← Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Design Expert: AI, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Digital Experiences
01:00:16
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- [00:00]
A
I think that if you go and try and predict what's going to happen in tech, especially AI right now, it's a great way to look like a fool. But there's a reason that a lot of people are worried that we're going to see job loss from AI, because imagine that you're. I think the inflection point is going to be when robotics are married to LLMs. And there's the ChatGPT moment for robotics.
- [00:27]
B
Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be sitting down with Joe Devin, a serial tech entrepreneur, podcast host and leading advocate for technology for everybody. What's cool about Joe is that he is at the forefront of a movement to better design, absolutely everything. And he's already seeing some amazing potential for AI that's been flying under the radar. I want to ask him if AI has the potential to radically change how quickly and effectively we can build and rebuild digital experiences, and what impact he thinks this will have on digital leaders and all the rest of us. Is it going to concentrate more power with big tech or create more opportunity than ever before for aspiring entrepreneurs? Let's find out. Joe, I want to say a big thank you for joining us today. Really excited to jump into things maybe, you know, to start things off. Can you tell us a little bit, you know, about your mission and you know, what you're up to these days that you're passionate about?
- [01:24]
A
Gosh, what a great question. The mission. I guess my life's work sort of found me rather than I decided what it would be because I wrote this blog post in 2011 proposing a global day of awareness around accessibility issues. And accessibility means making digital products work for people with disabilities. And this was on a database blog that maybe 10 people had ever seen in their entire life. And by the first year it went Viral was in 16 different cities. And now we stopped counting after a few years when we hit 220 million social media reach. So this thing went just so crazy that I would get invited to do keynotes and things like that. And I'm more an engineer type that doesn't necessarily like to be in front of a big room, but you had to kind of learn. And so I'd say a lot of my mission is really serving the disability community when it comes to making products work for them. But now AI is changing things so much that I'm starting to see that there's, there's some big things that we really need to worry about with AI, and I'm starting to think about maybe doing a little bit of work on that end.
- [02:44]
B
So, I mean, first of all, I think that's so cool and it's really exciting to hear about the impact that it's been having with the benefit of hindsight. Why in 2011, do you think that this blog post had the impact that it did? What was it about 10 technology digital products at the time that caused people to latch on to this idea?
- [03:09]
A
Well, at the time, I was a web developer for american idol.com and I think the accessibility community, people with disabilities that were so frustrated by how inaccessible websites were, because it was mostly websites, I would say back then, they wanted to see that somebody that's building technology cares about them. And so here was a web developer who said, hey, let's pay attention to accessibility. And then I paired with Jennison Ascension, who is just a force of nature. He's a blind develop, I guess, evangelist, you would call it. I forget his exact title at LinkedIn right now, but he has a huge network. I had done lots of community events. I had helped build the tech ecosystem in la. He had created these accessibility camps all over the world. And so between the two of our networks and know how, in terms of organizing community, that was definitely very helpful. But really it's, it's. I, I struck a nerve in, in something that was really needed and impacts a lot more people than folks realize because everybody, about 11% of our lives will be spent with a disability. So it impacts pretty much everybody. Your parents, your grandparents. The median age of the typical American is about 39 years old. And when you're 40, you start to need things like better color contrast. And so you need these affordances. And the statistics don't, quote, quite capture that. And so it impacted a lot more people than folks realize. And a lot of the community comes to me to speak because they're trying to sell that message. They struggle so much because the people that build technology think that it doesn't impact as many people as it does because they try and say, okay, the only thing they think about are blind folks or deaf folks or people in a wheelchair, that kind of thing. But if you put it all together in terms of who benefits from accessibility, but the number's huge, so.
- [05:23]
B
And that's exactly where I wanted to go, Joe, because, you know, you mentioned, you know, your partner there who's blind, and I feel like there's a tendency for people to think, oh, accessibility, you know, you've got to be blind or deaf for that to apply to you. You know, as you look at that community, that's like really massive in scale. Who typically benefits from this? Like, what is that long tail of disabilities or people who benefit from better, you know, design? Inclusive design, if I can call that.
- [05:55]
A
It's really about usability. Right. So I do not consider myself to have a disability, but being into in, you know, beyond my mid-50s now, I have clouds in front of my eyes and I don't see that well, so I definitely need larger fonts. Personally, I got an intraocular lens replacement which gave me 2020 vision, supposedly, but that caused color contrast to be a big issue. So if you've got, like gray text on a white background and it's small text, it's really hard for me to read. But then you look at things like closed captions. Once a studio executive asked me, well, you know, our audience, only 1% of the audience turns on the closed captions, and so should we really invest in this? And I didn't think of it at the moment, but it's like, yeah, your closed captions kind of sucked, and that's the reason that you're at 1%. And it turns out that a lot of organizations are seeing 80% of their users using captions, especially with movies and the dialogue being drowned out. I think it was like the high. What do they call it? The. There's a term for it that'll come to me when it's too late, but high dynamic range. That's what it is. I think the high dynamic range caused, like, the background sounds and the explosions to overwhelm the dialog. And now people just can't hear it well. And so if you have really good captions, which AI is making better and better, you're going to see huge percentages of the population use it. I could go on and on, but I don't want to bore you, but that's the.
- [07:36]
B
You use the word usability, and to me, that's usability design. That. One of my kind of hypotheses in this space, and I've been interested in accessibility for a while now, is that we have a tendency to say, okay, well, you're doing something for some small minority of the population. And it's so easy to. Easy, but not great to dismiss them. But good usability and good design, in my experience, impact such a broader audience than just people who have profound disabilities. Has that been your experience as well?
- [08:14]
A
Yeah, it's really about empathy. If you are talking to your users and a variety of your users, you're going to find that if you make things more usable for people with disabilities, it's going to be more usable for search engines because you're just organizing your information better. And it's the constraint that actually makes the usability better. So one interesting example is I have some blind friends and, and they tell me when it was great when mobile came out, because what would happen is on the web you have so many options and so many choices. And so the different divisions in a company would all fight over all this real estate and they would not organize their information well. And then as soon as you had this small screen, you had to think about what are the top five most important elements to show to your user first. And that organization makes it much more accessible for a screen reader. So there's so much that you can learn by talking to your users and making things more accessible. Your technology will be way better.
- [09:23]
B
Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that it actually is for everyone and it just leads to better design and to better usability. So we talked a little bit about kind of the state of things in 2011 with digital products when this started. Joe, what have you seen in the last 14ish years since then? Have things evolved dramatically as much as they should? And what kind of opportunities do new technologies like AI unlock in this space?
- [09:54]
A
Big question. When we started, the awareness was almost zero. The people building technology had never heard of accessibility. And then over the years now everybody's heard of it. At the least, everybody that's building tech has heard of it, but they're not really making it better. There's a web a million report that comes out every year that shows about 96, 97% for the last five years of the web, of the top million web pages were inaccessible. So those numbers are terrible. There's an organization, Arc Touch, that just came out with the SOMA report, the state of Mobile App Accessibility report. And their numbers were like 70%, 72% of the mobile apps. And these are like the top mobile apps really. They're like really high quality teams that have money and 72% were poor or failing in terms of their accessibility. And so I would have hoped to see better results on the other end of the awareness. But what I think has happened is the complexity of building an app or a website grew considerably. And when the web first got there in the 90s, it was so exciting because you felt like it was the little guy was going to be ascendant and anybody could build a web page. And now it feels like the standards bodies have sort of forgotten on the web standards, the only people that can afford to be on the W3C are these large organizations, and I think that they've forgotten the small user. And as a result of that, now they're catering to design teams, product managers, project managers, all these categories of people, and they're not thinking about, well, why can't a small business owner just put a website together and that. That it's accessible because it's simple to build. And I think that, that the industry has made a mistake because it also makes it a lot more expensive and difficult for the corporations to come out with their apps and websites because you might have a marketing department that just wants to put in a tiny little site together and they're going to need a react specialist and they're going to have to fight for resources, whereas if it was simpler, it would be a little bit easier for them to do so. I'd say that's what has dominated the last 14 years, if that makes sense. I've been talking a lot, so.
- [12:29]
B
No, no, for sure, for sure. It's, you know, it's a. A gently depressing picture, if I can call it that, about the state of things versus how they probably could and should be. And so with that in mind, as we look ahead, you know, what gives you optimism, like, what tools now are able to unlock a better, more inclusive future for the web and for mobile apps?
- [12:54]
A
Yeah. So when ChatGPT first came out, I started to go around and give a keynote on making people realize that accessibility and disability really is tightly coupled to the quality of the AI models that come out. Because artificial intelligence, it's in the name, is trying to emulate human beings. And if you want to emulate a human being, you want to know the diversity of their abilities. And the folks doing accessibility have studied these edge cases for a really long time, and I love to give an example. That isn't what you would typically call a disability, but it sort of is. Have you heard of aphantasia?
- [13:39]
B
The word sounds familiar. Let's walk through what it is.
- [13:42]
A
Sure. So I essentially have aphantasia, where it's blindness in the mind's eye. So for me, my dad passed away and he was the inspiration for all of gad. And I wish I could just conjure up an image of him in my mind, but I can't do it. It's pretty much black or almost. Almost nothing comes up. Right. And my fiance probably has the opposite, which is ifantasia. Don't. I forgot the word. But it'll come to me. She has the opposite, where she has a very Visual memory. And I remember once I was trying to test her, we were walking down and there was a plane with like three different colors. And so when she was looking away when we, when we were blocked by something, I said, what colors were that plane? And she named three colors, and I only remembered two. And I was. I had to look back again to see that third color. That's how hyperphantasia, that's how different our abilities are with visualization. And you might ask yourself, well, why does that really matter? And just to give you one example, AI is really good at doing translations. The transformer model is all about translating content from one form to another. So when I read a sci fi book that goes, that spends pages describing the ship and the scene and what everybody is wearing, I see black, right? And it does not speak to me. Whereas somebody that's very visual, if I would write a scene, they would probably be really bored because I would not do that visual stuff. And AI now allows you to do those translations. And that can be very powerful. Maybe it's not as important for this particular topic, but if you have a certain, a cognitive disability, it can translate things for you in a way that you can learn better. It can be really great in education. And this is now, if you can tie this back to disability. You have audio to closed captions. You can take a visual scene and create audio description, which I would have never even dreamed of trying to do this. I haven't touched code in about 15 years, but now I started to code with AI and in one hour I created something that will create an audio description that will send a file to different AI models and out comes an audio description. So that video now has an audio track that describes the scene, right? So these are the kind of tools that are getting much cheaper and much more accessible in the other sense of the word to just anybody to build. Wow.
- [16:31]
B
I love. You know, it's so inspiring because I think there's, there's a potential error you can make where you hear things about, you know, digital prod product accessibility. And you think like, you know, you think about closed captioning or, you know, oh, you can, you can access this website a little bit better or you can understand what they're saying and the Sopranos a little bit better. But, you know, you talk about learning, right? There's this, this, it unlocks this, this personalization of learning and helps people, you know, get more opportunities. I'm, I'm curious if you have any other, you know, examples or any other stories about ways people have used some of these accessible technologies to, you know, kind of better themselves or get access to something, you know, really meaningful.
- [17:13]
A
Well, what I'm waiting for that I, I'm sure is going to come and I'm definitely going to talk to some people who can probably make this happen when, when the technology is just needs a little more, I think. Imagine sign language. Imagine if you're watching a movie and Tom Cruise is signing to the other character. All the characters are signing with each other. So instead of having a sign language interpreter in the corner, you have the entire movie translated to sign language. Right? That would be a tremendous unlock. Typically, a lot of well meaning tech people have gone in and they said, oh, I created this avatar that will create translate sign language for the deaf community. You're welcome. Here you go. And they would not talk to the community and they missed out on so much of the nuance because they really prefer to have a human being for the most part, because there's a lot of. It is about the emotion that comes across on a person's face. But now there are some people that are deaf founders that are building AI models to do two way sign language translation. Right? And then you have the fact that there are as many sign languages as, as there are languages, including different dialects. So it's one thing to say, okay, now I have this in asl, American Sign Language, but you have British Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language and the ability to translate content into different kinds of sign language. These things are going to be game changers when you can take an entire backlog of content and make it available to the deaf community.
- [18:59]
B
So when we think about doing stuff, there's an important lesson in there, right, about making sure that somebody who's your target audience actually says yes, that would be useful to me. Do you have any guidance around how to involve communities with disabilities or how do you get that feedback? And how do you best work with communities to figure out what's going to work and what isn't?
- [19:23]
A
Really, it's, it's. There's organizations for pretty much every disability. So if you approach that organization and get in touch with them, they're usually pretty open about communicating. But you do have to be ready to spend money because what happens very frequently is people will say, hey, I'm doing you this favor by making this accessible. Now can you work for free? And there's a lot of under employment in a lot of the disability communities. So that's, that's the caveat. You definitely have to pay, right?
- [19:57]
B
So Joe, if you if you think about. And let's stick with digital maybe for a minute. But, but organizations who are best in class when it comes to accessibility, when it comes to inclusive design and usability, who, who in your mind are some. I want to name and shame. Let me put that on the table. I want to name and shame who are the best at this, who are the worst at this and what really differentiates their approaches.
- [20:24]
A
So unfortunately for this question, that is not the way I approach it and I'll tell you why. When you are trying to get into accessibility, there is a lot to learn and you're going to make a lot of mistakes and what a lot of people do. There are a lot of people that like to name and shame and then what happens is the person that wanted to be interested in accessibility is now scared to be involved in accessibility and it pushes them away. So I don't like to name and shame. And then like my approach is always to bring people in, to try and find common ground and to grow positive.
- [21:08]
B
Change.
- [21:10]
A
In, in the world.
- [21:12]
B
That sounds, that sounds completely reasonable. So in this, in the spirit of positive influence, who are some of the organizations and some of the products that you've seen do a really good job at this recently?
- [21:24]
A
It's always also tricky that you're going to leave some people out, but I would say that Apple is really well known for, for doing, really going out of its way to build things for users. And I think they say something to the effect that they don't do user testing but, or they approach it differently than others. But I am positive that they do speak to the end user in one form or another. They may not do it in the standard way that the UX community says that they should, but they absolutely are paying attention to the end user. And one of the early keynotes I would do is I would take videos of the iPad and show that cats were interacting with the iPad, that frogs were interacting with the iPad, that it was so simple to use, that animals were able to use it. And that simplicity translates to. I think it came from working with a community of folks that are disabled. And my mom, for example, had dementia for the last, I don't know, probably like 20, 15, 20 years of her life and she enjoyed the iPad as well. So I think that's a big one. There's a, there's a startup that's super interesting called Be My Eyes and they created Be My AI and they have a community of. I think, I think by now it's probably 800,000 blind folks and the. And volunteers in the. In the millions, probably like 10 times that. And the original version of it, they would allow. They would pair anonymously someone who is sighted with someone who's blind, so that they could say, hey, here's my closet. Can you tell me, can you point me to the brown shirt? Or show, hey, this is what I'm wearing. Does it match? Or I'm looking for my keys? But now they partnered with OpenAI and were launch partners for ChatGPT4, and now they have AI doing this as well. So they're a super interesting organization.
- [23:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, that's.
- [23:34]
A
It's.
- [23:35]
B
It's unbelievable. And just what you can, you know, unlock for people by having AI do something like that. So just kind of reflecting on that. For leaders who are interested in getting more in touch with accessibility with, you know, changing their design philosophy around how they spin up products like this, what's kind of your best advice for how they get started in a way that doesn't make it seem overwhelming?
- [24:08]
A
Oh, that's. That's such a huge question, because there's so many aspects to this. But I think the North Star is test with people with disabilities. And there is an organization called Fable that does a really good job of pairing people with disabilities to do user testing on products that, that people build. But I would also say that the world is changing thanks to AI so much. Have you played with Cursor or Windsurf or Claude code or any of these AI coding programs?
- [24:44]
B
I haven't done a lot of the coding there, but I've heard amazing stories from some of my colleagues who are doing that.
- [24:49]
A
Yeah. So I've been away for 15 years, and mostly because I was running a company, just to give you a little more background, I built a dev shop to about 100 people. Things were going great, and then Covid hit, and by the time Covid was done, my company was done. But during that time period, I was unable to code because, you know, the context switching was, was too much when you're running a company. So being that rusty, once I saw these AI coding tools, I said, all right, let me give it a shot. And trying them out. I was amazed at how, how, first of all, it could help you get into different code bases and explain what's going on in the code base. But also you didn't have to remember syntax anymore because you could just tell the AI to do what you wanted to do. And this concept of vibe coding came around. And the reason I'm asking about this is because the, the CEO of Cursor tweeted out recently that they are do they're generating a billion lines of code a day and there's about 3 billion lines of code written globally by humans. So Cursor alone was at a quarter of all written code. And there's about 45 different AI coder coding tools now. So you're talking about we're going to see an order of magnitude more code written by AI than by human beings. And so it's really key that the code that's written is accessible. Right. And so I bring that up to answer your question also because you're saying, what should everybody be paying attention to? They need to pay attention to the fact that they're going to be building products differently. And in terms of getting away from the depressing statistics that I said earlier, I'm very hopeful to see that AI is going to write accessible code. And in order to make that happen, I created a benchmark called amac, the AI model Accessibility Checker that tests the code that different AI models come out with and sees how accessible they are and gives them a score so that they compete. They can compete on accessibility.
- [27:12]
B
Wow. So is there, is there a world and maybe this is exactly what you're going for where it's almost like agentic or built into the AI itself, where as AI is creating code, it's self checking this to generate more accessible code.
- [27:27]
A
Absolutely. I mean the big trick is that the AI model companies have to prioritize it and they ask people, they say very openly that they need what's called evals, we, where you evaluate how well they are performing in your particular field. So they love to compete on things like benchmarks. And that's why I thought, all right, let's create a benchmark and then with that benchmark we'll be able to let them know. And I started having conversations with some of the people building the model. So I think that they're going to pick up on it. And I should call out that I have podcast called accessibility and gen AI and my co host heads up accessibility for ServiceNow and he backed me up on doing this and so we kind of launched it together. And I feel very hopeful that organizations are going to pick this up because a lot of people have come to us and are helping out and paying attention to it.
- [28:28]
B
No, that's awesome. That's really, really exciting to hear about. And I can certainly imagine the possibilities if this becomes, you know, standard for this. And I guess that's one of the benefits of, you know, some of these gen AI tools is as they become that platform, if you can build it into the platform itself, you can. You know, maybe it's easier than every individual trying to code it themselves.
- [28:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's a very simple equation, right? If the AI coding models are accessible, the world is going to get accessible and the terrible numbers in those reports are going to look amazing. But if it's not, it's going to make it that much worse. And we're really at that inflection point right now. And something that I learned from gad, from Global Accessibility Awareness Day, was you think that you cannot make a change like a massive global change, but the reality is, you would be surprised. And the key to achieving it is having a really good vision and having a community that you can share that vision to, because then people can work together and create something that will change the course of history. And so I really try to inspire people. Okay, look at what I've did. If I could do it, you can do it. Yeah.
- [29:51]
B
No, it's amazing talking about how GAD came effectively out of one blog post. So what does GAD look like now, Joe? And what's kind of the scope of the mission and what it's up to in present day?
- [30:06]
A
Yeah, so it was totally grassroots for the first 10 years, where we didn't even have a foundation or any nonprofit. And in reality, I describe it as a runaway train. And we just tried to hold on and basically support, support anybody that created an event. What people see publicly is that the big tech community, the big tech companies, pretty much all celebrate it publicly. They talk about it, they do videos, the CEOs do social media around it, which helps a lot with the awareness. But I think the part that people don't see is that we are asked all the time to speak through the accessibility departments. We are asked to speak to the entire company of lots of different organizations, and that's where the work is really being done. So some of them, for example, Amazon, I can say this because they've released it publicly, they do GAM Global Accessibility Awareness Month, where they do an entire month of training internally for accessibility. And so a lot of our time is spent going into organizations and giving talks about accessibility. And in terms of the mission of the foundation, it's about changing the culture of digital product creation to make sure that accessibility is a core value. And that's what we're spending a lot of time on.
- [31:36]
B
It's so amazing, and I'm really glad to hear about the impact you're having. You Know, from, you know, the AI organizations to the, you know, the tech companies. I mean, yeah, it's so great that you can be at the center and that they can be, you know, supporting that as well. You know, if you, if you had one wish for, you know, how you could extend this mission and what either tech companies or the general public need to be knowing about or doing differently to improve accessibility, what would that be?
- [32:12]
A
I think from the corporate side, and this is something that we're thinking about extending with the AMAC benchmark, I think that they, they need to look at the models they're using and put together a little analysis internally to see how accessible the code is or the different products, the different AI products they're using and create evals around it, because that's the only way to really test how accessible your work is with the AI models. But something that really been on my mind is the potential job loss. And I know you had MO on your podcast. I've listened to several of his podcasts and. Very interesting, very interesting fellow. I think that if you go and try and predict what's going to happen in tech, especially AI right now, it's a great way to look like a fool in a year or five months or five years. But there's a reason that a lot of people are worried that we're going to see job loss from AI, because imagine that you're, I think the inflection point is going to be when robotics are married to LLMs and there's the ChatGPT moment for robotics. So to give one example already today, if you get sick, you, if you use ChatGPT and you don't get caught up by a hallucination, you're already, in a lot of ways are having a better experience than going to your doctor. Who. And I, I, I have lots of friends and family in, in the healthcare space. If they spend more than 10 minutes with you, they're losing money. That's what I've heard. And that's why you can't really give them all your symptoms and you can't slowly develop the conversation with them. Whereas with AI, you can share everything. But now imagine that you have a robot in your home. So you have that ChatGPT or LLM connected to that robot and it has sensors and it looks at your skin every day, at your eyes, at your weight, all these different conditions, and it can warn you ahead of time of what's going on. And it can be essentially a better doctor than a doctor. So if someone is educated as a Doctor is challenged with their job by, by AI, then what? Hope nobody is really safe. And the inflection point there to me is are there going to be one, two, five big tech companies that are going to own the Dr. Robots and all the money goes to them, or will we find a way to take small businesses? So doctors are sort of in charge of 10 or 20 of these AI robots, robot doctors, and some of that money is funneled to regular folks. If we do not protect the individual and small businesses, we are in a world of hurt. It's going to be really, really awful unless there's just new jobs created that, you know, where we just can't see them today. But, but that really worries me because I don't know what job and a high intelligence that's connected to a humanoid robot. What is it that they can't do? Right?
- [35:37]
B
It's, it's such an interesting, it's such a, an interesting knot to untangle. And even, you know, even as you were explaining it, Joe, there's like, I can hear the like, optimism mixed with the concern and pessimism, right? Because, oh, you're getting better services than ever before. You have access to these things and, you know, your health care is in your own hands. But what about our livelihoods, right? Like, how do we create value? How do we earn a living? And what does that mean? And I don't know, the optimist in me, and this is like a whole thesis I'm trying to develop right now, but the optimist in me thinks if people can not just see a doctor or get medical advice by themselves, but as you said earlier, they can vibe code, they can combine at some point robotics with large language models and one person can do, or a few people can do what an entire enterprise was doing in 2020. You know, what does that unlock in terms of what people can do for anybody? And I don't know, that's the piece that gives me hope. I don't know if you buy that, but it's going to be really interesting to see how it shakes out.
- [36:51]
A
Yeah, So I have the same feeling in a lot of ways. But what does that really mean when you translate that into reality? What it means is the entrepreneur. It'll be a great unlock for the entrepreneur. But there's a lot of people, I'm an entrepreneur. So for me, I love that. It's great, let's do it. But I know a lot of people, they just want to do their 9 to 5. And these businesses are going to be run by Very small teams, plus AI. And so I don't know that it's going to create that many jobs. And so I've been thinking about, well, what is a solution to this or at least direction. And I hit on, on this concept which is, have you ever been to Venice? In, In Los Angeles?
- [37:39]
B
Like Venice?
- [37:40]
A
Yeah, like Venice Beach. Abbot Kinney area?
- [37:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, sure.
- [37:44]
A
So Abbot Kinney is such an interesting little spot because local regulations essentially they kept out any chains and it's all small businesses, little clothing stores, little independently owned restaurants, and it's the most beautiful street because they, they removed the chains from the equation. And private equity and big money have turned commerce into such a science that they've taken over all of these spaces. And culturally in America, I know you're, you're in Canada, North America, let's say we have not culturally done enough to support each other's small business and say, you know what, yes, there are good aspects to let's say a coffee chain, but let's divide it up and support our small businesses. And I think that if the big layoffs do come, the first thing that people should do is run for local office and start to create these zones that are free of chains that are essentially like Abbot Kinney, where you just have small businesses running things, where you have that love for the business and the love for the people, and you create amazing services and products and stores. And I think that that can be a path to at least mitigate some of these problems because you're essentially affecting the culture, because so many of these issues, it's all about culture. We've been lulled into the dopamine hit of social media to the point where we don't even realize what we're doing anymore and we're losing our culture.
- [39:34]
B
It's. Yeah, I, it's really interesting. And I, I'm totally bought into the vision, the piece I'm bouncing off. To me, there's kind of two sides in my mind. One of them is, do you have to regulate some of this stuff away? Or at some point is there a big enough backlash from the consumer, from the demand side, that they say, you know what, I've had enough of this social media, or I've had enough of these chains. I'm now drawn. And socially and societally, we're drawn to supporting some of the smaller organizations? I don't know, to me, if we can pull that off, that's even more powerful. But I don't know. What do you think?
- [40:12]
A
Well, I wasn't saying to regulate away the chains that they're not allowed to exist or anything like that. All I'm saying is if we're starting to see that, and I believe in capitalism, right. But I also believe in late stage capitalism. You have people either on one side or the other. I think socialism has been proven over and over again to be a disaster and has killed hundreds of millions of people at this point. And yet some people are so upset with late stage capitalism that they move toward the socialism side. But then you have the people that are against socialism and that are 100% into the capitalism and they, they brush aside that late stage aspect of it where essentially the governments are bought and, and paid for with lobbying. And then you have the dopamine side where it's been a science so we don't have the control and the will that we think we do to change things. And so I don't, I don't think it's a very good approach to say, hey, try and run for president or try and run for Congress, because that's too big an ask. But if you go locally and everywhere across North America, locally, you create these zones that are zoned in a particular way, it's going to be a different kind of a fight and it will just open the door for, for, for more local opportunity. I wish there was a bigger solution than that, but that's, that's, at least, I think that's a step in the right direction.
- [41:49]
B
No, I love that. And that's something I've been hearing more and more, talking to, you know, some of the leading thinkers here. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with Zach Kass who's a, he's a former executive from OpenAI and he's doing a really big push right now on local and kind of local communities, local engagement. And I mean my gut reaction is that he's absolutely right. And you know, certainly Joe, I hear you two talking about, you know, when you talk about capitalism and socialism, like what I hear is like almost getting back to the roots of capitalism, which is competition. Right. How do you enable competition versus have overly concentrated wealth in, in too few hands. And you know, how, how can we use local tools to do that better?
- [42:33]
A
Yeah, I mean I like a lot of people, for example, will, will attack Amazon for have that concentration of wealth, right. And I have some friends that are executives there and one of them pointed out to me, we, I don't know what the numbers are today, but he said we employ a million people in America. I think it's a million people In America, I believe, like, that's a good number. I mean, they do own like 50% of E commerce, so I don't know how good a number that is, but that's a huge number and there's nothing wrong with that. I think that that's wonderful. And at times their service is amazing. Right. Aspects of their service are amazing, although some stuff has fallen off. So there's nothing in my opinion wrong with that. But I don't know if they should own 50% of E commerce. That feels a little bit high and ridiculous. And it's the same thing with chains.
- [43:32]
B
Yeah, well, I think we're both of the same mind that more small business is good and it leads to, you know, more, I mean, frankly, just more wealth in the hands of, you know, small business owners versus concentrated in these large enterprises, but also probably better personalization for buyers as well. One of the pieces that concerns me, and, you know, I'm curious on your thoughts is as we talk about this and Amazon is such a perfect example because Amazon is in one of its core businesses, a marketplace. Right. Like, so much of Amazon's money is made by platforming other people's organizations. And so this is one of the things I grapple with too is even if we say, you know, what with AI, everybody's going to be an entrepreneur now because, you know, that's the way of the future. You know, how long is it before, you know, a couple of big Amazons swoop in and say, wow, you're going to be an entrepreneur on our platform and we get 30% of everything you make and suddenly we're right back to that wealth capitalization. Is that a risk? And what do we do about it?
- [44:43]
A
Oh, I mean, what was that saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you can't fool me again. That misquote. The 90s, the web came out. I was so excited for the future with the web. And I thought this was the moment for the small business. And then look what happened. It makes you so sad. The worst moment for me was when the RSS reader, where the reader, the name of the RSS feed aggregator that Google had when they sunset that it was like. And then all the browsers and Everybody stopped supporting RSS. Those of us that saw the 90s, that was like the death knell of the small business owning the web. And that's just awful. So I can't go in and look at AI and say, oh, this is going to be great for the small business. No, you can't fool me. Again.
- [45:54]
B
I've been certainly bummed out by the kind of corporatization of the Internet over the last, over the last 20 years for sure. And yeah, it's just been. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting cynical, but my sense is like every time I see these historical events throughout history, it just seems like no matter how many times you're like this time it's going to be an equalizer. The rich get richer. It feels like almost every time or every time, you know, there's a concentration of wealth and it's the people at the bottom who lose out.
- [46:30]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, like I said, I don't mind. They can be as rich as they want and that's fine. But when it's a struggle for the average person, that's the part that, that really worries me. And the monopolies, frankly, or oligopolies, I guess it would be that through lobbying just own everything, that, that's just a terrible experience. And if we lose our, if we lose the jobs and they try and do something like the ubs, the. What does that sound for again?
- [47:05]
B
Ubi.
- [47:06]
A
Ubi. Yeah. Universal Basic Income.
- [47:08]
B
Basic income.
- [47:10]
A
A lot of people think that's going to work. I think it's going to be a massive disaster to us culturally. It's going to, it will be awful.
- [47:19]
B
And you say disaster because you're concerned about people losing motivation or what's the, what's the concern there?
- [47:26]
A
You know, we sort of tried it with, with COVID and a lot of people had some disposable income that, that they had never really had before. And I just knew some small business like owners, I was at the Chamber of Commerce. So a lot of people would say that in, in their hotels they just got completely trashed and a lot of people came in and just abused it. So it was like in larger numbers than you would expect. And so part of me worries about that, but the other part is culturally, you know, I keep going back to culture. It's just so important if you do not work for something. Right. It's really the journey that gives you that meaning. And as I had mentioned earlier, like I, I was in a pretty good shape after building to, to 100 person company and I got to see what it was like to almost get there where I could retire and not worry about anything. And the motivation quite frankly felt like I didn't have to fight so much anymore. And losing that fight just impacts your, your day to day. You sort of need that fight. And now I'm back in the fight. And I don't know, in a way, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm happier, as crazy as it. As it may sound. Even though, like, I can't retire anymore. Like, I have to. I have to work on that again. Right. The journey. The journey is what. What makes the difference. And if you're just given that. That money and you don't have to work for it, it's going to change our culture, I think, in a bad way, but nobody knows, who knows? But I. I think it'll be bad.
- [49:11]
B
I love the sentiment of the fight being the meaning.
- [49:15]
A
Right.
- [49:15]
B
And I'm so impressed, Joe, by what you've accomplished as an entrepreneur and so many of the cool things that have kind of come out of your toil. And as we discussed, one of the things I certainly see is AI and the way it impacts jobs impacting 9 to fives a lot more heavily than it impacts, you know, entrepreneurs, for example. And, you know, to me, that means that we need. We need more entrepreneurs. We need more people with fight in them versus more people thinking, well, I'm here as a cog in the machine collecting a paycheck, you know, who cares what I do? And so I wanted to come back to you for a bit because you've got this, you know, amazing story. In some ways, you've beaten the odds, you know, and maybe it's been, you know, ups and downs along the way, but, you know, what has that fight meant to you? And, you know, the piece that I wanted to come back to specifically is you mentioned in passing. Gad, you talked about your dad very briefly. How did he come into play, both in terms of your kind of entrepreneurial spirit as well as your focus on accessibility?
- [50:26]
A
Oh, that's so interesting. So it was funny when it came to entrepreneurship, my dad was running the New York division of a housewares company, and I was 19 years old, and he gave me. He said, why don't you work for me, you know, in the summer? And within, like, a couple of weeks, I just started getting the sales going. And then he just looked at me and he said, who are you? Where did this come from? I had no idea that you had this in you. And. And it's just. It's just. I don't know, it's in the blood somehow, that. That entrepreneurial spirit and. And that fight, like, I can't work. The only way I'll work for somebody else is if I know that's a path to building something on my own where I could turn The. The job into a client. But when it comes to gad, just so you know, my dad was. Was brilliant. He spoke 11 languages, including Aramaic. He was as good at science as he was at the Talmud, and he was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. So he had been through it all. And you could tell the moment he walked in the room, he commanded respect. There's just no words to explain it, but you just saw that presence when he would walk in a room. And then when he hit his mid-80s, he started to lose his eyesight and his hearing, and he couldn't go. He couldn't drive anymore. Going to the bank meant taking access paratransit, which took all day. And they would leave him and my mom in the sun, sometimes in the valley for, like, two hours. So getting to the bank was hard. And here I was, a web developer working on American Idol, and my dad cannot bank because his bank's website is inaccessible. That was so painful. And so I wrote this blog post saying that we need to create this day of awareness. And there were so many moments that bring chills down my spine. But one of the big ones was by the third year, the bank, who I've never mentioned their name publicly, one of their accessibility people. And I don't even remember who this is. I don't even know who it is. They wrote me an email, and they said, we know that we have massive accessibility issues, so we are celebrating GAD in order to help our team learn about accessibility. And I never told him that they were the inspiration for the day, but here you go. Having an impact on an organization in such a short period of time just from a blog post. So that's my dad's story and how that came together. I don't know if I answered everything you asked.
- [53:17]
B
And did the bank know the connection with your dad, or was that just a coincidence?
- [53:22]
A
No, they had no idea. It was just. I'm not a big one to talk about fate or stuff like that, but that was one where you just have these moments where you're like, maybe there is something spiritual beyond what we see.
- [53:39]
B
Well, my reaction was like, you did it. You did this specific small thing you set out to accomplish, and you change the world along the way, which is just so, so powerful.
- [53:55]
A
Well, and that's the crazy thing is I always hated the hubris that a lot of people would have where I'd go to these conferences and they would say, I want to change the world. And then they would go to work for one of these big tech companies. And then just sort of change the world in a really bad way. And you're just like, you know what, let's talk about changing the world. Just either make a living and take care of your family, nothing wrong with that. Or try and do something good and then just see what happens. So on the one hand, I feel very funny to even sort of accept that nice thing you just said. And on the other hand, I want to inspire people to say you can make a difference. I don't want to say you can change the world, but you can make a difference by attaching vision to community. And the interesting thing is that the people that love to do things like be on a podcast or give a keynote, they tend to have a little bit more of a narcissistic tendency where they love to be the center of attention and enjoy that aspect of it. And then you have more the engineer types that don't want to be the center of attention but have so much more to share. And so it's important, important to connect to the engineering types. And I kind of see you to be in, in that way after, you know, all the podcasts I've, I've heard of yours that you have so much more to share and it comes off so much more genuine because it's not about hearing your voice, it's about sharing ideas that can make a difference. So absolutely everyone should sit there. I know you, I know everyone has an idea that, that can make a difference or change the world. Like just go to Toastmasters, get that stage time and learn how to become a public speaker and share it with the world because that may just change everything.
- [55:47]
B
Yeah, I love that and it really deeply resonates with me, Joe. And by the way, like, as you were kind of saying and as you kind of inferred, like I'm, I would never consider myself like a natural podcast guy. I kind of got thrust into that and I've spent my career in technology and product in, you know, you know, kind of that, that inside the guts of the corporation piece. And I've worked with, I consider myself an introvert, frankly, and I work with a lot of introverts. And I also just feel very powerful about, like you have something to say. And my gut tells me that with the advent of AI, so much of that heads down engineering work is going to be the first piece that's automated and the ability to speak up, to build relationships, to, you know, communicate your vision to people and to bring it to life. I like, I just, I think we're at a really special time in history. And, you know, I want to make sure all these, you know, brilliant people who maybe don't even see their own brilliance are taking advantage of that.
- [56:53]
A
And that's wonderful. And the guests you've had are so impressive. And it's such a. You go from somebody that's really well known, like Malcolm Gladwell, to some other names that are super interesting, but maybe not as well known. And I just love that mix that you've put together. Kudos on the podcast that you've done. And I'll add one other thing. AI is going. All these AI avatars. That looks so real. The influencer of tomorrow is going to be a swarm of AI AI influencers. And I think it's going to make people want to see folks in real life, to see that you can give a keynote, to see that you can attend a meetup, and to share things with the community. I think that that's going to grow a lot. And then when you show up on social media with a podcast, then people know that you're a real human being. That is one of the jobs, if you want to call it, that are going to grow, I think, and be really important and powerful.
- [57:57]
B
Yeah, I think so, too. And, yeah, the premium for human connection and real people just. Yeah, it makes complete sense to me, Joe, just as we sort of wind down the conversation here, and by the way, I'm deliberately shifting us away from your praise of the podcast because that's. That's not what I want to talk about, but I appreciate it. You know, as you think about, you know, the people that you're talking to who may be listening to this and may not be as entrepreneurially minded as you are. You know, what's kind of your parting advice for them as they, you know, think about their career and think about doing or not doing things going forward.
- [58:37]
A
I think for your protection, you should start some. You should start a company regardless. Just have something there where you can do some consulting work and then just dive into AI. Even if it's going to be sort of our albatross in a way, I think it's important for you to be aware of what's coming. And so dive into that 100%. And you don't have to be the entrepreneurial person yourself. You have friends that are entrepreneurial and you can help them. Everybody has something unique that they can bring to the table, and AI will just allow you to take that and be 100 times more productive. So dive into it 100%. Create your own company. Even if you're not entrepreneurial, you'll get some really good use out of it. Speak to an accountant who will help you set it up in a way that's going to be positive for you. And then try and connect with other people, you know, that are entrepreneurs and see if you, your unique skills can help them, because that will be a good protection for you.
- [59:48]
B
I love that. It's, it's such an inspiring message. It's, you know, it feels so doable in that lens. And, yeah, it's just such a pleasure and a privilege, Joe, to hear you and, you know, your insights, given your experience there. So I want to say a big thank you for joining on the show. We really appreciated having you.
- [60:06]
A
Thank you so much, Jeff. I really enjoyed it.