Design Expert: AI, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Digital Experiences

What does the future of digital experiences look like when AI, accessibility, and entrepreneurship collide? On this episode of Digital Disruption, we’re joined by serial tech entrepreneur, accessibility advocate, and co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Joe Devon. As Chair of the GAAD Foundation, Joe strives to disrupt the culture of technology and digital product development by embedding accessibility as a core requirement. Inspired by his 2011 blog post highlighting the need for mainstream accessibility knowledge among developers, GAAD has grown into an annual event observed on the third Thursday of May, promoting digital access and inclusion for over one billion people with disabilities worldwide. He also co-hosts the Accessibility and Gen. AI Podcast, exploring the intersection of accessibility and artificial intelligence. Joe sits down with Geoff to explore how AI startups are reshaping the digital landscape, from code accessibility to the rise of small business innovation. He shares the story of how one blog post led to a global accessibility movement, why AI-driven tools could either democratize or centralize technology, and how the entrepreneurial spirit will define the next decade. From robotics fused with large language models to AI coding assistants generating billions of lines of code, this conversation dives into the challenges, risks, and opportunities for entrepreneurs and digital leaders navigating this transformation. In this episode: 00:00 Intro 00:23 The “ChatGPT moment” for robotics 01:23 The mission behind Global Accessibility Awareness Day 02:29 How AI shifts the accessibility conversation 03:08 Why accessibility matters for everyone 06:17 Usability and empathy in digital product design 12:28 How AI can unlock inclusion and personalization 14:45 Aphantasia, hyperphantasia & diverse human abilities 17:34 AI and the future of sign language translation 19:23 How to work with disability communities 23:59 Advice for leaders getting started with inclusive design 25:13 AI coding tools revolutionizing software development 29:27 Can AI accessibility become the new standard? 30:06 How GAAD became a global movement 35:24 Entrepreneurship vs. 9-to-5 in an AI-powered economy 45:07 Lessons from the early internet and RSS’s decline 47:04 The debate on Universal Basic Income (UBI) 50:26 Joe’s father’s influence and the accessibility journey 52:34 From a blog post to real change in banking 57:13 The rise of AI influencers vs. the value of real humans 58:36 Advice for those unsure about entrepreneurship Connect with Joe: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joedevon/ X: https://x.com/joedevon Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcast Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 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 chat GPT moment for robotics.

• 0:26Geoff Nielson?

  Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be sitting down with Joe Devon, 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.

• 1:10Geoff Nielson?

  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?

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Gosh, what a great question.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  The, 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

• 2:12Speaker 00

  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 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 that I'm starting to see that there's there's some big things that we really need to worry about with AI. And and I'm starting to think about maybe doing a little bit of work on that end.

• 2:44Geoff Nielson?

  So I mean, first of all, I think that's 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, you know, this blog post had the impact that it did? Like, what was it about, you know, technology, digital products at the time? That, you know, caused people to latch on to this idea?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Well, at the time, I was a web developer for American Idol dot 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 and then I paired with with Jenison Ascension, who is he's just a force of nature. He's a blind developer, I guess evangelist, you would call it.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  The median age of the typical American is about thirty nine years old. And when you're forty, you start to need things like better color contrast.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  And and so you need you need these affordances and the statistics don't 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, OK, the only thing they'll 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, the number is huge.

• 5:22Geoff Nielson?

  So and that's that's exactly where I wanted to go, Joe, because you know, you mentioned, you know, your your partner there who's blind. And I feel like there's a tendency for people to think, oh, accessibility, you know, you've 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 of disabilities or people who benefit from better, you know, design, inclusive design, if I can call it that?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  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 fifties 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 twenty twenty 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

• 6:38Speaker 00

  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 dialogue. And now people just can't hear it well.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:34Geoff Nielson?

  Well, that's the, you use the word usability. And to me, that's usability design. That, one of my kind of hypotheses in this space, and I, I've been interested in accessibility for a while now, is that we, 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, you know, easy, but not great to dismiss them. But good usability and good design, you know, in my experience, impacts such a broader audience than just people who have, you know, profound disabilities. Has that been your experience as well?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really about empathy. If you are talking to your users and there's, 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 they tell me when.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  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 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 for a screen reader. So you know, there there is so much that you can learn by talking to your users and making things more accessible. Your technology will be way better.

• 9:23Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that it actually is for everyone and it it just leads to to better design and to better usability. So so we talked a little bit about, you know, kind of the the state of things in 2011 with digital products when this started. Joe, what have you seen in the last, you know, 14 ish years since then? Have have things evolved dramatically as much as they should? And you know, what kind of opportunities do new technologies like AI unlock in this space?

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Big question. When 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 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

• 10:37Speaker 00

  like 72% of the mobile apps. And and these are like the top mobile apps, really, that they're they're like really high quality, you know, teams that that have money and 72% were poor or failing in 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 nineties, it was so exciting. Because you felt like it was the little guy was going to be ascendant.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  And anybody could build a webpage and now it feels like the the standards bodies have sort of forgotten on the web standards. They're the only people that can afford to be on the W three C are these large organizations. And I think that they've forgotten the small user. And as a result of that, now you you're 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.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  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 for them to do. So I'd say that's what has dominated the last fourteen years. If that makes sense, I've been talking a lot, so.

• 12:28Geoff Nielson?

  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, how, what what gives you optimism? Like what what tools now are able to unlock, you know, a better, more inclusive future for for the web and for mobile apps?

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when ChatGPT first came out, uh, I started to go around and give a keynote on um, 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 their, 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, um, but it sort of is. Um, have you heard of AFantasia?

• 13:38Geoff Nielson?

  The, the word sounds familiar. Let's walk through what it is.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Sure. So I, I, I essentially have AFantasia where it's blindness in the mind's eye. So for me, my dad passed away, uh, and he was the inspiration for all of, of GAD. And I wish I could just conjure up an image of him in my mind, but I can't do it. Uh, it's pretty much black or almost, almost nothing comes up, right? And my fiance probably has the opposite, which is, uh, if I had to, uh, don't know, I forgot the word, but it'll come to me. Um, she has the opposite where she has a very visual memory. And, uh, I remember once I was trying to test her. Uh, we were walking down and there was a plane with like three different colors.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And so I was, uh, when she was looking away, when we, when we were blocked by something, I said, what colors were that plane? And she's 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? Um, and just to give you one example, we're 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

• 15:07Speaker 00

  and the 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.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Maybe it's not as important for this particular topic, but if you have a certain 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

• 15:57Speaker 00

  audio description, which I I would have never even dreamed of trying to do this. I haven't touched code in about fifteen 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.

• 16:30Geoff Nielson?

  Wow, I 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 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 in 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.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Well, what I'm waiting for that I I'm sure is gonna come and I'm definitely gonna talk to some people who can probably make this happen when when the technology is just needs a little more, I think. Uh, imagine uh 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 uh well-meaning tech people have gone in and they said, oh, uh, I created this avatar that will

• 17:54Speaker 00

  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 uh on so much of the nuance because they 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 um people that are deaf founders that are building AI models to do two-way uh sign language translation, right? And then you have the fact that there are as many sign languages as as there are languages, uh, including different dialects. So uh

• 18:37Speaker 00

  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 gonna be game changers when you can take an entire backlog of content and make it available to the deaf community.

• 18:58Geoff Nielson?

  So when we when we think about doing so, there's 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, you know, guidance around how to involve communities with disabilities or like, how do you how do you get that feedback? And how do you best work with communities to figure out what's gonna work and what isn't?

• 19:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:55Geoff Nielson?

  Right. 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 let me put that on the table. I want to name and shame. Who who are the best at this? Who are the worst at this? And what really differentiates their approaches?

• 20:23Speaker 00

  So unfortunately, for this question, that is not the way I approach it. And and I'll tell you why.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Change in in the world.

• 21:11Geoff Nielson?

  That sounds that sounds completely reasonable. So in this in the spirit of of positive influence, who are who are some of the, you know, organizations and some of the products that you've seen do a really good job at this recently?

• 21:22Speaker 00

  It's always also tricky that you, you know, you're gonna 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 the videos of the iPad

• 22:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  And they have a community of, 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, 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 ChatGPT-4. And now they have AI doing this as well.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  So they're a super interesting organization. Yeah.

• 23:33Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, no, that's, it's unbelievable and just what you can, you know, unlock for people by having AI do something like that.

• 23:42Geoff Nielson?

  So.

• 23:44Geoff Nielson?

  Just, just kind of reflecting on that, for leaders who are interested in getting more in touch with, with accessibility, with, you know, changing their design philosophy around how they, you know, spin up products like this, what's kind of your best advice for how they get started, uh, you know, in a way that doesn't make it seem, you know, overwhelming?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  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. Um, and there is an organization called Fable that does a really good job of pairing people with disabilities to do user testing, uh, on products that, that people build. Um, but I, I would also say that the world is changing thanks to AI, uh, so much. Um, have, have you played with, uh, with Cursor or Windsurf or Claude Code or any of these AI coding, um, uh, programs?

• 24:43Geoff Nielson?

  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.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so I've been away for 15 years and mostly because I was running a company, uh, just to give you a little more background, I built a dev shop to about a hundred people. Uh, things were going great and then COVID hit and by the time COVID was done, my company was done. Um, 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, uh, 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 would, could help you get into different code bases and explain

• 25:29Speaker 00

  what's going on in the code base. Um, 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, um, this concept of vibe coding came around. And the reason I'm asking about this is because, um, the, the CEO of Cursor tweeted out, uh, uh, recently that

• 25:52Speaker 00

  They are do, they're generating a billion lines of code a day. And there's about three billion lines of code written globally by humans. So cursor alone was at a quarter of all written code. And there's about forty five 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.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And in terms of getting away from the depressing statistics that I said earlier, I'm, 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.

• 27:11Geoff Nielson?

  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?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, the, the, the big trick is that the AI model companies have to prioritize it. And they, they ask people, they, they say very openly that they need what's called evals, 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.

• 27:48Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  And then with that benchmark, we'll be able to, 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 that I have a podcast called Accessibility in Gen AI. And my co-host heads up Accessibility for Service Now. And he backed, he backed me up on doing this. And so we, we kind of launched it together. And I, I feel very hopeful that, that organizations are going to pick this up because a lot of people have come to us and are, and are helping out and paying attention to it.

• 28:28Geoff Nielson?

  No, that's, that's, 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.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  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, we're really at that inflection point right now. And something that I learned from, 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.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Because then people can work together and create something that will change the course of history. And, and so I really try to inspire people, okay, look at what I've did. If I could do it, you can do it.

• 29:50Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, no, it's amazing, you know, talking about how GAD came effectively out of one blog post. So what is, what does GAD look like now, Joe? And what's kind of the, the, the scope of the mission and, you know, what it's up to, you know, in present day?

• 30:06Speaker 00

  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 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

• 30:50Speaker 00

  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 a whole, 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.

• 31:34Geoff Nielson?

  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 and what either tech companies or the general public need to be knowing about or doing differently to improve accessibility, what would that be?

• 32:12Speaker 00

  I think from the corporate side, and this is something that we're taught, 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.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  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 or five years.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  But there's a reason that a lot of people are worried that 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 L L M's and there's the chat GPT moment for robotics. So to give one example, already today, if you get sick, you're, if you use chat GPT 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 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.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  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 chat GPT or L L M 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 as educated as a doctor is challenged with their job by AI, then what hope, nobody is really safe.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  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 doctor 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.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  But, but that really worries me because I don't know what job, a high intelligence that's connected to a humanoid robot, what is it that they can't do? Right?

• 35:36Geoff Nielson?

  It's, it's such an interesting, it's such an interesting knot to untangle. And even, you know, even as you were explaining it, Joe, there, there's like, I, 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 healthcare is in your own hands. But what about our livelihoods, right? Like, what, how do we create value? How do we earn a living? And what does that mean? And I don't know, the, the optimist in me, and this is like a whole thesis I'm, I'm trying to develop right now. But the optimist in me thinks if people can, you know, not just see a doctor or get medical advice by themselves.

• 36:20Geoff Nielson?

  But, you know, as you said earlier, they, 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, you know, was doing in 2020. You know, what does that unlock in terms of what people can do for, for anybody? And, and I don't know, that, that, that's the piece that gives me hope. I don't know if, if you buy that or, but, but it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how it shakes out.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I 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, you know, great, let's do it. But I know a lot of people, they just want to do their nine to five. And uh, these, 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 a direction?

• 37:29Speaker 00

  And uh, I hit on, on this concept, which is, have you ever been to Venice uh, in, in Los Angeles?

• 37:39Geoff Nielson?

  Like Venice Beach?

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, like Venice Beach, Abbott Kinney area.

• 37:42Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  So Abbott Kinney is such an interesting little spot because um, local regulations, essentially, they kept out any chains. And it's all small businesses, little clothing stores, little uh, independently owned restaurants. And it's the most beautiful street because they, they removed the chains from the equation. And uh, uh, private equity and um, big money have turned commerce into such a science that they've taken over all of these spaces and culturally uh, 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,

• 38:29Speaker 00

  you know what, yes, there are good aspects to, let's say, a, a coffee chain. But let's divide it up and, and support our small businesses. And I think that uh, if, 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, that are essentially like Abbott 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, and stores. And I think that that can be a path to at least mitigate some of these problems.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:33Geoff Nielson?

  It's, yeah, I, it's really interesting. And, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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?

• 40:12Speaker 00

  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, that, you know, and I, I believe in capitalism, right? But I also believe in late-stage capitalism. You know, you have, 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 a hundred percent into the capitalism.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:48Geoff Nielson?

  No, I, I, 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 Cass, 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, 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?

• 42:32Speaker 00

  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?

• 43:12Speaker 00

  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, a little bit high and ridiculous. And it's the same thing with, with like chains, you know?

• 43:32Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, well, and 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.

• 44:13Geoff Nielson?

  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, you know, we get 30% of everything you make, and suddenly we're right back to that wealth, you know, capitalization. You know, is that a risk? And what do we do about it?

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, you know, what was that saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you can't fool me again. That, 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 is, it makes you, it makes you so sad. The worst moment for me was when the RSS reader, where the reader, the, the name of the RSS feed aggregator that Google had when they sunset that, it was like, and, and then

• 45:23Speaker 00

  all the browsers and, and everybody stopped supporting RSS. Those of us that, that saw the 90s, like, that was like the death knell of, of the small business. Uh, owning the web and, and that, that's just awful. So I can't go in and look at AI and say, oh, this is going to be great for, for the small business. No, you can't fool me again, you know?

• 45:51Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I, and I've, I've been certainly bummed out by the kind of corporatization of, of the internet, you know, over the last, oh, over the last 20 years for sure. And yeah, it's just been, I don't know, maybe I'm just getting cynical, but, but my sense is like, every time I see these, you know, historical events, you know, throughout history, it just seems like no matter how many times you're like, this time, like it's going to be an equalizer, like the rich get richer. It, it just, it, it feels like almost every time or, or every time, you know, there's a concentration of wealth and it's the people at the bottom who lose out.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, uh, 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, uh, the monopolies frankly, or oligopolies, I guess it would be, that through lobbying, just own everything, uh, 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, what does that sound for again?

• 47:03Geoff Nielson?

  UBS, or UBI.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  UBI, yeah. Universal Basic Income.

• 47:08Geoff Nielson?

  Basic Income.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  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 gonna, it, it, it will be awful.

• 47:19Geoff Nielson?

  And you say disaster because you're concerned about people losing motivation or what's the, what's the concern there?

• 47:25Speaker 00

  You know, we sort of tried it with, with COVID and a lot of people had some disposable income that, um,

• 47:34Speaker 00

  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 just abused it. So it was like in larger numbers than than you would expect. And so part of me worries about that. But the other part is culturally, you know, I I keep going back to culture. It's just so important. If if you do not work for something, right? It's really the the journey that gives you that meaning.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  And as I had mentioned earlier, like I I was in a pretty good shape after building to to a hundred 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, it it 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

• 49:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 49:10Geoff Nielson?

  I love the sentiment of, you know, the fight being the meaning, right? And, you know, I I'm I'm so impressed, Joe, by what you've accomplished, you know, as an entrepreneur and and so many of the cool things that have kind of come out of your toil. And, you know, a as we discussed, one of the things I certainly see is AI.

• 49:32Geoff Nielson?

  And the way it impacts jobs impacting nine 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, 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, um, you know, what, what has that fight meant to you? And, and, you know, the, the piece that I wanted to come back to specifically is you mentioned in passing, um, Gad, uh, you, you talked about your dad very briefly.

• 50:17Geoff Nielson?

  How, how did he come into play, both in terms of your, you know, kind of entrepreneurial spirit, as well as your focus on accessibility?

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Oh, that's, that's so interesting. So, uh, it was funny, when it came to entrepreneurship, my dad was, um, was running the New York division of a housewares company and I was 19 years old and he gave me, uh, uh, he said, why don't you work for me, you know, in the summer? And, uh, 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, uh, and it's just, it's just, I don't know, it's in the blood somehow, um, that, that entrepreneurial, um, spirit and, and that

• 51:08Speaker 00

  fight, like I can't work, the, the only way I'll work for somebody else is if I know that's a path to building something on my own, uh, where I could turn the, the job into a client. Uh, 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, uh, and he was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. Uh, so he is, he had been through it all and you could tell the moment he walked in the room, he commanded respect. I, 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 eighties.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  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 power transit, 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, 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

• 52:36Speaker 00

  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. He, they wrote me an email and they said, we know that we have massive accessibility issues. So we are celebrating that 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, how that, that came together. I don't know if I answered.

• 53:15Geoff Nielson?

  Wow. And did the, did the bank know the connection with your dad or was that just a coincidence?

• 53:21Speaker 00

  No, they had no idea. It was, it was just, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not like a big one to talk about fate or stuff like that. But that was one where you just, you just have these moments where you're like, maybe there is something spiritual beyond, beyond what we see.

• 53:39Geoff Nielson?

  Well, it's, my, my reaction was like, you did it, like you, you, you did this, the specific small thing you set out to accomplish. And you changed the world along the way, which is just so, so powerful.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Well, 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 like a really bad way. And you're just like, you know what, don't 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. That nice thing you just said. And on the other hand, I want to inspire people to say,

• 54:33Speaker 00

  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 of 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 to connect to the engineering types. And I kind of see you to be in that way after, you know, all the podcasts I've heard of yours.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  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 everyone has an idea 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.

• 55:47Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, I it's I I love that. And and there's 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

• 56:30Geoff Nielson?

  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 don't 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.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  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 that you've put together, you know, kudos on on the podcast that that you've done. And I'll add one other thing. AI is going all these AI avatars that look so real. The influencer of tomorrow is going to be a swarm of AI AI influencers.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  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, that is one of the jobs, if you want to call it, that are are going to grow, I think, and be really important and powerful.

• 57:56Geoff Nielson?

  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, you know, 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?

• 58:36Speaker 00

  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

• 59:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:48Geoff Nielson?

  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 then, you know, your insights given your experience there. So I want to say a big thank you for joining on the show. We've really appreciated having you.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Jeff. I really enjoyed it.