existence. She began researching transgender topics and discovered that medical science finally concluded that transgender was not a psychological or mental issue but rather it was, as Wendy says, a medical condition. In 2015 Wendy took the leap as she will tell us and became physically a woman.   She now not only coach's transgender people to help them navigate their uncertainties and concerns, but she is a recognized coach helping and mentoring anyone requiring aid in navigating life changes. As Wendy points out, we all are constantly dealing with change and thus transitions from one thing to another whether it be job related or anything else you can think of.   About the Guest: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, hello, once again, and welcome to unstoppable mindset. Today, we get to talk to a transition expert in all that that implies, her name is Wendy Cole. And she will tell you about her own transitions and also the things that she helps other people with. So I'm going to not give a lot away. Because I think it'd be more fun for Wendy to tell us and I think we're going to have a wonderful discussion about the concept of transition and change and so on. And it's interesting. For me, I hear a lot. And I know I've talked about it a bunch when we talk about September 11, of course, was just my story. Afterward, people kept saying we got to get back to normal. And for the longest time, I bristled at that until I realized why I wasn't happy when people said we have to get back to normal, which really was saying We don't like change. But the problem is normal would never be the same again. So we can't get back to normal because normal is different. And we need to discover what it is. And normal in reality changes regularly. And we'll talk about that. But I would like you to meet Wendy Cole and Wendy. Welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Wendy Cole ** 02:35 Thank you, Michael. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having me.   Michael Hingson ** 02:40 Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the earlier Wendy and all that sort of stuff and kind of catch us up but like to see where you came from and all that. All right.   Wendy Cole ** 02:54 Well, as we, as we've discussed, I, I help people learn to embrace change. And I help them explore and identify and eliminate the stresses of life changes. That's a very general statement about what change is all about. I have, I was born with a very different condition. I was born, what we now call today, transgender. And in 2015, I faced a monumental life change. And I went from living as male to which I really wasn't. I refer to him as my mail facsimile. And I went from living that way to living as when he and I have never been happier. And throughout that entire experience, I learned to embrace change in ways that I never dreamed possible. For me. I spent my entire life repressing what I felt who I felt I was, and I was told at age 10, that I would be committed and fixed at a psychiatric institute. If I didn't stop telling my parents that I was really a girl that was in the late 50s. didn't go well. I tried again in 1970. That didn't go well either. That was when a psychiatrist told me I was afraid and should move to New York City. At any rate, he was right and there was only a few choices I had so I began life with repression and hiding for real, and I was always told, get married. Have a Career have wife have a family. And you'll forget all about this. Well, that didn't work either. So, in terms of life changes, I struggled, I struggled, I repressed, and I repressed everything about myself for probably at least five decades. And we came into 20 2015. And that's when I found that everything had changed. The way I was born used to be considered a psychological condition with no treatment and no cure. And I found out in 2015, that as of 2012, it had been changed to a medical condition treatable through therapy, hormones, and surgeries. For me, I had to do it. I was 67 at the time, and it's never too late. And I just had to do it. One of the first things I started doing was working on myself, Michael, working on aligning my own inner being with who I knew myself, there really be. I did a lot of things to make that happen. visioning mindfulness, a lot of meditations, a lot of work with my therapist. And within six months, I was ready to make the leap, take the leap of faith. I realized at that point, there was no guarantees, I had no idea how it would come out, what would happen to me, and there are no guarantees in life. And throughout all of that six month period of the first six months of 2015, I learned a very hard lesson that life is all about change. And it doesn't stop, it just keeps going. So the best thing I learned to do was evolve with it. You know, it's   Michael Hingson ** 07:09 an interesting concept. And the issue is, you happen to experience that and exhibit that with a physical change. But that started with being different than people thought you were that is you were a boy, now you're a girl. And you were really a girl all along internally, right? But the reality is, does it really matter if it has to do with gender or any other thing? You know, like I said, September 11, people experienced that they wanted to get back to normal, but that genie got let out of the bottle on September 11. And normal would never be the same again.   Wendy Cole ** 07:54 Absolutely. So   Michael Hingson ** 07:57 yeah, and transition isn't just about gender, or any one particular thing. Transition is well, you know, children become adolescents, and they become adults. And if that doesn't change, I don't know what it is.   Wendy Cole ** 08:15 Right. And when I was going into this, I started thinking back on the earlier two years of my life, while I was repressing this while I was trying to get through life and just barely survive, which I did quite well actually. I realized that I had changed my life, periodically in many different profound ways. I started a career in the computer industry. I worked for 20 years for a computer company, second largest IBM,   Michael Hingson ** 08:52 at which company was that? Oh, that was digital equipment, corporate. Look where they are today. Okay. Anyway, I just have to say that yeah. Oh, I remember playing with Dell computers. We had a PDP 10 at UC Irvine. So   Wendy Cole ** 09:05 Oh, yeah. Those were the big ones.   Michael Hingson ** 09:09 Big ones. Yeah.   Wendy Cole ** 09:12 That was in the days when mainframes pretty much still ruled. And you know, disk drives were the size of washing machines.   Michael Hingson ** 09:21 And if one crashed, you knew it all over the campus you could hear.   09:28 So,   Michael Hingson ** 09:29 when a disk was a disk,   Wendy Cole ** 09:32 it was in 1989, that I faced a significant life change. And that was digital equipment was beginning to go out of business. And I was given a choice. I got laid off in New Hampshire, where I was living at the time, or take a transfer to Philadelphia and I took the transfer Were to Philadelphia and stayed employed until 1992, when I finally got laid off. And I got a severance package and two years worth of health benefits. And when I sat down and started thinking about what was I going to do with the rest of my life? Well, what was I going to do for work? So that in and of itself is a fairly profound life change?   Michael Hingson ** 10:26 By any standard it is, what were you doing for DEC,   Wendy Cole ** 10:30 I was, I started out with them as a quality engineer doing inspections of all the equipment before everything got bundled up for shipment. And by the time I left, New England, and the job there, I was a senior project manager overseeing projects in three different states. For the manufacturing facilities. And when I went to Philadelphia, I was a sales support tech type person handling a lot of the sales paperwork, making sure everything was technically correct. And when they messed up the orders, which they did frequently, I had to go in and fix them. So I went from doing that kind of work to I decided, well, I did pretty well working for Dec. Throughout the years, even though it drove me crazy. You see, it was a high tech company. And they reorganized frequently, the way they reorganize this the dissolve the entire organization, everybody had to go get new jobs, you had to do up a resume, you had to find out what the new organization looked like. And you had to go interview for jobs. And that was very frequent. So and that actually drove me crazy. During the time I used to drive a drive people around me nuts with the way I was. And when I was working, I resisted change. And it I just didn't deal with it. Well, and I lived like that for 20 years.   Michael Hingson ** 12:24 What about other people?   Wendy Cole ** 12:27 Um, some people just didn't care. It just kind of went with the flow. I was not one of those flow people at the time.   Michael Hingson ** 12:38 But you weren't guaranteed a job with the new organization, whatever that was? No,   Wendy Cole ** 12:42 you weren't. But the reality of it was this, almost everybody did get a new job. Okay. And the reality of it was, and this is what I found out. After going through that for 20 years, and then doing some serious introspection on what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I actually did better every time they reorganized, I always got a better job than what I always had. I just didn't recognize it at the time. And that was something that was kind of like a major aha moment in my life at that point.   Michael Hingson ** 13:27 Interesting, though, concept and interesting way to go about doing business even so just to constantly reorganize like that. I'm wondering what the professionals in the world would say today about that, or do we still do a lot of that?   Wendy Cole ** 13:44 There are there are organizations do change quite frequently, but what I noticed happened after that timeframe. And was the organization's didn't change. People started changing jobs. When I started working, the mindset was, and it's all about mindset. The mindset was, you go to work for a corporation, you work for them for 40 years, you retire. That's it. Yeah. Well, somewhere along the line, I think in the 80s, maybe even the early 90s, things really started changing and people didn't stay at jobs. They might work for a company for three, four or five years at the most and switch, go to another company get another job. Why? Ah looking for a better job looking for a new challenge, looking for some sort of improvement in their career.   Michael Hingson ** 14:53 Did the kind of reorganization thing that happened at DEC send a message that We're not necessarily as loyal to you, as maybe we were or as you think we ought to be.   Wendy Cole ** 15:10 Initially, I don't think that was the case. But I think as as the years went by, especially by the late 80s, that's the message that started going out. But the rest of the high tech companies at the time, they were all going through similar situations.   Michael Hingson ** 15:33 That's why I was wondering if it was somewhat, not whether the companies did it, even initially. But whether people thought that was the case, and wondering if perception went faster than reality, but reality caught up and companies end up not being quite as loyal as they had been wanting to just keeping for sure, exactly.   Wendy Cole ** 15:55 I think that was, that was probably more the case, things began to evolve as they started outsourcing and overseas, shipping jobs overseas. But what I had decided in the early 90s, when I was laid off was I didn't want to be an employee anymore. When I started, contract work. And I actually loved that. All I had to do was please my, the person that signed my contract and do a good job, which was something I always enjoyed doing. And I taught myself how to program in the Microsoft technologies. And I taught myself SQL Server database and started building intranet applications for corporations. So yeah, that was, I did that until 2012. So   Michael Hingson ** 16:58 that was a major mindset shift, needless to say, because it sounds like you went into the workforce, thinking you're going to be loyal to a company, and you're going to go through that whole thing. And then along the way, things changed. And then you decided to shift the mindset to Well, I can be loyal to somebody who signs my contracts. And that's great. And it might last a long time. But the bottom line is, I need to be loyal to me first.   Wendy Cole ** 17:29 Exactly. My contracts usually ran in three month increments. So every three months, I got the equivalent of a job review. But at that point, I had gone to the mindset of I didn't care, I was fine and confident in what I was doing. I knew I was doing good work and delivering results. I would take on major projects and make commitments to deliver incrementally, every two to three months, major changes and major improvements in what I was doing, or make progress in developing what I was developing. And that would always be visible and open to them. Because I would put everything on what I called staging servers, so that people in the organization assigned by the people signing my contract could actually go in and look at what I was doing. And give me feedback on it as I was working on it.   Michael Hingson ** 18:31 So even though you had contracts that went like in three months intervals, did people keep signing your contracts, and you stayed with the same contractor?   Wendy Cole ** 18:43 What my first contract was with a small ambulance company in Philadelphia. And that was an interesting meeting with the CFO who was signing my contract. He said I was very expensive, and that he could only afford me for a short period of time. And I decided well, okay, he said he wanted to know exactly what I was going to do and how I was going to fix their problems. By Friday, this was on a Monday. So I said to him, well, since I'm expensive and you want this by Friday, I'll save you some money. I'll leave now. And I turned and headed for the door. He told me to wait, I came back. He said Why are you leaving? I said well, it's gonna take me at least a week or two to figure out what your system is how it works. Forget about finding out what's wrong with it. This week, I just have to identify what you've got and how it's all working or not working. And within a week Within two weeks, I'll start being able to tell you how I can fix it. And that was something I could never say to a boss, one. Boy. under contract. Yeah, I could say that mindset shift. Exactly. And it felt good, Michael, it really felt good.   Michael Hingson ** 20:23 So what did he say?   Wendy Cole ** 20:26 He agreed. I committed to updating him every Friday where I would meet with him every Friday morning and tell him where I was and what was going on. And I did. And the first Friday, he was relatively pleased. The second Friday, he was very happy because I was making progress. I had figured out a lot of things. And I worked there for three months. And I was done. They they got there. They were having problems with their invoices to you United Healthcare being paid. And United Healthcare owed them $6 million, because their invoices hadn't gone through correctly. I fixed it, I put a new system in place for them. He was thrilled the money was flowing. He offered me they were moving to a new location. And he offered me the job as IT manager. I turned it down. But you can surprise   Michael Hingson ** 21:35 I had a mindset shift. Again,   Wendy Cole ** 21:37 I had a much better job offer, doing contract work at Merck. I wound up working at Merck supporting the serology laboratory where they do the blood tests from the clinical trials of drugs. And that was a really interesting job. And I enjoyed it, I learned a lot there. I continued to develop my programming skills and my computer knowledge as especially in the Microsoft platform, which I had not worked in in my first 20 years. In fact, I discovered PCs in 1992, and had my first one then. And being a former techie type hardware person. Within two weeks of buying my first PC, I tore it all apart, formatted the hard drive, just to figure out if I could put it back together. And it was fun. Yeah, the I worked at Merck for three years, every three months new contract. And I asked him, I said at that point, I wanted to work basically with intranet applications, and do that kind of development work. And they said they weren't interested in doing that. They didn't trust it. So much to their surprise, I think I quit. I didn't take another contract with them. That's when I went to NEC. Okay. I want the NEC for an in an engineering department and built a whole applicant SQL Server database application for them. And when after, after about a year, it was pretty much done with that and then moved on to a chemical company called FMC. And I took much the same approach to everything I'd been doing just, you know, a whole mindset shift of just been independent doing my work. And I didn't have to play office politics. I didn't have to do any of that stuff, Michael. Yeah. It was really good.   Michael Hingson ** 24:06 So you really took to this particular mind ship mindset. idea of being a contractor, which is cool that you you really liked what you were doing.   Wendy Cole ** 24:17 Yeah. It also helped me with my own personal issues, because   Michael Hingson ** 24:25 I was gonna ask that. Yeah, people like   Wendy Cole ** 24:28 me need distractions, things that will take my mind off of what I was struggling with and what I was repressing. And my computer career definitely did a good job of helping me in that department. But this is something that never goes away. It's just part of who, who I was.   Michael Hingson ** 24:56 So what happened in 2012 2012   Wendy Cole ** 24:59 I'm in the tech field, at least it at that point. And I know in hindsight, this was really wearing on me, I looked a lot older than I actually was. I probably just didn't have the right vibes and the right energy, when I was interviewing for contracts anymore. I was tired, Michael, really tired. And so I couldn't get another contract for quite a while. And what I wound up doing was just setting up my own little business doing in home. Computers and technical repair for small businesses and for IN HOME people. Okay, that kept me busy until about 2014 or so. And then that's when I pretty much went into retirement mode. Which I didn't like.   Michael Hingson ** 26:07 Well, you know, I've been dealing with basically 42 years on the job of doing something. Yeah.   Wendy Cole ** 26:13 So, and that was also I was in a really, really dark place with my whole gender issues and everything else. I've been fighting that for decades. And dealing with that, and it just, I was, I was really pretty much done living. But I did decide, I would go online, and look to see if anything had changed relative to my diagnosis that I'd gotten in 1970. I didn't look after that at all. Because thing. I I just couldn't. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 27:04 Well, that's psychiatrist and 20. When you were unwell when nothing, so 1970 called you a freak. I mean, that's a pretty traumatic sort of thing. Anyway. So one can but wonder what that psychiatrist would say today.   Wendy Cole ** 27:24 I, well, see, this is something to that. People like me go through. You try. And besides, you know, distractions, things that you can do for yourself to get past the gender issues and repress them. A lot of people embark on substance abuses, they become alcoholics, drug addicts, things like that. In from the 90s on, I was pretty much involved with psychiatrists. But I never told them what the underlying condition for my anxieties, my depression and my other things that were going on in my mind, I never told them. After all, why would I always call the freak and so but they're all too happy to prescribe medications. And have you come back for regular visits. So I spent a lot of that time very heavily medicated, when I discovered that the diagnosis had changed to a medical condition that you're born with. And that is treatable by therapy, hormone therapy, and any unnecessary surgeries. That was, sounded wonderful. could finally do something about this. And I was seeing a psychiatrist in Doylestown, Pennsylvania at the time. So I told him all about the underlying condition. Well, guess what? Michael, he wanted to send me to conversion therapy. And that's where they try to work on you so that they try to get it out of your mind by various techniques. And it's been proven not to work. They tried it a lot with gay people. They also tried it with people like myself, it just doesn't work. It's basically, when I was when I was still in the process of being born. My brain went female, my body went male. That's the condition And now it's recognized as such, and it's considered treatable. And it affects people differently. to one degree or another, not everybody goes through what I did. But I started seeing a therapist, she started me working with mindfulness started me, basically back into my old hippie days of meditations. And basically challenging all of my beliefs about who I am, what I am, so that I could learn to accept myself, develop self acceptance, self awareness, and actually begin to develop some degree of self love. Okay, and it, I just continued working on that all the way through the first six months, and giving myself little life tests of going to therapy as Wendy going out after therapy, different public outings and things like that. And I found out that I could do this. And that's when I discovered that there. It's all possible, and life is all about possibility. And   Michael Hingson ** 31:27 that's an important concept for anyone, no matter what, exactly whether you're dealing with a gender issue or whatever, right? Because   Wendy Cole ** 31:38 with once you realize that life is about possibilities, the thing that I found that blocked those possibilities from my vision, or make, it's my beliefs that make it look like it's impossible to do that. So I started asking myself, why, what do I believe that makes this impossible and started challenging that. And what I found, Michael, is that really works. I'm shifting my beliefs, your beliefs are made up of your thoughts, and your emotions. And it's the chemical reactions of your body, with your mind your being that drive that. So that's what I learned to change.   Michael Hingson ** 32:41 So I know you have what you call Windies 80% rule. Tell me about that. I think it's great, I love it.   Wendy Cole ** 32:51 Well summarized very, very briefly, it's 80% of all life change begins and is between your ears. It's in your mind. I really, truly believe that. And I've actually live live it now. Yes, there is a physical reality. But our reality is actually determined in our minds, our bodies, our brains take in through our senses of vision, sight, vision, sound, smell, touch. And that's how we form our reality. And those senses get processed in our minds. And that's what we see, touch, feel and experience from the outer world. And so, your reality, my reality, can be very different and very similar in many different ways. It depends on our senses and how we perceive the world.   Michael Hingson ** 34:06 Well, so, you know, if we talk about fear, for example, there are any number of experts who will tell you that we create most of our own fears, they're unformed, they're unfounded. And they'll never come to fruition. And the ones that are legitimate, that we should really be afraid of, also, oftentimes by using mindfulness by using meditation by using introspection and so on, they are also fears that I hate to use the word can be managed, but rather they can be understood and you can use the fear to help motivate you to do whatever you really need to do rather than being as I love to say blinded by fear.   Wendy Cole ** 34:57 Exactly. I I would totally agree with that, Michael, when, when I first started doing this, to become who I really am, I really had to get past a lot of fears, and change a lot of my thoughts and shift a lot of my emotions around so that I could actually enjoy becoming mate. In the real world.   Michael Hingson ** 35:37 You, you mentioned before about life, being very much involved with possibilities. And you said that our beliefs often keep us from dealing with and essentially mass possibilities. Tell me more about that? Well,   Wendy Cole ** 35:53 I've had people tell me that I couldn't have done this transition from male to female in six months. And my question to them is why. If you believe it takes longer than it will, whatever you believe is what it's going to be. And that applies to everything in life. If you believe that you can't successfully you wanted to try skydiving, you wanted to go up in an airplane and jump and experience skydiving, but you don't believe you can do it? Well, as long as you believe you can't do it, you never will get up and go up and do it. But if you shift that belief, change your emotions about it, overcome the fears of it. Then, at some point, when you feel you're ready, you will get on that plane, you will go up and you will jump and experience skydiving.   Michael Hingson ** 37:08 Which doesn't mean everybody has to test themselves by going up and doing skydiving. But that's an example. That's just a hypothetical. Yeah, there's so many things that that one deals with, but we do lock ourselves into the way we operate by what we believe or don't believe. And we, we tend not to be nearly as good collection of explorers as we ought to be.   Wendy Cole ** 37:39 One of the things that I learned is that the human mind is designed to resist change, change equals risk. We tend to want to stay in known situations and routines. We get up in the morning, we do the same things every morning to get ready for work, we go off to our jobs, we take the same route to work every day. We do everything as routinely as possible deviations from routines, and deviations from our weekly routines. These can be potentially stressful situations.   Michael Hingson ** 38:28 But do you think that's true? Because the mind is really designed that way? Or that's what we've been taught. that   Wendy Cole ** 38:36 I believe is what we've been taught. Because when I I've put myself into so many different situations. Especially since 2015. Where I enjoy taking on new situations going into new environments, doing things that I've never done before, or, or first time experiences. It makes life so much more fun.   Michael Hingson ** 39:10 Have you done skydiving yet? No. Just checking.   Wendy Cole ** 39:14 I'm not willing to jump out of a perfectly good airplane quite honestly.   Michael Hingson ** 39:19 Yeah, you know, I know people who have and I don't I, I have no problem with that. But I have just never had an interest in skydiving just like I've never really had an interest in skiing, but it's not a fear of it. I've done other kinds of things. But I love to tell people that you know Sonny Bono got hit by a tree because he was skiing very kindly and peacefully in a tree jumped out and grabbed him. So my my brother in law who's an avid skier says well then just don't ski near the trees and I said don't you don't understand whether you like it or not they come out and get you. And it's funny to joke about that but I just have never had an interest in ski but I I believe I know myself well enough to know that if I had to go out and do it, or if somebody really wanted me to go out and ski with him if Gary, my brother in law came along and said, Come on, would you just come out with me? I'd go. But it's much more fun to joke about it and blame the trees. Exactly. But But I agree with what you're saying. And I and that's why I asked the question, because I think that we oftentimes hear well, we're resistant to change, because that's what our mind is, is all about, we don't like change the brain is, is resistant to change, and I don't buy that. I think that that's what we're taught.   Wendy Cole ** 40:38 Exactly. I think it starts from childhood with our parents. It begins there. It's continued through especially the early grades of school, you know, doing things outside the box, as it were, are discouraged more often than not? Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 41:05 We just don't do it that way. Well, but why? Exactly.   Wendy Cole ** 41:11 So I, I really have enjoyed the last going on nine years of my life, far more than a lot of the aspects of my previous 60 some odd years,   Michael Hingson ** 41:30 will tell me what are you doing now? So So what have you been doing for the last nine years?   Wendy Cole ** 41:36 Oh, well, once once I did become authentically Wendy I just about every daily activity, everything in life was a brand new experience. Because I was experience it from a completely different perspective. The first time I ever signed my name is Wendy Cole. That, that was that was a really felt good. It was a and that's what I really believe that's what life is all about is feeling good. And I, the first time I got my driver's license, the first time I did my changed my name. And then all the way through everything on an everyday basis was a brand new experience it to one degree or another. And 2017 I had surgery. As I like to put it, I got my birth defect corrected. And that was at NYU Medical Center. And I met a lot of really great people there. And I met people in the city in New York City. And I had a wonderful time I had a lot of experiences there. My mail facsimile would never speak publicly. And I was invited to talk to a group of people, probably about 300, I think or so. About my life. I didn't know I was gonna, that was going to happen to me. And I was given the microphone and said, Go talk about what you've been through. And I did, and I enjoyed doing it. That was a brand new experience.   Michael Hingson ** 43:55 And that's the really cool part about it. You enjoyed it.   Wendy Cole ** 43:58 Yeah, this was all so different to me and also knew it was like, almost kind of almost like a rebirth. My psychiatrist and my, because I got a new psychiatrists thanks to my therapist. My therapist, and my new psychiatrists told me a couple of years after I'd been living as myself full time that they couldn't get over the personality change. They'd see me one week as my mail facsimile, and the following week in would walk Wednesday, and totally different personality, very outgoing, very social, and very open. And whereas I wasn't before, I had a secret to hide that I hit it.   Michael Hingson ** 45:03 So, but you understand that now? Yes, I do.   Wendy Cole ** 45:08 And that has really helped immensely in how I feel and how I live. After my surgery, I decided I wanted to help other people go through this. And I started helping people go in through the NYU organization to have their surgeries and things like that. I would talk to girls night before surgery. And I enjoyed doing that. So that's when I decided, well, I'll start actually coaching people and helping them do this. And in 2020, I spent the entire pandemic year developing my coaching business, and started doing that. And then I found that when I was working with people on helping them change their mindset, and how they approached life, so that they could do this and actually find joy in doing it. I found that the things that I was working with people in that regard, applied to everybody, to one degree or another, it all works for everyone.   Michael Hingson ** 46:38 So it gets far beyond the whole issue of transgender exam is really about life in general and recognizing that, as I would say it, we're always in transition.   Wendy Cole ** 46:54 Oh, absolutely. The other thing that I do want to point out is that this has done wonders for my physical health. So I believe that the mind, the human mind, and all interacts with our body through the chemicals that the mind forces the body to produce the neuro peptides that get produced by the hypothalamus, the hormonal production and everything. So if you're in perpetual state of stress, and anxiety, perpetual fear, you're doing harm to your body physically. You might not eat healthy. I did all of these things. I weighed 70 pounds more than I do now. My blood work was horrible. And I was type two diabetic from age 39 on my doctor, my primary care doctor I was about I was about 6869 at the time looks at me and goes you're no longer diabetic. I'm taking you off the meds. What do you attribute this to? And all I said to him was it starts with being happy. I had I had I've lost 70 pounds I'm not I no longer have the cholesterol issues that I had, I no longer had the triglyceride issues that I had, and I'm no longer diabetic. And I exercise I take care of myself I eat properly. And I enjoy life now. I'm not producing the internal body chemistry that causes that that tells my body that I'm having anxiety   Michael Hingson ** 49:06 what what cause you to use or decide to use the name Wendy? Ah   Wendy Cole ** 49:14 she was a girl in one of my grammar school classes I think around fifth or sixth grade. She was the prettiest girl very popular. Always look nice. And I I wasn't interested in interested in her as a girl. I wanted to be her. So I liked that name. And I adopted that name at that age that if I could ever actually be the person that I knew I was.   Michael Hingson ** 49:50 That would be my name. When nothing to do with Peter Pan huh? Nothing. Second star on the right straight on till morning. Oh, that's good. Thank you. Well, it's it's interesting, those in all seriousness that the way you you talk about this and the whole issue of transition, it goes far beyond. And I'm glad that you do it this way far beyond any kind of gender transgender issue, right? It's recognizing that it's something that we all are constantly going through, I know that, for me, doing this podcast, although I was interested in doing the podcast from the beginning, I wondered what it would be like, and, and it has been absolutely fun. And as I love to tell people, if I'm not learning at least as much as anybody else who listens to or is involved in this podcast, I'm not doing my job well, because I love learning new things. And I love exploring. And I'm glad that so many people have blessed me by coming on and are willing to tell it and talk about stories like, like you're doing.   Wendy Cole ** 51:03 Oh, I agree with you, and I love doing this. It's, it's also part of sharing my life with people so that they can see that. In reality, I'm not that much different from a lot of other people. Right. And there's so many times that people like myself are talked about by politicians by so called religious people. And all these really outrageous comments are made, or they treat us like that psychiatrists treated me and like the seventh day. And I, I really started doing this as a as a way of showing people that I'm not that much different from anyone else. This is how I was born, I finally had the opportunity to do something about it. And I did. And I am grateful for my mail representative, my mail facsimile for not making me a drug addict, not making me an alcoholic, like so many. Go through, unfortunately, and definitely not killing myself, even though I thought about it a lot at times, and went through some very dark times during my life. So I got to a point where now I can enjoy it.   Michael Hingson ** 52:45 Well, you talked about self love and self acceptance and self awareness. And that's clearly a really significant part of it. And, and self love is not an ego thing at all. It's appreciating who you are.   Wendy Cole ** 53:00 And we all have doubts as to what we can do, and what we are able to do. And just shifting your emotions and changing your beliefs will get you past so much of that. And that's what I've learned to do over the years. So   Michael Hingson ** 53:21 what what kinds of basic things do you teach in your different coaching sessions for for people? Since you do talk a lot about transition in You talk a lot about change. I assume that one of the things that you do is that you talk about transition, in terms of saying it's more than changing from what you weren't to what you are.   Wendy Cole ** 53:53 But when we're talking when I'm talking to a person who was born transgender. I like to shift that around to it's less about transitioning and more about more about correcting a condition you are born with, so you can be who you always were.   Michael Hingson ** 54:26 But extrapolate that out beyond transgender to other people in dealing with change.   Wendy Cole ** 54:32 There are okay I've had people that had issues with abandonment parental abandonment, abandonment by a spouse, whatever. And what we need to do in those situations is talk through their beliefs and their their emotions associated with their thoughts, and change those thoughts so that they are creating a pot more, a more believable thought that they can get past that issue of band of abandonment. Look at it differently, change the perspective, change how you look at it. And I'm also a believer in journaling, and writing down all your thoughts, no matter how negative no matter how horrible, they might seem to you write them down, document them in some way that you can go back and look at them 234 days later, and read what you wrote. And when you do that, that's when you start to realize how you were thinking and how you were feeling. And you actually come to the conclusion, I don't want to feel that way anymore. Why am I thinking that? Let's change that thought. So that's when I teach them how to shift that belief that that shift that thought into a new thought, that's a little more supportive of where they need to go and what they need to do. And this can go fairly quickly if they're willing to do the work. And just start to shift all those thoughts, learning how to block thoughts. I've used personally techniques where I have a rubber band around my wrist, and I start thinking, I realize I'm thinking all this, this fall, that makes me really anxious, really upset. I don't want to feel that anymore. Snap the rubber band. It's a way of learning to block the thoughts. It's it's our thoughts that drive our emotions. And the two combined if they persist, form these beliefs that we've got to overcome. You know,   Michael Hingson ** 57:23 I hear a lot of people when they talk about being gay or being transgender or whatever. And they, they tell others about it. They say they're coming out. But I'm wondering, to again, extrapolate that, do you ever encourage people like you're talking about whether it's dealing with abandonment, or whether it's dealing with any kind of life change? Do you is part of the coaching program that you do? Do you encourage them to go out and talk about it?   Wendy Cole ** 57:58 Yes. Because once you start talking with sharing your thoughts and sharing your feelings, with a really good friend. And I actually did this with people that were, relatively speaking complete strangers. I would meet people in a social setting and a bar, go to a restaurant where there's a bar sit at the bar, and you wind up talking with somebody. And, you know, sharing soda or something at that point that is highly personal and somewhat stressful or anxiety loaded. And hearing what the how they respond to it. That can be very helpful. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 58:55 Well, and it can be anything. Exactly. I'm really afraid of not having money, or I'm afraid of a job change or any kind of change. And you coach people through that and get them to the point where they can say, you know, it really wasn't what I thought at all. No. And I want to tell the world about I mean, I've asked that because of the fact that you so eloquently talked about how you then started speaking publicly and talking and speaking right to 300 people right off the bat, which is pretty cool.   Wendy Cole ** 59:32 That was that was something that I would have. I would have had it for the door before.   Michael Hingson ** 59:40 Yeah. It's, it's something that you never thought you would do. But you, you did it. Well, I understand that you're now writing a book. Tell me about that.   Wendy Cole ** 59:50 Well, yes. I've wanted to do this for a couple of years now. Good for   Michael Hingson ** 59:58 you. And And I,   Wendy Cole ** 1:00:01 I started out by writing what turned out to be a 36 page life story of my family and my life. And that that story is the first post in my blog on my website now. And one of the things that talks about is my father, my father was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI in Troy, New York, research chemical engineer, work for Texaco research labs for I think it was almost 45 years,   Wendy Cole ** 1:00:44 over 100 patents, and his name was a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War Two, my parents were products of the early 20th century, group lived through the Depression, lived through World War Two.   Wendy Cole ** 1:01:07 My father was very conservative. And he has my story on the on the blog post details. He wanted his son to continue the family name. And so he wound up with his first marriage having two daughters, and then with my mother had me. So that that was quite quite a significant thing about it for my life at age 10. When I said, Hey, I'm a girl, and insisted on that, that didn't go well, I'll bet it and no. And that was in a late 1950s, early, very early 60s. So in my book, what I'm doing is focusing more on my life. And what I learned as a result of it. One of the chapters that I'm working on now is having to do with parents who find out their children are transgender. Another one I thought that I'm working on is, has to do with the Wendy's 80% rule. So I also did, I also have been working on another chapter of where I highlight and go through all the differences between men and women. Other aspects of what I've learned. And a lot of it has to do with the whole issue of mindset shift, mindset change, and how we treat each other. Like, with the parents, so many, that's that's a really big problem in some areas of the country now. People find out their children are transgender, they throw them out of the house. There's a program here in where I'm living now. It's a it's a home. It's a facility where they take in kids who have been thrown out of their homes. That   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:48 because it happens for more reasons than just transgender. But, ya know,   Wendy Cole ** 1:03:52 it used to happen a lot for gay, but they don't do that so much anymore. That's become a little bit more acceptable.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:59 It's maybe not as much in this country as in other countries. But yes, yeah, there are a lot of reasons why things happens to kids, because it's not what the parents expected, as opposed to what is   Wendy Cole ** 1:04:11 right.   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:14 But it's really unfortunate. Now,   Wendy Cole ** 1:04:17 and I've, I've, I've had quite a few experiences in doing this writing that I'm working on. I never thought of myself as having been abused as a child. Now it was perfectly normal in the 1950s to get spanked. And the way my parents treated me as a result of all of this back then, I didn't think twice about it wasn't something I was would, would have considered or thought of as being abused or being abused by A psychiatrist or somebody like that. But yeah, by standards, it's abuse. Does   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:08 your book have a title yet? No, it doesn't. Okay,   Wendy Cole ** 1:05:13 I've got a collection of, I'm working with an editor and I have a collection of what we call rough titles, or chapters. And I'm going through working on each chapter as I feel the inspiration. When   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:33 do you anticipate the book being published?   Wendy Cole ** 1:05:37 Definitely next year. And definitely, I hope to have it in the, into the publisher by no later than the first half of next year.   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:51 Well, they will, they will, I'm sure have other edits and other things publishers do. Although it happens, that's okay. We're writing live like a guide dog right now, which is the book that I'm writing all about learning to be able to control or use fear in a positive way, rather than being blinded by it. We expect that out next July. So that's getting pretty exciting. We, we still get some things from the publisher about well, now we've got this, we saw this error, or we saw this, but it's gotten to be like, only two or three little minor things now. So we're getting pretty close to I think the publisher being totally happy, but also what they've been doing lately. Were good catches. So it's okay. Yep. Well, that's exciting.   Wendy Cole ** 1:06:45 That's the job of the editor. As I understand it, it is   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:48 as long as they don't try to change what you are and who you are and what you wrote. Right. Which is, which is good. Well, I want to thank you for being here. We have been doing this now for well over an hour. And it's been fun. I know time flies when you're having fun. Right? Well, I guess Thank you. But I want to thank you for being here. And I want to thank you for listening to unstoppable mindset, wherever you may be. We'd love to hear your thoughts about it. I'm sure Wendy would if people want to reach out to you maybe talk to you about coaching and so on. Wendy, how do they do that?   1:07:21 Wendycolegtm.net/connect. Do that once more, right? My website slash connect when they call jpm.net/connect. And GPM means GTM GTM gender transition mentor got   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:42 it? Okay, well, let's go jtm.com/dotnet. Right, cool ash   Wendy Cole ** 1:07:49 connect slash Connect. The domain name was the name that I picked in 2020 When I first started,   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:59 but you don't need to have a gender issue to talk to Wendy about transition. So please, reach out. She'd love to communicate and talk with you and assist in any kind of dealing with life changing and transition stuff. And I want to encourage you to do it. You can also reach out I'd love to hear from you and hear your thoughts about unstoppable mindset. You can reach me at Michael m i c h a e l h i  at accessibe A c c e s s i b e.com. Michaelhi at accessiBe.com. Or go to our podcast page, which is www dot Michael hingson.com/podcast. And Michael hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n so Michael hingson.com/podcast. Wherever you're listening, we would appreciate it if you give us a five star rating for the podcast. We appreciate your comments and your ratings. And when you're writing please write your comments. We'd love to hear what you think and and love your your thoughts. If you know of anyone else who want to be a guest on our podcast and Wendy same for you. We'd love to hear from you. We're always looking for guests, and more folks to come on everyone I believe has a story to tell. And we're always interested here I am interested in hearing your stories and, and giving people the chance to to help us learn more on the podcast. And also as I've mentioned, I am a speaker and travel and do a lot of speaking. So if anyone wants to reach out to me and learn about speaking again, feel free to reach out we'd love to talk with you about that as well. So one more time, Wendy, I want to thank you for being here and thank you for taking all this time to be with us today.   Wendy Cole ** 1:09:41 Thank you Michael for having me man. I love being here.   Michael Hingson ** 1:09:50 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.   As a Transition Mentor, Wendy Cole helps her clients face any significant life changes. I help others identify, explore, and eliminate the stress of being themselves and facing life changes. Since 2017, Wendy has guided others through transitions. Her life experiences are the tools she uses. She believes in the mind's powers; she practices mindfulness, shifting her beliefs and energy to support herself going forward, making profound changes in her life, health, and finding joy in being.   Knowing who you are, and not BEING who you are: this is the starting point of every Transitional situation. You KNOW who you truly are, in every aspect, but the outside is what matters. That is what people see. Taking that first transitional step is TERRIFYING. It's the stress: stress of the journey, stress of the mental weight, stress of worrying about the outside world… The physical transition is the easiest part; it's getting through the mental transition that holds us back.   Knowing from childhood she was a girl, Wendy yielded to familial and societal expectations to fit in. At age 67, Wendy changed her life with her transition. Beginning in January 2015 she focused internally: accepting who she really was, confronting fears, doubts, and anxieties that held her back for decades. She took the leap of faith to find freedom and joy in being herself. By July 2015, Wendy was living as a woman. She had her long-awaited surgery at NYU Medical in 2017. Wendy knows by focusing inwardly to find freedom and joy will benefit the rest of your life.   Ways to connect with Wendy: Website:  https://wendycolegtm.net Connect with Wendy: https://wendycolegtm.net/connect/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendy-cole-gtm/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@wendycole8326 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wendycolegtm   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/   https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes:

Ep139 Leaders Using Both Sides of the Brain, with Sonia Jeantet Author of The Integrative Brain, Sonia Jeantet developed the Integrative Leader model, leveraging the full potential of one's thinking abilities through wholebrain thinking. Neuropsychology demonstrates that the human brain cannot ignore a question. Questions activate the relevant parts of the brain to provide relevant answers. The trick is to know what questions to ask! [9:00] An integrative leader is going to take a look at the business. It's almost like, if you were doing a body scan and you were trying to see like, well, what parts of is, is my head healthy, is my heart healthy, is my stomach healthy? Start wherever you want to start. Ideally, you start in the left brain because that's where it requires more of the analytical part. And so you basically say like, so what business are we in? What is it that we really do here? What is it that we really are known for? Is that still relevant today? And then the next one would be to go to the right brain and try something else is going to the why. And basically, it's the understand, why are we doing this? Why are we using this technology? Why are we in a specific market? Why? Why would . . .? Why do our . . . ? e.g. why do our clients use our products? Why do they use our services? So then at that point in time, you sort of the overall bigger picture of the business. Now, let's go into how . . . How would we implement it? return on uh implementation who should be involved with this, who, who are, who should be on the project, who are our clients, who do we need to interact with in order to make this happen? And then stepping outside of that into the bigger picture, taking all four quadrants into consideration is so based on all of that, Where are we? Are we at the beginning phase? Are we at the end of a particular era? Do we need to start thinking about doing something differently? And then the last one is so when do we do this? When do we launch, when do we make this happen? ABOUT SONIA JEANTET Sonia Jeantet is Founder of Cima Executive Development, a coaching and consulting firm in Southern California. Sonia has been an international master personal and executive coach with Fortune 500 companies, and a Fortune 100 sales executive with Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation. Having coached more than 400 senior executives to grow and sustain profitable results, Sonia Jeantet is author of The Integrative Leader. ABOUT PODCAST HOST, NINA SUNDAY Connect with Nina Sunday on LinkedIn HERE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninasunday/ You can suggest a guest, ask a question, make a comment, subscribe to Nina's newsletter, "Second Curve Thinking".   To subscribe to Nina Sunday's personal blog go to https://www.brainpowertraining.com.au/ and scroll to bottom of the page to register.    To learn more about face-to-face training programs with Nina Sunday or one of her experienced Facilitators from Brainpower Training Pty Ltd in Australia Pacific, visit: https://www.brainpowertraining.com.au/signature-programs/   To visit Nina Sunday's speaker site for global speaking bookings visit: https://www.ninasunday.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Todes has a fascinating story to tell. The South African technologist and entrepreneur is TechCentral's guest in the final episode of season 1 of the popular TCS Legends podcast. Todes, who is perhaps best known for helping fight Telkom's attempts in the 1990s to extend its telecommunications monopoly to the internet, has a storied career that began in the mid-1970s in the pre-PC era of mainframes and minicomputers. In this episode of TCS Legends, Todes tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the founding of Compustat with his long-time business partner Mendel Karpul and how they went on to develop a word processor called GhostWriter (the name of which Microsoft later tried to wrestle away from them). In the show, Todes chats about: • How he and Karpul got their start selling a bureau-based accounting solution for pharmacies – and how they got their first big break. The solution was developed in Fortran using punch cards and ran on a minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation; • Their development of Survey 2000, a cadastral land surveying system – their first product for personal computers (developed by Hewlett-Packard, prior to the launch of the original IBM PC); • The development of GhostWriter, which became an early DOS-based competitor to the likes of MultiMate, WordStar and WordPerfect. • The launch of Internet Africa, a pioneering South African internet service provider that was later sold to Datatec (and later to Naspers); • The early days of the internet industry in South Africa, the formation of the Internet Service Providers' Association and the existential fight with Telkom over whether the telecommunications operator's government-sanctioned monopoly included the provision of internet services; • Working with Naspers, Mweb and the late Antonie Roux; • The launch of Korbitec (and its later sale to Naspers); and • How he and Karpul became early pioneers in the CD-ROM business. There's much more than this to Todes's story, making him one of the true legends of South Africa's technology industry. Don't miss this concluding episode of season 1 of TCS Legends. The series will return for season 2 in 2025. TechCentral

In this episode of Discover Daily, we explore a range of topics from the tech world and beyond. We begin with the potential sale of Humane Inc., a startup working on an AI-powered wearable device called the AI Pin. Despite significant funding and high-profile partnerships, the company has faced challenges, leading to a potential sale. We then move on to Nvidia's impressive first-quarter results, with the company's stock surging past $1,000 per share due to a 427% increase in data center revenue driven by AI demand.Next, we celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day, marking the first real-world Bitcoin transaction on May 22, 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. We also discuss China's new AI chatbot, 'Chat Xi PT,' based on President Xi Jinping's political philosophy to ensure compliance with socialist values.Finally, we examine the increasing concern of extreme air turbulence, particularly clear-air turbulence, largely attributed to climate change. Studies indicate severe turbulence has increased by 55% between 1979 and 2020 on busy North Atlantic routes, with projections suggesting further increases. We also pay tribute to Gordon Bell, a pioneering figure in computer architecture who made significant contributions to computing, including his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and his role in the development of the internet.From Perplexity's Discover feed:Nvidia stock tops $1,000 a sharehttps://www.perplexity.ai/search/Nvidia-stock-tops-AQRTP1YOTDiOfpDfgGMLrgThe history of Bitcoin Pizza Dayhttps://www.perplexity.ai/search/The-history-of-0xnlfaWPSnGpV2ro1U2QNAChina's Chat Xi PThttps://www.perplexity.ai/search/Chinas-Chat-Xi-3dDp2SXpQbOdC4DfHTF3hAGordon Bell's computer historyhttps://www.perplexity.ai/search/Gordon-Bells-computer-W7h9wfgkTBWiG3IfqyEcKQIncrease in extreme air turbulencehttps://www.perplexity.ai/search/Increase-in-extreme-LN2CI_8iQxO2V_WNrChxtwHumane AI explores sellinghttps://www.perplexity.ai/search/Humane-AI-explores-0yI7F0qIRfOcK82dvnaGeAPerplexity is the fastest and most powerful way to search the web. Perplexity crawls the web and curates the most relevant and up-to-date sources (from academic papers to Reddit threads) to create the perfect response to any question or topic you're interested in. Take the world's knowledge with you anywhere. Available on iOS and Android Join our growing Discord community for the latest updates and exclusive content. Follow us on: Instagram Threads X (Twitter) YouTube Linkedin

Sonia Jeantet is the founder of Cima Executive Development, a coaching and consulting firm in Southern California. She is also known in executive circles as “The Leadership-Suite Whisperer”. Sonia has been an international master personal and executive coach for twenty-five years, primarily with Fortune 500 companies, and a Fortune 100 sales executive with Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation. She has coached more than 400 senior executives to grow and sustain profitable results. Sonia is also the author of The Integrative Leader which shares the model that engages cognitive diversity. Click here to purchase The Integrative Leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Sponsor: Blinkisthttp://thisistheconversationproject.com/blinkist  Today's Rundown:New York police clear the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia Universityhttps://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1248401802/columbia-university-protests-new-york Threat 'neutralized' after active shooter reported outside Wisconsin middle schoolhttps://abcnews.go.com/US/wisconsin-mount-horeb-reported-active-shooter/story?id=109800261 Instagram and Twitch roll out new TikTok-like short-form video discovery featureshttps://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/instagram-tiktok-roll-new-tiktok-short-form-video-discovery-features-rcna150231  Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conferencehttps://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/ Wegovy and Zepbound Shortages Will Last Until Summerhttps://www.everydayhealth.com/weight/wegovy-and-zepbound-shortages-will-last-until-summer/   Marvin Harrison Jr. Has Refused To Sign His NFLPA Licensing Agreement Due To "Beef" With Fanatics From His College Dayshttps://www.totalprosports.com/nfl/report-marvin-harrison-jr-has-refused-to-sign-his-nflpa-licensing-agreement-due-to-beef-with-fanatics-from-his-college-days/ Dan Schneider sues over portrayal in ‘Quiet on Set'https://www.audacy.com/knxnews/news/local/dan-schneider-sues-over-portrayal-in-quiet-on-set Trump acknowledges he told Secret Service on Jan. 6 that he would 'like to go down' to the Capitolhttps://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-acknowledges-told-secret-service-jan-6-go-capitol-rcna150298  Website: http://thisistheconversationproject.com  Facebook: http://facebook.com/thisistheconversationproject  Twitter: http://twitter.com/th_conversation  TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@theconversationproject  YouTube: http://thisistheconversationproject.com/youtube  Podcast: http://thisistheconversationproject.com/podcasts     ONE DAY OLDER ON MAY 2:Dwayne Johnson (52)Jenna Von Oy (47)Princess Charlotte (9) WHAT HAPPENED TODAY:1978: The first unsolicited bulk commercial email (which would later become known as “spam”) was sent to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States. The aggressive marketer decided to invite 393 ARPANET users to a product presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation. The ARPANET was the network created by the U.S. Department of Defense and was the predecessor of the Internet.2011: U.S. Navy Seal Team Six raided a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden's body was buried at sea in accordance with Islamic rites later that day.2023: 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike. The strike would last through September 27, 2023. WORD OF TEH DAY: ruse / [ rooz ]a trick, stratagem, or artifice    PLUS, TODAY WE CELEBRATE: World Password Dayhttps://www.nationaldaycalendar.com/national-day/world-password-day-first-thursday-in-may#:~:text=The%20Registrar%20at%20National%20Day,year%20as%20World%20Password%20Day.     

Overview Recently Ken Fallon did a show on HPR, number 3962, in which he used a Bash pipeline of multiple commands feeding their output into a while loop. In the loop he processed the lines produced by the pipeline and used what he found to download audio files belonging to a series with wget. This was a great show and contained some excellent advice, but the use of the format: pipeline | while read variable; do ... reminded me of the "gotcha" I mentioned in my own show 2699. I thought it might be a good time to revisit this subject. So, what's the problem? The problem can be summarised as a side effect of pipelines. What are pipelines? Pipelines are an amazingly useful feature of Bash (and other shells). The general format is: command1 | command2 ... Here command1 runs in a subshell and produces output (on its standard output) which is connected via the pipe symbol (|) to command2 where it becomes its standard input. Many commands can be linked together in this way to achieve some powerful combined effects. A very simple example of a pipeline might be: $ printf 'World\nHello\n' | sort Hello World The printf command (≡'command1') writes two lines (separated by newlines) on standard output and this is passed to the sort command's standard input (≡'command2') which then sorts these lines alphabetically. Commands in the pipeline can be more complex than this, and in the case we are discussing we can include a loop command such as while. For example: $ printf 'World\nHello\n' | sort | while read line; do echo "($line)"; done (Hello) (World) Here, each line output by the sort command is read into the variable line in the while loop and is written out enclosed in parentheses. Note that the loop is written on one line. The semi-colons are used instead of the equivalent newlines. Variables and subshells What if the lines output by the loop need to be numbered? $ i=0; printf 'World\nHello\n' | sort | while read line; do ((i++)); echo "$i) $line"; done 1) Hello 2) World Here the variable 'i' is set to zero before the pipeline. It could have been done on the line before of course. In the while loop the variable is incremented on each iteration and included in the output. You might expect 'i' to be 2 once the loop exits but it is not. It will be zero in fact. The reason is that there are two 'i' variables. One is created when it's set to zero at the start before the pipeline. The other one is created in the loop as a "clone". The expression: ((i++)) both creates the variable (where it is a copy of the one in the parent shell) and increments it. When the subshell in which the loop runs completes, it will delete this version of 'i' and the original one will simply contain the zero that it was originally set to. You can see what happens in this slightly different example: $ i=1; printf 'World\nHello\n' | sort | while read line; do ((i++)); echo "$i) $line"; done 2) Hello 3) World $ echo $i 1 These examples are fine, assuming the contents of variable 'i' incremented in the loop are not needed outside it. The thing to remember is that the same variable name used in a subshell is a different variable; it is initialised with the value of the "parent" variable but any changes are not passed back. How to avoid the loss of changes in the loop To solve this the loop needs to be run in the original shell, not a subshell. The pipeline which is being read needs to be attached to the loop in a different way: $ i=0; while read line; do ((i++)); echo "$i) $line"; done <

Dr Nofsinger talks about injuries to Kirk Cousins, Aaron Rodgers, Grady Jarrett, Vita Vea and more. Dr. Nofsinger graduated from the Honors College at the University of Michigan with a BS in Computer Science. He then completed a master's degree at Brown University in Computer Science. Dr. Nofsinger started a software consulting company while following the Harvard Post Baccalaureate program for medical school. During this time, he published several papers on supercomputing with colleagues from Digital Equipment Corporation.

Paul V. McEnroe is an award-winning engineer who achieved remarkable feats during his 23-year tenure at IBM. He spearheaded the pioneering development of the Universal Product Code (UPC), also known as the barcode, marking a groundbreaking commercial application of laser technology, barcode scanning, and magnetic Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) coding. He chronicled his contributions to this transformative technology in his book, "THE BARCODE: How a Team Created One of the World's Most Ubiquitous Technologies," published by Silicon Valley Press in Fall 2023.Paul McEnroe BiographyPaul V. McEnroe is an award-winning engineer who achieved remarkable feats during his 23-year tenure at IBM. He spearheaded the pioneering development of the Universal Product Code (UPC), also known as the barcode, marking a groundbreaking commercial application of laser technology, barcode scanning, and magnetic Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) coding. He chronicled his contributions to this transformative technology in his book, "THE BARCODE: How a Team Created One of the World's Most Ubiquitous Technologies," published by Silicon Valley Press in Fall 2023.During his role as a group director at IBM, Paul further refined supermarket connectivity technology, evolving it into the Token Ring Local Area Network IEEE 805.2, connecting numerous computer systems worldwide. As Director of IBM's Raleigh Laboratory, he efficiently managed a vast team of engineers dedicated to the development of communication hardware and software. Paul also made significant strides at Trilogy Systems Corporation, where he pioneered multi-chip module technology and successfully led the company through a merger with Digital Equipment Corporation.Paul earned advanced engineering degrees from Purdue University and Stanford University, along with the honorary title of Doctor of Science, awarded by the Board of Trustees of the California State University and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, recognizing his technological achievements and community contributions. Paul was named the University of Dayton's Most Distinguished Alumnus in 1999 and received prestigious awards from Purdue University. Paul also received the IBM President's Award for the Development of the Supermarket System.Today, more than three decades into his retirement, Paul dedicates his time to ranching in the Santa Ynez Valley while actively supporting the Central Coast community as an advisor. His commitment extends to various non-profit organisations, including the Santa Barbara County Cattlemen's Association, the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, the Western Commercial Space Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the Cal Poly President's Council of Advisors. In 2011, Paul and his wife founded The McEnroe Reading & Language Arts Clinic at the University of California Santa Barbara, further solidifying their dedication to educational advancement and community betterment.Learn more about Paul McEnroe on https://www.openbusinesscouncil.org/wiki/paul-mc-enroeAbout Dinis Guarda profile and Channelshttps://www.openbusinesscouncil.orghttps://www.intelligenthq.comhttps://www.hedgethink.com/https://www.citiesabc.com/https://openbusinesscouncil.org/wiki/dinis-guardaMore interviews and research videos on Dinis GuardaSupport the show

Google's hidden search, Spotify and audiobooks, X removes headlines Elon Musk removing headlines from Twitter posts and how that enables fake news Concerns about Twitter misinformation affecting the 2024 election Apple considered DuckDuckGo for Safari private search before deciding against it Microsoft close to acquiring Activision Blizzard pending UK regulatory approval Google accused of secret changes to search queries to maximize ad revenue Ransomware attack on MGM hotels and casinos 23andMe customer data breach due to credential stuffing Meta considering charging for Facebook and Instagram access Apple TV adds support for VPNs Spotify expanding into audiobooks Video game Cyberpunk 2077 costing over $400 million to make Digital Equipment Corporation's history and legacy Brave conducting layoffs despite privacy focus CRTC to start regulating online streaming in Canada How gasoline is produced from crude oil Urban air mobility vehicles for intracity travel Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Wil Harris, and Glenn Fleishman Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: lookout.com expressvpn.com/twit paloaltonetworks.com/network-security/zero-trust-ot-security

Google's hidden search, Spotify and audiobooks, X removes headlines Elon Musk removing headlines from Twitter posts and how that enables fake news Concerns about Twitter misinformation affecting the 2024 election Apple considered DuckDuckGo for Safari private search before deciding against it Microsoft close to acquiring Activision Blizzard pending UK regulatory approval Google accused of secret changes to search queries to maximize ad revenue Ransomware attack on MGM hotels and casinos 23andMe customer data breach due to credential stuffing Meta considering charging for Facebook and Instagram access Apple TV adds support for VPNs Spotify expanding into audiobooks Video game Cyberpunk 2077 costing over $400 million to make Digital Equipment Corporation's history and legacy Brave conducting layoffs despite privacy focus CRTC to start regulating online streaming in Canada How gasoline is produced from crude oil Urban air mobility vehicles for intracity travel Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Wil Harris, and Glenn Fleishman Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: lookout.com expressvpn.com/twit PaloAltoNetworks.com

Google's hidden search, Spotify and audiobooks, X removes headlines Elon Musk removing headlines from Twitter posts and how that enables fake news Concerns about Twitter misinformation affecting the 2024 election Apple considered DuckDuckGo for Safari private search before deciding against it Microsoft close to acquiring Activision Blizzard pending UK regulatory approval Google accused of secret changes to search queries to maximize ad revenue Ransomware attack on MGM hotels and casinos 23andMe customer data breach due to credential stuffing Meta considering charging for Facebook and Instagram access Apple TV adds support for VPNs Spotify expanding into audiobooks Video game Cyberpunk 2077 costing over $400 million to make Digital Equipment Corporation's history and legacy Brave conducting layoffs despite privacy focus CRTC to start regulating online streaming in Canada How gasoline is produced from crude oil Urban air mobility vehicles for intracity travel Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Wil Harris, and Glenn Fleishman Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: lookout.com expressvpn.com/twit PaloAltoNetworks.com

Google's hidden search, Spotify and audiobooks, X removes headlines Elon Musk removing headlines from Twitter posts and how that enables fake news Concerns about Twitter misinformation affecting the 2024 election Apple considered DuckDuckGo for Safari private search before deciding against it Microsoft close to acquiring Activision Blizzard pending UK regulatory approval Google accused of secret changes to search queries to maximize ad revenue Ransomware attack on MGM hotels and casinos 23andMe customer data breach due to credential stuffing Meta considering charging for Facebook and Instagram access Apple TV adds support for VPNs Spotify expanding into audiobooks Video game Cyberpunk 2077 costing over $400 million to make Digital Equipment Corporation's history and legacy Brave conducting layoffs despite privacy focus CRTC to start regulating online streaming in Canada How gasoline is produced from crude oil Urban air mobility vehicles for intracity travel Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Wil Harris, and Glenn Fleishman Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: lookout.com expressvpn.com/twit PaloAltoNetworks.com

Google's hidden search, Spotify and audiobooks, X removes headlines Elon Musk removing headlines from Twitter posts and how that enables fake news Concerns about Twitter misinformation affecting the 2024 election Apple considered DuckDuckGo for Safari private search before deciding against it Microsoft close to acquiring Activision Blizzard pending UK regulatory approval Google accused of secret changes to search queries to maximize ad revenue Ransomware attack on MGM hotels and casinos 23andMe customer data breach due to credential stuffing Meta considering charging for Facebook and Instagram access Apple TV adds support for VPNs Spotify expanding into audiobooks Video game Cyberpunk 2077 costing over $400 million to make Digital Equipment Corporation's history and legacy Brave conducting layoffs despite privacy focus CRTC to start regulating online streaming in Canada How gasoline is produced from crude oil Urban air mobility vehicles for intracity travel Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Wil Harris, and Glenn Fleishman Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: lookout.com expressvpn.com/twit PaloAltoNetworks.com

About Alan: Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life in search of mindfulness tools that can be used by everyone (young and old) to transform their ability to speak at a professional level, as well as, to reduce the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and in between the words we speak. Meditation Coaching Schedule Time with Thom (Complimentary consultation)   Links from the Episode: Personal: https://www.facebook.com/alan.carroll.7359 Business: https://www.facebook.com/AlanCarrolltrains LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aca-mindful-you/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulnesseminar/ Web Site: https://acamindfulyou.com/   Become a Super-Fan of the Show Support ZEN commuter and get access to patron bonuses THANKS FOR LISTENING! Thanks again for listening to the show! If it has helped you in any way, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the page. Also, reviews for the podcast on iTunes are extremely helpful, they help it reach a wider audience.  The more positive reviews the higher in the rankings it goes.  Of course that means more peace in the world.  So please let me know what you think.  I read ever one of them. Did you enjoy the podcast?  

Enterprise Knowledge CEO Zach Wahl speaks with Stan Garfield: KM Author, Speaker, and Founder of the SIKM Leaders Community. Stan spent 8 years at Deloitte leading communities and enterprise social networking. Prior to that, he spent 25 years at HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Stan launched Digital's first knowledge management program in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq, and led the Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management Program for HP. Stan has published over 900 articles on leadership, innovation, knowledge management, communities of practice, enterprise social networks, and social media. He is also the author of the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring knowledge management thought leaders.

Gary Thuerk, often referred to as the "Father of Spam," pioneered the world of digital marketing with his groundbreaking unsolicited email campaign on May 2nd, 1978. The Internet was in its infancy. That very early incarnation was called ARPANET. The Digital Equipment Company sent an unsolicited commercial email to every ARPANET address on the West Coast. And just like that, email spam was born. The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. As the marketing manager at Digital, he was hoping to get attention, particularly from West Coast customers, for Digital's new T-series of VAX systems. Instead, he ended up getting crowned, for better or worse, as the 'Father of Spam'. He prefers to think of himself as the father of e-marketing. There's a difference. In fact, Gary's original spam "did work," according to him, "We sold $13 million or $14 million worth" of the DEC machines through that e-mail campaign. On the negative side, complaints started coming in almost immediately, and a few days after the original e-mail, an ARPANET representative called him up and chewed him out and made him promise never to do it again. Listen in to hear how the late Queen Elizabeth II also used ARPANET in 1976!

Welcome to episode 70 of the official podcast of Your Unofficial Boys. Every week we review beers, talk sports and discuss funny current events. Please like and Subscribe! Episode Guide: Beers of the Week: Perni-Haze by Wicked Weed Brewing (Asheville, NC) - Rating: 4.00 River Days Lager w/ Lime by Deep River Brewing Cop (Clayton, NC) - Rating: 4.00 Fact of the Week: Cinco de Mayo Isn't Mexico's Independence Day Mexico Celebrates the Military on May 5 Cinco de Mayo is also not a federal holiday in Mexico Cinco de Mayo celebrations came stateside thanks to F.D.R. Cinco de Mayo is recognized as a national holiday in the U.S. Mexico did achieve a major victory against the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 Mole Poblano is the official dish of the holiday This Week in History: On May 3rd, 1978 - First unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail ("spam") is sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the US west coast. On May 4th, 2008 -  Seth MacFarlane reaches an agreement worth $100 million with Fox to keep "Family Guy" and "American Dad" on television until 2012, making MacFarlane the world's highest paid television writer. On May 5, 1962 - "West Side Story" soundtrack album goes #1 & stays #1 for 54 weeks which is more than 20 weeks longer than any other album. On May 6th, 2004 -  TV sitcom "Friends" airs season finale in 10th and final season in US (52.5 million viewers) Your Unofficial News: Naked Landlord doesn't justify lower rent. Company offers $1,000 to track all the crashes in 'The Fast and the Furious' franchise. Pornhub blocks Utah due to new state law. Golden Retriever escapes from new home and walks 40 miles over 27 days back to former owners who got rid of him. Unofficial Fanzone: NFL Draft Re-Cap. League Leaders. Playoff Updates. Unofficial Thoughts: Just Hanging out We are proud to announce that Your Unofficial Boys has become Ambassadors for the ShankItGolf brand. Please use the following link and use promo code: “YourUnofficalBoys” to receive 15% off any purchases. https://shankitgolf.com/?ref=yourunofficialboys Please go follow us on our social media and subscribe to our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast. Also check out our website www.yourunofficialboys.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/your-unofficial-boys/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/your-unofficial-boys/support

Creating Space for Joy and Ease with Alan CarrollIn this episode of Curiously Wise, I had the pleasure of speaking with Alan Carroll, an educational psychologist specializing in transpersonal psychology. We talked about how and why to create space in our minds in order to free ourselves from the ego's negative thoughts and judgements so that we can transform our reality, and even bring some kindness into our lives and our world.To learn more about our guest: Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life in search of mindfulness tools that can be used by everyone (young and old) to transform their ability to speak at a professional level, as well as, to reduce the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and in between the words we speak.Website: Alan Carroll & AssociatesPodcast: Launching soon!Socials: @mindfulnessseminarRecommended Book(s): A Course in MiraclesCreditsAudio Engineer: Sam WittigMusic: Where the Light Is by Lemon Music StudioPhotography & Design: Asha McLaughlin/Tej Art & DesignTo learn more about Laurin Wittig and her work: HeartLightJoy.comCopyright 2023 Laurin Wittig

Linda is an amazing entrepreneur, and I am so grateful to call her a friend. She is incredibly smart, dedicated, and committed to changing how corporations find, attract, and retain talent. Her company TalentGuard is changing the game regarding workforce skills management. Despite their success, Linda continues to grind every day to continue to be a thought leader in how AI can develop the best talent for an organization. She and her team are breaking new ground with their software and approach, and I, for one, am so grateful she shared a little bit of their approach and some secrets to her entrepreneurial success. Here's a little bit more about Linda: Linda is the Founder and CEO, TalentGuard • Linda is the Founder and CEO of TalentGuard, a leading Workforce Skills Management Platform that enables organizations to meet business and workforce demands for reskilling, talent mobility and personalized development. • Before TalentGuard, she founded a successful career development franchise, The Ginac Group, serving clients across the U.S. and Canada. Prior to this, Linda was Vice President of Product Strategy at Cofiniti, where she was instrumental in pioneering Cofiniti's global entry into collaborative financial planning using cloud-based technology and helping to prepare the company for a successful exit to H&R Block.  • Linda also served as marketing executive at pcOrder collaborating with the team that led the company from a start-up to a NASDAQ-listed public corporation. In prior leadership roles, Linda served as Vice President of Marketing at EPSIAA, where she led global expansion of the brand through acquisition by Fiserv, Vice President of Business Development at Computer People and a few roles in marketing at Digital Equipment Corporation. • Linda is based in Austin, TX, USA, and has a Master's Degree in Career Development from John F. Kennedy University and a Bachelor's Degree in Liberal Arts from Norwich University Follow Linda on Instagram @lindaginac and be sure to check out her company at talentguard.com

Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life in search of mindfulness tools that can be used by everyone (young and old) to transform their ability to speak at a professional level, as well as, to reduce the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and in between the words we speak. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/expansionofconsciousness/support

The UK government has announced a consultation on crypto regulation. Dr. Wright believes that rather than new regulations, the priority should be to enforce existing financial laws because crypto is not outside the conventional financial system: “I mean, we should just actually start applying the rules and the argument that it's new, that it's online... It's really not.”As far as Bitcoin SV is concerned, new regulation should be welcomed, and probably won't require changes: “it'll just make our life easier as everyone else has to now start doing things that we've been doing already.”On the first of a new series of CoinGeek Conversations, Dr. Wright defends his sometimes aggressive style on social media. He admitted that “some of it” might be seen as the digital equivalent of yelling, but insisted that was “usually only when there's trolls and you want to shut them down”. On a recent YouTube interview he'd had some harsh words about Binance. On CoinGeek Conversations he backs up his view by describing an experiment he'd conducted to demonstrate how someone could make use of it in a way that could allow money laundering: “I set up in one day 10,000 email addresses and registered 10,000 accounts on Binance from the US, both in the US and the foreign Binance where I had a two BTC limit. And in theory, their argument is that they have AML provisions, but that's $40,000 an account. So that's $400 million a day that I could transfer. And I could have added more accounts.”Another way of showing that the ‘crypto' sector isn't operating as it should – if further proof is needed for anyone reading the news recently – is that there are more Bitcoins in total that are claimed to be on exchanges than the 21 million that will ever exist.“I mean in some of these like FTX and Binance together, there were over 40 million Bitcoin being sold …And even when you account for the same thing being sold in multiple exchanges, like some people argued, it's still too much Bitcoin.”As for selling blockchain solutions to industry, Dr. Wright believes there's a big marketing job to be done by nChain and others: “if there's no one telling them, then how do they know?” He compared this phase of developing the­ blockchain sector to his experience of the early days of the internet, when there were “big, massive conferences, multiday events” to which he was invited. “I went to parties by Cisco [and] from Sun. I got flown around the world when I was young because of Digital Equipment Corporation.”In that spirit (without the free air travel), the London Blockchain Conference is coming up from May 31 to June 2.In a second CoinGeek Conversation show next week, Dr. Wright discusses the origins of Bitcoin and explains how he set it going from his farm in Australia.                   

What is wrong with being a fire hose when speaking? Why is it important to put a space between the sounds that you make? Today, we're bringing you the speaking expert, Alan Carroll. He is passionate about helping people become a confident and mindful spacious speaker. In this episode, Alan talks about the power of space and pauses in speaking. He also gives us some tips on how we can practice Mindful Spacious Speaking even in our home. Don't miss:What is Yang Energy and how does it affect your speaking? The difference between an Automatic Speaker and a Conscious Mindful Spacious Speaker.Pausing creates relaxation in your mind and body, maximizing your connection to your database.When you're a Mindful Spacious Speaker, you will have the controlling switch.What experience are you bringing to your audience when you're speaking so quickly?When you become more spacious, you become less resistant to life as it flows.The importance of speaking in a relaxed state.The three pillars of articulation in public speaking.About Alan CarrollAlan Carroll, an Education Psychologist, specializing in Transpersonal Psychology, created Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. Alan authored The Broadband Connection – The Art of Delivering a Winning IT Presentation.He is passionate about giving people the experience of mindfulness and presence through public speaking. Alan's daily yoga and meditation practices, which he learned at Isha Foundation with Sadhguru, are another layer in the foundation he has created to be grounded and non-judgmental in the present moment.He has dedicated his life in search of tools that can be used by everyone to escape the psychological suffering caused by our Ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent spiritual dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think.Website: https://acamindfulyou.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlanCarrolltrains/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aca-mindful-you/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulnesseminar/About About the Host:Michelle Abraham - Podcast Producer, Host and International Speaker.Michelle was speaking on stages about podcasting before most people knew what they were, she started a Vancouver based Podcasting Group in 2012 and has learned the ins and outs of the industry. Michelle helped create and launched over 30 Podcasts in 2018 and has gone on to launch over 200 shows in the last few years, She wants to launch YOURS in 2022!14 years as an Entrepreneur and 8 years as a Mom has led her to a lifestyle shift, spending more time with family while running location independent online digital marketing business for the last 9 years. Michelle and her family have been living...

What's your relationship with pauses?  I always knew there was phenomenal power in them. But Alan Carroll made me respect pauses in an entirely new way.  His phrase, 'most people are asleep when they are speaking,' fascinated me. And I'm excited to present this deep and eye-opening conversation to you. Tune in, and you'll learn: How to be awake when you're speaking How to control ‘the instrument that makes the sound' - your body How to get into a state of relaxation How to be present when you speak and control the timing of your delivery How to manage and capture your thoughts How to overcome nervousness before speaking Alan Carroll is an Education Psychologist. He created Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago to transform people's ability to speak at a professional level by practicing Mindful Spacious Speaking. Before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. Alan authored The Broadband Connection – The Art of Delivering a Winning IT Presentation. Connect with him here: acamindfulyou.com  

Why aren't you connecting effectively with your audience when you speak? Alan Carroll is an expert in psychology and public speaking who discovered the secret. The secret is…space! Join us for a fun, engaging conversation about the power of space to empower your audience so you are more effective in everything you do.About the Guest: Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life in search of tools that can be used by everyone, to escape the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent mindful dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and between the words we speak.Free Gift Link: 30 Day Mindfullness Challenge www.ACAmindfulyou.com Password is “pause”Please support Alan Carroll by sending him connections to do a TEDx Talk. WEBSITE: www.ACAmindfulyou.com About the Host, Elaine Starling: An international TEDx speaker, bestselling author, coach and mentor, Elaine Starling is recognized for her video show and podcast, The Abundance Journey. After a comprehensive conversation with our higher power during a stroke, Elaine created The Abundance Journey 6 week course to share what she learned. As the Abundance Ambassador, Elaine mentors spiritual, growth-oriented women to align with Divine guidance to achieve their dreams. Elaine's clients experience more clarity, confidence, and commit to action that achieves their goals. Elaine Starling Social Media Links:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elaine.starling1/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elainestarling/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3eXgwdMYYzLicCEcB1DdrgTEDx Talk, “Abundance Is a Choice” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMQ0D4sfEys&t=1sWebsite: www.TheAbundanceJourney.comThanks for listening!Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page.Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!Subscribe to the podcastIf you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.Leave us an Apple Podcasts reviewRatings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.

Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life to searching for tools that can be used by everyone, to escape the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent mindful dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and between the words we speak. Listen & Subscribe on: iTunes / Stitcher / Podbean / Overcast / Spotify Contact Info Website: acamindfulyou.com Book: The Broadband Connection: The Art of Delivering a Winning IT Presentation by Alan Carroll  Most Influential Person Spiritual Teachers Effect on Emotions Sadhguru describes anger and he holds up a cup. He says anger is like drinking from a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die you are angry. And so why would you cause chemical changes in your physical body that causes diseases that are caused by the toxic release of chemicals because of the anger? Why would you do that? You would do that because the ego doesn't care about your body. The ego cares about being right. And what it does to my body is irrelevant. As long as I get my pound of flesh, I'm happy but when you start looking at your body, you recognize that there are loving emotions and there are emotions that are toxic. And so you stop because there's a space for you to observe. or that, hey, it's not beneficial for me to be angry. So I gotta figure out another strategy. That's mindfulness. Thoughts on Breathing Breathing is part of the autonomic nervous system, you do not have to think about breathing when you're speaking. It does it automatically. But the point being is that the amount of oxygen you take in when you don't think about breathing is about a little over a liter, of the six-liter capacity. So if you think about breathing, you can actually tell your body to take in more oxygen than is necessary, which gives you more prana, more energy. And so you can regulate your energy by becoming conscious of breathing, but you can't become conscious and breathing unless you are able to tell your body to breathe, you have to have the thought, the thought inside your head while you're standing up. If I'm an audience, I'm going to take a deep breath right now. Then you can take a deep breath, but you have to be able to pause to create that space in which you get to know and control the timing in order to tell your body to breathe. Suggested Resources Book: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment By Eckhart Tolle Book: A Course in Miracles: Combined Volume App: Isha Bullying Story Nothing is either right or wrong. But thinking makes itself so. You shouldn't be bullied, bullying is wrong. So in the reality in which you live, your ego is now engaged in there's something happening in your movie right now of this situation or this person what they're doing, and you're labeling it bullying, and so and so you're not present in the moment, you're dealing with a bully at the moment not objectively, logically right now, that's a bully, and so and so until you, until you're able to be more relaxed with the energy that's around the Bolinas. Then whatever solution you're going to try to figure out may not strategically be the best that maybe tactically it might work. immediately, but strategically you have to deal with the person who is looking at it and labeling it. And realizing that that label is not the best way to label it. Related Episodes Fuse Corporate With Calm; YorYoga Founder Kremena Yoga Wisdom Beyond The Mat; Kelly DiNardo Mindfulness in Yoga with Boho Beautiful, Juliana and Mark Spicoluk Special Offer Are you experiencing anxiety & stress? Peace is within your grasp. I'm Bruce Langford, a practicing coach and hypnotist helping fast-track people just like you to shed their inner bully and move forward with confidence. Book a Free Coaching Session to get you on the road to a more satisfying life, feeling grounded and focused. Send me an email at bruce@mindfulnessmode.com with ‘Coaching Session' in the subject line. We'll set up a zoom call and talk about how you can move forward to a better life.

Hacker Public Radio New Years Eve Show 2021 - 2022 Part 1 2021-12-31T10:00:00Z Welcome to the 9th Annual Hacker Public Radio show. It is December the 31st 2021 and the time is 10 hundred hours UTC. We start the show by sending Greetings to Christmas Island/Kiribati and Samoa Kiritimati, Apia. LINT Christmas Island/Kiribati Kiritimati Ken and Honkey talk about setting up streaming Mumble → Client (Butt) → Ice Cast https://www.mumble.info/downloads/ https://danielnoethen.de/butt/ https://icecast.org/ http://www.darkice.org/ Ken and Honkey talk about COVID-19 Omicron Variant https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/omicron-variant.html https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-support/coronavirus/about-coronavirus Ken, Honkey, and Netminer talk about mental health, Asperger's Syndrome, Eli The Computer Guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/mental-health-aspergers-syndrome https://aspergersfromtheinside.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-FpBZR7DbpvNj5UrFN8qUA https://www.youtube.com/c/Elithecomputerguypage Ken gets his HAM radio license http://www.arrl.org/getting-licensed Ken talks about rebuilding the house Growing up in the 60's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Greeley https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197497.The_High_Tech_Knight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frankowski What is a Dunny? https://www.warrenfahey.com.au/the-dunny-a-history/ https://www.pinterest.com.au/rosepat52/old-aussie-dunnies/ Farming Talk Isaac & James https://www.facebook.com/IsaacenJames/?fref=mentions&__tn__=K-R More Amateur Radio Harmonised Amateur Radio Examination Certificate (HAREC) http://www.zs6mrk.org/RAE%20Handleiding/The-HAREC-syllabus---CEPT-T_R-61-02-Annex-6---Class-A-only.PDF Raspberry Pi 400 Chat & Makulu Linux (installs Android APKs) https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ http://www.makululinux.com/wp/ https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=makulu Honkey Talks about his Pi4 and Steamlink, Diet Pi , Etcher + more https://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/Steam_Link/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.valvesoftware.steamlink&hl=en_US&gl=US https://apps.apple.com/us/app/steam-link/id1246969117 https://dietpi.com/ https://etcher.download/ https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager Archiving Old Vinyl https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/hi-fi-raspberry-pi/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWGU0lk_fr4 Tony H. Netminer & Dave Chat https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com/ https://mintcast.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantasket_Beach Buying PCs/laptops with Linux pre-installed. https://www.entroware.com/store/ https://junocomputers.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC UK Fiber Optic ISP https://cityfibre.com/ Group Chat about various tech topics BSD flavors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution https://www.openbsd.org/ https://www.freebsd.org/ https://nomadbsd.org/ Boxes VM Manager https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-boxes/stable/ ARPANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET Leena / Lena Lenna or Lena is a standard test image widely used in the field of image processing since 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX Knight TV /Tom Knight (Knight TV) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Knight_(scientist) http://pdp-6.net/knight-tv/knight-tv.html PDP 11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11 Haiku OS https://www.haiku-os.org/ Motorola StarMax Mac Clones https://everymac.com/systems/motorola/index-motorola-starmax-mac-clones.html DECstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation VMS / OpenVMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS DEC Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18752/dec-alpha Ultrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix PowerMac G5 https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/index-powermac-g5.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5 Tru64 Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX https://winworldpc.com/product/tru64/50 TU58 http://gunkies.org/wiki/TU58_DECtape_II http://web.frainresearch.org:8080/projects/mypdp/tu58.php http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/dectape/tu58/EK-0TU58-UG-001_TU58_DECtape_II_Users_Guide_Oct78.pdf ICL 1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited http://www.ict1900.com/ DECwriter http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.html https://vt100.net/docs/tp83/chapter14.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECwriter ISDN Phone Lines https://uh.edu/~wrice/phone.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Services_Digital_Network X.25 https://www.lifewire.com/x-25-816286 https://networkencyclopedia.com/x-25/ IMP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor https://www.techopedia.com/definition/7692/interface-message-processor-imp UK Academic Network. JANET (Joint Academic Network) https://www.jisc.ac.uk/janet/history UK Academic Coloured Book Protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols Anne & Lynn Wheeler https://garlic.com/# https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ George 3 Operating System http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/pdfs/icl1900_intro_george3.pdf Hercules MVS Emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator) http://www.hercules-390.org/ Doctor Who, K9, Ultraman, and Thunderbirds+ more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who%3A_The_Curse_of_Fatal_Death https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2x0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1102732/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraman_(1966_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarionation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who:_The_Curse_of_Fatal_Death https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_Night_(1999) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfQFmZCbOfM Log4J Vulnerability https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/apache-log4j-vulnerability-guidance Hacker Public Radio show mention -- Fixing a Noisy Blower Motor http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=3499 Netminer suggests a newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery Sysadmin humor Better than a 45 to that damn server. . Nike Missile Site mention http://ed-thelen.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nike_missile_sites "Bubba shot the Jukebox" song reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbQW7rDOPxI ClaudioM's Blog - Hello from the End of 2021!: https://claudiomiranda.wordpress.com/2021/12/31/hello-from-the-end-of-2021/

Jon Callas is a computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle. He has held major positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple, PGP, and Entrust, and is considered "one of the most respected and well-known names in the mobile security industry. His views stem from big tech's mass pooling of personal data for advertising and the polarization within Silicon Valley. While some companies are committed to privacy, many more earn their revenues from selling user data. Callas has stated that if the advertising market takes a downturn, companies that protect their users' data are the most insulated from harm. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/out-of-the-blank-podcast/support

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 13th, 2022The Rise and Fall of DECWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for June 13th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on June 13th included Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Tim Bray, Ian Grunert, and XXX. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: Pronunciation and mispronunciation Bryan's DEC reading list: The Ultimate Entrepreneur by Glenn Rifkin, George Harrar Learn, Earn & Return - My Life as a Computer Pioneer by Harlan Anderson High-tech Ventures: The Guide For Entrepreneurial Success by C. Gordon Bell, John McNamara Computer engineering: A DEC view of hardware systems design by C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, John McNamara Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital by Spencer E. Ante DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation by Edgar H. Schein, Paul J. Kampas, Michael M. Sonduck, Peter S. Delisi @1:29:05 Ian mentions Computer History Museum's oral history program prompting strong recommendations: Ian: Bernie Lacroute Adam: Pierre Lamond Bryan: Dave Cutler If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Array Cast - May 13, 2022 Show Notes[01] 00:01:25 https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/Forums[02] 00:02:10 https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode26-stevan-apter[03] 00:02:28 Joel Kaplan video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni0Kj3Xjk1k&t=1s[04] 00:03:10 https://www.morganstanley.com/[05] 00:03:15 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Arthur_Whitney[06] 00:03:25 https://www.1010data.com/[07] 00:10:20 APL-DI https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800136.804492[08] 00:12:10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks[09] 00:12:36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Shaw[10] 00:15:25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos[11] 00:17:00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation[12] 00:18:15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100[13] 00:18:55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates[14] 00:18:55 Gates APL Interpreter https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm#tc30[15] 00:23:11 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Bob_Bernecky[16] 00:26:15 https://mathworld.wolfram.com/NearestNeighborProblem.html[17] 00:29:26 Generalisation of the Axis operator apl.wiki/Rank (operator)[18] 00:30:50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY[19] 00:31:37 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/A[20] 00:34:00 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/K[21] 00:34:17 APL machine https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL_Machine[22] 00:35:07 Analogic https://www.analogic.com/?locale=en[23] 00:37:07 Aaron Hsu video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBf6A2eAA[24] 00:41:19 http://www.nsl.com/[25] 00:43:45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi[26] 00:43:52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbolic_thought[27] 00:52:30 https://www.ubs.com/ca/en.html[28] 00:54:20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Muller_(businessman_and_singer-songwriter)[29] 00:56:30 https://www.dyalog.com/[30] 00:57:10 https://shakti.com/[31] 01:00:35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs[32] 01:01:30 https://www.jsoftware.com/#/README[33] 01:04:09 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Ken_Iverson[34] 01:08:30 Steven's blog post https://www.5jt.com/all-that-jazz-the-librarian-s-song[35] 01:12:18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis[36] 01:13:33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot[37] 01:14:15 Society of Quantitative Analysts https://www.sqa-us.org/[38] 01:14:47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmuel_Winograd https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Winograd_Fourier_transform_algorithm[39] 01:14:41 Yorktown Heights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson_Research_Center[40] 01:14:52 John Cocke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYwd30iWVvw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke_(computer_scientist)[41] 01:15:25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Cooper[42] 01:16:19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wolfe_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_programming https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~brecht/cs838docs/wolfe-qp.pdf[43] 01:16:41 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio[44] 01:18:54 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay[45] 01:18:58 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stepanov[46] 01:20:09 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike[47] 01:22:05 https://www.reddit.com/r/apljk/[48] 01:22:30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)[49] 01:24:43 Conor's videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1kBxkk2bcG78YBX7LMl9pQ[50] 01:25:13 Rodrigo's videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd_24S_cYacw6zrvws43AWg[51] 001:25:01 "Easy to Learn - Worth Mastering" https://dyalog.tv/APLSeeds22/?v=o-0xk96_BNw[52] 01:25:55 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Outer_Product[53] 01:26:55 BQN https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/[54] 01:27:25 https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Inner_Product[55] 01:29:55 Ripple shuffle expression https://tryapl.org/?clear&q=%7B%E2%8D%B5%5B%E2%8D%8B%E2%8D%922%7C%E2%8D%B3%E2%89%A2%E2%8D%B5%5D%7D%27ABCDEabcde%27&run

In 1978 Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corporation, needed to send a message to potential clients. Instead of sending each person a message one at a time, he had his assistant write one single mass email. Spam email was born.  Host Mike Hover (@hoverdrive) talks with Kristina Thuerk (Dana Ehrmann @ehr_head) about her father's legacy. The legacy is voiced by Mark Rosenthal (@markrosenthal)       Music provided by audionautix.com and additional sound effects music provided by freesfx.co.uk.

Nate, Logan, and Evan discuss Netflix's slowing subscriber growth and Gov. Beshear's statements on legalizing medical marijuana in Kentucky. This week in tech history: The first ever spam email goes out advertising Digital Equipment Corporation mainframe computer system. Now, 14.5 billion spam emails are sent each day :( Watch Middle Tech's Friday Updates LIVE at 8:30am EST on Instagram every week! @MiddleTechPod Today's Friday Update is sponsored by KY Innovation and Render Capital Visit us at MiddleTech.com

“You may not be able to control the thoughts the ego thinks, but you can certainly control the thoughts that the ego speaks.” — Alan Carroll   A lot of the time, we get lost in our train of thought because it's a continuous stream of consciousness. Therefore, your ego gets in the way because your thoughts are your ego. Alan Carroll, a Transpersonal Psychologist, focuses on the 5th Greek element which is space to be utilized in becoming more mindful and present as we speak our minds.  In his experiments, he discovered that as you create spaces consciously, you become more spacious. Space is beyond the physical and literal but if you can create space between the words that you speak, by just pausing, it also connects to the thoughts that you think. With this space, there will be a command or a switch to control when you want to stop and when you want to go. To do that, practicing mindfulness and being present is important. This creates a space of stillness or a space of love.   Wellness Nuggets: ●       That ability to stop gives you choice about what's the next action you're going to take ●       STOP stands for S: Stop, T: Take three breaths, O: Observe and P: Perceive ●       You're not going to get to a higher level of consciousness until you can love where you're at right now and that means you have to have loving thoughts about yourself   We invite you to ignite the Wellness Warrior in YOU!   About the Guest: Alan Carroll, an Education Psychologist, specializing in Transpersonal Psychology, created Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that he was a Senior Sales Training  Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. Alan authored The Broadband Connection – The Art of Delivering a Winning IT Presentation.  He is passionate about giving people the experience of mindfulness and presence through public speaking. Alan's daily yoga and meditation practices, which he learned at Isha Foundation with Sadhguru, are another layer in the foundation he has created to be grounded and non-judgmental in the present moment.  He has dedicated his life in search of tools that can be used by everyone to escape the psychological suffering caused by our Ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent spiritual dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think.  Website: https://acamindfulyou.com/ (acamindfulyou.com) Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/AlanCarrolltrains ( https://www.facebook.com/AlanCarrolltrains) Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/mindfulnesseminar/ ( https://www.instagram.com/mindfulnesseminar/) LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/aca-mindful-you/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/aca-mindful-you/) YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpGGeQuWjGOTERBsWi10b4A/featured ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpGGeQuWjGOTERBsWi10b4A/featured)

It is not often that most of us have the opportunity and honor to meet a real trendsetter and pioneer. Today, you get to meet such an individual.   Mike Paciello has been a fixture in the assistive technology world for some thirty years. I have heard of him for most of that time, but our paths never crossed until this past September when we worked together to help create some meetings and sessions around the topic of website accessibility. As you will hear, Mike began his career as a technical writer for Digital Equipment Corporation, an early leader in the computer manufacturing industry. I won't tell you Mike's story here. What I will say is that although Mike is fully sighted and thus does not use any of the technology vision impaired persons use, he really gets it. He fully understands what Inclusion is all about and he has worked and continues to work to promote inclusion and access for all throughout the world.   After you hear our podcast with Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to email me at michaelhi@accessibe.com to tell me of your observations. Some directories do not show full show notes. For the complete transcription please visit https://michaelhingson.com/podcast About our Guest: Mike Paciello has been a pioneer and influential figure in the accessibility industry for more than three decades. He wrote the first book on web accessibility and usability (Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities), and has since achieved many notable milestones. He is the founder of WebABLE.Com and co-founder of WebABLE.TV. Mike currently serves as AbleDocs VP of US Operations. Mike served as co-chair of the United States Federal Access Board's Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee (TEITAC), co-founder of the International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD), and was recognized by President Bill Clinton for his contribution to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). He was the recipient of the 2016 Knowbility Lifetime Achievement and the 2020 ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium Social Impact awards. Contact Mike at mpaciello@webable.com or mpaciello@abledocs.com About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Welcome to another edition of unstoppable mindset. Thanks for joining us this week, we have a guest I've been looking forward to for quite a while his name is Mike Paciello. And I'm not going to tell you a whole lot about him because he gets to do that himself, except I will tell you that he's very deeply involved in the web accessibility world. Why do we deal with web accessibility a lot on this podcast? And why do I continue to bring it up. Because if you've listened to many of these podcasts, you know that there is an ever widening gap between websites that are accessible and those that are not. And it is something that we all need to deal with. Because there are so many people in this world who don't get to access all the websites that everyone else can access for one reason or another. Mike has been very deeply involved in dealing with those issues for a lot of years. And I'd like to introduce you to him now. And we can talk more about it. Mike, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Mike Paciello  02:23 Thanks, Mike. Great to be here.   Michael Hingson  02:27 So how did you even get involved in this? I mean, you you are cited you, you, as far as I know, don't have any what people would call physical disabilities and all that. So how did you get involved in all this?   Mike Paciello  02:41 Well, it's a it's a long and winding story that probably folks have heard many times in the past, but I was worked at a a computer company that no longer exists anymore. It maybe exists in parcels at HP. But it was Digital Equipment Corporation back in the 80s. I actually   Michael Hingson  03:03 just this morning was reading something from someone on a list where they were talking about the old desktop synthesizer.   Mike Paciello  03:10 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know that memories. Yeah, I know the guys that worked on that. And Tony Vitaly was one of the lead engineers on that. And Tony, now we're good friends. He passed away several years ago from ALS. Ironically enough, it he discovered it while he was at the seaside conference. Boy, I think so. So this was in the late 90s, maybe in early 2000s. But at any rate, I was working as a technical writer at Digital in the mid mid 80s, right through the early 90s. And was asked to take on a project voluntarily, which involved providing our computer software documentation we did mostly operating system software, to the National Braille Press in Boston. And I just thought it was interesting. And so I followed up and they said, and maybe you'll get a request once or twice a year. I hadn't had the project for more than a few hours. And I got a cost a call right away from Bill reader who was the writer? Yep. You know, Bill, yes. And he said, Hey, we need this, this this this? Can you bring these down? And I said, Sure, I'd have been happy to. And so I hadn't carried the physical publications, which as I found out, they would then take and transcribe into and reproduce in Braille. And Bill was awesome. He gave me a complete tour of, you know, the factories and the offices and what they did. And right away he started talking about, you know, screen reader. Well, actually, it was a screen reader technology that was braille translation software at that particular time. It's so that that piqued my interest, and i i At the same time I was doing that I also happen to be working in the very first instances of markup language. This is pre SGML, which, as anyone that knows the standardized, standardized or Standard Generalized Markup Language was the precursor to HTML, which is makes up the web. But it was actually a, a markup language used to basically mirror what an editor, a physical editor of a red publication would do, you know, take a ticket document from an individual divided up into, you know, logical portions on on, you know, within a page. So this is a paragraph, this is a list, this needs to be indented. This is a title, this is a heading, those type of things. And Dale SGML could do that electronically. And at the time, I specifically was working on a project that involves converting our electronic documents or digital into postscript, which anyone knows a postscript is that free PDF? Yes. So I thought to myself, if we can do these electronic conversions from basically a text markup file, to a postscript file, which is, you know, kind of a graphical a page, right? Right. Why not output it to Braille? And that led me on my quest to go figure out how to do that.   Michael Hingson  06:36 So what did you What did you end up doing?   Mike Paciello  06:39 Well, I curse I had established a few contacts, because of this arrangement that digital had with the National Braille Press. And one of those contexts was George cursher. Anyone that knows anything about this business knows that George is a champion and a hero, and just one of the greatest human beings I've ever known. And Matt, and it's great to be to be called a friend and a colleague of his,   Michael Hingson  07:08 and George was the person who kind of really was the proponent of the DAISY format, which is used today not only in audio recordings to make them fully accessible and navigable, but he did it for Braille as well.   Mike Paciello  07:22 That's right. That's exactly right. And I'll tell you, a lot of people remember George for when he worked for what you would call it out there in New Jersey and Princeton for the blind index,   Michael Hingson  07:36 RFP coding, right. Now Learning Ally, right,   Mike Paciello  07:40 right, right, exactly. However, before he joined RFB, nd he had his own little company called computerized books for the blind, write it so I established a contact with him, he and I started talking about markup languages. He pulled it a couple of other people like Joe Sullivan, from Duxbury Systems. And Yuri Minsky, who was the President CEO of soft spot, which was a major producer of SGML editing software. And we formed together with many other colleagues, also international colleagues, what was a working group called the International Committee for accessible document design. We did that in the late early 90s, early 90s.   Michael Hingson  08:30 So you, you put some processes together? And how successful were you at being able to get postscript translated into Braille?   Mike Paciello  08:43 Well, no, no, as far as I know, there was no success there. Yes, story. The story with postscript is, you know, Adobe, eventually converted everything into a PDF. And that's where the success so to speak, relatively speaking, came in play. Adobe actually had members that were part of our, the internet international committee for accessible document design. And they got involved effect their lead engineer at that time was Carl Orthey. And Carl met with George myself in another great colleague, who worked with me at that time at Digital TV Raman. And we looked at ways of, again, taking the PDF and converting into something that was accessible. So that's that's so there's no real story as far as I know around postscript. It's all about PDF at that level.   Michael Hingson  09:42 It's, it's interesting. You had a lot of good beginnings and laid a lot of foundations. But But today, it seems like a lot of the accessibility that we're seeing is still somewhat sporadic and spotty. In that not everything gets to be put into or can easily be put into an accessible form. Even with Adobe, there is a lot of document, there are a lot of documents that are released and created by various people that aren't accessible. Why is it that Adobe and other organizations don't really follow through and try to create native accessibility? Right from the outset?   Mike Paciello  10:28 Yeah, well, you know what that is, it's it comes down very simply to it's a business decision. You know, corporations. for all intents and purposes, they've got a mindset, they're all about reporting back to their boards of directors, and reported profits. I mean, it's just a business's business, especially here in you know, in this in this country, where we're driven, you know, by a by, you know, why the markets in so businesses, businesses look at it, and I've yet to see this not be true. Even for those companies that I believe Excel, where accessibility is concerned, a businesses have never been able to figure out really how to turn accessibility as you and I know it into a business value proposition, they haven't figured out how to make it, how to make money out of it, there are all kinds of numbers that are thrown out there about discretionary income by people with disabilities. But it doesn't come down to that. It's it's channels, it's business lines, it's, it's we're talking about, you know, companies don't want to talk about making business unless we're talking about billions of dollars now. And then, you know, it won't take much longer looking at the recent, the recent profit reports, you know, by by Apple and Amazon, that we're going to be talking about trillions of dollars. So if we can generate that kind of thing, then then, you know, a business business really does want to want to investigate. And secondarily, designing architecting, developing all of the engineering lifecycle or product lifecycle disciplines that are associated with ensuring that whatever it is that we're building, and I'll just use just a software environment, because that's, that's what I'm most familiar with, whatever software platform or interface that we're designing or developing, you know, it has to be accessible, they're not doing enough, you know, out of the box, it's not being done in the concept, you know, conceptual design and architectural, and then fall all the way through. If you know, what I'm doing right now, as I'm illustrate, I'm using, you know, kind of a gesture to show, you know, for the beginning, all the way to the end of the lifecycle, there, every piece of that needs to be accounted for, where ensuring something is usable, and accessible to a variety of people, disabilities, and the persona types associated with it. And companies just typically don't make that kind of investment. Unless someone at the top is driving it. And, you know, you can look at, you know, I think Microsoft is a is a good company right now to kind of hold up there, because I believe that they've done a great job at raising the bar. Because all of its being driven by Jenny in by, you know, by their CEO, you know, he himself has, I think, at least one son with with a disability. So he's got a personal connection to it, but you don't see that at 90% of most businesses. So again, like I said, it's a, it's a value cost analysis, that, you know, from an accessibility standpoint, it's probably never going to really, truly wash. Now that even   Michael Hingson  14:04 go ahead. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just gonna   Mike Paciello  14:07 say, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't tackle this pervasive, really, you know, like global challenge, using other means by which to, you know, kind of change the world and change thinking. And I really think that that's probably another big piece of it.   Michael Hingson  14:28 We see them with Microsoft, but even with Microsoft, now with new windows 11. There are a lot of things that are technically accessible, but they're not obvious and they're not obviously located so that one can see them, you know, as an example. It used to be in his latest Windows 10. If you wanted to go to what we're now calling even with Windows and app that's installed on your machine, you hit the start button. And then you could use the arrow keys to go down and find the AP. But that's not the case in Windows 11 anymore. And there are additional keystrokes or other things that you need to do. They have not kept the same obvious process. And yes, it's accessible because you can find it. But is that really is usable, and was a lot of thought given to that when they were creating windows 11. And it seems to me that Jenny has has done a lot and we're speaking by the way for those who don't know, of Jenny Lefevere, who is the Chief Accessibility Officer for Microsoft, and Jenny is deaf, we met at a convention a few years ago. And obviously, you, you work with her pretty well. But I just think that there are things that they aren't, they're still not giving a lot of thought or as much thought as they should, to some of the architecture and ways to make Windows is obviously usable as it should be.   Mike Paciello  15:59 You know, I mean, Mike, I can't, I can't deny that I totally agree. I think, you know, what we see out on the web in terms of social networking, social Mark marketing, we see what Microsoft wants us to hear, right, but we're not inside. In I am not at all surprised, because I frankly, I hear this about a lot of the other, you know, big companies, who was it was at Forbes was at Forbes, or was a fast company that just came out with this glowing article. It in mentioned, it was it was really kind of interesting. It mentioned Microsoft, Amazon, Google. Facebook, who else was in there apple in all these great, wonderful things that they do in I mean, you can't deny the fact that they've made some awesome, you know, steps forward and done some great things in behalf of the entire disabilities marketplace. Right. But force, but at the same time, you and I both know, I see every single day, if not hundreds, you know, dozens, you know, if not dozens, hundreds. So whichever way you want to look at it, I have people who are seeing exactly what you're saying. Yeah, great, but now I can't use Windows, I've seen that. I've seen that whole discussion on Windows 11. So what happened? Who's Who's not watching the the watching the ball there? How can you not at this point in the game, when you're in industry, as mature as Microsoft is? Including the accessibility space? How could you miss these things? You can't. So someone's making decisions that should either is, is not well educated, well versed and accessibility, or be and I think this tends to be more likely scenario. They're doing it because they're being driven by whatever financial incentives that they have. Right?   Michael Hingson  18:04 Right. But But here's, here's another aspect of that. I agree that in especially in this country, we tend to be very driven by the financial aspects of it. What Uh, what about our stockholders, we've got to report directly to them. And they're the only ones who matter, which I'm not convinced is true. But that's what what companies do. But when do we get to see companies believe? It says much about the cost of doing business to include people with disabilities, and we'll deal with blindness here. But in general, to include people with disabilities as it is others look at Adobe, if you install Adobe Acrobat, or if you look at a lot of the things that that you can do with Acrobat, and Acrobat, DC today, we have Acrobat, DC, licensed as I do here, you get options for different kinds of languages, you get a variety of different kinds of settings. And obviously, those were put in because people somewhere thought it was important to have more than English, then of course, part of that is you want Acrobat to be able to be marketed all over the world. But even in this country, you want Acrobat to be able to produce documents and English and Spanish and Chinese and Japanese and other languages as well. But so there's a mindset there, that that's important. But I think part of the issue with corporate decisions is there isn't a mindset yet about dealing with disabilities, even though more than 20% of all people in this country and around the world have some sort of disability there isn't a mindset of inclusion for those people yet.   Mike Paciello  19:56 Yeah, I totally agree. Um, you know, we all I often talk about culture, we often talk about acumen, we I used to have a domain that was called thinkaccessibility.com. And it's true with the mindset is, they're just not doing it. But I also feel like in I kind of apologize, because I haven't been able to come up with the right answer yet. But I used to talk in terms of what, you know, what, how do we change the world? I mean, that's, that's what we're trying to talk about, right? We're talking about changing the world change the world's mindset, as it relates to people with disabilities, in, in accessibility. In terms of any kind of interaction or, or or inclusive design doesn't matter whether it's hardware, or software, wood, or paper, or electronic. The same thing is true all the way across the board, I still see buildings that are built, and they don't meet the ADA standards. Right. Right. So So what is it? I used to talk about, you know, back in the, in the 90s, particularly, we went through this phase, where alternative energy became, you know, a big thing. In many governments, many, many governments put billions of dollars into alternative energies for a lot of reasons, right? They want to stop fossil fuel pollution and things along those lines, right? The the atmosphere, but there were a lot of reasons for doing it. But the the government's and the people, the scientists behind it, saw, had had the foresight, they saw a vision of what the world would be like, in 5060, you know, 100 years or decades ahead, in from the term from the standpoint of preservation, for from the standpoint of, you know, global warming, pollution, things along those lines, it became intrinsic to life, for every human. We haven't achieved that in the disability accessibility. A world in our world, we have not created a mindset that says, We need to change the world, because if we don't, this is what's going to happen in the years to come. Right? That makes sense. It does.   Michael Hingson  22:31 And, you know, part of the problem is the term disability is still, we're great at redefining words, right? I mean, we've re defined, we've redefined diversity all over the place. And now diversity generally tends not to include disabilities. And will but we haven't been able to define disability yet to not mean you're not able. And so it is a problem. And I'm just not sure how we're going to get around that. But somewhere, we need to do that, to get the mindset to shift so that people can truly understand and accept that just because a person has a different ability set than they and it doesn't include some of the things that that their ability set includes. That does go the other way as well. And it isn't all of a physical nature necessarily.   Mike Paciello  23:24 I totally agree. I tell you every I mean, what's also factually true is, you know, the profession, the business and the community that you and I are part of, is it is in and of itself kind of a civil rights notion, right? It is. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the US, it's absolutely that, well, actually, most countries, it's absolute. That's why you have, you know, Ada, like legislator, legislation and laws throughout, you know, throughout the world. But here's the interesting thing about that. Every great civil rights movement, every great movement, has always had a great leader and a vocal leader and a visible leader. And I've always thought that that's one of the things that we miss, we don't really have, we have some great leaders, we've got some great people out there. Jenny being one of them, for example. You know, when I, when I grew up, Ellen Brightman was like, it was like my hero key and Gary Moulton. Were just, you know, awesome. Good. George cursher, you know, to this day is, but we don't have, you know, a Martin Luther King, like individual, you know, a Mahatma Gandhi, like individual who, who doesn't just bring the cause, but brings the recognition in, in in creates change as a result of that in in so I still kind of think that that's something that we we probably need in this industry to to to change the world the way that we want to change it.   Michael Hingson  24:56 Yeah. And and the problem is that to bring the recognition that take a Martin Luther King, the the thing is, there were some differences about him. But there were enough similarities between him and everyone else that people could rally around him. And I'm not sure that when you're viewing people as physically disabled or developmentally disabled, when you bring that disability in, there's, there's a part of it, that I'm not sure that anyone yet has figured out a way to get around the closest person who I ever encountered. And I never met him personally, but person who I think could have achieved that, although not in the exact same strident way that Dr. King did would be Jacobus timber, the founder of the National Federation of the Blind. He was he was the deep philosopher, and extremely vocal about it and very innovative, but he was blind. And I think that that's that problem is what we face in terms of dealing with disabilities.   Mike Paciello  26:11 Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, so I mean, I think that's just one, one piece of the, you know, of the puzzle, so to speak, to try to solve this worldwide mindset that that needs to be changed.   Michael Hingson  26:31 Yeah, and I'm not sure how we're going to get around it. Because I think we also tend to not be violent, and we shouldn't be violent about what we do. But we do need to somehow cross this barrier. And maybe the way we need to do it is to be more forceful, collectively, and get people to to notice, but there are things that that companies could do take apple. So Apple, finally came to the realization and it took in part of the threat of a lawsuit to make it happen. But Apple finally took the iPhone and made it accessible. The iPod. And they even went so far as to make iTunes you available, although I don't hear as much about iTunes you today. But still, it was the method by which a number of people could get class lectures, and so on. And they made all of that accessible. The problem that I see with what Apple did is that they didn't take that last step. That is to say, there is still nothing in the App Store today that mandates any level of accessibility for the apps that they allow to go through the store. And they could make an incredible change in mindset and shift in mindset. If they would just say, your app has to have some level of accessibility. And that's going to be different for different kinds of apps. But at least I ought to be able to control apps that go through the store. And I recognize that a lot of apps are going to be graphical in nature, but they still ought to give me the ability to control the apps and manipulate the apps and my example that I use are star charts, you know, I'm not going to see star charts. But for me to take the time to describe it to someone and describe what I want to get them to manipulate it rather than me being able to manipulate it and then saying to someone, what do you see, I still don't even get that. And apps go in and out of accessibility in the app store all the time. Apple could, with a fairly simple process, make accessibility as mandatory in the store, as it does other things. It would seem to me.   Mike Paciello  28:54 Yeah, well, what companies do about their own products is definitely one thing. But again, I still think it comes down to dollars and cents. No, they're not gonna push any harder than they have to, because they just don't have the C level people who should be, you know, putting this on their agenda and in prioritizing accessibility the way it ought to be, as we as we see it.   Michael Hingson  29:21 Right. Right. But what's but what's the message there? The message, it seems to me is still we're still not really important enough for us to do that.   Mike Paciello  29:31 Oh, that's right. You're not a viable entity? Yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt about that. They'll never say it. But in fact, that's really what's going on in the boardroom. Now. One One thing that we tried to do have been unsuccessful up till now. But when Jim Tobias and I shared the the last five weeks, one of the things that we had already laid groundwork for doing was implementing the Five weight requirements, which include all the the web accessibility requirements into the Americans Disabilities Act, because the Department of Justice was a participant there, they're following what we're doing. And we made some good head rows, headway into it. But it came to an abrupt abrupt stop. As a result of politics, frankly speaking. We, my my last meeting, ironically enough, at the White House, was the day before the 2001 or 2016 election. Yeah, yeah. 2016 election. And I listened to President Obama's chief technology officer, and his chief science officer, both talked about the players that they were laying out for the next four to eight years. In all those things got trashed right after that election. So again, not not not really, in no way am I see he could have a political position here, because I don't I stay out of politics, but I'm just sitting, having been the chair, a co chair, rather, of a committee, whose charter was to enhance the lives of individuals with disabilities by enhancing technology for accessibility. We lost, we lost, we lost quite a bit at that level. Now. You know, will it ever get into ADA? I don't know. I really don't know. It's it's more or less than table, that the Department of Justice position at this point is well, you know, things are fair, you know, are out there for everybody to follow. They don't need enforcement. But the reality is, lawsuits are gonna keep coming until until until enforcement is mandated. And then then corporations will do one or two things, they'll either comply, because they'll have to obey. Or they'll do what they typically do, which they send lobbyists groups in and fight it.   Michael Hingson  32:06 Yeah, well, and you bring up a really interesting thing regarding lawsuits, because lawsuits can can be a powerful and valuable way to help the process if the litigation is brought for the right reason, namely, we really want to help fix the problem. But we're also seeing a lot of lawsuits. And it's been going on well, certainly before the ADEA. But we'll use the ADEA. And, and and our situations and experiences as the example, lawsuits today are often filed by lawyers who just want to make a bunch of money. They're very frivolous lawsuits. I saw one last week, where a lawyer decided to sue a company actually a bunch of different companies, because they said their websites were inaccessible. And they use the same boilerplate on on all of the lawsuits. And in reality, from the time the plaintiff, quote, looked at the website that I am aware of, until the time the lawsuit was filed was about a month. And in that time, unbeknownst to the defendant, or to the plaintiff, the company took action to make the website accessible because it was the right thing to do. So that by the time the lawsuit was filed, in reality, the claims were totally baseless because the website had become accessible and usable, demonstrably speaking, but yet the lawsuit was still fired filed, and there are so many of those frivolous lawsuits. It seems to me that one of the things that we ought to figure out ways to do is to get Bar Association's and others to go after these lawyers who are doing these frivolous lawsuits, because they're not doing anyone any good.   Mike Paciello  34:07 Yeah, yeah, there's no doubt about there are a lot of evil, it's chases out there. They've been out there for as long as I've been, you know, in the software and web accessibility, because it's, I mean, I don't know if we'll ever be able to change that unless, unless we do what would there is there has been some inroads made in terms of how much a person can sue for and, and in some of the motivations for but yeah, yeah, I mean, it's sad, in unfortunately, they they bring in individuals with disabilities, you know, to be part of the of the suit itself. And that creates angst in the communities as well. Right. So I mean, it's, yeah, it's, it's funny, I gave a talk at the UN years ago on fear based incentives, and I hate them. I mean, it's such a stands for any kind of fear based incentives. But the fact of the matter is that we see it does. It does effect change, right. So you've seen large corporations in organizations in educational institutions who have made the changes because they were forced to as a result of those lawsuits. I don't like it. I don't think anybody likes to be quarter, you know, put into a corner and then have to fight out. It just gives accessibility and disabilities a bad name overall. But it is effective. Set   Michael Hingson  35:36 offer, marketing, fear based marketing is all around us. I mean, turn on a television, and you hear commercials, like your check engine light is going to turn red at some point. And then it's going to be too late. You have to get our car warranty. Now I'm in fear marketing is all around us.   Mike Paciello  35:56 Yeah, that's true. And I work separately. It is ironic, because it is kind of ironic that you're talking about that, because we are kind of talking about messaging, and marketing. It's one of the reasons why would I built web able, one of the things that I really wanted to focus on was trust based marketing, that anyone that I did business with, has to has to be truthful in everything that they say and everything that they do. And so I've worked really hard at that focus, I'm actually updating our pages right now to add another set of value statements associated with trust, and in truthful marketing, because I believe it's ironic my drive here is to make sure that people with disabilities and consumers with disabilities, you know, what they're being told, or what they're being sold, is, you know, an accurate reflection of what your product can or cannot do. So or what a service company or a service based company says they can and will do, because I believe, frankly, speaking, very analogous to the lawyer, you know, the English face lawyer scenario, is I believe that there that that individuals with disabilities, not unlike the elderly community are often take advantage, taking advantage of, because they don't know everything that's going on it, you know, their disability puts me into a situation where they, they, they often are not aware of what the true motivations of a corporation or organization really are.   Michael Hingson  37:38 Right. And it's, it says an important for those of us in the disability community to understand corporate dynamics, and do as much as we can to become a part of the corporate world, because change does have to come from within, and it won't come unless we help bring it about and unless we work as hard as we possibly can to get other allies on the inside. But I still think ultimately, it's it's going to require that mindset shift. And I'm, I'm not convinced that it needs to be a costly thing to bring about accessibility, especially if you create a native way to make it happen right from the outset. Then you're building it into the cost of doing business, which is what Apple did, of course, with the iPhone, and the iPod and the technologies that are in the   Mike Paciello  38:37 Mac voiceover voiceover right. And then voiceover,   Michael Hingson  38:41 it's a cost of doing business. And I'm not even sure I totally like that. But it's, it's okay. It's a cost of doing business to make sure everyone can use the product. And I think that's a reasonable thing to do. But that's why I think that they, they need to take that last step. And get to the point of recognizing that part of that same cost of doing business has to be to say, to developers, you've got to have some sort of basic amount of accessibility, just like we do with the with the iPhone and the iPad and the Mac itself, because you're leaving people out. The The problem is that Apple put itself in that position by being a policing agency for what goes into apps and how apps work. I understand. I don't even I haven't looked lately, but I understand that if you create a piece of software that looks like it has a Windows desktop, that was true of Windows 10. Anyway, Apple wouldn't release it in the app store because it didn't look abolition often look to Windows II and of course their competitors. They have the ability to make and they do make decisions based on what they choose.   Mike Paciello  40:02 Yeah, yeah, there's no no no doubt about that, again, businesses are in the business of doing business. Right. And, and, and that's why we have things, you know, like trademarks and copyright and, and patent infringement and patents, and, you know, all of that it's all proprietary, proprietary systems closed open. This that's, that is the world that we that we live in today is as as we started, as you said, from the beginning, the sad part of all of this is that in that the decision makers, the architects, the designers, are not really truly thinking about accessibility and building an infinite start.   Michael Hingson  40:44 And it would make it just and it's not that hard to do. If they would do it. Tell me about the web accessibility initiative a little bit.   Mike Paciello  40:53 Gosh, sure. Well, I'll tell you, as much as I know, I mean, I haven't. I've been on the fringes of it more or less for the last 15 years or so. But I'll tell you the, the interesting story about the about the way is that I and I was working as a volunteer, I was working at digital and working as a volunteer to kind of with MIT, in the WCC to just kind of build some content, leads, you know, email lists, you know, some some resource information, and just keep it there for accessibility. Organizations like trace ad, which then under Greg Vanderheiden, was at the University of Wisconsin, now down at University of Maryland, Baltimore, I think that's where they're at. And in WGBH, here in Boston, under Larry Goldberg's directorship in cast, they also were organizations that were kind of pulling together these resources around around the web. And so while I was there, I came in contact with a few key people like Daniel da, and of course, Tim Berners. Lee, I was working closely with with Uri Rybicki before he passed the 96. In others, Dave Raggett, just a few other people that were there, in ultimately, you know, we started talking about, you know, can we do something with this. But at the same time, conversations were being carried on with with the National Science Foundation is Department of Education, and a couple of European consortiums, including tide. And what happened was, Tim, as I understand it was approached by either Vice President Gore, or President Clinton at at that particular time said, hey, look, would with the W three C, would you guys be interested in kind of building a project around people disabilities that access to the web? And Tim came back to myself DlG Villar a dragon and said, Hey, do you guys think that we could do this, but would this be something that we could do and ultimately, that led to us putting together a plan and a proposal for an initiative at the time was called the web accessibility project or whap. And I never liked it. Never like, you know, from a marketing standpoint, you know, a branding simple, I just knew it wasn't gonna work. So when we decided that we were going to launch it in 1997, Danielle, and Danielle and I went back and forth, okay, what can we name this whole thing? And I came up with way Wi Fi. That was marketable, it was easy to say and easy to brand. And Daniel liked it. And and we were back in 1997. Now at the I think it What was it? Like everybody, I think it was the sixth, sixth or seventh. Why would conference, I think the seventh I want to say seven, but even six. And I've got my stuff right over here on my other shelf. I can't see it right now. But we launched it there. It's at Stanford and see in Santa Clara. And that's that led to, to the launch of the initiative. We got funding, US government funding matching funds from MIT in matching funds from the tide initiative for three years. So we built a three year business plan for it. Ultimately, I at that time, actually, I changed jobs and Dale Yuri had passed away 96 It's now 1997. And I was the executive director of the European ski and sky foundation. So under that notion, I went out and helped help lead and build the the Web Accessibility Initiative Program Office. And ultimately that led to us hiring Judy Brewer. Who was in Massachusetts, it had been very well known for her activity with. With her boy, I can't remember the name of the organization was I want to say the mass mass association for disabilities. But she had led the effort to requiring Microsoft to ship Windows, Windows 95, with certain accessibility features into it. And so she was a great hire, you know, to leave the office, I went back off and eventually left the OSI Foundation, and started up my own company TPG.   Michael Hingson  45:43 And now you've since fairly recently sold TPG, right?   Mike Paciello  45:49 Today, it's already been for almost five years.   Michael Hingson  45:54 What did TPG do? What what did you form the company to do?   Mike Paciello  45:59 Yes, so I, what I really wanted to do was forming a professional services organization, company that helped make web web applications and software, regardless of the platform, usable and accessible to people disabilities. So I built an initial team, we went through several iterations of the team, before I could pull the right group of people together. But ultimately, that's, that's, that's what we did. And that's how I sold it became one of the most, if not the most well known brand, in software, professional services around web and software accessibility in the world. And that led to the company at the time, was VFO. Now now known as Despero, and they acquired they acquired TPG is specifically for that we had the largest bring not the largest company, but the largest brand most well done. It was because we were built on a foundation of trust. Every client that we had, came to us by referrals, we never did outbound sales ever. And, and we had lots of lots of repeat business enough to keep you know, ultimately, I think when I saw that we had about 40 or so people on staff in some of the world's best, best of the world in this business. Now my drop it in their knees, because they're all there are there. So they've gone off and formed their own companies. You know, I find I find that a little bit of a legacy. They you know, a car girls would often in antennen, and now he's with level access. Leone, Watson went out and started petrological. And she's got, you know, seven or eight members of her key team are all former TPG employees. Sara Horton is going off. She's doing her thing. So and I've gone off and done my so there's, there's been a lot of it's kind of interesting, a lot of breakout companies from from TPG.   Michael Hingson  47:52 And now you're doing web ABL.   Mike Paciello  47:56 And now I'm doing web ABL. Yeah, I've kind of labeled right. Web evil and evil docs.   Michael Hingson  48:02 And you're married. So you have three jobs. What's that? And you're married? So you have three jobs?   Mike Paciello  48:08 I probably have five because yeah, there's that parent tells me I have like five jobs now. So yeah, we're able to able to access web people. It really started out at TPG. It was my idea to kind of build a marketing, but I wanted to honestly, I built a news aggregator which the front of it is front end of it is a news aggregator. But ultimately, I wanted to be a digital marketing social networking marketing company strictly within the context of of, of accessibility and disability. And that's, that's where it's at.   Michael Hingson  48:47 And what Able Docs?   Mike Paciello  48:49 Able Docs is a right now, it is primarily known for documentation accessibility across the board. So it's not just PDFs its word, its Excel, PowerPoint. We're dealing with Google Docs. But it is a company that is involved in digital accessibility. We've recently branched out and started building on our, our own web accessibility services. So we did an acquisition of web key it out in Perth, Australia, so that we brought them in. And we're buying some tools and we're building some business long there. So so I've been helping Adam Spencer's, the CEO there at Apple docs. Adam has a long history in documentation accessibility, and they're one of the world leaders in that. So I'm here to help them build their USN branch.   Michael Hingson  49:43 Pretty exciting, isn't it?   Mike Paciello  49:44 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's startup all over again. So it's kind of fun from that standpoint, but a lot of hard work   Michael Hingson  49:52 well, and doing it in the COVID era. Well, you get to do it at home. So there's, there's there's lots of time do it. So at least you just don't have to travel as much right now.   Mike Paciello  50:03 Honestly, that's the thing I missed the most. I love travel. Yeah, I do too. I love traveling. I love speaking, I will go no everywhere and anywhere to do that, you know, to kind of carry the mission. So I missed that the most.   Michael Hingson  50:17 I I've never really minded being on airplanes, although I understand the whole issue with COVID right now, but I've never really had a problem with it. I enjoy traveling. I haven't been to a place yet that I couldn't find some things to like about it. And I've enjoyed everywhere I've gotten to go and all the people I've gotten to speak to and speak with and educate. Yeah, I miss it as well.   Mike Paciello  50:42 Yeah. Well, you and I saw each other down in Washington, DC. We do in Baltimore. So the NFB and, and then m&a Bling. But I right after that COVID started to break out again with the Omicron variant. So I stopped all travel. So right now and I've done probably five or six other events since then. Right now, if all things work out, I'll be at CSUN.   Michael Hingson  51:09 Tell me about that. You're going to be the keynote speaker this year?   Mike Paciello  51:13 Yeah, I was kind of surprised. I got a call from from from CSUN. And they asked me there their executive director asked me if I would see any uploading, asked me if I would consider I was really shocked. To be honest with you. I haven't been at CSUN. In you know, in four years right now. Yeah, in four years. Because my first wife passed away. And I was like, at home for I retired after I sold TPG. I retired for, you know, for the better part of four and a half years. And you know, was caretaking for Kim. And I really couldn't travel. So I did go to C center. I've been to CSUN since 2018. Yeah, so be four years now. So when they call when I can't think it now just lost her name. Oh, see any? Sorry. I went didn't see anyone see any called me. I was really surprised. But she asked me if I would consider giving the keynote and, you know, see son to me. See, says where I got my start in terms of networking and meeting people and getting involved in the community, not just on the national level, but on the international level. And that I think really spearheaded an awful lot for me in just about every other company that that's out there. So it holds a very dear in your place to me, Harry Murphy's the director, the founder of CSUN. He and I are close friends, even to this day. He retired over 10 years ago. And I served on I served on two advisory committees to to see some over the years. So when Sandy? Yeah. Well, she asked me, I said, Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I've got so   Michael Hingson  53:04 so what are you going to talk about? Can you give us a hint? Well, the theme   Mike Paciello  53:07 is trying to get make it a little bit interesting, intriguing accessibility users and the golden goose, why trust is a vital digital asset. So kind of goes with what you and I've been talking about what we've been talking about. We we in I did actually talk about this at m&a Bling. That I think there are four key attributes of our business in our industry that needs to be pervasive and promulgated and in founded, organizations and companies need to be fully immersed in. And that's innovation, collaboration, transparency, and trust. When those four attributes are built together, then then I think we come out with a winning value proposition. And so I'm planning on taking using a trilogy of three stories, life stories, and bring them all together to show how they work out that way and the value behind them.   Michael Hingson  54:12 Yeah, I've been in sales a long time having started while working for Kurzweil and taking. Actually, my first foray into sales was the Dale Carnegie sales course, which was a 10 week program once a week with live lessons and then other things during the week, but in Massachusetts, and the the interesting thing, and the overriding message that was constantly addressed during that course was that when you're selling, you're really advising you're, you're helping people and you're establishing a rapport and if you You're doing it just to drive somebody to get your product no matter what, then you're not selling the right way it is all about trust.   Mike Paciello  55:08 Yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt. Well, I think it's all for these areas, I really, you know, especially because we're in high tech in a digital economy and digital society. So innovation is critical, right? Working together, right? dispelling the myths associated with with competition. And collaborating, I think is crucial, especially again, in our space, transparency, transparency, you know, organizations need to be, you know, transparent about what they can and can't do. This is one of I think, one of the, I don't know, I don't know exactly where to attribute it to. But this much, I do know that people with disabilities are more than happy to work with you or your organization, your company, they're there, they'll they're one of the first ones to jump on board, and help you to make things useful and accessible, right? Because it benefits that. But if you're not transparent with them, right, if you know, tell them what is what is truth, right? What my product can or can't do upfront, it worse, you, you know, you, you mark it, or you sell something that's not trustworthy, or truthful, you're gonna lose them as a community, and you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna get five bad vibes, because this is a very close knit community of individuals. So you've got to be transparent, it's okay to say, look, we've gone this far, I've done this much. Our plan is to go this far in over the next three, five years is what we're going to do. People with disabilities will, will will support you, they know you're making some inroads towards accessibility. They applaud the effort now, okay, so they see your plan for the future. As long as you stay true to that mission. They're all in, and you'll get all the support in the world that you need from them. Which is why trust is so important. Because once you break those first three, and you break the trust, then you got nothing.   Michael Hingson  57:14 In 2016, the Nielsen Company did a study of brand loyalty. I don't know all the details of how it got commissioned, or whatever. But one of the main points of the study was that persons with disabilities tend to be very brand loyal to those companies that include them want to work with them want to make their products available to them. And the brand loyalty is extremely strong because of that, which really goes along with exactly what you're saying.   Mike Paciello  57:48 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I remember when Jacob did that, that study. I think I may have even been involved in it some at some level. But yeah, that's it's absolutely true. I think people with disabilities, with maybe the strict exception of possibly elderly individuals are the most free and loyal community of individuals population of individuals ever, period. When it works. Sorry, you're not going to, you know, people, I mean, you know, this, people are Jaws users use JAWS because it works. Right, right. Even though Jaws is flawed, JAWS has has bugs in it, right. Just like every other piece of it I've ever I've ever seen. I've never seen a bug free piece of software at all technology. But once users got into it and started using it, it became very, very clear that this is going to be even though they've got to pay for it. Compared to say, and, VA, right. They're very, very, very strongly loyal to it. And that's been true about all 80. Frankly,   Michael Hingson  58:58 but NVDA is is catching up NVDA has come a long way and is working better it is free, but it is still not Jaws know, at least in people's minds. And still not Yeah,   Mike Paciello  59:12 nothing. Nothing is just me just, you know, Freedom owns 80% Plus that market. Right and in who have you seen over the years that have kind of gone by the wayside? Be You know, because they just churn market. Right. So   Michael Hingson  59:30 and that will, that will be the case. As long as as you said, the trust is there. If if the sparrow breaks the trust ever, that's going to be a big problem.   Mike Paciello  59:43 Yeah, I totally agree. I absolutely agree. They know it. I know it. And more importantly, all of the individuals have visual disabilities, the users know it.   Michael Hingson  59:54 Yeah, no doubt about it. It's it's been that way and I've been using For a long, long time and have watched how they've grown and developed, and they've done some things that that have been challenging, but in the long run, it works, as you said, and that's what really is important.   Mike Paciello  1:00:13 Yeah, yep. No doubt about it, Mike.   Michael Hingson  1:00:16 Well, we have been going on for an hour How time flies when we're having fun. And I want to really thank you, if people want to reach out to you, how might they do that, learn more about the things you're doing and so on.   Mike Paciello  1:00:30 Well, if they want to learn about Web Able, if you get what we're doing, I mean, we are we're on a sponsorship drive right now. So we're really looking for sponsors going into 2022. So you can send me email at M as in Mike Paciello, P a c, i e l l o at webable.com if they want to contact me at Able Docs for documentation, accessibility and even professional services around software and Web. And you can send me email at mpaciello@abledocs.com.   Michael Hingson  1:01:02 Well, we've been we've been working together now for what since September, and October, and m&a billing and all that. And I know you're talking with folks that accessiBe, and there's a lot of exciting stuff going on there. And hopefully, we'll all be able to work together and make this a little bit more of an inclusive world. And hopefully, we'll be able to change mindsets, and get people to maybe look at the world a little bit differently than they're used to, and maybe look at it in a little bit broader and more inclusive way.   Mike Paciello  1:01:34 I totally agree. Totally agree.   Michael Hingson  1:01:38 Well, Mike, thanks very much for being here with us. And hopefully, you'll you'll have a chance and come back again. We'd love to have you back anytime. If you would have anything you want to talk about, then let us know. We'll try to catch the speech at CSUN. Not sure whether I'm going to travel down there or not this year, we'll see. But hopefully we'll we'll we'll work it out somehow. But thanks again for being here on unstoppable mindset. And for those of you who want to learn more about us, you can you can find us at Michaelhingson.com that's M I C H A E L H I N G S O N.com/podcast. And you wherever you heard this podcast, you can go anywhere where podcasts are posted and and released and you can find us there. So join us next week for another edition of unstoppable mindset wherever you are, wherever you happen to be at the time, and with whatever hosts you use. We'll be looking forward to seeing you then.   You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

En el episodio #54 del Podcast Hablemos Copywriting comparto la historia de esto que conocemos como mercadeo vía email o email marketing. ¿Cuándo se Envió el Primer Email de la Historia?   Uno de los programadores de la Red de Agencias de Proyectos de Investigación Avanzada envió el primer email en 1971.   En 1972 se creó la primera versión piloto de un sistema de gestión de correos electrónicos.   ¿Cuándo se Usó por Primera Vez el Email para Mercadear y Vender un Producto?   En 1978 se usó el email por primera vez para vender. Se dice que el gerente de mercadeo de Digital Equipment Corporation envió un email a casi 400 personas anunciando la venta de unas computadoras.   En 1982 los usuarios dejaron de usar el término mensaje de correo electrónico y lo redujeron a correo electrónico.   En 1989 la palabra SPAM se añade al Oxford English Dictionary.   Para 1989 el mercadeo vía emails siguió ganado terreno con el debut de Lotus Notes 1.0 y además AOL grabó su famosa frase sonora You Got Mail.   En 1996, Microsoft desarrolló lo que hoy conocemos como Outlook y también nació Hotmail.   Y en 2003 el gobierno de los Estados Unidos aprobó la Ley CAN-SPAM.   Además de que a partir de ese momento surgieron mútiples proveedores de servicio de email marketing como Active Campaign, AWeber y Mailchimp, entre otros para hacer nuestra vida empresarial mucho más sencilla para llegar a más suscriptores, sin esfuerzos innecesarios.   Estoy segura que después de conocer más de 40 años de exitosa cronología tienes razones adicionales para que acoger el mercadeo vía emails como uno de los canales principales de comunicación digital para tu negocio digital.   ¿Quieres Estar al Día en Todo lo Relacionado con la Escritura Persuasiva?  Suscríbete al Podcast Hablemos Copywriting para que ganes más clientes e ingresos para tu empresa. ¿Necesitas Ayuda con tus Copys?  Como Copywriter puedo ayudarte porque si emociona investigarlo, imagínate escribirlo. Aquí tienes toda mi información de contacto.  Contáctame por email: jrestocopy@gmail.com Sígueme en Instagram: www.instagram.com/jrestocopywriter Sígueme en Facebook: www.facebook.com/jrestocopy Sígueme en Clubhouse: @jrestocopy

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 27th, 2021The Books in the BoxWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 27th, 2021.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on September 27th included Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Antranig Vartanian Simeon Miteff Matt Campbell, Jeremy Tanner, Joshua Clulow, Ian, Tim Burnham, and Nathaniel Reindl. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: Not recommended :-(  Dave Hitz and Pat Walsh (2008) How to Castrate a Bull book Peter Thiel (2014) Zero to One book [@2:45](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=165) David Jacques Gerber (2015) The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber book [@7:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=441) Sidney Dekker (2011) Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems book [@13:08](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=788) Robert Buderi (1996) The Invention that Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peace book MIT Rad Lab Series info Nuclear Magnetic Resonance wiki Richard Rhodes (1995) Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb book Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson (1997) Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age book Craig Canine (1995) Dream Reaper: The Story of an Old-Fashioned Inventor in the High-Tech, High-Stakes World of Modern Agriculture book David Fisher and Marshall Fisher (1996) Tube: The Invention of Television book Michael Hiltzik (2015) Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex book [@18:05](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1085) Ben Rich and Leo Janos (1994) Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed book Network Software Environment Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Sea, Air and Space Museum in NYC. [@26:52](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1612) Brian Dear (2017) The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture book [@30:15](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1815) Randall Stross (1993) Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing book [@32:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1941) Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock (2010) Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor book [@33:06](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1986) Lamont Wood (2012) Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution book Charles Kenney (1992) Riding the Runaway Horse: The Rise and Decline of Wang Laboratories bookTom's tweet [@34:06](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2046) Bryan's Lost Box of Books! Edgar H. Schein et al (2003) DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation book [@36:56](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2216) Alan Payne (2021) Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster's Inevitable Bust bookVideotape format war wiki Hackers (1995) movie. Watch the trailer ~2mins Steven Levy (1984) Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution book [@42:32](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2552) Paul Halmos (1985) I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography book Paul Hoffman (1998) The Man Who Loved Only Numbers about Paul Erdős book 1981 text adventure game for the Apple II by Sierra On-Line, “Softporn Adventure” (wiki) [@49:16](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2956) Douglas Engelbart The Mother of All Demos wikiJohn Markoff (2005) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry book Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late book 1972 Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing documentary ~26mins (wiki) included big names like Corbató, Licklider and Bob Kahn. Gordon Moore (1965) Cramming more components onto integrated circuits paper and Moore's Law wiki [@52:37](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=3157) Physicists, mathematicians, number theory, proofs  Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem 1993 wiki Simon Singh (1997) Fermat's Last Theorem book Ronald Calinger (2015) Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment purports to be the first full-scale “comprehensive and authoritative” biography [@1:00:12](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=3612) Robert X. Cringely (1992) Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date book Jerry Kaplan (1996) Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure book Brian Kernighan (2019) UNIX: A History and a Memoir book [@1:03:03](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=3783) Douglas Coupland (1995) Microserfs book Douglas Coupland (1991) Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture book Fry's Electronics wiki [@1:06:49](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=4009) Michael A. Hiltzik (1999) Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age book Albert Cory (pen name for Bob Purvy) (2021) Inventing the Future bookXerox Star wiki [@1:11:20](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=4280) Corporate espionage, VMWare and Parallels, Cadence v. Avanti wiki, Cisco and Huawei (article) If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Christopher Gardner is the founder of iValue LLC as well as the author of the highly acclaimed book The Valuation of Information Technology: A Guide for Strategy Development, Valuation, and Financial Planning (John Wiley & Sons), and Measuring Value in Healthcare. Previously he was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP where he led the Information Technology Strategy Group in the New York office. He was also a vice president at Bain & Company and worked at A.T. Kearney where he was elected principal by the Board of Directors. He began his career as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and has served clients across a wide-range of major industries. Prior to consulting, he worked in the high technology industry, joining the Digital Equipment Corporation after graduation, and working in central engineering as a manager in the semiconductor, office workstation, and VAX computer system development groups. With the support of Digital he co-founded The Software Agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a company engaged in the business of representing software authors to software publishers. He was educated at the University of Chicago where he received his MBA in Finance and a BA/BS in Physics a year earlier. He spent his summers working at Fermilab and at the Enrico Fermi Institute and is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. TAGS #Consulting #Technology #UniversityofChicago EPISODE LINKS Christopher's Email: cgardner@i-value.com Books: - The Valuation of Information Technology: A Guide for Strategy Development, Valuation, and Financial Planning: https://www.amazon.com/Valuation-Information-Technology-Development-Financial/dp/0471378313 PODCAST INFO Podcast website: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NUTPAa Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3e6DEKK Anchor.fm: https://anchor.fm/masonhargrave/ Full episodes playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAAkUcxW_NWRXAlo7dlxjDuKfJ6c8OEBz Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAAkUcxW_NWQBBzYWp-GuOqLiM9kXb0A8 OUTLINE 0:00​ - Introduction FOLLOW ME - Twitter: https://twitter.com/MasonHargrave - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/masonhargrave/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metaphysical_ramblings/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/masonhargrave/support

Valley Boy And The Maltese Falcon

In this episode we learn all about my profound lack of handiness during the Covid pandemic and my suburban Massachusetts childhood.  Plus we hear about the unusual circumstances under which I met tech giant Ken Olson, founder of my home town's Digital Equipment Corporation, when I was 16 years old.And finally, the entertaining and cautionary tale of the first time I got fired.  Spoiler alert, it was at the hands of a New Jersey mobster.

Guest: Ryan Burke - SVP, International @InVision (Formerly SVP, Sales & Custome Success @InVision; Formerly @Compete, @Mainspring, @Goldman Sachs) Guest Background: Ryan joined InVision in 2014 as the Vice President of Sales. He quickly grew his remote salesforce of 3 to over 100 talented professionals responsible for identifying new market opportunities for collaborative design, developing new revenue streams and managing both enterprise and inside sales. Ryan was eventually promoted to SVP, Sales before taking on his current role as the SVP, International leading their international expansion efforts around the world. Prior to InVision, Ryan was at Moontoast as a member of the senior management team. He created and managed both enterprise and inside sales functions, selling both SaaS and custom solutions to clients including Toyota, P&G, GM, Microsoft and others. Prior to Moontoast, Ryan was the SVP of Sales at Compete which was acquired by WPP and later became Millward Brown Digital. He led all sales efforts, including a senior vertical enterprise team as well as an inside team selling the Compete.com SaaS product. Guest Links: LinkedIn | Twitter Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The 3 F's to Build Your Sales Team from 1-50 - The InVision Story - InVision = 1,000 Remote Employees: How to Hire, Onboard, Manage and Communicate w/ Remote Teams - The Role of Sales in Creating & Cultivating a Global Brand & Community - Inside Sales vs. Enterprise Sales Full Interview Transcript: Naber: Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber: Hey everybody. Today we have Ryan Burke on the show. Ryan Burke joined InVision back in 2014 as the Vice President of Sales. InVision has a $1.9 billion valuation and $350 million in capital raised. Ryan quickly grew his remote salesforce of three to over 100 talented professionals responsible for identifying new market opportunities for collaborative design, developing new revenue streams, and managing both Enterprise and Inside Sales teams. Ryan was eventually promoted to SVP of Sales before taking on his current role as a Senior Vice President for International @InVision leading their international expansion efforts around the world. Prior to InVision, Ryan was at Moontoast as a member of the Senior management team. He created and managed both Enterprise and Inside Sales functions, selling both SaaS and custom solutions to clients including Toyota, P&G, GM, Microsoft and others. Prior to Moontoast, Ryan was the SVP of Sales at Compete, which was acquired by WPP and later became Millward Brown Digital. He led all Sales efforts at Compete as the SVP of Sales, including a senior vertical Enterprise team as well as an Inside Sales team selling Compete.com SaaS solutions. Here we go. Naber: Ryan, awesome to have you on the show. How are you doing? Ryan Burke:     I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Brandon. Naber: I've seen you with a beard without a beard and a lot of my research I've been doing in the last few hours here. I like the beard and without the beard. It's very rare you can say that about someone you like it equally, and I typically lean towards beard by, I really like both. Ryan Burke:     And now it's the grey beard. Now it's the grey beard. Naber: It's like, you go from all bald on the face to some salt and pepper, to a lot of salt, and then you're just, it sinks in. This is just a grey beard. This is just a great, love it. Love it. You and I have gotten to know each other personally over the last few months professionally as well, which is quite cool. I'm happy that we get to, go through a lot of this, as content today with you. What I figured we could do is go through some personal stuff first. So start with Ryan Burke as a kid, what you're interested in. Then ultimately graduate into, pun intended, where are were in school with Baldwin the Eagle up in Boston, and then all the way through your professional jumps into your time at InVision. And in that time we'll just cover a bunch of superpowers as well as things that I know, people have said that you are very good at. And I know that you excel at given a lot of the places you've worked, and roles that you've had. Sound okay? Ryan Burke:     Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Naber: So Westford, MA. What was it like for Ryan Burke as a kid? What were you like? What were you interested in? What were some of your hobbies? Let's go. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely, definitely. So Westford is about 40 minutes northwest of Boston. Typical New England town with the centre of town, and the old church, and the common, and all of that. And it was great. Kind of prototypical New England childhood riding a bike around the neighbourhood and doing that whole thing. It was funny, my first job actually was, snake busters. So my buddies and I, when we were, I don't know, maybe 12, decided that we were going to rid the neighbourhood of snakes. So we would walk to people's houses, knock on the door, and charge a dollar a snake. It went well, it went well. It went well. We made all these crazy tools and t-shirts. We ended up just grabbing them with our hands, harmless garter snakes. But it went well until my mother came home one day and found a giant trashcan in the garage that had about 40 snakes in it. That was the end of, that was the end of snake busters. Naber: Did you call it snake busters? Ryan Burke:     Oh yeah, we did the tee shirts that we hand drew. I mean, it was right around, I mean, I'm dating myself, but it was right around the Ghostbusters days. So, that was, that was my first commercial endeavour. Got me started in, got me started in Sales. But. Westford was great. I was kind of the athlete, whatever, captain of the basketball and soccer teams in high school, it was great. National Honor Society, I got kicked out my junior year, and came back in my Senior year and won the leadership award. So, it was a fun time and nothing but good things to say about Westford. I had a great childhood. I stay in touch with a lot of my friends still from Westford, pretty close to the community. And the Grey Ghosts, which was our mascot, which I still think is a great name, and I was the 200th graduating class of Westford academy. So it was public high school, but 200. Naber: So, one more question then we'll, we'll talk about your move up to BC. What did your parents do, when you were growing up? And what were some of the hobbies and interests you had outside of sports? Because obviously, you were quite athletic. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely, definitely. So my dad was, that day and age was still the time of the long runs at companies. And so my dad was that a Digital Equipment Corporation. So he was at DEC for shoot, 30 years, I think, a long, long time. He ran manufacturing for a couple of plants there. My mom worked there as well for about 10 years. Naber: Is that how they met? Ryan Burke:     No, they met outside of Hartford, Connecticut, in college. But my dad had a great run in Digital. My favourite thing was during his retirement ceremony, they renamed the big board room, the Bill Burke Board Room, and then they did a top 10 Bill Burke famous quotes. The number one quote for Bill Burke that I'm not sure what it says about him for his 30 years. There was f*ck 'em. I mean it was celebrated, and it was a quote on a plaque, and all of that. But for 30 years that was interesting, and it kind of describes my dad, in a nutshell, a little bit. Naber: It's funny because people that know your dad if you gave him 10 guesses, they'd probably guess it. People not knowing your dad, like myself, if you gave me a hundred guesses, that wouldn't have been it. I'm so glad that that just happened. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. So, and then the hobbies. Like it's interesting, you grew up in Massachusetts, but for whatever reason, my brother and I got really into fishing. And so, that's become a lifelong passion. I actually started and ran a fishing tournament for about 13 years on Cape Cod, kind of post-graduation. The Headhunt. The Harwich Headhunt. And yeah, it just became a passion, and I still fish all the time, and I've gotten my kids involved, and all of that. But that was one of the things that my brother and I would sort of hike through the woods, and find little ponds, and build our little boats or whatever, and float out there, and catch bass and perch and whatever all day. And then we got the bug and started to get closer to the ocean and do some of the offshore fishing, which has been great. Naber: Wow. Very cool. All right, we're going to get into BC, but I have to go rogue on this one. If you're not heavy into fishing, what's the best part about fishing? Like, why do you love it? Ryan Burke:     Yeah. I mean honestly now that we get out offshore and go out on the ocean, you're just so in such a different environment and a different mindset, and really things just kind of melt away. And just from the stresses of the world being 10-15-20 miles offshore in that type of environment, we go to tuna fishing, there are whales jumping, whatever's going on, it's just a real escape. The phone's half the time don't work, and so, it's just...a lot of times we'll go out for an eight-hour fishing trip and my wife will say, well, you didn't catch anything. What the heck did you guys do out there? You're in this small confined space with like three other friends. She's like, what do you guys talk about the whole time out there, not catching fish. And so, it is a fairly intimate experience as well with your buddies, and there are beers involved, and all of that. Yeah, I just liked the whole like mindset change when you kind of get out on the boat, and you're heading out, like everything else sort of melts away the further you get offshore, and I really enjoy that. Naber: Wow, that's great. And from your sons perspective, as they're growing up, that's so cool that you're bringing them into your headspace and that world, to truly disconnect like that. That's really special. All right, you're away from the Ghosts, you're moving onto the Eagles - Baldwin The Eagle, your best friend. Why Boston College? And maybe a couple of minutes on what you were looking like in University. Ryan Burke:     Yes. So, it's funny, BC was the only local school that I applied to. I really want to go to Duke, didn't get in. I almost went to Wake Forest. For whatever reason, I wanted to go and explore another part of the country, but I ended up, going to BC. Obviously great school, a lot of fun. And I'll say I'm really happy with the decision based on what it was able to give back to my family. And so what happened at BC, the football games and the tailgates. And so my dad, my mom would get season tickets and they'd come to every game. And they just developed a great relationship with all of my roommates and friends. Sometimes inappropriately with like, the conversations, they would hear were just crazy. And they get to meet other parents. And so over the four years, like my parents were really involved in my college experience. And for them to be honest writing the checks, like I felt like that was an opportunity for me to give them something back. And I always cherish that, bringing them into that experience. And we still talk about the glory days of the football games and beating another game Notre Dame, or whatever. So it was a great experience, and being in Boston was a lot of fun. Even most of the friends that I had at BC, were actually from outside of Boston. But yeah, BC was great. We were sort of in the heyday of sports when I was there too. We had some good runs, they're obviously terrible now. But I also, all things considered, I liked having a team. Me and my wife went to Holy Cross, and I kind of give her crap all the time because, it was great school as well, but like having a team and a brand that you can sort of follow. And I'd still all way too close to I know every high school recruit that football team is right now and I read it every morning. And it's a little creepy, I know, but I'm pretty involved. Naber: That's a job because they come from all the country to BC obviously. Ryan Burke:     And I did it, I did it as a job a little bit. So I got so involved after graduation that I actually started writing for a BC website that was all focused on recruiting. And so I did that for about three years, just on the side for shits and giggles, and go to the game, sit in the press box, interview Matt Ryan after the game on the field, and all of that. And I was when I was still trying to figure out if I was going to get into the sports, as a career. But it was a lot, it was a lot of fun to do that. Naber: You know, it's really interesting. We're going to get into your professional jumps. That's a really good segue. But what I find when I'm talking to a lot of these, a lot of folks in this podcast and a lot of the folks I really admire professionally with an entrepreneurial spirit, it comes out in so many different ways. And I actually don't think that the person talking about it really knows that it's coming out. So from snake busters all the way through to, like you have side hobbies you've turned into like organized things that you do. Like, getting into BC sports, writing about it, making an organized effort and project around that. Same thing with fishing, 13 years of running that tournament. Like, taking your hobbies and turning them into something organized, structured so that everyone can enjoy and you're the driving force behind it with your effort because effort is the great equalizer within entrepreneurship. I think that that entrepreneurial spirit always comes out in people's hobbies, and I don't think that most of the people talking about it often think about it like that. But it's coming out in your hobbies right now. That's pretty cool. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And if you want, I can do a quick sidebar into a hobby that turned into somebody that, did you hear about my book club? Naber: Oh, don't tell me, scorpion something. What is it? Ryan Burke:     Scorpions. New Speaker:  Scorpions. Yeah. Tell me about it. Ryan Burke:     Something I'm proud of and something I will also say is potentially my biggest regret. But my wife was in publishing, and she'd go to these book clubs and she would come home have a couple of glasses of wine and saying, Hey, did you talk about the book? Nah, we just sorta talked, and chatted, and drank wine. And I was like, you know what, this is a bunch of BS. I'm going to go and I'm going to start a book club to spite your book clubs, and just show you that I can build a better book club than any of the book clubs you've been a part of. And she's yeah, yeah, whatever. And so I was all right, I'm going to call it the scorpions. I came up with a tagline that was "Read. Bleed.", and it was all sort of tongue in cheek. So in Boston, it was like the all hard guy book club. And so I got about seven or eight of my friends who were smart, a bunch of entrepreneurial folks as well, a few guys that have been CEOs and sold companies. And we all read. And so what we did was we would go to places like dog racetracks, or shooting ranges, but we would actually talk about the book. So we would actually talk about the book. We would do trivia about the book. And then we would typically end it with a physical challenge to see who could pick the next book. And so what happened was one of the guys that was in the book club worked with my wife in publishing, and he released a press release. Because my whole point was I'm going to create the Anti- Oprah Book Club. I'm going to create, where a woman can walk into a store and know exactly what book she should be buying her husband, boyfriend, or whatever with a scorpion stamp. And so we read a book, and then we released a press release just for fun and games. Scorpions select, I don't remember what the first book was. Scorpions select this book as their official monthly book club, Dah, Dah, Dah. And we did it a couple of times, and the next thing you know it starts getting picked up. And I get a call one day from The New Yorker. And the New Yorker says, Hey, we want to do an interview with you. We do a feature on a book club every month. And we read about the all hard guy book club, the Scorpions. And we're like, all right. And so, called and interviewed me, Dah, Dah, Dah. And they put it on their website. Called back the next day. Hey, this has gotten so, so many hits. We want to go front page tomorrow. we need more pictures. I'm like, I don't have any pictures. Like literally get up that morning with my wife, take my shirt off, put up World War Z, which we're reading the time up in front of me with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and she snaps a picture on her iPhone. And that next thing you know, that's on the front page of TheNewYorker.com next day. And so then it gets picked up, and Gawker picks it up, we had these magazines reaching out. And what happened was it snowballed very quickly where authors, I mean agents were calling me and saying, Hey, we want you to review our author's book. We want you to give it the scorpion seal. We made like a seal and all this stuff. And we're what is going on here? And we had people calling us from all over the country. Can we start a scorpions thing? A reality TV show reached out to us. My buddy called me at one point, my roommate from college, and he's like Hey, what did you start some stupid book club? I'm like yeah, the scorpions. He's like well I'm reading the 50th-anniversary edition of Playboy, and you guys are in here. And I was what? And so we picked up playboy and we're in there. So we almost got a book deal. We almost got a TV deal. And the whole thing sort of faded. It was at that stage, we're all just having kids. A couple of guys were going to sell their company, and so we really give it the attention. But finally I was able to go back to my wife and say, listen, I proved you wrong, I started a better book club. And now there's talk of bringing it back because I still think there's actually an opportunity in the marketplace for that sort of Anti- Oprah Book Club. And we actually read good, compelling books. And so that was my tie into the hobby question. Naber: You know, it's funny. One of the reasons I love doing the personal side before we jump into all this other stuff is, before you reach out to somebody, before you first have conversations and when you just look up on the pedestal of this person at this company with this title, and your background, your experience, I think it's quite intimidating before you start having conversations and humanize the experience. And that's one of the things I love about, about this section. But that's a perfect example. If you're hey, quick sidebar, I want to tell you about something and the entire Scorpion's book club, love it. It's great. So cool. All right. So that is, that is not a segue, but I'm going to create one, into, you're leaving Boston College. And so Scorpions Book Club, the best thing you ever did, but we'll talk about some of the second and third best things you ever did after, after that. You're leaving BC, and run us through your professional experiences, up through the end of when you're at Compete so we can jump into InVision. So just run us through, the companies you were at, and the roles that you're in, maybe like five to seven minutes so we can, we can get some detail on there as well. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely. Definitely. The first job I had out of college...I still get amazed at the jobs and internships that today...I'm really impressed. Like back in my day, it was kind of like, all right, we're going to travel to Europe, we're going to screw around after graduation, whatever. And so when I was midway through my Senior year in college, a buddy called me - this is 1996 the Olympics in Atlanta - and he said, hey, I work for a staffing company, Randstad, I've gotta hire like 20,000 people. Do you want to come work for the Atlanta Olympics for the summer? And I was sure, I got nothing going on. And I became known as the kid on campus that, like, I'd walk into any party and be like, hey Burke, I heard you can give me a job with the Olympics. And I'm like, yeah. So people giving me their resumes to work at the Olympics. So I think I got 40 kids from BC jobs at the Olympics. So we all went down there, and we all rented condos in the same little complex. And this was back in the Buckhead days of Atlanta too, the bars were open till five the morning before Ray Lewis ruined it. So worked for the Olympics. Great experience. I ended up staying there for a year, working for the Olympic Committee for a year. And it was just a really, it was a really cool experience. And then randomly, again, I was still trying to figure things out, and I had a buddy call and say, hey, you want to move to San Francisco? And I said, yeah. And jumped in the car, and we moved to San Francisco and slept on a floor for six months, and tried to figure it out. Did some temp things, and then I ended up getting into finance. So I got into a small kind of Muni Bond Equity House, which was, which was really cool. It was a really small, company. I touched so many different parts of the business. from the trading to the operational side and it was good. Series 7, Series 63 the whole deal. And then I use that as a springboard to get into Goldman Sachs. Worked in the private client services group in San Francisco, with Goldman. This was sort of during the heyday too. So, managing some of the early Amazon folks back in the day, and making some of those trades. I was what am I doing wrong? So it was great, and I had a good experience at, Goldman. And then it just, I got to the point where there were some family pulls back to the East Coast and at the same time I was at that stage where I was, on a pretty good trajectory in finance, but it was just something about finance that wasn't really getting my juices flowing. And I just knew. I mean just the culture of it. It very, obviously, money-oriented, and people are doing very well. And I just don't know, it just wasn't for me. And so I knew, okay, if I didn't get out then like I was just going to double down, sell my soul, and do the finance thing. And so I pulled the plug. I found a job back East at a tech consulting company. So this is the tail end of sort of the internet boom, and I got into a company called Mainspring, which was really interesting. It was a really smart group of folks from BCG, and McKinsey, and Bain that basically wanted to create a digital strategy consulting firm. And this is just at the time when all these companies are trying to figure out a digital strategy, nobody knew what it meant. And it was also interesting, in that they had a Sales function. So I joined as an Inside Salesperson, which was, your typical cold calling bullpen environment, and weird because you're dialling for dollars for high-end strategy consulting. And it actually differentiated us in the market a little bit, but I really cut my teeth in Inside Sales there, and just opening doors, and prospecting, overcoming objections. I really liked it. Mainspring actually had a pretty good run for a little while. We ended up going public. And then, the market sort of tanked. And then IBM ended up acquiring Mainspring. And so, it ended up working out in that, it was kind of offered a package. I could have stayed at IBM. It was another one of those decisions where similar to financial services, it was all right, I can take a job with IBM, but do I want to do that long-term at this stage of my career when I knew I wanted to be in something smaller and entrepreneurial. And I liked the small team environment, even at Mainstream when I started it was only 100 people or whatever it was. And that's when I got into Compete. Naber: You spent 11 years there. There's a lot of learnings here. So if you want to take your time and go through the next few minutes to talk about some of the things you learned as you're jumping through each individual step that you had, that's all right because that's probably helpful. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely, definitely. And so Compete was interesting because that was back in the incubator model days. So basically Compete was an incubated business. David Cancel, who's the CEO of Drift, was kind of the first employee founder there. And I journal joined early on. It was basically, we had a web-based panel that we aggregated data and sold back competitive intelligence to companies. So, Hey, my website traffic is this, how does this compare to my peers? My conversion rate is x on my site, how does that compare? And you know, there were some dark days early on. There was your typical start-up, really young management team, screaming matches in the glass-encased conference room that was like raised four feet above, so everybody could see it, you know. And there were a few turnovers of Senior Leadership early on. A few turnovers of the entire Sales team that I survived twice early days. And we did that for the first probably two to three years. I was kind of the top Salesperson. And worked with some really smart people. And again, that entrepreneurial environment that I like, we had trouble figuring it out. And then for us at that point, the inflexion point was really when we decided to go vertical. And obviously not something that I think every business needs to necessarily do, but from a competitive standpoint...I helped found a kind of the wireless practice, and this was back in the Nextel, Singular, AT&T days, and they were all so hyper-competitive. And so we had this really rich data set to show like, how much online traffic are each one of these sides getting. What is their conversion rate to get people to sign up for bill pay? What was their conversion rate for e-commerce? And really valuable data. And so we built some dashboards, we layered on a consulting component on top of that. And it was really, it was really interesting. And that started what was a pretty big catalyst. Wireless became the biggest vertical at the company. I sold the biggest deal with Sprint, which is $500k, when our ASP was like $30k. And it was interesting in the fact that as a Salesperson, what kept me there as well, is when I started that vertical, I was able to position myself as more than just a Salesperson. And I became a wireless expert. And I would go speak at conferences, I would write white papers because that always gave me the credibility when I wanted to go and sit in a room with Senior folks. I mean we would do crazy stuff like I had business cards made, different business cards for like the big wireless conferences, the CTIA's or even the CES's, and I'd get invited as press because I would write white papers, and so they would put me in as pressed. So like here I go to these things I get to sit down for 10 minutes with the CMO of Verizon and the CTO of AT&T to do briefings. And inevitably you share some data. And the other thing that we did at the time was we partnered with Bear Stearns, who was a big analyst in the Wireless space. And we created this really nice white paper that they distributed - a glossy cover, Bear Stearns, and it was all our data. And free data for Bear Sterns, whatever. But that became a little bit of every meeting we would walk into that was on somebody's desk. And so it was very easy to point to that and say, oh, that's our data in there. And they're like, oh really? We didn't know that. Tell us what you did. And so, building a brand beyond just being a Salesperson was really valuable to me from a career perspective. And partnering with somebody like Bear Stearns at the time was really powerful in the space from a wireless analyst perspective. And using that as a vehicle for content was just so big in building our brand at the time. And so, that was the kind of the earlier part of my career at Compete. And there are always times that thought about leaving, but every time it was sort of thinking about it, there was a new opportunity that would arise. And so then I moved into more kind of Sales leadership, and that was a new challenge. And building out sort of an Inside Sales and an Enterprise Sales team. Then `we were required. So the company was acquired by TNS, a big research firm. And then six months later by WPP, so essentially acquired by WPP, became part of that world. And that opened up a whole new world of opportunity and challenges, and that kind of put me into a new role. And then I became Head of Global Sales, SVP of Sales, across Compete. And that was within sort of the WPP, umbrella organization. So that was fun. So yeah, I was there a long time but worked with some really sharp people. My old boss Scott Earnst, I sort of followed him up as well, and he became CEO, and one of my mentors to this day. And so it was a really interesting ride. Definitely a really interesting ride. Naber: Very cool. And that brings, does that bring us to your jump into InVision at this point? Ryan Burke:     I did have a quick move, between there, I went to a company called Moontoast. Naber: Oh, that's right. Yeah, Moontoast. So, hey, before you do that, I want to talk about, you mentioned managing Enterprise and Inside Sales Teams. You've done this at three different organizations if not more if you've done some advisory work on this. But you've done Inside and Enterprise Sales at the same time. A lot of the people listening will either start a business, have started businesses, will be the VP of Sales, VP of marketing, whatever. And they'll either inherit Inside Sales or inherit Enterprise Sales. And usually, they kind of tack one onto the other or they graduate from Inside Sales Leader into Enterprise Sales. You've managed both at three different businesses. Let's talk about that for a few minutes here. What are the main best practices or tips that you have in managing Inside Sales as a contrast to managing Enterprise Sales? And we'll get into the top tips and best practices for that, but Inside Sales first. Inside Sales, what are the biggest differences between managing Enterprise and Inside Sales teams? When you're talking about Inside Sales, what are the best practices and tips for doing that? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the end of the day it's still, Inside Sales is obviously a lot more transactional and so it's a lot more around kind of that process. And Enterprises is around the process as well, but obviously very different motion, trajectory, timing, all of that. And so, with Inside Sales I would say one thing that's probably most important is figuring out what that customer journey is upfront, and really defining that path, and finding those friction points, and then building a process around what are the activities and behaviors that..like to me, everything kind of boils down to behaviors and activities when it comes to Sales. And that's relatable to Inside and Enterprise. And so performance in numbers is one thing, but you just need to figure out what the right activities are for Inside Sales. So break apart that funnel, figure out what those metrics are, and then really measure on those activity metrics. And that's been probably the most important thing. The other thing is, even when I started at InVision, we'll talk about it, making sure you have the operational infrastructure to define that for Inside Sales, whether it's hiring an operations person, like to me, you can never hire operations too early. I probably waited, I probably waited too long at InVision, and getting that in there early for Inside Sales, and building out, we even call them the leading indicators of what will drive you to a particular transaction. And so I think those behaviours and activities are incredibly important for Inside Sales. And then you just have to evolve it for Enterprise because that's a different motion, different ASP, whatever it is. And so same concept around leading indicators, behaviours and activities, it's just a different framework. And the hardest part is obviously, you sort of view Inside Sales as a stepping stone to Enterprise. And that's not really the case from a mindset standpoint. And that's, you almost have to break bad habits and rebuild them because the Inside Sales folks, currently really good at transactional, driving acquisition, boom, boom, boom. And then you move into Enterprise, you're like, whoa, slow down, let's talk. Now we're value selling, where before it's much more of a product sell. Inside Sales is much more of a product sell. Enterprise Sales is a value sell. And that's a big transition from a mindset standpoint where, step back, make sure you're asking these questions, figuring out obvious things like pain or whatever it is. And again, when we promote Inside Salespeople, sometimes there's that period where the onboarding for Enterprise is just as important as when you're onboarding them as a new employee for Inside Sales because it's a totally new framework and mindset. And if you're using the methodology like MEDDIC or Sandler or whatever it is, you've got to kind of break them down and rebuild them again. Naber: Yup. Yup. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. So moving from Compete to Moontoast, let's hop into why you moved to Moontoast, and then give us a summary of that, and then we'll hop into InVision and I've got a few questions on some of the superpowers that you have, some of the things you've done really well, and a couple that InVision has as well. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And so Moontoast was a social advertising, kind of rich media, social advertising - rich media within the Facebook feed predominantly, or any social feed. Part of it was at the time I was looking to get out of Compete. Moontoast came along, social was obviously very sexy, they just raised some money. Kind of wanted an opportunity to go in and be the guy from day one, and build it up. And you know, everybody's got a miss on their resume, and this was a miss. I came in, and we had some good momentum, really enjoyed the product team and sort of the position we had in the market. But we also existed within the Facebook ecosystem, which I don't care what you say, they just own everything. It's really hard to do exist. They make one change in their technology and like 20 companies go out of business. So I built a really strong team. I've hired my top guy from Compete, brought him over. Hired some really good Salespeople, a few who I've actually taken to InVision. But the product, we had to re-pivot product, and we ultimately had to re-platform it to try to fill the gap with services while we got the platform, then Facebook changes. We missed it. We just missed the window and things got a little ugly. It was one of those startup things where it was a little messy. And so I ended up leaving. I ended up just saying, you know what, and Moontoast not seeing their Future, we'll leave it at that. But I left. It was a good learning experience, met some really good people there. Social space was interesting, I'll never go back. Then I left there and then that was when I had the opportunity at InVision. And I can tell you kind of how that's how that started as well. Naber: Yeah. So this is good. So people are gonna want to hear the story. You joined really early. You're employee number 35, I believe at InVision, you've got upwards of almost if not above, around the thousand employees or so, shed load of them remote if not all of them remote. Exactly, all of them remote. Like the largest, that I know of, tech workforce in the entire world that is remote - it's unbelievable. So, tell us about the story. Run us through the journey that you've been on so far, and then I've got a question around building your Sales teams from one to 50 that we'll cover, after you kind of tell us what the journey is up until now. Ryan Burke:     Sure, sure. And so the quick story of how I ended up at InVision was, I quit Moontoast so I was out of a job. I was in sort of this panic mode and got some opportunities right away. And I was I don't want to act, move too quick. And then, just really stressful at that time in life, couple kids, like the whole deal. I was like, what am I doing? And was really close, I had paper in hand to an offer as the CRO of another company in Boston. Ended up being out on a boat with a few folks for my old boss, Scott Earnst, goodbye from Compete, and was sitting with Dave Cancel, we're having a beer on this boat, and tell them about my situation. Naber: I've heard so many good things about Dave, by the way. So many good things through the grapevine. I'll meet him sooner than later. But as far as he's such a good guy. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, he is. And just sitting on the boat, and he was like, Hey, don't sign that paper. I was like, why? He's like, you need to talk to Clark at InVision. And I was I don't know anything about InVision. And he's like, design prototyping software. I'm like, I don't know anything about it. Just talk to him. So I didn't sign the paper. We had a couple of conversations, he introduced me to Clark the next day. Had a couple of conversations with Clark, Clark Valberg, the Founder & CEO of InVision, who is just an incredibly interesting, inspiring person. And so the way it went down was, it was like a Wednesday night at probably 9:00 PM in Boston. And Clark, who was in New York, calls me and he's like, alright, I want you to come down tomorrow and meet with the board and meet with me. I'm like, alright, what time? He said, eight o'clock tomorrow morning in New York. And it's like nine o'clock at night in Boston. I'm alright, I'll make it work. And so I go down there, meet with a board member. Clark comes in, and I've never him met in person or anything, and he just sits down and he said, all right, I'm going to spend the next two hours convincing you that this is the wrong job for you. I'm like, interesting. And so we ended up having about a four-hour session on design space, and how Enterprise might not work for design, all of these things. I remember at one point he was like, oh wait, when is your flight? I was well, I missed, it was like an hour ago. He's like, why didn't you tell me? And I was like, well, I want the job, this is super interesting. And so it was great. So we hit it off. Quick background, InVision before me had two VP's of Sales - one lasted a week, one lasted a month. And so I was pretty intimidated, and they were clearly a rocket ship. Even from the early days, you could just see the momentum. And that transactional business, like I had done some the Inside Sales stuff, but like not to that scale before, and build on it from a freemium model. So it was a pretty big leap for both sides and forever grateful for, for Clark taking the chance. And obviously it's been a successful path so far, and a lot of fun. But that's kind of how the whole thing kinda started, which was interesting. Naber: Great. Great Story. And so tell us, tell us about how many people were there when you got there. Like, what the Sales team can seem consisted of, which I'm pretty sure was like two people plus you. And then give us maybe a couple of stats on where you are right now as a company, so we can understand that growth trajectory. And then I'll hop into how you did a lot of those things. Okay? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So when I joined those 35 people, I think there were three people on the Sales team, that I inherited. And the Enterprise business really didn't exist at that point. It was kind of formally launched a few months beforehand, but really there wasn't, there wasn't much revenue there. But what we were doing is we were getting about a thousand people signing up for the product every day to the free service or the self serve plan .So just incredible product-market alignment, and that momentum, and those signals for the business. And so I came on, now we are about 900 employees globally. We work with 100% of the fortune 100. We are fully remote. Raised $350 million total. So it's been, it's been a ride, that's for sure. And it's been a lot of fun. Naber: Man. Unbelievable. You've got almost a $2 billion valuation on that $350 raised. You've been there for about five years now. Is that right? Ryan Burke:     Yup. Naber: Wow. Amazing. First of all, congratulations on all the success you guys have had. I just think it's an iconic company, an iconic story. And I think you guys are can't miss, can't lose, badass product company who is, building so fast, doing it the right way, which is great...From the outside looking in, and that's even before you and I started having conversations, I'm so impressed. So let's talk about a couple of things. One, you have, you talk a little bit, in the past around building your Sales Team from one to 50. And you talk about it using the story of InVision, so let's use that story. But you talk about, building your Sales team from one to 50, you got to think about the three F's - the First Five, the Foundation, and the Future. Let's walk through each one of those bullets if you don't mind. Why don't we talk about the First Five, first? Actually, you know what, if you want to tee this up at all, that's fine. But I want to hear about the three F's for building your Sales team from one to 50 because it's an excellent framework. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And so, the way I was thinking about it when I kind of looked back and break it apart is really, figuring out the right people for each stage. Because it evolves and it changes. And then the customer journey changes as you mature, and the deals get bigger, and you move more into the Enterprise. And so you kind of have to chunk it up and hire the right people at each stage, address the customer life cycle at each stage, remove friction points. And so, the biggest thing for me early on was getting the right people in the boat early. And fortunately for me, my first two hires, two Salespeople, that one is now a manager for me in Amsterdam, the other one's the top rep in the US, still here. Which is good because right before I took the job, Mark Roberge from HubSpot, a buddy of mine, called me and he was like, on speed dial who are your two best Salespeople? And I gave him these two names because I have a job. And they both got offers from HubSpot. And they both turned them down. And thankfully...Roberge was like, what the hell? I'm like, I don't know man. And so then I got the job with InVision a month later, and it just worked out like, I called both of them, and I was like you guys are on the team, and it ended up working out really well. And I think, back to the First Five, I think some of the important traits for those folks early on is, they weren't necessarily just Salespeople. Like they were product managers almost at that stage and they just, they knew the product inside and out. And without having, proper Sales Engineer support, or any of that product support on calls, like it was a little bit of the wild west and we had to do our own thing. And InVision couldn't be further at that point, especially couldn't have been further from a Sales culture. Like it was a free product, free value to everybody, designers, it wasn't a push market, it was fully pull-motion, it was all bottoms up. And so we were definitely a little bit out there trying to figure it out. And so, hired these folks early on, that really could talk to the customer, understand their concerns, and their process, and their journey. And then ultimately we built the Sales process around that. And the other key thing about those first people are, you've got to get the people that are on the boat that want to join a company at that stage for the right reasons. If you want to make a lot of money as a Salesperson startup, like InVision at that stage and start, that's not the right place. It's just not, go work at Salesforce. And so, you need to find people that are there because of the opportunity. They want the career opportunity. They want to be co-owners and building something. And that's what the early folks on the sales team, I actually think to this day we still hire people with those profiles...with the trajectory of InVision, like it's still early. And um, that was really critical to find people that wanted to join for the right reasons and not just purely on the financial side. And so getting those builders in early, the ones that can have those product conversations, that was really important for us early on. Naber: Very cool. Yeah, I think in one of the talks that you do, you talk about focusing on key traits - resilience, adaptability and fighters; and then focusing on key motivations - opportunity, vision and ownership. Those six things I think are so important. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Ryan Burke:     Yeah. And I would say resilience is probably the biggest one because, at any startup, you're gonna have so many challenges. And so, I mean, I've even made some decisions where we've hired people that have had really good runs at really big companies and their resumes are great, and you hire them to a place like InVision, and it doesn't work out, and they're not ready for it. We probably hired them at the wrong time, the people that are better off, like I even tell our recruiters like, go find people that had a big run at a company, at a really successful company. Then went to a startup that ran out of money or a startup that went out of business. And they've gotten their nose bloodied, and they know what it feels like because your nose is going to get bloodied at a startup inevitably at some point. And so you need the people that can take the punches and be resilient and battle through that. Not only can do it, but want to do it. And some of the folks we hired, like they just didn't want to do it at that stage in their career. I don't blame them either. So, you just gotta figure out that profile and make sure that things like resilience that is so important for those early hires. Naber: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's incumbent upon the person hiring them to help those Salespeople to make that decision. Like oftentimes you don't know that you need to go get your nose bloodied, or you need to go have a failure somewhere else after your first jump from an organization or you've had a really good run or a long run. Like you have to go get that, that that failure, you have to go learn and have that learning experience. Like it is incumbent upon the person hiring those individuals to help those individuals realize whether or not it's the right time in their career to make the jump into that startup or not. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, that was really important early on. And then in, the only other thing was that I talked about is finding all of those friction points early. So, mapping out that customer journey and figuring out why aren't people buying your product. Is it the price? Did they not trust you? Not know who you are? They do not want to sign up for a longterm commitment? Is it particular features? Like, whatever it is, you've got a map that out, and then start to figure out how do you remove each one of those and address each one of those. And that's really important early on. And that will evolve once you move into the Enterprise, you're gonna have different friction points and you have to readdress them. Security and things like that all start to come in a little bit more, overtly. But early on, like just why don't people have the product in their hands? And do everything you can to remove those friction points to get the product in their hands. Naber: Yeah. Awesome. So there's a couple of examples that you use and some of your past content. Like, if the price is a friction point, using free trials and freemium, you are getting the product into their hands with free trials. Seeing the product in action, doing group Demos. You talk about understanding how they use it, pre-populating the assets and pre-populating the product. Lack of trust in your brand, building customer testimonials. Longterm commitments to a product, offer an opt-out, just get them on board. And then lack of features, sharing the roadmap for the product team, from the product team, getting them involved with that journey, and setting them up, setting the customers up with the product team to help evolve that journey. And I thought the examples you used and the solutions to them, I think those are extremely valuable as you're thinking about each one as different friction points, both as you get started and sometimes you don't solve those problem points with those solutions that you just talked about until mid-stage, late-stage and building Sales teams. So sorry to kind of steal some of that thunder. But I thought you've talked about this a bunch of times in the past and using those examples, I think that that's really valuable for people and it's just great content. Ryan Burke:     You did your homework. You did your homework, Brandon. Naber: Hell yeah, brother. I'm always doing my homework. It's all about the prep in my world. So that's First Five. Now let's talk about Foundation. Ryan Burke:     Yup. Yeah. And so the Foundation is sort of when really want to start building out the process, and that's when, like I said before, like that's when it's really important to hire operations because you're going to start to build out those leading indicators that I talked about - what are those activities that you want to measure? Because again, at this stage it's less about the results. I know that the results are important, but you really need to figure out like all of the specific activities and that'll lead to potential success. You can start to understand like what are the points, even in the Sales process, that you need to, that you're struggling with. And these aren't, these aren't things that are meant to beat the team upon. There's always like this head trash, and people are like, ah, I don't you to measure how many meetings I have a week, and I don't want you to measure many prospecting calls I'm doing, whatever. And it's like, that's not the point. The point is not to like manage you out if you're doing it. The point is to help identify the coaching opportunities for the managers to say, okay, you're not able to get people to respond to your emails. Like, let's go through those and evaluate. You're not getting enough meetings. Like, let's look at some of your other outreach. You're not converting meetings opportunities. Let's go through your talk track in those meetings. Their guidelines and they're really coaching opportunities is what they essentially are. Naber: Diagnostics. Exactly. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, building that Foundation. The other thing, for a specifically for a company like InVision early on, is, how do you offer value beyond the product? And I'm really sort of incredibly lucky and proud of what we do at InVision because we offer so much more beyond the product. But that's really important early because to some extent you need to build the trust and the credibility with your customers when your product doesn't always fulfil every promise. And that buys you time, especially early on. That's really important. So even when the Sales team, I never want somebody to prospect and try to set up a meeting to just talking about the product, it's like, offer something of value - a piece of content, whatever it is, but like offer value to somebody all the time. And you can, there are opportunities to do that beyond on the product. I mean, just a quick, a quick thing. I mean, our CEO is a brilliant marketer. And one of the things that we did is we made a movie. And so, even when I first started, Clark was Hey, we're making a movie. I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like we're making a feature-length film on design. It's like, you're crazy. And we hired this production company out of New York and flew around the country, and we made a feature-length movie called design disruptors. And it was an intimate look at companies that were using product design to disrupt entire industries. Google, Airbnb, Netflix, all of these, all of these companies. And we made this awesome movie, and we weren't in it. InVision wasn't in it, but it was brought to you by InVision. And so what we did was, we did a world premiere in San Francisco, Castro Theater, red carpet, press, the whole deal, VIP dinner after. Then we did one in New York, and we did one in London, and they were huge. And then what happened was, we were like alright, we're going to release the movie. But then people started emailing us and saying, hey, how can we do a screening here? I want my executive team at Uber or NBC or at Salesforce to see this. And so we sort of weaponized. And we didn't release it to the public. And we said, all right, if you want to do a screening or at your community, you know, wherever, we will host it. And I think we've probably done 500 screenings across the globe at this point. You name a company, we're doing...we're doing one next week in Europe with a company, and what an opportunity to one, reach out to somebody and say, Hey, we've got this incredible story that will help your management team understand the value of a design-centric approach. It's super entertaining. Why don't we come on, have some drinks, get a couple of hundred people in the room, whatever it is. Sometimes we'll even do a panel, we'll get people and product leads. We'll do a panel discussion after the movie. And it's been such a great a vehicle for us. I mean, now we have a full, we have a whole film team now at InVision, we did a documentary with IBM or called The Loop on their process, celebrated and evangelize their process, which, sort of strengthened our relationship with IBM. But again, offered value to the community, which the movie then ultimately did. Like it was a free offering from us to the community. Here's some really good content, best practices, examples, in an entertaining format that we are going to deliver to you as part of what our brand represents. Now we've got a new movie that we're releasing this fall. And it's been incredibly successful. It's just another example of how do you go ahead...And not everybody can make a movie, I get it. But although I've seen some good copycats over the last six months or the last year, it's coming. It's getting out there. But, Clark Valberg, this is yours. Valberg this is yours. It was a really powerful vehicle for us. Naber: Nice. Very good. And so you talked about adding value beyond your product. You talked about focusing on behaviours and activities. You talked about some of the activities. And you talk about hiring your first layer of management. You talk about hiring coaches, and not managers. Can you explain a little bit about that? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, I just feel like early, early days you just, you need folks that are, they're not about coming in as a manager for title reasons. And you get people in there that are really good at coaching because that's what is so critical. Using those leading indicators, using those behaviours and activities, finding those opportunities to help coach the team. And that's why your first Sales Director, or whatever it might be, they've gotta be a really good coach. Because it's gonna be all about the failures, and the misses early on, and the objections, there's going to be so many objections you're gonna face, whether it's product, price, competitors, whatever it is. Like you really need to figure out how do you coach the team on overcoming those. And so that's why it's really important from a profile perspective that you really dig in when you're interviewing in terms of, talk me through, talk me through an example of where you identified something with a rep, and coached them through it to an improvement. What was the result? Those types of things are really important when you're building that Foundational team. Naber: Nice. Awesome. Okay. So that's that's the First Five, then we just talked about Foundation. Now let's talk about Future. Ryan Burke:     Yeah, and the only other thing that I'll mention on the Foundation, now that you're kind of bringing up the topic, which is just one of the things that we did that was interesting at InVision, was it's so important to understand your customer and like everything about their customer. This evolves at every stage. And so, early on, like I hired one. And so I hired a designer onto our team instead of a Sales Engineer. I hired a designer, this person came on boards, still with the company, he's great, but just gave that credibility to the Sales team in terms of the day in the life of what a designer deals with. And could hop on calls and give us some credibility in terms of talking to designers, which is a very unique persona to sell to. They don't like to be sold to. They want to touch and feel the product, learn about it, and then use it, and if they like it they'll tell their friends about it. So, figuring out who your customer is and then hiring them was really important. The other thing that we do now, which is an interesting kind of nuance is around understanding the customer. We now have a program called delicious empathy. And every person at InVision anywhere, again, fully distributed company, we have people all over the world, and anybody at the company from Operations, to Sales, to Finance, has the ability to take a designer out to dinner once a month and expense it. And the only rule is you're not allowed to talk about InVision. And so it's just about, again, building those relationships, understanding the motivations, the personal motivations even of your customers. And that just feeds into everything that we believe in and do as a company. And so that's been another kind of interesting thing for us to do across the company to help people build empathy with our customers. Naber: Yeah. Yeah. It's great. You call it, I think you call it relentless focus on the customer. It's a pretty cool example. Delicious empathy. I love the Pun. Delicious, as in, take you out to dinner, that's good. I'm not usually a laggard on the jokes, that was a good one. Le's talk about Future. so you talk about a Foundation for building the Future. Go ahead. Ryan Burke:     Yeah. So the Future is, I feel like, at this point, this is where, you built the Foundational team, you've got some infrastructure in place, you're moving into the Enterprise. Like this is when things will break. Like things are gonna start to break. And you've got to kind of revisit the overall customer journey. You've got to revisit the friction points as you move into the Enterprise, things like legal process, security, all of those are going to be new friction points that you're going to have to learn how to address. And this is also, in a lot of cases, this is also when you make that shift from a transactional product-focused sale to the value-based one. And that's when you've got to hire a different profile of Salesperson at this stage. You've got to have all your motion at this stage. And so, now is kind of when you're, when you're really selling, and you've got to get people that are, again, stewards of your brand. Along all of this, your brand is so important these days that just, I think people sometimes underestimate the impact of hiring the wrong Salesperson on their brand. And like, you gotta think about is this somebody that you would want in a room with 15 of your prospects, your customers? Would the be someone you would want presenting at a community event on behalf of your brand? And if the answer is no, they're probably not the right person. Even if they're the best seller in the world because they are representative of your brand. And you've got to create that value through your Salespeople and that represents the value that you want to project in your brand. That's really important. And the other part about this stage is you've got to find people that are really good storytellers. And that's so important. Can they tell a story? Because at this point, people don't really care about your product. Like this is when the transition switches on the customer side as well. They don't care about your product. They care about what the promise of your product can deliver. They care about the results, they care about the examples of what other customers have done to drive tangible business value from the product. And so there's that shift, and this is where you don't need the product experts in the Sales team. And this is where you can introduce things like Sales Engineers, or Product Specialists, or whatever it is to fill some of those technical gaps. But this is where you need people that can actually tell that story and sell the dream of what your products and more importantly what your brand represents. And that's really important at this stage as you kind of build out the team. Naber: Nice. Okay, so I want to hop onto a different topic or anything else you want to talk about before we conclude on that? Ryan Burke:     No, I think that's good. Naber: Okay, cool. I've got two more topics I want to talk about and then we'll wrap. First one is, hiring, onboarding, and managing, remote Sales teams, and really remote workforces are what you guys have to manage as an entire business. But specifically hiring, onboarding and managing remote Sales teams. So there are a few different things that I'd like to cover. I think there's five in total. First one is hiring profile and hiring execution. How do you search for the right person that is a great person to hire as a remote employee. What are some of the things you look for in making sure that they can do that? And then what's your execution process look like considering you're hiring people all over the world, you're not necessarily sourcing them in one city or one industry. You're looking for them all over the place. So what's the hiring profile and how do you execute on the hiring process? Ryan Burke:     Yeah, and I think we are the single largest fully remote company in the world now. It's a little crazy. There's definitely cracks at times and things. And just a little, a little bit of context. It started where our CEO wanted to hire the best engineering talent. So we started to hire folks in different places. Even when I started, he was like, Hey, if you want us to open up a Boston Sales office, you can. And I did the whole tour of real estate in Boston, and almost pulled the trigger, but then it just in part of our culture. And so we started to hire some people from all over, and you could kind of place people strategically in these maybe lower-tier markets, or whatever. And so it became really, really, valuable for us. And it's a big asset. On the hiring, you've got to find people, not everybody is ready for it. The last person you want is the person that found you on a remote job site, and you ask them what they like about InVision, and they say, oh, I want to work from home. Like, they're out. You do need to find people that are proactive. Like you need to find people who seek help because sometimes it's hard, and you can get lost or and you can hide. And you've got to find those folks that are very proactive in their approach and sort of ask questions around that in in the interview process. That's really important. But the biggest thing in one of the biggest lessons we have learned here is onboarding. Onboarding is so critical because it can be very intimidating your first day sitting there and not having anybody to talk to. And so we've evolved our onboarding process, pretty dramatically over the last couple of years to, we kind of map out everybody's first 90 days now. And they need to know exactly who they're talking to, exactly what they should be focused on, exactly what the expectations are. And we can still improve that. But even from things like time management, like I think there are still opportunities for us to improve there, especially for some of the younger folks that come in. And they're living with four other buddies in San Francisco, or they're off on their own somewhere, wherever, and they get up in the morning like, how do I spend my day? And so we're getting a lot more prescriptive in terms of just even time management training. And what percentage of the time per week should they be focused on these types of things? What percentage of the times did we focus on these things? Even like learning and development. And so the onboarding process is something that it's just so critically important for a remote team, and there are still opportunities to improve, but I think we're doing a pretty good job now. Naber: Nice one. So you just talked about hiring profile and some of the things that you need to assess to make sure someone's ready for that. You've talked about time management. And you also just talked about

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of the Domain Name System, or DNS for short.  You know when you go to www.google.com. Imagine if you had to go to 172.217.4.196, or the IP address, instead. DNS is the service that resolves that name to that IP address. Let's start this story back in 1966. The Beatles released Yellow Submarine. The Rolling Stones were all over the radio with Paint It Black. Indira Ghandi was elected the Prime Minister of India. US Planes were bombing Hanoi smack dab in the middle of the Vietnam War. The US and USSR agreed not to fill space with nukes. The Beach Boys had just released Good Vibrations. I certainly feel the good vibrations when I think that quietly, when no one was watching, the US created ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.  ARPANET would evolve into the Internet as we know it today. As with many great innovations in technology, it took awhile to catch on. Late into the 1980s there were just over 300 computers on the Internet, most doing research. Sure, there were 254 to the 4th addresses that were just waiting to be used, but the idea of keeping the address of all 300 computers you wanted to talk to seemed cumbersome and it was slow to take hold. To get an address in the 70s you needed to contact Jon Postel at USC to get put on what was called the Assigned Numbers List. You could call or mail them.  Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI) had a file they hosted called hosts.txt. This file mapped the name of one of these hosts on the network to a IP address, making a table of computer names and then IP addresses those matched with, or a table of hosts. Many computers still maintain this file. Elizabeth Feinler maintained this directory of systems. She would go on to lead and operate the Network Information Center, or NIC for short, for ARPANET and see the evolution to the Defense Data Network, or DDN for short and later the Internet. She wrote what was then called the Resource Handbook.  By 1982, Ken Harrenstien and Vic White on Feinler's group at Stanford created a service called Whois, defined in RFC 812, which was an online directory. You can still use the whois command on Windows, Mac and Linux computers today. But by 1982 it was clear that the host table was getter's slower and harder to maintain as more systems were coming online. This meant more people to do that maintenance. But Postel from USC then started reviewing proposals for maintaining this thing, a task he handed off to Paul Mockapetris. That's when Mockapetris did something that he wasn't asked to do and created DNS.  Mockapetris had been working on some ideas for filesystems at the time and jumped at the chance to apply those ideas to something different. So Jon Postel and Zaw-Sing Su helped him complete his thoughts which were published by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, in in RFC 882 for the concepts and facilities and RFC 883 for the implementation and specification in November 1983. You can google those and read them today. And most of it is still used.  Here, he introduced the concept that a NAME of a TYPE points to an address, or RDATA and lives for a specified amount of time, or TTL short for Time To Live. He also mapped IP addresses to names in the specifications, creating PTR records. All names had a TLD or Top Level Domain name of ARPANET.  Designing a protocol isn't the same thing as implementing a protocol. In 1984, four students from the University of California Berkeley wrote the first version of BIND, short for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, for BSD 4.3. Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou using funds from a DARPA grant. In 1988 Paul Vixie from Digital Equipment Corporation then gave it a little update and maintained it until he founded the Internet Systems Consortium to take it over.  BIND is still the primary distribution of DNS, although there are other distributions now. For example, Microsoft added DNS in 1995 with the release of NT 3.51.  But back to the 80s real quick. In 1985, came the introduction of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .com TLDs. Remember John Postel from USC? He and Joyce K Reynolds started an organization called IANA to assign numbers for use on the Internet. DNS Servers are hierarchical, and so there's a set of root DNS servers, with a root zone controlled by the US Dept of Commerce. 10 of the 13 original servers were operated in the US and 3 outside, each assigned a letter of A through M. You can still ping a.root-servers.net. These host the root zone database from IANA and handle the hierarchy of the TLD they're authoritative for with additional servers hosted for .gov, .com, etc. There are now over 1,000 TLDs! And remember how USC was handling the addressing (which became IANA) and Stanford was handling the names? Well Feinler's group turned over naming to Network Solutions in 1991 and they handled it until 1998 when Postel died and ICANN was formed. ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, merged the responsibilities under one umbrella. Each region of the world is allowed to manage their own IP addresses, and so ARIN was formed in 1998 to manage the distribution of IP addresses in America.  The collaboration between Feinler and Postel fostered the innovations that would follow. They also didn't try to take everything on. Postel instigated TCP/IP and DNS. Postel co-wrote many of the RFCs that define the Internet and DNS to this day. And Feinler's showed great leadership in administering how much of that was implemented. One can only aspire to find such a collaboration in life and to do so with results like the Internet, worth tens of trillions of dollars, but more importantly has reshaped the world, disrupted practically every industry and touched the lives of nearly every human on earth.  Thank you for joining us for this episode of the History Of Computing Podcast. We hope you had an easy time finding thehistoryofcomputing.libsyn.com thanks to the hard work of all those who came before us. 

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC.  DEC was based in Maynard Massachusetts and a major player in the computer industry from the 1950s through the 1990s. They made computers, software, and things that hooked into computers. My first real computer was a DEC Alpha. And it would be over a decade before I used 64-bit technology again.  DEC was started in 1957 by Ken Olsen, Stan Olsen, and Harlan Anderson of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory using a $70,000 loan because they could sell smaller machines than the big mainframes to users where output and realtime operation were more important than performance. Technology was changing so fast and there were so few standards for computers that investors avoided them. So they decided to first ship modules, or transistors that could be put on circuit boards and then ship systems. They were given funds and spent the next few years building a module business to fund a computer business.  IBM was always focused on big customers. In the 1960s, this gave little DEC the chance to hit the smaller customers with their PDP-8, the first successful mini-computer, at the time setting customers back around $18,500. The “Straight-8” as it was known was designed by Edson de Castro and was about the size of a refrigerator, weighing in at 250 pounds. This was the first time a company could get a computer for less than $20k and DEC sold over 300,000 of them! The next year came the 8/s. No, that's not an iPhone model. It only set customers back $10k. Just imagine the sales team shows up at your company talking about the discrete transistors, the transistor-transistor logic, or TTL. And it wouldn't bankrupt you like that IBM. The sales pitch writes itself. Sign me up! What really sold these though, was the value engineering. They were simpler. Sure, programming was a little harder, and more code. Sure, sometimes that caused the code to overflow the memory. But at the cost savings, you could hire another programmer! The rise of the compiler kinda' made that a negligible issue anyway. The CPU had only four 12-bit registers. But it could run programs using the FORTRAN compiler anruntime, or DECs FOCAL interpreter. Or later you could use PAL-III Assembly, BASIC, or DIBOL.  DEC also did a good job of energizing their user base. The Digital Equipment Corporation User Society was created in 1961 by Edward Fredkin and was subsidized by DEC. Here users could trade source code and documentation, with two DECUS US symposia per year - and there people would actually trade code and later tapes. It would later merge with HP and other groups during the merger era and is alive today as the Connect User Group Community, with over 70,000 members! It is still independent today. The User Society was an important aspect of the rise of DEC and of the development of technology and software for mini computers. The feeling of togetherness through mutual support helped keep the costs of vendor support down while also making people feel like they weren't alone in the world. It's also important as part of the history of free software, something we'll talk about in more depth in a later episode. The PDP continued to gain in popularity until 1977, when the VAX came along. The VAX brought with it the virtual address extension for which it derives its name. This was really the advent of on-demand paged virtual memory, although that had been initially adopted by Prime Computer without the same level of commercial success. This was a true 32-bit CISC, or Complex Instruction Set Computer. It ran Digital's VAX/VMS which would later be called OpenVMS; although some would run BSD on it, which maintained VAX support until 2016. This thing set standards in 1970s computing. You know Millions of instructions per second (MIPS) - the VAX was the benchmark. The performance was on par with the IBM System/360. The team at DEC was iterating through chips at a fast rate. Over the next 20 years, they got so good that Soviet engineers bought them just to try and reverse engineer the chips. In fact it got to the point that “when you care enough to steal the very best” was etched into microprocessor die. DEC sold another 400,000 of the VAX. They must have felt on top of the world when they took the #2 computer company spot! DEC was the first computer company with a website, launching dec.com in 85. The DEC Western Research Library started to build a RISC chip called Titan in 1982, meant to run Unix. Alan Kotok and Dave Orbits started designing a 64-bit chip to run VMS (maybe to run Spacewar faster). Two other chips, HR-32 and CASCADE were being designed in 1984. And Prism began in 1985. With all of these independent development efforts, turf wars stifled the ability to execute. By 1988, DEC canceled the projects. By then Sun had SPARC, and were nipping at the heels.  Something else was happening. DEC made mini-computers. Those were smaller than mainframes. But microcomputers showed up in the 1980s with he first IBM PC shipping in 1981. But by the early 90s they too were 32-bit. DEC was under the gun to bring the world into 64-bit. The DEC Alpha started at about the same time (if not in the same meeting as the termination of the Prism project. It would not be released in 1992 and while it was a great advancement in computing, it came into a red ocean where there were vendors competing to set the standard of the computers used at every level of the industry. The old chips could have been used to build microcomputers and at a time when IBM was coming into the business market for desktop computers and starting to own it, DEC stayed true to the microcomputer business.  Meanwhile Sun was growing, open architectures were becoming standard (if not standardized), and IBM was still a formidable beast in the larger markets. The hubris. Yes, DEC had some of the best tech in the market. But they'd gotten away from value engineering the solutions customers wanted.  Sales slumped through the 1990s. Linus Torvalds wrote Linux on a DEC Alpha in the mid-late 90s. Alpha chips would work with Windows and other operating systems but were very expensive. X86 chips from Intel were quickly starting to own the market (creating the term Wintel). Suddenly DEC wasn't an industry leader. When you've been through those demoralizing times at a company, it's hard to get out of a rut. Talent leaves. Great minds in computing like Radia Perlman. She invented Spanning Tree Protocol. Did I mention that DEC played a key role in making ethernet viable. They also invented clustering. More brain drain - Jim Grey (he probably invented half the database terms you use), Leslie Lamport (who wrote LaTex), Alan Eustace (who would go on to become the Senior VP of Engineering and then Senior VP of Knowledge at Google), Ike Nassi (chief scientist at SAP), Jim Keller (who designed Apple's A4/A5), and many, many others.  Fingers point in every direction. Leadership comes and goes. By 2002 it was clear that a change was needed. DEC was acquired by Compaq in the largest merger in the computer industry at the time, in part to get the overseas markets that DEC was well entrenched in. Compaq started to cave from too many mergers that couldn't be wrangled into an actual vision. So they later merged with HP in 2002, continuing to make PDP, VAX, and Alpha servers. The compiler division was sold to Intel, and DEC goes down as a footnote in history.  Innovative ideas are critical to a company surviving after the buying tornadoes. Strong leaders must reign in territorialism, turf wars and infighting in favor of actually shipping products. And those should be products customers want. Maybe even products you value engineered to meet them where they're at as DEC did in their early days.