Category: blog

Transcript

[0:00] Viv
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast, the Gadigal people. This is their land never ceded always sacred and pay our respects to the elders past present and emerging of this place.

[0:17] Viv
Coming up on Remarkable Insights…

[0:19] Varun
So when you talk to the people for whom you’re designing there’s no substitute for that. You’ve got to figure out if you are actually solving for the right problem. The problem that you want to solve is that problem that needs to be solved.

[0:36] Viv
Viv Mullan here for the Remarkable Insights podcast which is all about disability driving innovation. On my screen in front of me is Varun Chandak, a disability entrepreneur who almost as excitedly might have a special guest join us on the podcast but I’ll let you give a visual description of who and where you are and who might be joining us.

[00:55] Varun
I am a South Asian male, I am wearing glasses, a hat, a sweatshirt and behind me there’s a couch. At some point during this podcast, my dog might make a guest appearance, so I’ll just be sure to call that out if he does.

[01:12] Viv
We welcome all dogs on this podcast. Big thank you for joining us. I had the absolute pleasure of being able to meet you in person last year. But for everyone who maybe doesn’t know of you yet, would you mind just giving a bit of an introduction into how you got to where you are at this point in your life?

[01:28] Varun
For sure. So just to set some context, I’m the founder of ‘Access to Success’, which is a not-for-profit in Canada that is. How I got here is that I have a couple of disabilities myself. I’m hard of hearing and I have what’s called ‘Erb’s Palsy’, which is a form of partial parallelism of my left arm, and a lot of the work that I do, pretty much all of the work that I do with Access to Success stems with my own lived experiences with disability, and I guess that’s what got me to where I am today.

I’m originally from India, but I came to Canada in 2016. I was in an extremely privileged position, to have access to those accommodations and offer a fact that not everybody’s experience is like that. And I’m about to answer how my experience was very much not like that when I was in India. And there, this is a unique situation, I used to attend a class, a daily class when I was studying to become a chartered accountant. That class was a class of 300 to 400 people at a time. And the guy used to walk around with the mic, obviously, and the mic wasn’t very good. So I couldn’t follow what the speaker was saying very well, and my friends were an instrument in helping me in those situations and yet other times, like in my professional career, it was hard. It was very hard. I had to work harder than every single colleague of mine just to prove that I’m first as capable as them, and then more capable than them. So in the beginning when I used to work in finance and I couldn’t talk on the phone even back then, so that led to some difficult conversations, but I worked very hard to prove to my boss that despite this limitation, I’m better than everybody else in the room, or at least I’m harder working than everybody else in the room.

[03:22] Viv
Does it feel like there was this moment in your life where you started to really understand how technology could allow you to do these things more independently rather than needing someone there to help do that sort of translation?

[03:36] Varun
I’d say that the moment I realized that technology, at least in theory, could be a game changer, was when I was first diagnosed with hearing loss. The day I was diagnosed with hearing loss I started daydreaming of a day when there would be smart contact lenses that would give me live captioning. I wanted my assistive tech to be completely invisible because that was my mentality at the time. Anyway, I still dream of that day, but that’s where it stemmed from, but at least in there, for me, it was about hiding my disability. I didn’t wanna ask for accommodations. I didn’t wanna ask for help cause I thought it would be held against me. When I applied for MBA, I didn’t actually disclose I have a disability for the same fears. But after coming here, after doing a lot of the work that I’ve done, the work that I’m doing, technology has already changed my life massively and I know the potential that it has to change my life in the future.

[04:38] Viv
Wow and do you think that perhaps technology has allowed you to feel more confident to step out and tell people that you identify as living with a disability?

[04:48] Varun
The first, yes, the second, not necessarily. Technology has helped me become independent. To give you an example, I lip read and yes the lack of technology at MBA was the catalyst and me inadvertently subconsciously picking up lip reading. I call myself extremely lucky that in a way, the pandemic hit when it did because live captioning only came into being around 2017, I would say before that it wasn’t very common, and it wasn’t very accurate. From 2017 onward was a turning point in automatic live captioning. So when the pandemic hit without live captioning, I would’ve lost all ability to communicate with people on my own, people who were wearing masks. But with live captioning, I could do that. It was, as I said, life changing for me.

[05:48] Viv
So Cool. And now can you speak a bit to the work that you do at Access to Success?

[05:53] Varun
For sure. We support the development of future leaders with disabilities and assistive technology. So in the future when kids like me search for corporate leaders with disabilities to have a good long list of people to look up to. So we do that through the Access to Success fellowship for MBA students with disabilities. Which provides up to $90,000 in annual scholarships to MBA students at four of Canada’s top business schools. We provide, in addition to that financial contribution, a lot of support, resources, mentorship opportunities networking opportunities and stuff like that to not just the recipients of the fellowship, but also any MBA student at one of our member business schools. The second part is supporting the development of assistive tech. It’s a nature, very similar to the amazing work that you and your team do at Remarkable, which is to support startups that are building products for people with disabilities.

[06:53] Viv
So Great, and what have you learned about the size of the assistive tech market in Canada and then the world?

[06:58] Varun
So speaking of people with disabilities in Canada, people with disabilities are estimated to command 82 billion dollars in annual disposable income. This is according to the research done by a Canadian Rich Donovan whose research is now world famous in this space. Globally, this market, depending on numbers, we look at, there’s several hundred billion dollars of income. If you include, for instance, friends and family of people with disabilities, caretakers for instance, that’s estimate to be a total of over a trillion dollars. Long story short, people with disabilities have a lot of money to spend.

[07:34] Viv
What do you think is the missing piece in the education systems that we are teaching people about how to build a business and build a product? What is missing from that?

[07:45] Varun
The biggest thing, the first thing really is to start with what we call ‘Co-design’. Co-design is the idea is that you design your product, your solution with people with disabilities, that means that you talk to the people for whom you’re designing that product. Far too often what happens is that really well meaning innovators coming from a really good place in their heart, make assumptions about what people with disabilities might need, and create a technological solution that might not really serve a purpose. A very prominent example is Sign Language Gloves. The idea of sign language gloves has existed since the eighties, since the 1980s. And every single year news comes out of another researcher PhD candidate who’s working on new Sign Language Gloves, and consistently the thing that they miss is actually talking to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community about ‘what do they actually need?’. So when you talk to the people for whom you’re designing, there is no substitute for that. You gotta figure out are you actually solving for the right problem, the problem that you want to solve? Is that a problem that needs to be solved?

[08:58] Viv
And do you have examples of maybe even technology that you use in your daily life that does have that ripple effect where it is, it’s something that you use that benefits everyone else that you interact with, and then that has a flow on effect?

[09:12] Varun
Yeah, absolutely. So I have hearing loss and I rely on live captioning, so that’s the one I can talk about at length right now, for the purpose of this conversation, I’m using Google Chromes inbuilt captioning, and that’s the reason we’re able to have a fairly smooth conversation. I also use this app called Otter.ai, that’s Otter like the Animal. And it’s a great live captioning and note taking app that I’ve been using ever since I first heard of live captioning. One other technology that I want to talk about. Even though I was diagnosed with hearing loss when I was 18 or 19, I’ve never been able to speak on the phone my entire life. My family, and I just didn’t know that it’s because of my verbal cognition limitations because of certain technical limitations that I won’t bother with, essentially live captioning until very recently, didn’t work directly with phone calls. So if I want to wear my hearing aid and have the phone audio go directly to my hearing aid or my earbuds, for example, live captioning, wouldn’t pick that up because for that to work, the audio needed to be on speaker and it wasn’t very accurate cause the audio quality was very poor, until recently. Google’s Pixel phone was the first phone ever to come out with the functionality to have live captioning for phone calls. And last year I had my first ever conversation with my wife that lasted for longer than five minutes on the phone, and at the end of the conversation she goes, ‘Varun do you realise this is the first time we’ve had a real conversation on the phone?’ And I was like, ‘oh, dang! You’re right’. I’m probably never going for another phone because I’m just so attached to Pixel now because of that memory.

[11:02] Viv
How wonderful! What did that feel like in that moment?

[11:07] Varun
It was amazing! It’s the same thing, one was just like emotionally it was… so great. For the first time in my life, I can independently make phone calls by myself. It wasn’t something I could ever do before, literally to talk to my doctor. I needed to have my wife with me to talk to my bank! My bank wouldn’t talk to me on the phone because I told them that my wife is helping me, and they said ‘she’s not authorised so we can’t talk to you anymore’. I can actually have those conversations now.

[11:40] Viv
That is so cool, Varun. And at the end of these conversations I like to ask the guests that we have on our show to leave our listeners and the people enjoying this podcast with a remarkable insight. And that can be a piece of advice, words of wisdom.

[11:56] Varun
Perseverance was what did it for me, it’s what always did it for me. Like a lot of people with disabilities, I have received a lot of No’s in my life. A lot of disappointments. A lot of rejections, a lot of times things don’t pan out, where disability had a direct and real impact on those decisions and having that thick skin to take that punch. Take a day after you recover from the punch, but then the next day I get up and keep going. That perseverance was instrumental in helping me not just get where I am, but also continue going where I’m trying to get to. Times when perseverance doesn’t help is the second piece of advice, which is a sense of humor. When perseverance doesn’t help, when you’re trying and you’re trying and you’re trying and you keep getting a no, you just laugh about it, right? Maybe it’s not for everybody, but it’s what helped me a lot.

Transcript

[0:00] Viv
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast: the Gadigal people. This is their land never ceded always sacred and pay our respects to the elders past present and emerging of this place.

[0:17] Viv
Coming up on remarkable inside…

[0:20] Minnie
I was called back into the principal’s office and she genuinely looked devastated and she said look, the organisation said you can’t do this now because you’re disabled you’re blind. and that was the first time I realised the world might see me differently.

[0:35] Viv
Surprise! We had so much fun talking with Minnie that we couldn’t continue to one episode so here is a spontaneous part 2. In this episode we Speak about how Minnie accidentally became the first person in the world to have an eBook and her experience growing up with disability.

So firstly Minnie I understand you received your diagnosis at quite young and soon after you met a doctor who changed your life by introducing you to new technology?

[1:02] Minnie
No, you’re so right. Absolutely. I was so lucky that when I was given my diagnosis, I was sent to the hospital. So I grew up in a town called Palmerston North in New Zealand. The ophthalmologist who diagnosed me then sent me off to a specialist at the hospital Leslie Bolton. I still remember this so vividly, walking into this beautiful room, cause hospitals on the whole aren’t. Known for their beauty, but I think it was because I remember there was sunlight coming in and she had this sunny personality and she was all about what I probably now call possibility thinking. She was only focused on what was possible. She was always looking for different ways at different solutions, different technology that could support her patients, and in this case me as a 15 year old and This was in about 1985, and so it was really pre-computers in a way. There were probably a few emerging, but she had the most extraordinary array of magnification equipment and some of the most extraordinary technology. For me to try out, particularly in the classroom, because the big issue for me was as my site deteriorated, by this stage I was virtually unable to read books and I certainly couldn’t see anything on the blackboard, and I couldn’t see using overhead projectors, which are a thing of the past now. And so you can imagine that made accessing schooling really difficult. I was a very keen student. I loved learning, but. I felt sort of these barriers were coming into play, and so we tried all this equipment, which she had sent me back to school with magnifiers and like little telescoped kind of things to look at the blackboard with, and this piece of technology that was like a handheld device that I could run across my books. Because it was just like this red light and it was a single line of text, but you had to keep your hand really still because you were actually literally running this camera over the page one word, one line at a time drove me absolutely bonkers, insane. Because it was so slow and cumbersome. But nonetheless, these were all the precursors to the technology that we now have available. So some of it worked, some of it didn’t. Look, it’s fair to say none of it could bridge the gap of my site loss. So everything took me maybe incrementally closer. But none of it unfortunately was like that, and here’s the thing that will really put you on a level playing field. But as I said, it was a process of elimination. It was also at a time where technology was evolving quite rapidly. Certainly today, if I was a 15 year old getting this diagnosis and heading into the classroom. The kind of tools that are available are just, oh, they’re in a different league. There’s no comparison. When I was studying, I went to university quite young, and one of the ways we got around the fact that I chose to do English literature, goodness knows what I was thinking. There is so much reading in English literature, but my darling mother would read. As many books as she could. She brought us up pretty much on her own at that point and was working full-time. So it wasn’t easy for her. But she would sit in her bed and read the novels I had to read onto an audio cassette and post them to me at university, which was extraordinary. My earliest audio books were my mother reading to me and there were these funny moments. We should spill tea or something and she’d go, “oh, bugger. I’ve just spilled the tea!” or something in the middle of the book.

[4:50] Viv
That’s such a good example of how your mum would record her voice and essentially give you the first prototype of an audiobook.

[4:50] Minnie
Yes.

[4:51] Viv
Was that something that you told your classmates or your teachers that you were doing?

[4:45] Minnie
Oh my God, no. Isn’t that funny? I don’t think it would’ve occurred to me. Isn’t that interesting? I think it’s possible. I didn’t tell anyone. Probably my flatmates would’ve known… no. And I think a lot of that was I felt that I had to nut a lot of this stuff out on my own. It was tricky. It was very tricky. And I think part of the way I probably responded, and probably to some extent still do, although hopefully I’ve learned a few other strategies to ask for help now, is to go inward and think, now how can I do this? What do I need to do to get through? So I think what I’m, I feel lucky that I seem to have a disposition that is focused on. There’s gotta be a way, there’s always gotta be a solution, there’s gotta be, I’ve just gotta look at this differently. And I have always had the ability to think laterally, I guess in terms of a situation. Sometimes I think I’ve had to wait until I was nearly at the breaking point to discover what that was. But that sort of desire inside of me to persevere, to keep on trying and trying must have been instilled in me somewhere really early on in my life.

[6:16] Viv
And is that a narrative that you experienced a lot? When you had your diagnosis?

[6:22] Minnie
So yes I did. And I noticed that the world quickly fell into two categories. There were the people who. Couldn’t seem to imagine for one moment what I could now do or what they perceived I couldn’t do. And I really stressed that cuz I think that was more about their limitations and their worldview than mine. But the problem is if they are people in power, if they’re our teachers or employers or whomever, That limited worldview can be incredibly destructive. The other side of it is the my doctor Leslie Bolton worldview, which is the possibility, let’s, it’s just a matter of looking at this differently and using some imagination and being creative. And so I talk about the people who have a possibility, worldview and the people who don’t, or I talk about the people who are with you as an access citizen and the people who are not with you. The first time that really happened was when I was selected to represent the school on this amazing boat adventure that high school students would be selected for, and there was often only one student per school. And you’d go away with a group of other students for a week and sail all around in New Zealand. And I’d been selected, which was just extraordinary. And then about a week later, I was called back into the principal’s office and she genuinely looked devastated. And she said, ‘look, the organisation says you can’t do this now because you are disabled, you’re blind’. And that was the first time I realised that the world might see me differently and in that moment, limit my opportunities. And so that was gutting. I just, yeah, I’ve never forgotten that moment and thinking, how am I gonna navigate this if other people are so unimaginative?

[8:14] Viv
I know language is super critical. And just for people listening, you like to use the term ‘access community.’ I would love to unpack what that term means for people listening. And you think if people with disabilities or impairments were given the right , access that they wouldn’t experience disability in many ways.

[8:30] Minnie
That’s it. Probably the first thing I’d say is I think language is so powerful. Every social change movement comes with a shift in language. Language is how we make sense of the world around us, and we communicate ideas and how we create shared frameworks for understanding and meaning creation.It’s vital. So when we set ‘Be Accessible’ up, back in the day, everything in the world was around disability. It was ‘disability’, this ‘disability’ that. Absolutely fine. And I understand the social model and I’ve researched and studied the medical model, so I really get all of this and I also respect, if that’s the language people choose to use.
‘Be.Accessible’, we didn’t call ourselves ‘Be Disabled or ‘Be Disability.’ We called ourselves ‘Be Accessible’ ; it was a call to action. We want the world to be accessible. So we felt as a social change movement, it was vital that we had language that mirrored our intent, and I wanted us to work in a worldview that we were calling an ‘accessibility worldview’, and that was a worldview that believes that equality is possible. It’s a worldview that actually sees all of us at some time in our lives will have a disability, or what I would call an access need. If we live long enough every single one of us on this planet is likely to have some kind of impairment through ageing. I also wanted language that was inclusive of everyone because the challenge I see with disability is that we often use it to denote a particular group over there. And I think it runs the risk of keeping us very binary, us and them, disabled, non-disabled. So accessibility was an endeavour to create a more spacious environment that can hold all of us. And I also noticed that one of the largest communities who have disability is the ageing population. Baby boomers, I haven’t yet met a baby boomer who has happy to call themselves disabled. They’ll say, ‘oh dear, I can’t hear very well, (this is my mum) or I can’t walk, or whatever. But I’m not disabled, I’m just getting older’. And I thought, okay, so we need some language that invites them in. So this was an invitation to smooth off some of those edges. By making it a universal experience. That was also a critical part of our argument that by creating accessible businesses, schools, education, workplaces, customer experiences, we are actually creating a better world for all of us.

[11:09] Viv
Minnie, thank you so much. You have been absolutely brilliant.

[11:15] Minnie
Thanks, Viv!

[11:16] Viv
Thank you for coming.

[11:17] Minnie
It’s a pleasure.

Transcript

[00:16] VIV
Coming up on Remarkable Insights…

[00:19] MINNIE
We had this announcement at the launch of our organization announcing that we had been granted a million dollars a year to set up this social change organization and I remember the entire room just went absolutely silent.

[00:34] VIV
Stick around to see if I ask for a small loan.

[00:37] VIV
Hi everyone I’m Viv Mullan, host of Remarkable Insights, a podcast about disability driving innovation. Minnie Baragwanath joins us to tell us why being human is the greatest innovation in technology today.

Minnie, welcome to Sydney. Thank you so much for coming here and joining me today. How are you?

[00:54] MINNIE
Oh, look I’m fantastic. It’s just such a treat to be here, actually. Been up swimming this morning, 7.30 in the pool.

[01:06] VIV
24 hours in and she’s sunburnt.

[01:09] MINNIE
First thing I bought this morning was a sun hat and some sun lotion as well.

[01:15] VIV
I think that’s how every trip to Australia should work though, right?

[01:18] MINNIE
That’s true.

[01:19] VIV
Now I remember last time we were together in person was in San Francisco and when we were there I took the chance to ask you about visual descriptions and saying at the start of our podcast episodes we would ask a lovely guest to come in and give it a visual description for anyone that was enjoying the show via transcript or video. And I would love to know if you would like to give one and also if it’s something that you find useful or enjoy in podcasts.

[01:46] MINNIE
Look, do you know it’s not something I had really encountered. You introduced me to the visual descriptions – in terms of, in this context, I do now listen to audio description on films and things and actually it’s quite entertaining and I sometimes do think, what movie are they watching? But anyway it’s like in the things they don’t describe. 

But anyway I’m very happy to do that. So I describe myself or do I describe you? I’ll describe myself. So I’m wearing a… I think it’s called Cali Green, I think is the green, which is like an Irish green dress and I have creamy white skin, which is looking a little pink today after the early morning swim. I have on a gold necklace and I have on bright red lipstick and I have blondish hair and I have green eyes. Is that enough?

[02:44] VIV
It’s beautiful. And do you find that information useful for you when you’re at events and things? And if you were going to listen to this podcast would that be useful for you?

[02:54] MINNIE
If I was at an event and there was a speaker presenting and I thought, oh gosh, I’d really like to go and talk to them afterwards, it probably would be helpful to have some idea of what they look like. I am partially blind, visually impaired but I do have some vision. 

In other contexts I probably… it might not be something I’d worry about too much? I’d be, so I’d probably just be interested in what it was they were there to talk about. So it probably is all about context actually.

[03:23] VIV
Thanks for your perspective on it. For the people that are listening that don’t know you can you just give a bit of a description about what it is that you do and how you started doing the amazing work that you do.

[03:36] MINNIE
What do I do? Yes, and this has become a more difficult question rather than… Sometimes I think if only I was a lawyer or an accountant, you know I’d have a one word answer. I have to write an entire book, as it were to explain it. We’ll get to that later.

When I was 15, I was diagnosed with a rare sight condition called Stargardt. And Stargardt is a form of macular degeneration, so I have no vision in the center of both my eyes.

And leap forward several years and I guess now maybe I would say I’m a social entrepreneur, an accessibility innovator but I think the common denominator is everything I’ve done, particularly of the last 20, 25 years has been really focused on finding and exploring multiple different ways of trying to advance accessibility and at the heart of that, it has been really how do we engage mainstream society in different conversations and ways of thinking about access.

So I’m always interested in exploring different ways to get people’s attention around why it’s so important that we level the playing field.

[05:04] VIV
Can you speak to your journey opening up Be.Labs and then that evolving?

[05:09] MINNIE
Absolutely. So it’s funny because people sometimes say, ‘what led you to set up what was originally called Be.Accessible?’ It rebranded about 10 years later into Be.Lab and people are thinking, ‘oh, there’s gonna be some very inspirational story’.

But I always say it was probably equal parts desperation and inspiration, which is a really powerful combination. And I think it was a mixture of realizing that I could not stand the kind of employment situation I was in any longer and I kept thinking there’s gotta be a way for me to have a better experience of being employed. And I was also incredibly frustrated with the slow pace of change around accessibility that I was observing internationally, but in this case, particularly in New Zealand. And I felt I had something slightly different to offer into the mix. I felt maybe there was a way of approaching accessibility that maybe had some value.

I’d never employed anyone. I had never managed anyone. I’d never run an organization. There were a lot of reasons why people… quite a valid reason this time have said ‘Minnie, that’s maybe, a bit out of reach’, but luckily for whatever reason at that moment in time all my guardian angels rallied around me. And all the right people showed up, all the ‘possibility people’, all the ‘with people’ started to show up in my life and before I knew it, there was a team of us with this vision for this organization called Be.Accessible.

All of a sudden we seemed to have funding. It was extraordinary and I remember going down and I’d been invited to present down at Parliament and I walked into this room and I’d never been, I’d never presented to ministers before and I’d completely underestimated the magnitude of that moment and realizing that it was now or never. And I just had that feeling of Minnie you’ve gotta jump and trust, you’re gonna fly or flop. But as it were, I think I flew.

And then finding out I don’t know maybe, it must’ve been three months later that we had this announcement at the launch of our organization announcing that we had been granted a million dollars a year to set up this social change organization. And I remember the entire room just went absolutely silent because first of all, disability organizations, new organizations just never got funding so this was extraordinary. Secondly, it was during the global financial crisis. So it was a zero budget. There was no money, new money going to anything yet, somehow in that environment… oh my God, it still makes me quite emotional now thinking about it, this had happened and it was, it truly felt like a miracle.

And that was when you felt we had this incredible belief and support for this vision for Aotearoa to become the most accessible country in the world.

[08:22] VIV
You speak about the excitement when you found Remarkable and finding people working in the same space, what are some of the risks that you get scared of in this moment of excitement as well? When we see people becoming interested and wanting to put money into this space?

[08:38] MINNIE
Oh, that’s such a good question too. What we need to be asking ourselves and other people coming in is ‘why are you working in this space?’ Or ‘why do you want to invest in this space?’ Or ‘why do you want to make a product for disabled people or access citizens?’

I look at the access space and I feel some of this excitement that’s going on and I start to think people with a lot of money don’t just invest out of the goodness of their hearts usually, that might be one of the motivations. If they’re seeing a business model in here, there’s a business model in here. Why would we, as the ‘access community’, allow ourselves to be exploited for others to make money out of our suffering? Because that’s actually what it is at its worst.

Then you go, okay, we live in a capitalistic world, what’s an appropriate business model that values the ‘access community’ as we invest in products and services with that community? Is there a business model that means ‘actually if I’m developing something for the blind community, how do I make sure that a certain return from the profit of this product actually goes back into the blind community, not just into my shareholders?’, because we wouldn’t have even designed it had it not been for the blind community and their lived experience. Do you see what I mean? I’m really interested.

I think one of the areas of innovation we must be thinking about is, what is the business model we would be proud of in 10, 20, 30 years time that our ‘access ancestors’ can say, thank goodness people were thinking about this 30 years earlier, so that we’re creating products and services in a way that are affordable for us because a lot of the products and services are being designed at the moment are actually designed at a price point that many people can’t afford.

This space needs money. This space needs investment. It’s critical.

[10:39] VIV
You’ve released a book and I’m so excited for you but the people that need to read it are certainly the people in the startup space building technology with and hopefully by people with disabilities because it holds a mirror up. And as part of that, you talk about both people outside the community and in the community holding a mirror up to themselves and what the word disruption means in relation to that. Can you shed a light about that concept of disruption?

[11:10] MINNIE
Yeah it’s funny, ‘disruption’ is one of those words that gets used a lot these days, and particularly marketers love it. If we want things to change, if we really want an accessible future, if we want a future full of possibility where we celebrate and value ‘access citizens’ as the extraordinary innovators, creators, designers, citizens that they are. Then we adopt a ‘with’ approach to everything that we do. It’s that simple. That’ll be in my second book.

[11:43] VIV
Your second book will just be that. Those few words, end of!

[11:49] MINNIE
Exclamation mark! Exclamation mark! My poor editor had to remove all my 10 million exclamation marks.

[11:56] VIV
She’s an enthusiastic person! And one of the last things we like to ask people and you’ve left, I’m sure people listening with a bunch of insights that they can walk away with but what would you like people if you were going leave a remarkable insight for the people enjoying our show to go and think about and ponder and hopefully carry with them after this, what would you like that to be?

[12:21] MINNIE
The most extraordinary technology, if we want to use that phrase and the broadest sense possible, are human beings.

So in this sort of scramble to design the next greatest thing, let’s not forget to keep investing in human beings and in our capacity as humans to imagine different realities, different possibilities and to really show up as the best person and people we can be.

Because this revolution, this possibility revolution or change that we are talking about today can only happen if we choose to show up as people who deeply care about equity, about fairness and about the wellbeing of all humans.

So my little soapbox is all about investing in humans as the most remarkable technology I think we will ever experience on this planet.

[13:26] VIV
Thank you to our guest and hopefully you’ve found your own remarkable moment. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and follow our Instagram @remakable_tech for unheard moments from this episode.

Talk with you all on the next one!