Okay. So here we are. Genetic technologies as a category, which I know a little bit about now, tomorrow and in the next centuries. So I really want to talk with everybody rather than just talking at you. So I'm going to try and get through this fast, but I'm not very good at that. Okay, so what are genes? Let's talk about what we're going to talk about. So genes are instructions and they tell the body, and I can't see you all, let me. Okay, now I can see you all, which will make me happier. Okay, so genes are instructions for making polypeptides, which are pretty much proteins with a little bit of extra stuff tacked on the gene sequence for an organism is basically unique. And they are essential properties of who you are if you had very different genes, you would be very different you'd be a tomato or something else not necessarily a tomato genes are not all expressed all the time all in the same way in every cell and every individual. And they're not even uniform throughout the organism your different cells have different DNA through mutations that just accumulate in different tissues you are multitudes, which is really cool genes are also not the only feature of who you are. Even biologically there's a lot more going on. Most importantly, this is a very common misinterpretation that we all fall into genes are not schematics genes do not have all of the information necessary to create an organism period. You could not just take DNA and 3D print an organism that is insufficient information. So that's genes what are genetic technologies. So genetic technologies are pretty diverse but their stuff we do with genes one category is looking at stuff and figuring out what it does personalized medicine could look at someone's genome and develop specific drugs or things for them, because of what how they respond to things. We can also observe the genetics of germ cells and decide which ones to develop into full organisms. We can also mess with things nowadays. So gene editing takes the form of somatic gene therapies or germ line germ line is taking a single cell changing its DNA and then building your whole organism out of it. Whereas somatic gene editing would be just taking a local region and somehow affecting this sub portion of the organism. So we can change how they're expressed without changing anything. And there's a lot of really crazy stuff that's cool and I'm just acknowledging it exists but I'm not going to talk about it. So present challenges GMOs are really interesting and very powerful and the root of a lot of the progress in agriculture. So, pretty much all of the economically important ones are owned by a very, very small set of organizations which I find extremely dangerous. Another difficulty with genetic technologies comes from genetic sequencing of individuals and the information that that can give them I have a friend who was diagnosed with Huntington's disease which completely changed their life and their expectations for their life and their decisions. And it's not clear to her or to other people in her circumstances that she's talked with, whether or not having that diagnosis improved her life. This is a pretty straightforward but surprising example of just because you can doesn't mean you should. Information is not always helpful or appreciated. So, genetic screening is the poor man super baby but actually only available to rich people really. You can just get a very, very large number of genetic possibilities pick the ones that are desirable and exclude potential persons from existing intentionally, instead of accidentally. Right so the near future this is what we're here for. De extinction is becoming possible we have genetic sequences of extinct creatures and we could try and recreate them. So, I said that DNA is not a schematic, just because we have DNA for the passenger pigeon doesn't mean that we can just create passenger pigeons with a 3D printer, but we have close relatives. And after some bootstrapping, based on these close relatives we could have a pigeon have a passenger pigeon DNA containing child, which would in great measure be a passenger pigeon, but would also bear some of the features of its parent because of the environment it developed in. For instance, you could not grow a passenger pigeon in the womb of an elephant. But that's really actually important. There are organisms that we could not bootstrap. If we got the full sequence of a velociraptor, we would have to start with chickens and there's probably just too large of a gap and so there'd be a very long process of slowly creating something like a velociraptor like anyway de extinction is actually possible.  But where do we put passenger pigeons now, and other creatures who are much less prevalent than they were or extinct will rhinos be killed off again. Are we mostly doing a service to poachers if we de extinct rhinos. This is connected to something important. I think target group of this idea of renewal and returning to a prior state is a prior state of the earth, valuable, inherently, do we have a responsibility to return things to a prior state. And what is the earth and is the past earth real in the same sense that the current earth is real and does it have rights to be restored. Okay, so GMOs and concentration of power to in the future, there may be a vast democratization process where people can start making particularly microbes on their kitchen table, potentially making their own insulin on their kitchen table from yeast, possibly creating a new variant of smallpox. Concentration of power is really, really hard, and I don't have good answers it's just really, really hard and important so I'd like to talk about that. Personalized medicine and your medical records and intelligence agencies and how they have access to whatever they want because they're defending their country and everyone just bends over to what they ask. If we can develop personalized medicine we can develop personalized pathogens, which is a potential tool that law enforcement will want. I'm just telling you scary things sorry, the write down topics that you think are really interesting and we'll talk about them. Again, gene therapy will become far more sophisticated, possibly creating real designer babies. That has huge implications for particularly for barriers to entry for those sorts of activities. And possible futures. Biodiversification is going to come up, I promise. Okay, so cloning is not that cool. It's pretty cool. It's not that cool. You're not going to run into your doppelganger because someone cloned you in a lab and accelerated your growth and implanted your memories except maybe in the really far future. But yeah. Okay, so corporate life. So if you think your boss is a problem now. What about if you were grown by your boss to be an experimental subject or just because they want slaves and like, you don't have parents they just created you our ethics are not prepared to deal with these sorts of challenges. We don't have categories to deal with these things about how when person and property start to get very, very similar and start to get entwined. And how much of the brain do we have to remove before they don't count as a legal person anymore and we can just do whatever we want to them. People are going to be asking these questions and they're very dangerous questions, possibly even to ask artificial biology is adding new new elements the genetic code changing how things are expressed, creating new substrates for life. So we really can't anticipate how far life is going to go and how much we'll be able to describe it is life but a lot of it will be relevant to biology. And again I bring this up because it will defy categories that we currently have ecology is definitely going to change in the distant future. So that yeah this is what you all came for probably I don't know if this is what you came for. But anyway, this is what I advertised by diversification. So we develop genetic technologies that are tremendously powerful we can start adding back diversity into populations that have been hunted or otherwise bottlenecked into having reduced genetic diversity. We can increase the rates of mutations we can do all sorts of manipulations we can de extinct entire ecosystems that didn't exist, or haven't exist for a long time and bring them back. So biodiversity can be a manufacturable resource in the future. An important feature of ecology of the future is that it really won't be ecology as we know it anymore. So ecology and other ethics that drive our approach to the sciences are in my estimation, value laden that ecology approaches questions with an assumption of what the right sorts of answers are going to look like. And with an I, most importantly, that's also not to imply that they're dishonest scientists. Because engineers go about doing their work with the intention to make things that do things that are valuable, according to their value system. Ecology approaches these questions with some assumptions about what humanity's place is in solving these problems as a guardian as a protector as someone who should shove off. But ecology is approaching these questions largely from an ethical standpoint about what we ought to be doing and how we ought to be preserving these things and that we ought to be preserving these things there aren't ecologists that advocate for getting rid of large types of wildlife. There's the concept of regulation but they're very, very few ecologists that would call for bringing any species to extinction. There are a few. There's lots and lots and lots of feeling that we need to not have invasive species, because they do things that we inherently see as damaging. So a lot of the categories for describing things invasive species extinction are value laden concepts invasive species are just bad. So we need an ethics of the future inspired by the fact that as our powers increase we may need to rethink what we considered good. This is where I think nationalism can provide important insights because of this feature that we have at where informed by faith traditions and faith traditions, especially Mormon faith traditions. Consider the ethics of vastly powerful beings that are human. Our God is essentially a human God like us and human like our future and we need to be thinking about these ethics that we would be abiding by and that's resulted in some interesting thought. When we're trying to figure out what our faith traditions say about the ethics of gods that we're going to have to start worrying about as our power extends to rewriting ecologies, and vastly modifying organisms possibly removing their capacity for suffering changing what they rely on nutritionally. We need to figure out what our traditions that we're drawing on are saying and should be understood to be saying. Typical ethics of faith could be loosely drawn into commandments that you've been told to do things and those are the things that are right that's very deontological do this don't do that you get a New Testament enhancements and refocussings that I really like but there's still commandments there's still two great commandments and so forth. It's pretty straightforward to say yeah these ethics ought to apply to us we ought to be considering these things. It may not be trivial to update them. A category that the MTA is very fond of believing in is aspirational ethics that oh there's a prophecy we should go do that. And that's that's actually very challenging to to interpret that. Oh yeah prophecies were given by God to tell us what to do in the distant future. There are folks that hold this position. And I think pretty much appropriately. These good prophecies that we like are stating that there are things that are good that God would do and that we therefore ought to do. Should that become possible and there are also folks that are horrified by this and would ask that we stop playing at being gods. And I tell them to pay a little more attention in Sunday school but their point is is well taken. You know the S traditions. Well the Mormon traditions. As I've explained before have a lot to say about this idea of just it's our job to create worlds and so should we start creating more as soon as we can. All right there we go so how much time we have left. Let's talk a little bit. Richard can you hear me. I can now Ben. So we it's time for a break now but it's lunch break so people want to they can if they want to hang in here and ask questions that's totally appropriate also. I'll just formally kind of close this and thank Richard for a great presentation. And everyone is welcome to stick around here and ask questions and then we'll be reconvening in about 20 minutes in the main hall. So, right. Thank you Richard. All right Jesus amen. Thanks Ben. Okay. Yeah so we've got questions. So people really mind if mosquitoes went extinct. It's a huge thing for ecology there's this mindset that we need to be really really careful about what chunks of our system we just punch out because they're really inconvenient and they don't achieve values that we like. And we should probably remember that cows would probably like to just kick out humans because what any cow really mind if all humans went extinct. So, Robotnist. Thank you Sage mosquitoes are important. A question, could we modify mosquitoes to be less harmful to things that we value. And as David Pierce briefly asked in his slides is a lion a lion, if it's not just totally wrecking things all over the place.  And as an alternative definition of mosquito as something that does all that but doesn't pass disease or irritate my skin. A fair thing for us to impose. So yeah but malaria kills a lot of us and I value human life a lot. So, yeah. We have lots of discussion on mosquitoes and cows. Very good. If anyone wants to wave at me or unmute and just ask a question or got I proposed a billion topics so let's look at genetic technologies and appropriate use of genetic technologies, rather than necessarily, de-extinctioning things. Talk about de-extinctioning things. Do we need saber tooth cats? Well, no we need all the suffering that they would ask. This has got to happen eventually. Yeah, prophecy. But no, there are plenty of amazing things we can do with it. I actually think de-extinctioning is one of the less interesting ones honestly. There's a lot of information about species that went before but what we can do with biotechnologies that goes along, especially in terms of things like industry and developing life to produce all the things that we're currently having to do with our complex and difficult to reproduce machines is going to be exceptionally valuable. We've already begun to see it with microorganisms which we can get to produce things like artificial oil. Suppose the use of other organisms as instruments for achieving our objectives is kind of hard for a human to avoid doing. That's a lot of stuff that we do is just oriented around making things that we like happen and depending on how cynical and reductionist you want to be you can even say like oh yeah we bring animals into our home so we can love them which is just this purely instrumental use like love is just an object that we're trying to maximize and cats or dogs help us maximize our love expression value. Should we be looking at life as a tool and as a machine. I would argue that yes it's a specialized machine I mean right down to the human body which we should certainly assign high value to as a complex machine that can do things and has a special place among the hierarchy. Ultimately it's a bunch of chemistry doing very specific tasks and coming together to achieve. We don't understand necessarily how all of it works but otherwise far as we do continue to understand more and more of it. It all comes back to that same basic. And you could easily demonstrate this with any particular cell. We have cells and they do things like kill themselves off and build this structure do that they have very specific programming in the DNA points further to this idea. I think I would categorize that as the argument that well biology is machines and so it would just be responsible to see it as what it is. It's a fair capture of a short version. Sure, makes sense. Does anyone want to pretend to be someone who disagrees that biology is a machine that in the same way that we think of machines. I think that's useful in certain circumstances but in the wider ecology I think that'd be so tough to manage because like there's so many influences on any ecosystem that you know if we do you know make some kind of machine like it killing off all the other things that we need to eat or breathe or whatever you know could be pretty devastating I don't see how, especially at least here on earth. We could engineer everything. I don't know, maybe that could be possible at some point, but at least right now.  I represent three time periods in my slides to capture that idea that in the very distant future, we may be able to start considering ecologies as machines that are internally managed that we can understand and really deeply manipulate but we. That's certainly not even in the near term, except perhaps in highly controlled ecologies so in your desktop bioreactor where you're producing insulin and 510 years. So artificial ecologies. More naturally match this model of machine, I think. That is more or less for my particular interest focus is trying to get entire artificial ecologies to function. Maybe that colors my thinking somewhat I don't know on the. But it seems that, especially since these ecologies are made up more than anything by single cell organisms. That the most basic machinery sense would make particular sense, because cells really are just responding to the most basic of signals and they are very fundamental in their components. Yeah, I would agree fundamental in terms of scale. And we've managed to find their fundamental fund the components of these fundamental components. But there is metabolism still are mind boggling complicated to me. That's only a 20 stop. Yeah. Alright, another thing. Let's just random categories in here. Oh, John. Yeah, so about the whether or not we can serve life to be the equivalent of something machine or at least machinic. Do you think the distinction between viruses which are often presented as non living entities. I guess, all other forms of life. Can that be an intellectual tool we could use to go and think about when we're dealing with something that's truly mechanical when we're dealing with something that might have some kind of logical difference. Therefore, maybe some kind of different ethical responsibility towards. I feel like that's a really good extension of Ben's talk. The what. Sorry, but he's got a run. No, but can you repeat the question I missed it. John, can you use that direction, looking at multiple categories of life, not just like the animal life and consciousness and experience but even categorizing viruses as life or non life. And right, we look a lot more machine like and do we have this continuum of machine like to creature like. We use like sharp links, sharp breaks we could go in and identify, like the virus cell division. Right. So, yeah, I've, I've put some thought into this. So, Descartes thought that animals are, you know, just machines and then, you know, few centuries later we've realized okay maybe he wasn't quite right about that. I think we should have an open mind about whether viruses can feel. So yeah, I was just wondering. We're working on the consciousness survey project at canonizer building consensus around the best theories of consciousness. And there's an emerging camp now being called representational quality theory. Basically, it's just the general idea that everyone pretty much is unanimous agreement even then it's predictive Bayesian coding theories are supporting sub camp of that but basically it has the idea that when you look out in the world and you perceive the world there's like a diorama of knowledge in your brain. And half of that diorama is in your left hemisphere. And the other half of that diorama is in your right hemisphere so if you have a knowledge of red strawberry in your right hemisphere, and a green leaf in your left hemisphere the corpus class on is binding those together. So you can be aware of both the redness and greenness in both hemispheres and vs Ramachandran was the first one proposed using corpus class some like bundle of neurons to connect multiple brains together. And this was portrayed in the movie avatar where they had the neural ponytails where you could connect it together which would enable the computational binding of consciousness so basically if you're hugging your loved one, you can only feel half of the sensations. But if you could have a computational binding there, then instead of just two bound hemispheres you could have four bound hemispheres, and you could feel all of the experiences as you hugged your loved one instead of just half. And if they have inverted red green qualia, you would quickly notice that oh your redness is like my greenness but anyway, I wonder if you guys had any thoughts along that kind of stuff. And along with genetic technologies, particularly. Yeah. Engineering, such an organ is probably really hard. But genetics would probably be the level you'd want to. Maybe that would be a level you'd want to go in. I think I would initially prefer to use an electronic interface but that's my field of research. So what do you think about. Oh, good. Yeah, so, in other words, you say electronic. So a key part of that is the binding, the computational binding if something is computationally bound into your conscious awareness, you are aware of it and so. In other words, the binding problem that's the hardest part. And so, so it sounds like you're saying that that electronics could achieve that kind of binding, rather than some. Yeah, if we, I tend to look at the body of the machine, I fall into the machine camp very squarely. And it's magic is that the brain is aware of the stuff in it, that's in it. And if you can tell the brain that it's two brains, it'll be aware of the stuff that are in both brains. That would be my guess. I want to, because we're really close to the end of our break, I want to talk a little bit about what ecologies should exist, because this is a question that it becomes possible to ask and it's important to diversification is an ideal ecology one with radical diversity and radical mutation rates. Is it an ecology that serves some aesthetic purpose to the highest conscious beings that exist obviously us and mosquitoes. What ecologies should we have and what ecologies are bad and shouldn't exist and shouldn't have lions killing other stuff. If we get to start making choices. What is a worthy ecology. I'm pretty resistant against the possibility of modifying ecology in a way, in any way, like in any substantial way in terms of like, you know, modifying the actual genetics of organisms. Before we actually understand what the mental states of those organisms are like, so unless we understand what suffering is for them, unless we have like very high confidence that we understand that I would say that I'd be pretty resistance towards, you know, like modifying animals and mass or completely radically changing ecology. And so I would I would tend towards being like a proponent of inertia and that like we should try to avoid changing ecology, as much as possible from like it's evolutionary basis. No, for example, by reducing pollution and climate change. And we can eventually maybe modify ecology dramatically to improve the mental states of animals, only once we have a confidence that we actually understand those mental states. We've got a mean question for you. So, so future ecologies don't exist yet. Unless you take a really weird view of history. Future ecologies don't exist and we get to influence how they happen is humans butt out stop interfering with stuff let evolution happen. Reverse climate change are ecologies that spontaneously develop in in some circumstance or another superior. If there isn't one that is. This is the one where humans weren't involved. This is the one where humans are involved. Are there any ecologies that are superior to other ecologies, particularly based on their evolutionary history. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure how that's mean. Oh yeah. I just wanted to mention that like humans are part of nature like we like to think we're some separate entity, but like we are part of that ecosystem. And so like, you know, it. I don't think we're doing any favors by saying oh like, you know, humans are making unnatural decisions like we are by definition part of nature. Yeah, yeah, that's the hard bit is a global warmed globe. Better or worse is the tremendous loss of diversity, actually loss of diversity. Or just a different diversity. I mean I do think that like it is extremely bad like. Yeah, we are like, morally obligated to do something about it. Climate change. Yeah, like, yes. But like, I also agree with that Jeremy was saying like, like we only have started to understand a lot of these systems that have been in motion for millions, not billions of years. But like, we should be very careful, especially when it comes to the genetics. Like, we might think oh there's a gene for switching off pain or intelligence but like there might be side effects for that it's not like there's one to one mappings between a gene and a phenotype so like we should be really careful. I like David Pierce's timeline of like 1000 years for some of these things. And in the near term like, I think if we do understand the science well enough for climate change for example which we do. Yeah, at least I think we do. And we decide we want to do something about that, like, yeah I'd be much more inclined to do to take action there in the near term. Yeah, and the stability bias for the near term. Yeah, humans really like the status quo is not terribly surprising it's what we came into and it's certainly how we tend to operate it best. But there's something to be said for the earth and being in a constant state of change. It always has been. In fact we wouldn't even be doing what we're doing right now but hadn't been basically warming somewhat on its own since the last age. Or if that Ice Age hadn't come and forced us into a different position or if life itself hadn't made huge alterations to the climate throughout Earth's history, which allowed life as it currently exists to be. So, you know, we can make certain an argument that this may be an ideal situation if that's what humans want to stick with but we can also look at potential benefits coming out of it or the fact that the climate is not necessarily to keep life and ecology and everything else going in a positive direction. Right, I think with if we look at the two different futures for the end of the century. See like, oh, one where it's gone up four degrees Celsius and air pollution is terrible like, versus, we've kept it relatively the same. I think you could make an argument that there'd be less suffering and more happiness in that second scenario. But like you said like, you know, there are other parameters that we could we should keep in mind. And like if I guess not just about temperature. Well, and sometimes, you know, suffering is a necessary part of these things. We have mass die ops and immediately after we have huge new changes in biodiversity life going in whole different directions, dealing with these new scenarios and opportunities that it has. And that has resulted in all kinds of advances I guess you call them in life and approaches. So, is it right of us then to shut that down permanently. Or are we now the cause of it because we're doing what we want to do we are, you know, the drivers of a new shift in the next step I guess in evolution or ecology. Thanks everyone for a great, for a great session. Thanks again ready. Yeah. Thanks for sure. Thanks all.


Morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. My guest today is Bill Schubart. Hi Bill. How are you? How are you? I'm good. No complaints. It's a bit like maybe May or June out here. Yeah, but wait till Friday. I think we're going to get some ice and snow and subzero weather. So like I think it was Mark Twain who said, if you don't like the weather in Vermont, just wait a second.  Bill Schubart has lived in Vermont with his family since 1947. He is an entrepreneur, community leader, novelist, commentary writer, storyteller, collaborator, public speaker, and the go-to guy in Vermont if you want to get the best advice on just about anything. Do you say that's about right about you, Bill? Oh heavens, yes. Well it is. I mean you are a person who people go to when they need to talk about issues and things that are going on in the state that they want some perspective on. You are that person, and so you cannot run away from that, my friend. Now let's start with your childhood. You grew up in Morrisville, Vermont. Now how did your parents get to Vermont? Well, my father died in the war before I was born, about four months before I was born. He died in late golf in the Philippines, and my mother was pregnant with me and was put in the Plaza Hotel, which was a residential hotel at the time by my biological father's family, and was told to stay there for a year until I was born. And frankly she went stir-crazy and she escaped one night with me as a newborn, got on the Montreal out, got off at random in Waterbury, took the Couture Jitney to Morrisville, ran into Second Floor apartment, and moved in with me as a newborn, well almost a year and a half year old, and two years later married a handsome French-Canadian ski instructor named Emil Rene Petruer, who I, as the only person I ever knew, was my father. A wonderful, wonderful man.  You were raised by a single mom for those few years until she remarried, and your mother and Mr. Couture had two more children, which is your brother Michael and your sister, right? So tell us a little bit about your father's Mr. Schubert's mother, who lived in Manhattan and your relationship with her and how she, because you lived in rural Morrisville, Vermont, so you had this rural life that you loved running through the rivers and the woods, having this sort of backwoods life, beautiful life with your mother and her new love. My paternal grandmother lived in an 18-room duplex on 71st and Park Avenue with three balconies overlooking Park Avenue, full maids quarters. I had my own bedroom, even though I lived in Vermont, and she was very concerned when my mother took off to Vermont that her only male or only grandchild would be raised by a bunch of country robes. So she actually threatened a suit, a custody suit, which of course we were going nowhere. And dad, my stepfather, was a consummate diplomat and a truly wonderful man, and he stepped in and he said, look, let's work this out. We'll set it up so Billy comes to New York once or twice a year and stays with you, and that settled it. So once or twice a year, dad would drive me down to Waterbury and put me on the Washingtonian southbound, and troops would send a domestic to Grand Central Station to meet me and bring me up, and we'd have lunch at the Russian Tea Room and go to the old Metropolitan Opera, and I'd lie in bed crying because I wanted to come home and play with my friends in their haylofts. Oh, sweetheart. Well, I think it was unfortunate that your grandmother tried to take you away from your mother. That must have been horrifying for your mom, but at the end of the day, thank heavens that your stepfather, who was really your father, Mr. Couture, had the wisdom and the diplomacy to work it out. And I think you being raised in New York probably had a lot to do with who you are today and the cultured man that you are. So, Bill, who would you say had the greatest impact on the way that you see the world? Wow. Our house was always filled with really interesting people, and that was partially my mother's influence and my stepfather, Emil Couture. We had very, very close friends across the political spectrum. We had Father Jim Dodge, who had been a trappist monk at Gethsemane, and went to become the spiritual advisor to the Trapp family until he got in a screaming match with the Baroness, and he moved into our cellar supposedly just for a few weeks, but lived with us for four years, living in our basement. So, we had a Catholic priest who was a fascinating guy, and then he brought someone over from Germany, who also ended up living in my bedroom. I had to move in with my brother, who was with us for a couple of weeks, named Herr Dr. Dr. Hermann Steinbach. He was an inventor, absolutely loony, but very interesting, and Ron Terrell, who owned the local gas station in Moisville, but was a collector of pre-revolutionary Russian artifacts and new Russian history, which I loved, and then there was Fred Westfall, who was the legendary ultra-right wing legislator from Elmore, who was frankly far right of Genghis Khan, and he was a good friend and way out on the spectrum. So, you had lots of influencers in your life growing up. Was there one person in your life who had the greatest influence on you? I don't think so. I think it was a panoply of people. It's a whole group of fabulous people. Yeah, I had a cousin in New York who was a black sheep in the family and New York, a photographer, a world-class photographer. She did mythogram dance company. She went to travel all through the South during the civil rights era, put her life at risk, and she was a huge influence on my life and was not really accepted by the family because she was so far out there, but she sort of inherited the Alfred Stiglitz gene in the family, a passion for how photography could change society. Fascinating. So, Bill, you started two companies in your life, and one of them is Filo Records and the other was Resolution. Can you tell us a little bit about that period in your life? Sure.  He is your brother. He is my brother. He was a musician at UVM, and when I was an Exeter, I fell in love with the whole science of recording and had the great good luck to participate in a recording of Mozart's Requiem with Nadia Boulanger, who was a student of Debussy and legendary in classical music, and I just fell in love with recording. So, I bought a pig bun one night after having too much to drink from Terence Tiny and East Charlotte and borrowed the money and woke up the next morning owning Saul Douglas's Pig Bun, and a friend of mine, who was a wonderful architect, agreed to do all the work for nothing and we converted the bun into a recording studio, and I did a lot of the initial engineering and the setup, but the real creative force in Fido Records and what was Earth Audio, the bun, was Mike. He produced some of the most wonderful, we produced about 140 albums altogether and the ones that just, and they're all available, and everything we did is still in the market. Mike was really the creative force. Michael Kutcher. Yeah, and then when we saw that technology was democratizing, that the, all the money we'd spent on all this reporting technology, you've seen the same thing in film, was coming down to be affordable to the average person. So, the distinguishing factor was creativity, not technology, that the main barrier to entry was cost of technology. We realized that there wasn't going to be a future for a four hire recording studio, so we looked for a film company merged with Blue Jay Films, Jimmy Taylor and Brian Doubleday and Barbara Potter, and started a company called Resolution, which grew up to 225 employees. It was massive. You did all the videos for 60 minutes and you were nationally and internationally known. It was a huge success, Bill. It really was. It really was. Well, congratulations on both those incredible companies. Now, you have served on many, many, many boards throughout Vermont, and you've chaired many of them, and a couple of them you've actually pulled me onto, and I thank you for that. What do you believe has been your greatest contribution to the state of Vermont, or contributions? We can be plural. I don't know. It's hard. I mean, my, the one tool that I have is writing. So, whether I'm writing a novel about Vermonters, like Lila and Farron, or, you know, Panhead, or LaMoyle stories, the ability to take the oral tradition and put it in writing is something I feel very strongly about. But then also I write opinion pieces for Vermont Digger, and my goal there is to take really complex issues like health care, public education, criminal justice, the penal system, and, and make it comprehensible and not polarize the discussion, not blame people. So much opinion writing as well. These people are doing this, and these people, but to take all that out and just say, look, here's what's actually happening. And here's some pathways out of this. So, again, my tool is writing. I'm, I'm a student of governance. I worry about the nonprofit sector in Vermont, the hospitals, all these wonderful people doing all this work who don't understand governance. They don't understand the role of a board of trustees. And I've offered, you know, at no charge to work with any nonprofit organization that's struggling with governance issues. Yes, you have. And for my viewers, I'm speaking with Bill Schubert, and his website is www.schubertscubart.com. I suggest you visit his website. It's a beautiful website, Bill. Let's, let's talk a little bit about some of your written books. You've written Spirit Traffic, The Correctional Facility, The Priest. No, I just have to correct you. I didn't write Spirit Traffic. That's the one book I published. It was not by me. That you did not write. Well, I mean, thank you for clarifying that. But you did write The Correctional Facility, The Priest, Lila and Theron, which is one of my personal favorites. I weep through that story of their long life, and it was, and you actually knew them. The lamoille stories, one and two, photographic memory, I am baby, panhead, and fat people. Tell us a little bit about how you chose the subjects that you have woven into your books, some nonfiction and others fictional. Well, as a child growing up in a French community and family, you heard stories. If we went to Grammy coutures for Sunday dinner after mass, you know, somebody was always telling a story. If we went to Uncle Mando Couture's house, for whatever, you know, there was always somebody up there telling a wonderful story. And those stories really stuck with me as a kid. And I wanted to write them. So I did. I just that was my my first book was just writing down stories. And I wrote one about Morrisville and I submitted it to Vermont Life. And Tom Slaton was wonderful. So Bill, one of the first things you do as an author is to look at our publication guide, and you'll notice that we don't do fiction. But I love the story. So why don't you enter it in this contest? And I added it in the the short story contest that Green Mountain Power was funding. And it won. That was so encouraging that I wrote more stories and then published for the moral stories, which is still my best selling book. Fat People is a book I had to write. I have weighed at my peak four hundred and sixty five pounds. I've lost a couple hundred pounds several times twice in my life. And now we're about two hundred and seventy five, which feels fairly comfortable oddly enough. But I needed to write. I needed to write about that experience. So Fat People is a book that I wrote. It's a collection of short stories. It's not designed to teach you how to lose weight. It's it's not a how to guide. It's a collection of pure short stories that if anything I would want would elicit empathy for people struggling with eating disorders, whether it's bulimia anorexia or overeating, whatever, because it is an addiction and I was fully addicted. The book I'd want to be remembered for is I Am Baby. The Reverend Baby Hoover was a blind street singer in New York City who sang for ten years out of the awning at Blooming Dales on Lexington and 59th. And I got to know her and I was so blown away by this woman that I brought her up to Vermont. We produced an album of her and her partner, Virginia Brown, singing on the street. And it won an award. Didn't sell any copies, obviously, but I never forgot that woman. And I look at the photograph of her every day. And she taught me about gratitude. So a woman who had nothing to be grateful for. Nothing. Everything was taken away from her. She was raped when she was 14. She had a kid, her baby was taken away. And she was a reverend, an exhorter into the New York system. And I went out to her church one day and she only had six parishioners all blind. And she delivered a sermon on gratitude.  And then I ended up a few years ago writing her life story. Well, perhaps she would be the person who had the greatest influence on you, Bill Shubart. Well, that's, there's a lot of truth to that. Perhaps. Perhaps. A lot of truth. So, Bill, thank you for that overview. By the way, I believe, I believe that people can go to your books on your website at Shubart.com. And they can read your books online or order them. They can order them, but I encourage people to go to local bookstores. I mean, the Vermont bookstores have been really wonderful. They stock my books. And my books are all available in print, audio, and ebook. Perfect. So for my viewers, go to www.shubart.com and review Bill's extraordinary books. Two of your more passionate subjects that certainly you and I have talked about have been Vermont's healthcare system and our current prison system. Can you talk a little bit about both of them with our viewers, Bill? Yeah, it's interesting the timing of this, because I was at a statewide meeting two days ago where a lot of us who are working on healthcare reform in the state came together. And a really interesting inflection point. We are all in a 100% agreement and all together there's over 100 of us. And the legislature, just Brian Chinna's H-156 expresses this, is a consensus that the infrastructure for the delivery of affordable accessible healthcare in Vermont is primary care. Hospitals are secondary. We are treating hospitals primary. You know, consuming more and more money, they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The executive compensation, I won't go into, but it's scary. And it's the first time in all the years since I was chair of Fletcher Allen after Bill Betcher was taken away, the president to go to jail. The Ed Kalavi came to me and said, Bill, I want you to be on the board of Fletcher Allen healthcare. And I said, Ed, with all due respect, I don't know anything about healthcare. And he said it's not about healthcare, it's about governance. Anyway, that got me started. And that's where you're the go-to guy in Vermont, if you want to get the best advice on just about anything. You and Ed Kalavi, no, really, truly. So this is an issue. You've written a lot of commentary and you have a vision for how to fix Vermont's healthcare system. As do many others. Which is cool. Are you making headway? Yes, definitely. All right. So let's talk then a minute about the prison system. And I know that you wrote a white paper, which I quote from time to time. And I think a vision of yours, which is of mine, is to close down the woman's prison and for nonviolent offenders, get these women out of the prison system who, by the way, many of them are there because of the men that they were with or the people they associated with. Or technical violations. Or technical violations, exactly. But get them out of the prison system and put them in one of the vacant campuses in Vermont. The vision is, Bill, and I think you're with me on this, put them in the dorms, allow them to have their children, set up a daycare center, allow them to start a cafe, to start making cloth products, to have a gift shop. And to then all of us, we go down and we donate our time to educate them on things like financial management or starting a business or whatever. And that's a vision that I've had ever since you published that white paper. I just have glammed onto that, Bill. And I'm, and I share it with everyone. So talk a little bit about that vision. Well, I just, I mean, it's interesting growing up as raised as a Catholic, the whole concept of punishment and atonement, you know, it's very haunting when you're raised a Catholic, but I've really come to understand that punishment doesn't make anybody better.  Humiliated. Humiliated. Humiliated. Humiliated. They're seeing the light. And just adding to the trauma that they're experiencing.  How do we move that needle, Mr. Schubart? I see it moving a little bit. I mean, there have been some really, really encouraging there are many less women in prison than there were two years ago. That's a good sign. The smart justice work, the ACLU of which you're a part is, you know, is really making headway. I've worked with a number of people, psychologists, as I'm sure you have, and sort of general agreement that there's 12 to 14 violent women in Vermont who probably need, you know, to be kept away from, that's going to, that's always going to be there. We're always going to have to protect the public from dangerous violent, you know, borderline folks. But everyone else, there has to be a redemptive path. So it has to be, how do I regain my family, my loved ones, my community, the economy, a place to live? What is the way back? And that, of course, is the whole point of restorative justice. So, Bill, let's, let's, let's do this. I mean, this is something you wrote five, six, seven years ago. There are empty campuses on Vermont, in Vermont. And at the end of the day, when women go to prison for non-violent offenses, their family abandons them in a lot of cases. When men go to prison, their wives will stick by them, their girlfriends will stick by them. With women, it's very different. They end up being alone and they lose their children. And that destroys the family and their lives will never be restored. So, Bill, let's, let's make it, let's make a pact that we really get down on this and make this happen now. I'm totally with it. Yeah. Thank you for that. And all your work on this. So, Bill, what is your vision for the future of our planet? And what do you believe that humanity needs to do to reverse it? We are seeing as the road toward our species extinction, as I look outside with no more snow on my meadow and 50 degree weather. What is, what is your vision for the future of our planet and our species? Well, the dark side of my vision is the Gaia concept, which is that we're just in, you know, in a multi-million year history, we're just one species and we're killing ourselves. And the best thing that Gaia can do, Gaia being the Earth, can do is to let us kill ourselves and then see if there's a more benevolent species, you know, that assumes hegemony. One of the things that appalls me is the fact that we are unwilling to regulate the pharmaceutical industry that we're, you know, we're poisoning ourselves. We're unwilling to regulate the chemical industry that's poisoning our air, water, soils. You know, in Europe, the most toxic stuff has all been made illegal. You can't put round up on fields in Europe. Or in Canada. But you can in Vermont. Oh, it's in our, it's in our, all of our hardware stores. It's stacked up at the ceiling. Round up. What it all boils down to, Melinda, simply is, do we put profit ahead of well-being? And the answer is, in most cases, yes. We do it in healthcare. We do it in the environment. We do it in private education, you know. For human comfort. I mean, people's comfort, their comfort level. Yeah. So I appreciate that. I sort of have a very similar view of that as you do, but it's horrifying when I think about the world that my grandchildren will be living in in the next 50 years. And we're, we wonder why young people in the world are suicidal. Why are emergency rooms in Burlington on any given day? They have 20 to 35 young people sleeping on gurneys in paper clothing so they won't hurt themselves with no place to help them. And, you know, that's that issue. But given what we're handing them, you know, given what we're doing to their environment, their economy, their communities, why wouldn't you be depressed? Why wouldn't you be angry? We need to do better. And we're the generation who started Earth Day and fought for the planet. And we've failed miserably. And I'm says, I apologize every time I do a lecture. I always apologize to the young people and ask for their forgiveness of my generation that did not do enough. Yeah. Let's move into the words of wisdom because we're talking about the youth. What words of wisdom would you like to share with our youth on how they navigate the enormous challenges facing them today? Try and look at what is good in your life. Study, understand, and practice gratitude, no matter how small, you know, what you're, you have going for you. Focus on that. And one of the best ways to preserve mental health is to give, not take. You know, we have, we have a taking economy. You know, our businesses are focused on profit, not all of them, but many of them. We're focused on how many things do I own, you know, how many this, how many that. And let that go for a bit. You know, focus on how can I give back? What can I give somebody? Because you know what? You feel infinitely better when you give something to someone than when you take something from someone. Absolutely. But our kids today are looking at a world that they may not be able to survive in. And so for them to navigate that is a true challenge. Now, another issue that I know you and I both share deeply in our hearts is the issue of our democracy. And as you know, it is and has been under attack. So how do we as citizens ensure the future of our freedoms and our liberties here in the broad? I mean, I think we talk about it, we write about it, we sing about it, we organize about it. We proselytize in every way we can. When a young person says to me, when I say, did you vote? They say, oh, what's the point? Why bother? I say, oh, thank you very much because you're part of the problem. You know, and they say, well, my vote's not going to make any difference. And the answer is the vote of all of the people you represent is going to make a difference. Vote. Give blood. Give, you know, donate. If you make, you know, $500 a week working in a restaurant or $300 a week working in a restaurant, give some small amount. Give $3. Whatever. Well, it's very different than our generation too, because we, 17 percent of our generation was, you know, challenging our norms. And it's tough for kids today who are dealing with their student loans and their climate change. And $1.75 trillion in U.S. student debt. Which should be forgiven. I'm sorry, but I know it's probably an emphasis on my viewers. But at any rate, so our democracy, I think we're probably, I'm feeling a little bit more positive about that today than I was, you know, a couple of years ago. Be careful. I'm trying to find the positive. Every stone, I'm looking for the positive. And thank you for writing about it, Bill, because you do that so beautifully. Can you name, for me and my viewers, the three most important sectors of Vermont's economy that need major overhauling? Definitely, agriculture and food systems. The amount of money that we are spending, you know, to support a dying dairy industry, which monocrops, you can't grow corn without, you know, chemicals, that needs to be redesigned. And we are redesigning it.  I think another area is public education. I'm haunted by this idea that we are supposed to spend $179 to $279 million to create a a child care system when we're going around to small communities and closing our schools. We need to redefine public education as starting after a six month bonding family leave that our schools open when a child is six months old. And, you know, there are early educators who understand the balance of play and learning, you know, and, and at the other end too, lifelong learning.  I mean, that's one system I want redesigned.  Yes, we did. And the health care system. So why have you never journeyed into politics, Bill? Boy, I'm always embarrassed when people ask me that question. I don't want to embarrass you, but I just know before it, it's fair. I have been asked if I would run for political office. And I've thought about it and I've said no for two reasons. One is you put your entire life and your entire family into the public view.  But do I want to expose myself and my family to all of that? What do they call it? Opposition research is the term. And the other thing is, after working as hard as I have building businesses, I don't want to work that hard. I want time to write, to be outdoors, to be in the woods, to swim. You know, at 77, the quality of my life is really important. And I used to joke with my good friend, Will Patton, why don't we both run for governor? We could split the job and each work just 30 hours a week. I think you should choose a female partner to run with you. But I totally hear you on all that. And thank you for that honesty. Could you tell my viewers a little bit about what you're working on now, what your next project is? I don't have any specific next project. I do feel, as I said, we're at a cost in health care. So I'm spending a lot of time writing about that, meeting with people, talking with a wide variety of people about how do we get this to happen in the next couple of years, not in the next 10 or 20 years. I'm writing my 10th book, which is a hard one, but I'm at that wonderful place where I've written enough now, so the characters take over. What is your book? What is the book you're working on? I don't know. I mean, it takes place when I and a woman my age rent a camp on Willa Bay, and then it just moves from there. And I know roughly what it's going to be about. It's going to be partially mysterious. But again, I never know when I start writing a book where it's going to take me. Well, for all of my viewers, please visit Bill Shubart's website at Shubart.com, S-C-H-U-B-A-R-T dot com. All of your books are there. Your commentaries are there. They're phenomenal.  And aren't we lucky to live here, Bill? We are lucky to live here. I mean, we really are. I worry sometimes that we're a little too self-referential. We're better than any other state. We've done this first, that first, so on and so forth. Then I pick up The Guardian, which is England's major paper, which I read every day, because they report on America almost more thoroughly than the New York Times. And the second headline is Vermont has the second highest per capita homelessness population in the United States. And I say, you know, as good as we are, as lucky as we are to live here, we've got work to do. We do have work to do. But in Vermont, we can call up our governor. Yeah, that's true. Anyone can go down to the local store, the little rudry store in Huntington, and see Tom Stevens and talk to him. In Vermont, we have the capacity to run for government and be elected. And the changes that we're making in this state are phenomenal. And we are, and I think the efforts to deal with the homelessness and the addiction issue and the poverty in the state, I mean, there was a point when 26% of Vermont's children were going to bed hungry. And we have the largest nonprofit sector of any state in the, I think, in the union with all these issues. So I hear you on all this. And I am, you know, Bill, I think in some ways you are the conscience of Vermont. And well, look, you just, well, whatever, it's my show. I can say whatever I want about my viewers.  And so to my viewers, I want to thank you for joining me and Bill Schubart today for our moment to talk about Vermont and in our world. And to Bill Schubart, I want to thank you for being the Renaissance man that you are and for all that you've done for Vermont. And thanks for being on my show, man. We've been friends for a long time. Thanks for inviting me. And I admire you so much. Well, I, the feeling is mutual.  Well, to my viewers, thank you for being with me. And I will see you shortly for another moment with Melinda. Goodbye.


Today is an incredibly special veteran covering an exceptionally important topic on National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Army veteran Zubi Anwuda is a Harvard and MIT trained innovator. He is the patented inventor of brain control of blind assistive tech and founder and CEO of Think and Zoom. Zubi is a four-time TEDx speaker, a DAV member, Patriot Boot Camp alumnus and a legally blind disability advocate. He's here to talk about disability inclusion in tech. But before we do that, I wanna mention that Zubi is famed, at least DAV famous, for participating in a parabolic flight that DAV helps support through astro access and zero gravity. Let me show you a picture of this, it's incredible. There he is, there's Zubi in space. Zubi, along with longtime DAV ambassador, CC Centra Mzik, were two of 12 people with disabilities who were able to experience limited gravity with the hopes of making space travel accessible to all. Zubi, thanks for being here. I know you had a lot you wanted to talk about today, but you have a fascinating life. And I'd really like to get into the background of some of your personal experiences. Can you tell me about your life before you joined the United States Army? Sure. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for having me, Dan. Thanks so much to the DAV family and the DAV PVC team. It's really a great pleasure and an honor to be here, speaking to everyone, especially in this month of October, which is known as National Disability Employment and Reigners Month. For me, growing up, I was born and raised in Nigeria, and at a very early age, I gravitated towards STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. And I can still remember my very first experiment where I was in primary school. I was a battery with copper wires on both ends and the excess copper wire rocked around the piece of nail and while I hadn't lived like for pregnant, I still remember it like it was yesterday. So growing up, I really, really loved everything that had to do with science and technology. I watched Space 1999, all of the Back to the Future, the Terminator, the Robots, the AI.  I was raised to be disciplined and always studied everything at Britson. So as a result, I was fortunate to always be one of the top students in the class. So growing up, I would say was factorized by just being a lover of anything, science and technology and a lover of continuous improvement and problem solving. And how'd you end up in the United States Army? Right after high school, I was very fortunate to have received the Green Party to come to America to study medicine. And it's a way to thank the country for giving me the opportunity, I also enrolled in the military. And the plan was to become a military doctor. So I started college, I enrolled in the Guard and I was 18, 19, 20, and I thought I had it all figured out, life was just coasting and you couldn't tell me otherwise. But I then went over to basically, you know, joined the full-time army at Fort Leno in Missouri. And that's when I became legally blind from a disorder of the retina called Starbucks, Michaelum Districting, which means that this is now at the genetic level. And so the flushing mechanism that takes away excess vitamin A from the eyes is back and it leaves the excess sitting on the retina and starts decaying the photoreceptor cells, those wide cells and point cells that sit on the macular. So all of this activity is happening at the back of the eye. And the retina plays a very significant role because it's the pathway to the brain. It literally launches to the brain through the optic nerve. And so while the majority of the war, things that an eye problem equals, you know, get a pair of glasses or surgery and you should be fine. There are those eye problems that we still can't really do much about it. Those are a lot of genetic disorders. And so that ended my medical studies and military career. And I had to switch out of that and I wanted to become an engineer. So it cost shut my military service. And how did the condition go after you went into engineering? Dan, I can honestly tell you that if I knew now what I knew then, I definitely would have chosen the engineering. It's simply because of the barriers. Again, I already painted a picture of growing up how I love STEM. And so I thought I could carry on by, you know, living medicine and going into a different STEM field. But now I'm legally blind.  I became legally blind, you know, right after exiting my teenage years. So I didn't understand, you know, the barriers and challenges to accessibility. And it really affected me that halfway through my computer engineering degree, I flunked out and I was homeless for a little while. It was really very challenging going through a university where there were I think maybe 40 to 50,000 undergrad, 16 schools of engineering, but yet to my recollection, I was the only disabled engineering student. And so you feel a level of isolation, right? That's kind of what we describe. And remember, this is college. Everybody remembers the college atmosphere, but you're going through things that people around you can't even really relate to. So it was really very challenging. I loved the curriculum. I loved, you know, problem solving, but the barriers and challenges made it really a tough climb for me. What is it about tech that, why do you think inclusion is important in tech? Well, if you look at today's world through a couple of lenses, if you look at the lens of everything around our personal life today and your wearables, smart devices, smart TVs, smart phones, smart tablets, self-driving cars, robots that can make you pizza, coffee, a smoothie, it's all technology.  So we're now in the fourth industrial revolution where you cannot, you cannot escape technology. So it becomes ultra important. It's no longer a choice of this or that. You're thrusting it unless you don't live in the planet. As long as you're in the planet today, you are surrounded by technology and the businesses you do commerce with are all leveraging technology. And so you're all surrounded by technology.  So why do you think that from a tech perspective though, what is the value of hiring someone who's blind? I think there's a lady, she's about 21 from London and she's captured this world. She says, being blind, I see the world differently from others and the way other people view the world. And so hiring somebody who is blind just brings that different perspective. Another example I can give is I think during my second TEDx talk, I talked about certain individuals who are disabled and I talked about what disabled people actually built society. What if a blind person builds a car that runs on the road? Well, because they can't see, there will be no need for a windshield or a back mirror, anything to see through. However, they're gonna make sure that car is going to safe to take you from point A to point B. That's all they're gonna concentrate on. And so perhaps we should get blind people into self-driving, automated vehicles. And so simply because somebody who's blind doesn't mean that they are not able to contribute. It is true that they don't have sight, S-I-G-H-T, but sight, you shouldn't look at that one aspect of life and disregard everything else that the person can contribute to. One of the IBM fellows today, a fellow means someone that has achieved the highest technology rank in IBM and they're only about 60 to 70 fellows. She's blind. Her name is Chico Asakawa. If you look up all of her patents and technological achievements, it's mind-blowing. But again, that's a scenario here. The company looked at her for what she can contribute and they didn't look at her as someone who doesn't have sight. That's awesome. And you've been able to overcome a lot of obstacles in your life. Can you tell me about your invention? That invention was born purely, purely out of necessity. Before I went into the military, I went to the DMV and I got my driver's license. I went through the routine, the ice creaming test and in a few seconds, I read the A513, whatever it was, they put it in front of me. And then when I became legally blind and left the military and now had to renew my driver's license, I went back to the same DMV. And this time around, it was night and day experience. I spent five minutes there, tears were flowing through my eyes. But this time around, it felt as if, it was as if someone injected some kind of cloud between my naked eye and what I was trying to read. It was there, but yet I couldn't make it out. And it really twisted my brain. I can never forget that was back in the late 90s. I can still vividly remember that feeling because wait a minute, I just did this just a couple of years earlier, what is happening?  And then as soon as I saw what I needed to see, we'll understand that, okay, I'm done. And then it will shrink itself back up and disappear. Now fast forward from the late 90s, of course, I think about the late 90s and we're still in a dialogue AOL, right? And we didn't have a lot, but fast forward to 2015, when I actually prototyped it, that's actually what I prototyped. So between then and 2015, I discovered the power of neuroscience and the power of neuro technology meaning that in every human, we have this circuitry running through our body, electrical impulses, neurons that start from the brain and the brain sends all these electrical impulses to our body. And so I was able to leverage brain computer interface technology, BCI sensors to tap those signals from the front of the forehead, the cranial. And in essence, I was able to create a solution where all I could do to see better was to look at something, think, send a signal to a magnifier and zoom. And that's where the main thing comes in. So what happens when you do that? What happens when you think and you send that signal? When you think and you send that signal, you're now able to magnify things without using your hands. So in today's world, a blind person relies on magnifiers and screen readers. With a magnifier, it's manual. It's hand-holding and manual operation. But in the natural way of things, when your eyes are created, I would say way, way back, it's automatic operation, if you will, right? Scene is similar. The eyes work like a camera.  It's fast, it's automatic. But when it comes to the blind community with these magnifiers, it slows down the individual. You're not able to compete in a fast-paced world. And so that manual operation makes it cumbersome. And so with think and zoom, what I, all I tried to do was to mimic the natural way of seeing. Hot out the cords, hot out the hand-holding. So now your natural or current and electrical circuitry is now the thing that sends your signal for you. So it will help you detect whenever you're struggling to see, it will send the signal, magnify for you or stop reading for you, text to audio.  That's amazing. I wanna remind the audience that if anyone has any questions, whether you're on the Zoom or on social networks, please feel free to ask.  Like, what was it, what was your experience in the army like? What was camaraderie like in the army? I can still remember landing at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri at 4 a.m. in the morning and the drill sergeant is yelling at me with his nose one inch away from my nose. These are things you can never, ever forget. If you watch any of these army movies with boot camp training, but the military is always a place where you're taught to discipline. We're working up at five a.m. in the morning. We're giving out routines. If you don't follow your routine, well, there are consequences for that. And so I'd say that I really, really enjoyed my time. It was unfortunate that I became disabled. But of course, from where I was coming from, I'd never been in military service before. So everything was all brand new. But I had a disciplined mindset. And so I think that I fit in very well with following all the routines that were laid out in front of us. And I never got into any trouble at all. So that, you know, I took it back to my background. I really had a great time. I enjoyed my time. I was really fortunate that I was put short. Now, a lot of people watching, especially in the disabled community, it's hard to imagine going through losing your vision or having a decrease in your vision. But it's easy to imagine facing a large challenge. Can you speak to, I mean, how do you emotionally respond?  It's what you thought was going to happen is no longer going to happen. Can you talk about that? Then asking that question, I can still picture Sergeant Johnson in Missouri telling the private hall, you going blind.  There's no pathway to follow. The words coming into your ears spell the end. The end, the spells doom and spells disaster, the spells you can no longer continue in the current path. And so I'm really very grateful to the people around me, the family that really provided me with a lot of support and encouraged me and mentored me and kept telling me to keep pushing, to be able to now overcome, you know, those human emotions that you just can't escape, to be able to now think through to find another path to keep the government. But I can tell you that honestly, when that happens, you're not prepared for it. You know, there are no side grills for that. It's something that really gets into a bewildered state of mind and it takes some time to think through it and get yourself back inside. That's fantastic. Now talking about inclusion in tech, so do you think that you're the example you show where you've been able to, you know, break through in spite of the bears? Is that something that you would bring as an employee to a team? Well, then not just myself, but other blind and other disabled people, you know, around the world. There's a platform called our future of disability that I want, future of disability and global. And these are some of the people that I feature, for example, Joshua Mealy. Joshua, I think at the age of four, fortunately some sort of acid attack, there's something left in blind. But if you look at Joshua's achievements today, Joshua is a leading researcher at the Amazon Research Lab and has come up with so many different inventions. I think one of his creations is about making YouTube videos accessible. But as a result of all of his remarkable work, he was awarded the MacArthur Genius Award. Let me repeat that. Joshua Mealy, an individual who is blind, was awarded the MacArthur Genius Award. Now Dan, wouldn't you want to hire somebody like that into your company? I think we'd find a place for him. We actually have a question from the Zoom audience. Jeff Kirkpatrick, if you'd like to come on and ask yourself. Thanks, Jeff. Hey, everybody. How are you doing? I'm Jeff Kirkpatrick. Thank you guys for inviting me to this Zoom call. I appreciate that. Zuby, you know, you display the warrior spirit, man.  And that's really awesome. I appreciate that. But you know, some of the stuff you're talking about is pretty cool. And we kind of do a little bit of, we just started out with do robotics kind of projects and data science, that kind of thing. But in the field of robotics, vision is huge. And some of the things that you're talking about could be very beneficial. I feel like in the field of robotics, how do you feel about that? Good afternoon, Jeff. And thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for your words. In the field of robotics, there's a computer vision, which is the eye of the camera. And I think when it comes to at least blindness, personal disability, I think that this can be leveraged or in order to provide, in order to provide accessibility. To help those who are visually impaired. For instance, at Microsoft, there is an app, an application, a mobile application called Seeing AI. One of the leading engineers on that project is Sakeep Sheikh, and he's still at Microsoft. And with that application, it leverages computer vision. So you turn it on, it's as if you're looking through the camera of your phone, and you can read a business card, you can read an entire page, you can distinguish different colors, you can look at currency, it tells you different modes. And that's just a snippet, that's just a snippet of the power of computer vision. Computer vision is used in self-driving cars to be able to tell that there's someone crossing the street, there's a stop sign, there's a traffic light, et cetera. So Jeff, you bring up a very important point that we can leverage this emergent technologies in serving the disabled community. Thank you so much for your question. That's great, and I believe we have a question from Heather. Heather, would you like to come on? Is Heather there? There she is. Hi, Heather. Hi, sorry, I'm a little slow there. Thank you so much again, like everybody said, for taking the time to talk to us today. I just had two questions about your personal experiences. What was your greatest challenge during the development process of your invention? And were one or two serendipities, what were some of the best things that happened because of your invention? Hi, Heather. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for joining us. And thanks for your questions. For the challenges between when I was diagnosed and when I developed the thinking Zoom prototype, I think I'd been seen by about 300 different IKEA professionals. That's a different look, certainly. And one of the challenges I faced was that for three years, I started writing some of these doctors that I could be, that could put together this solution that could help the blind and doctors from Johns Hopkins to other institutions couldn't understand what I was talking about. So that, I guess, deleted the prototype by three years, till I actually went and did it myself in 2015. And since doing it, to answer your second question, it's taken me around the world. I think I've spoken in six or seven different countries now, including being featured at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, the UN Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. The TEDx talks all feature various aspects of the solution. I've spoken at the Academy of Automologies I think three times now. So the rewards have been immense, because it's brought me into spaces that otherwise, perhaps, I may never have been able to get into. And it's allowed me to share the message of disability and innovation in multiple spaces and the multiple platforms around the world. Thank you so much, Zuby. I think we might have a question from Derek Brown. I'm recognizing some of these people from our last cohort of DAV Patriot Bootcamp. Derek, did you want to come on? Yes, thanks, Dan, and thanks, Zuby. I appreciate that. So for me, I'm a therapist by trade. And so I'm just interested in your technology. I was just wondering the applications to therapy. I mean, specifically with veterans who may be suffering from like TBI or PTSD, can this technology be leveraged to tap into that unconscious part of the mind and be able to see some of those maybe thoughts that are not always so evident in our conscious mind in the frontal cortex. So just curious if there's been any other application. Thanks so much, Derek, for joining us. And thanks so much for your question. When it comes to the think and zoom, I guess focused specifically on disability. Of course, I am not a therapist and I'm not a trained therapist. However, your question reminds me about a different application that I saw on a head talk. I think that Zuby, I think we've lost Zuby for just a second here. Hopefully we can get him back real quick. Zuby's doing a great job for us. I know that we've had a few different questions. Really appreciate it. I do wanna talk while we try and get Zuby back. I do wanna mention thank you to the folks. Heather was one of them who attended our first DAV new to DAV Patriot Bootcamp cohort. Patriot Bootcamp of course has been going for 10 years now. But it was the first one that was done as a DAV program. We had 46 participants out here and they did just a fantastic job. If you're interested in DAV Patriot Bootcamp, please sign up for our newsletters at patriotbootcamp.org. You can go to that site, DAV, or actually patriotbootcamp.org and log in and we'll keep you notified. We have programs coming up this coming spring, May and going into October next year. So we're gonna have more on that. From Patriot Bootcamp, one of the things we had, which we have at most events is a pitch contest. And the pitch contest was fantastic. We had 10 or 15 of the participants engaged in that out of 46 members. And I wanna tell everyone to stay tuned for a Shark Tank event that DAV Shark Tank that we're gonna have in a few weeks. I'm not sure if we're gonna get Zuby back. Do you know, Michael can help me with that. And if we're not, I just wanna thank him for all he did, all he stepped forward with. And if we get a chance, we'll have Zuby come on back. But for now, I think it's better we just sign off. Thank you everyone for tuning in and welcome to DAV Caffeine Connect. We'll stay in touch. Thanks guys. Bye-bye.


So today I'd like to talk about the Barnaton category and the Kovanov homology of a tangle. So maybe let's just recall. So say D is a nm-tangle diagram. And if we had this category, which I had this horrible name, add of Cobb nm-gr. That's far too long to write all the time. So let's just abbreviate that by C bar of nm. And now we have the cube of resolutions. So well, in this category, I'm allowed to shift gratings by multiplying objects by powers of q. I'm allowed to take direct sum of objects. And I'm also allowed to add morphisms together. That's why we went to all this categorical work, so I could do those things. So now to a vertex v, I can just assign, let me say, q to the l1 norm of v times dv. This is a perfectly good object of our category C bar nm. And to an edge, e from v0 to v1, I have a morphism. Let's call it Se, let's say Se empty set. Because remember, these morphisms in here came with a set of marked points, finite set of marked points. So here, there are no marked points at all. Going from q to the v dv to q to the, oops, this is v0 and v1, dv0 and dv1. And then two-dimensional faces commute. So now we can form a chain complex in this category. C of d, at the level of objects, it's just the direct sum over all v of q to the l1 norm of v, dv. And the differential d is given by taking the sum over all edges, e of, let's say, minus 1 to the sigma v. And then this morphism Se empty set. So this is an endomorphism C of d. And because two-dimensional faces commute, d squared is 0. So it's a totally formal construction. But one thing that I'd like to point out, which is still formal but useful, is that horizontal composition gives a functor. Let me call it h for horizontal composition from c and m, tensor c bar and l to c bar and l. And the proposition, which categorifies the proposition we had last time about horizontal composition, is that if I take c of dd prime, so if I compose two-tangle diagrams, I get c of d tensor c of d prime. And rather than write down a proof, I'm going to observe a few things. So let's notice that c of, for example, this crossing here, this is a complex that looks like, let me write it this way. The zero resolution goes by the one-handle co-bordism S. That's where I add a one-handle like this to the one resolution. So it's a short complex. Now, say I have two short complexes. Say, c0 goes to c1 by some differential d. And I tensor this complex with c0 prime goes to c1 prime by d prime. Well, what is this? This is just a complex that looks like this. c0 tensor c0 prime goes to, say, c0 tensor c1 prime. Here I have c1 tensor c0 prime. And here I have c1 tensor c1 prime. And for example, this map is one tensor d prime. And this map is d tensor one. You can fill in the others. You'll notice that taking a tensor product of short complexes gives me a cube. And that's really what the cube of resolutions is. It's a tensor product of short complexes associated to these crossings. OK. So now we wanted to pass to the Barnathian category.  So definition, so c is an additive category. So an ideal i in c is a collection of things that look like ixy for pairs x, y, which are objects of d, such that 1, ixy is a subgroup of harm x, y, and 2, maybe I'll take script EI to be the union of all of these things. So if beta is in ixi, that means that alpha compose beta and beta compose gamma are in i. Whenever these expressions make sense. So if I have an ideal, I can take a quotient category. How should we call that? Maybe c mod i given by, I have to tell you what the objects are and also what the morphisms are. Well, the objects of c mod i are exactly the same as the objects of c. But harm in c mod i of x, y is, well, it's the only thing it could be. It's harm in c, oops, wrong place, harm in c of x, y modulo this ixy. So the thing to understand, if you've never seen this before, is that the objects are the same. But objects that weren't isomorphic in c may well become isomorphic in the quotient. So a canonical example, maybe let's say c is the category of chain complexes over some ring r. i is the set of chain maps that look like dh plus hd, so the null homotopic maps. And then the quotient, say c mod i, this is the homotopy category of chain complexes. So two chain complexes that are homotopy equivalent are isomorphic in this category. Let's make a definition. Let's call it, say, ibn is the ideal in c bar. I guess if I'm keeping score, I should maybe write some nm's down here, generated by some local relations. And the local relations are as follows. So if some component of my co-bordism is a sphere or a sphere, so now I'm going to draw, remember we have this set of mark points on our co-bordisms. I'm going to draw the mark points as dots. So a dot means a point in A. So we have this co-bordism, s comma a. This is also equal to a sphere with three dots on it. And they're all equal to 0. So any time I have a co-bordism with a component that looks like that, that's the zero-morphism in this category. On the other hand, a sphere with one dot on it, I can erase it and just have the number 1. So I can just erase that sphere at no cost. Those are sort of sphere relations. And then the most interesting relation is usually called neck cutting. And it says that any time I have a piece of my co-bordism that looks like this, that's the same as the sum of these two co-bordisms, plus almost the same thing, that I switch the dot to the other side. And now these relations may look like they come out of nowhere, but actually the place they come from is the TQFTA that we used yesterday to define the Kovanov homology. There's an exercise in which you're asked to sort of relate these relations to the TQFT. And let me just remark. So here in this category, we impose local relations on morphisms. You should compare that to define the Kaufman bracket. We imposed local relations on diagrams. We said that this was this minus Q times this. So when we pass to this categorified version, instead of working with local relations on non-diagrams, we work with local relations on co-bordisms. So now it's obvious what I'm going to do. I should have said it's a terrible form, but let me just do this. Let me remark over here that there's an obvious functor, sort of projection functor, say pi from c to the quotient whenever I have a quotient category. OK. So then we define c b n, n comma m. That's this category c bar of n m. Modulo, this ideal of Barnathan relations. And c k h of d is going to be the image of the complex c of d under this projection to the Barnathan category. So now what we're going to do is we're going to study the structure of this category c b n. Now the structure c bar is really kind of woolly. It's got lots and lots of objects. And instead, what we'll see in this category is basically everything can be expressed in terms of finitely many objects. And the key point here is the following proposition. So let's just write it this way. So if I have a diagram, I'm going to write my planar diagrams with parentheses around them. So if I have a planar diagram just with a circle in it, and if I were working with a Kauffman bracket, I'd say that that was equal to just q plus q inverse, where I erase the circle. OK. Here what I can say is this is isomorphic to q times the object where I erase the circle, plus q inverse times the object where I erase the circle. OK. So how do I prove this? Well, I have to write down some isomorphisms. So I need to write down a morphism, f from this object to this object. And what is it? Well, this will sort of be a matrix with one column and two rows. And what the matrix is is it looks like this. So here I cap off this circle with a two-handle, and I put a dot on it. And down here, I don't put any dot. And I'll write that as sort of eta x and eta where x corresponds to a little cylinder where I've put a dot on it. And eta is the two-handle co-bordism. OK. So now I need a morphism going the other way. Let's call it g from q empty set plus q inverse empty set to the diagram where I have a circle. OK, that's going to be a matrix with one row and two columns. And what is it? Well, it's this matrix. So now I put the dot over here. OK. And I could write that as maybe epsilon and x epsilon, where epsilon is the zero-handle co-bordism. All right. And now I need to check that when I compose these two things, I get the identity map. So it means to be an isomorphism. So for example, if I multiply the matrices fg, that means I'm going to take this matrix and multiply it by this matrix. And that'll give me a 2 by 2 matrix. You can do the multiplication, and you'll see you'll get four pictures each with a sphere. This one, the dot is on top. This one, the dot's on the bottom. Here, I have dots on both the top and the bottom. And here, I have no dots. But that's really just the matrix 1001, which is the identity. So here, I use these sphere relations. And similarly, if I look at g composed with f, that's when I multiply these matrices to get a 1 by 1 matrix. Well, that's the 1 by 1 matrix. It has two different terms in it. One of them looks like this. And the other one looks like this. And conveniently, the other relation was just made to tell us that this is the cylinder here. And what's the cylinder? It's none other than the identity co-bordism for the circle. So these things really are isomorphic. And again, notice that in this category, we don't have to impose the relation that these two objects are isomorphic. We get it from the relations that we imposed on the morphisms. So we calculate that this is true. So a corollary of this is that every object of CBN is isomorphic to a direct sum of things that look like, say, q to the i pi, where pi is a simple planar diagram. So I can express all the objects in my category in terms of this finite number of objects, which are the simple planar diagrams. So now let's think about morphisms. So maybe first dilemma. So if S a has a component with more than one dot, so more than one element of a, then it's equal to 0 as a morphism. So now, from now on, I'm always working in this category, CBN. And the proof, well, so maybe here's my component with two dots on it. It looks like this. So I apply the net cutting relation and cut this blue neck right here. And then I see that that's a sum of two things, each of which involves sort of the rest of the co-bordism in a sphere. One of them has three dots here, but that's 0. And the other one has one dot here and two dots here, but that's still 0. So the whole thing is 0. OK. So now let's make another definition. Right, so the relation that I just used, so to pass from here to here, I use the neck cutting relation. So there's around this blue circle, there's a cylinder. And so I applied the neck cutting relation on that cylinder, and I got these two terms. Is that the question you're asking? OK. Question? Yeah, that's right. So remember, the objects in this category cob were planar-tangle diagrams. Yes. OK, so definition on, let's say, SA is simple if every component of, let's just say, SA is a disk with either 0 or 1 dots. OK. And then the proposition is that HOMP0P1 is spanned, maybe has a basis even, consisting of simple co-bordisms. So this is a basis, I guess, as a Z module. OK, so the proof, well, 1 is if S has a component with mon0 H1, so maybe I have something like this. So I choose an embedded curve representing a non-zero class in H1. So I apply neck cutting, a non-zero class, to reduce H1. Well, so after I've done that, I've got a whole bunch of components with no H1, so there's spheres and disks. So then I kill spheres with sphere relations and the disks with the lemma. So if I have a disk with more than 1 dot on it, then I know it's 0. OK, so here the corollary is, and now we come back to our old friend, that TQFT. So if P0P1 are simple planar diagrams, then HOMP0P1 is actually isomorphic to this TQFTA applied to let me draw this diagram big so you can see it. So let me do it down here. So this is A applied to the following diagram. So I take P0, I stick it together with P1, but I have to kind of turn P1 around like this. OK, can everybody see the operation that I did on P1? OK, and why is that? Well, proof, let me call this P0P1R diagram here. So if I look at co-boardisms from P0 to P1, well, this diagram P0P1R is none other than P0 times 0 union P1 times 1 union xn times 0 times i union xm times 1 times i. OK, in other words, it's the boundary of any co-boardism between P0 and P1. I've just the boundary of this curve here sits on a cylinder and I've taken and squashed this cylinder flat onto the blackboard and that's why I had to turn this P1 around. OK, and now, homophism is supposed to be, well, I need to choose a disk for each of these and then I put an x on it or not. So that's like labeling each circle in this picture with either a 1 or an x and that's what this is. And if I wanted to get the gradings right, I should probably put in a factor of Q to the minus m plus n over 2 here. OK, so now we really know everything about this category. We know what its objects look like. We know what the morphisms look like and we can just go compute. So let's do that. So maybe let's think about proving right-of-meister moving variance. So this is the categorified analog of the exercise that you did yesterday. So say that I look at, let's call this right-of-meister moves. Say I look at CKH of this diagram here, which I know I can untwist. OK, so what is this? This is, well, when I do the zero resolution, I get a curve that looks like this. The one resolution gives me a curve that looks like this. Can people see this curve here? Is this large enough for, OK. And then there's a morphism in between them, right? I have to remember these aren't just objects. There's a morphism in this chain complex, which corresponds to adding a little one handle right here and cutting off this disk. OK, so now this chain complex in the category, I'm gonna write down an isomorphism to another chain complex. Oops, and I forgot I should have put a Q here, shouldn't I? So here I have this object. Well, this is just the identity. This is the.